interesting times

The American police officer Ali Perez asserts that every moment that Jesus delays his return to earth is a time of mercy.
Any of us can call on him, repent, be saved.
Father Commane said something similar during my childhood at Newbridge College: "While we yet live it is a time of mercy."
When I'm tempted towards hatred, these days I tend to look for a few favourite testimonies on Mr Youtube's sometimes nifty sometimes opprobrious website.
The video testimonies I seek are those from Ali Perez, or Mary Neal, or Mickey Robinson or Ian McCormack or Don Piper.
These are the five who claim they have seen heaven and I think are worth listening to.
Jesus once said: "If you make my word your home, you will come to know the truth and the truth will set you free."
He is directing us to the gospels.
A man's only enemy is satan.

the 23rd psalm

the lord is my shepherd
there is nothing i shall want
fresh and green are the pastures to which he leads me
he brings me alongside the most beautiful rivers
glowing bright with glorious peacefulness
to restore my weary spirit
he sets me in paths of righteousness
for his name's sake
yay though i walk through the valley of the shadow of darkness
i will fear no evil
because you are with me lord jesus
your shepherd's staff and your rod of kingly authority
they comfort me
you have prepared a table before me
in the presence of my enemies
you have anointed my head with oil
my cup runneth over
surely goodness and mercy will follow me
all the days of my life
and i will dwell in the house of the lord
forever

the music of the gugs

Opening the musty time dinged cabinet on the overhead shelf in my kitchen.
A wooden egg cup precipitates from above and bocks me on the head.
Seized by an unholy fury I snarl an imprecation, grab the offending object, and fling open the back door preparatory to hurling it (the egg cup not the door) into the field.
I stop.
My heart ponders.
I realise I haven't eaten a boiled gug in decades.
Instead of casting the egg cup into the outer darkness, why not just use it to eat an egg?
I go back inside and for the first time since the 1980's, I rustle up a boiled egg.
Delicious.
There's a lesson there somewhere.








Corrollary: The Irish sometimes call eggs gugs and vice versa.

today they said

For the third time in a week, a member of the IRA terrorist mafia's proxy parliamentary political party Sinn Fein has complained about being inconvenienced by security procedures at American airports. Aside from contributing mightily to the gaiety of nations at a time of great suffering in the world, the Americans treatment of Irish mobsters and their molls does raise some interesting points.
Mary Lou McDonald who styles herself deputy leader of Sinn Fein, complained that the Americans had subjected her to an invasive search. One wonders what might be genuinely considered invasive by a member of the IRA Sinn Fein mafia. I mean the mind boggles. But Mary Lou McDonald remained coy on the exactitudes of what she says she experienced. Her fellow party members who were "inconvenienced" earlier this week, were the gun runner Martin Ferris and the old torturer Gerry Adams himself who is the leader of the IRA. The words attributed to Mary Lou McDonald below have been culled from the Irish Times newspaper except for her final sentence which I made up.

Mary Lou McDonald: "We are not looking for special treatment but I would ask for myself as to why I would merit special security checks. Why would any member of Sinn Fein merit special security checks? The security checks were heavy handed and invasive. I will be raising concerns with the American ambassador about these invasive searches. Because nobody, but nobody, ----s with the Rah."

James Healy: "Invasive was it? As invasive as what you people did to Jean McConville? As invasive as what you people did to Robert Nairac? As invasive as what you people did to Robert McCartney? As invasive as what you people did to the families of all those human beings you kidnapped, tortured and murdered? As invasive as the Northern Bank robbery through which the IRA has funded its present expansion of Sinn Fein? As invasive as your institutionalised burglarisation of Anglo Irish Bank via illegal billion dollar loans to IRA fronts posing as businessmen? As invasive as your leeching off Ireland's history by hijacking celebrations of the anniversary of the 1916 Rising to promote your permanent bigot war with Britain? As invasive as your mentoring of skang gangs in every town and village in Ireland? As invasive as your Kinahane IRA skang gang? As invasive as your Hutch IRA skang gang which has recently invaded my hometown of Kilcullen to the not unalloyed pleasure of those of us who live here? As invasive as all the IRA skang gangs? As invasive as your poisoning children with drugs in every town and village in Ireland? As invasive as the thirty IRA members the Irish Independent newspaper claims are currently being investigated for child abuse? As invasive as your flooding of Ireland with Muslim immigrants as part of your people trafficking activities? As invasive as your use of multiple murdering mobster Whitey Bolger to subvert the FBI office in Boston while running guns into Ireland. As invasive as the IRA Sinn Fein alliances of convenience with Al Qaeda, Cosa Nostra, Chinese Triads, the Russian mafia, Nigerian devil worship rings, the Zeta cartel, Farc, and all the major international criminal organisations? As invasive as the IRA Sinn Fein infiltration and manipulation of Ireland's trade unions, Civil Service, broadcast media, and Judiciary. As invasive as the IRA Sinn Fein's malicious infiltration of community groups, prayer groups, local magazines and employment assistance organisations? As invasive as everything you and your thugocracy do? Is it just possible Mary Lou that the Americans, in common with everybody else, are getting tired of mobsters terrorising, torturing, murdering and ruling us from the shadows?"

they are coming

"James what do you think of Donald Trump?"
The words were those of the formidable Phoenicia Lincolnshire a legendary matriarchal regional backroom boss for Ireland's Fine Gael political party.
She was serving me tea in her home in front of a roaring fire.
I began to talk around the Trump issue.
I don't like to hedge but I don't like to be misinterpreted either.
Such considerations are part of the burden of being a show biz personality.
I started to say that I agreed with Trump's stated positions on certain issues and that my own views were probably more direct than his in that while I believed we needed to decisively reestablish our borders simply in order to promote the rule of law, I also believed that we needed to make it clear to the populations of Africa and Asia and Arabia that there is no inherent right for any of them to move to our countries. and that in addition and most importantly we need to repudiate and end the influx of Muslims into Europe, Australia and America until such time as Muslims reform their culture and behaviour at a broad societal level and abandon their all out war with humanity.
I was about to elaborate by advocating that to do any of this will necessitate all out war with the IRA and associated drug dealing and people trafficking mafias who have drawn these Jihadis to our shores in the first place, and the removal from office of a subverted generation of Judges and Civil Servants who on behalf of the aforementioned mafias, are deliberately facilitating the systematic collapse of immigration law.
I was going to conclude with my classic one liner:
The wars of the future will be mafia.
I didn't get to say it.
Because she threw me out of her house.
Ah yes.
A woman who cannot bear the thought of expelling Jihadis from Ireland had no problem expelling me from her house.
Sobering what.
I suppose we all have our demons.
A few hours ago this evening Al Qaeda's Isis franchise began detonating bombs at the airport and on a metro train in the Belgian capital Brussels.
My first response was to think of Phoenicia and our conversation last December.
Her daughter works in Brussels.
I wonder what she's thinking now.

special guest blogger thomas hardy

in time of the breaking of nations

only a man harrowing clods
with a slow silent walk
and an old horse that stumbles and nods
half asleep as they stalk

only thin smoke without flame
from the heaps of cut grass
but this will go onward the same
though dynasties pass

yonder a girl and a boy
come wandering by
war's annals will cloud into night
ere their story die

coughlans and muscle men alive alive oh

Several years ago IRA controlled skang gangs attempted to stampede legislators towards the legalisation of drug use in Ireland by opening drug dealing shops, styled Head Shops, simultaneously in every town and village in Ireland.
The move was coordinated.
The idea was to create facts on the ground.
To change the public mind by changing reality itself.
The IRA was hoping to make legalised drug dealing a fait accompli.
At a stroke the gangs hoped to collapse drug law and precedent and turn Ireland into the Netherlands.
A valiant flicker of the old soul of the nation put paid to their plan as families and communities adn the braver local politicians organised to oppose these poisoners in our midst.
In spite of the IRA terrorist mafia and its political proxies Sinn Fein infiltrating the community groups that opposed the Head Shops, the public will has prevailed.
At least for now.
IRA drug dealers still terrorise our towns and villages with impunity.
But they do so largely from the shadows.
Not from commercial premises on Main Street.
At the time of the IRA's Head Shops gambit, in the town of Naas near where I live, a property owner who was also a Judge had rented premises opposite the court house to the IRA drug dealers.
Here too public opprobrium eventually forced the Head Shop to close.
Judge Coughlan claimed he never knew who he was renting to or what they were selling.
I passed that way last week and looked in on the premises to see who was occupying it now.
My eyes beheld something styling itself the Boston Barbershop Company.
Here's larks, thinks I.
Surely not the same company that Senator Mairia Cahill last year outed in the Sunday Indpendent newspaper as a front for the Rah.
The one and only.
Mother Ireland you're rearing them yet.
But what an unlucky fellow Judge Coughlan is in the tenants he rents to.
And how lucky we are to have such a fine upstanding paragon of decency propping up the law in the Republic of Ireland.
As are all our judges, all of them, fine upstanding paragons of decency.
Seriously though, they're doing a wonderful job.

zorgs on the forward scanner captain

Coffee with the Duke of Earl.
"Well Heelers you've done it again."
"What have I done?"
"The Drama Group met yesterday and they've decided that from now on there will be no programme brochures produced to accompany forthcoming plays."
"What's that got to do with me?"
"They decided it because of you."
"You're joshing me."
 "No, I'm serious. Do you remember you wrote a programme note for them a while ago?"
"It was like two years ago."
"Still being talked about. Whatever you wrote about has now led to them cancelling not just programme notes, but the programmes themselves, for all future productions."
"What did I say?"
"Apparently you didn't restrict yourself to theatrical fare. Apparently you brought your notions about the cultural implications of abortion, contraception and divorce into your assessment of whatever play was being produced at the time."
"Oh right. That sounds like me alright."
"How do you plead?"
"I'd say I was trying to make the thing meaty. If someone asks me to write a piece for them, I try to give em something to read. I want to reach them."
"You reached them. No more theatre programmes Heelers. How does that make you feel?"
"Alexander looked on the borders of his empire and wept. For there were no more worlds to conquer. Hans Gruber too."
"What are you on about?"
"I suppose I'm feeling a sobering sense of my own power."
"Are you angry?"
"I'm not really angry. But it's a bit Irish. I mean, you know, if some members of the Drama Group don't like my programme notes, why not write a programme note in reply? Why not write expressing your point of view to the local magazine? Why not shoot me down on Brian Byrne's Kilcullen blogspot. He's a sneaky little shit. (cf Niedermeyer in Animal House and imagine me saying it in Dean Wermer's voice. There you go.) He'd just love a controversy like that with me on the receiving end. Honestly, I don't understand why anyone who had a problem with something I wrote in a play programme, would respond to it by abolishing the whole concept of play programmes in perpetuity instead of robustly making their case in the public square. Was it for this the Wild Geese spread, the grey wing upon every tide? For this something something something? For this Edward Fitzgerald died? And Robert Emmet. And Wolfe Tone. All that delirium of the brave. But let them be. They're dead and gone. They're with O'Leary dating Neil Leslie the investigations editor at the Sunday World. Well you know what I mean. What is happening to people? If I started playing rugby for Old Kilcullen, would rugby clubs everywhere simply abandon the sport? If I flung off my disguise and declared for the Gay Rights Movement, would all the homosexualists simply opt out of the lifestyle with a cry of "this is no fun anymore," and start riding women? Or what if I joined the Rah? Would Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness give up mentoring drug dealing people trafficking murder gangs all over Ireland and say: Terrorising human beings, enslaving children to poisons, and subverting the nation via the trade union movement and a corrupted judiciary is suddenly profoundly immoral since Heelers started doing it... We'll all be ruined sez Hanrahan before the night is over. Ho hum. No more theatre programmes, eh. Well I never. I mean hardly ever. But where will it all end!"

donald trump versus megyn kelly

Megyn Kelly is the only commentator working in broadcast media today who has had the courage and ability to roundly and demonstrably refute Republican Presidential nominee candidate Donald Trump over matters of fact to his face.
Megyn Kelly is the only journalist who has explicitly, but also with courtesy, restraint and legal erudition, shown Mr Trump to be in error about claims he has made relating to the running of one of his failed businesses styled Trump University.
Megyn Kelly is the only moderator who has been able to hold her own with Mr Trump live on air as he attempted to dominate the discourse through the force of his personality.
In my opinion Mr Trump's criticisms of Megyn Kelly are unfair and untrue.

memory

in memoriam
Hugh Clowers Thompson,
American,
who showed us the way.

enemy at the gates

(more of the night Gerry Adams came home, ie tried to gatecrash the White House)

The security men indicated to Gerry Adams that he should stand to one side.
A burly officer patted him down.
Adams was sure he felt definite cupping but he fumed silently.
An hour went by.
Inside the President of the United States was receiving a bowl of shamrock from the Prime Minister of Ireland.
Gerry Adams was missing the whole ceremony.
Suddenly the old IRA torturer could take it no more.
With strange high dignity he stamped his foot and cried out:
"Am I such a craven
That ye keep me waiting here
While Enda Kenny and Barack
Are swigging down the beer
Then on Genucci and Savanelli
He bestowed a bitter ah
Nobody but nobody
----s with the Rah"

the blurst of times

(celebrating the Easter Rising with the Heelers Diaries)

The quadrangle at Newbridge College.
Okay, the playground.
I am declaiming poetry.
"Am I such a craven
That I would not get the word
But for that some poor man
Had heard I had not heard
Then on Pearse and Connolly
He fixed a bitter look
Because I helped to wind the clock
I came to hear it strike"
There was a silence after my declamation stopped.
I began to explain that the poem was about a character called the O'Rahilly ('the' is an Irish honorific) discovering Padraig Pearse had kidnapped another rebel leader Bulmer Hobson who had first sworn Pearse into the movement, and now Pearse was about to start the Rising against Hobson's wishes and more importantly against the express wishes of the Irish people, as evidenced by 200,000 Irish people joining the British army to fight Imperial Germany at the time, and that O'Rahilly having declared like Hobson that there was no justification for a Rising, and having ordered the rebel units under his control not to take part, came along anyway and took part in it himself, supposedly intoning the classic euphemism for killing people and ruining cities and enslaving nations to mafioso IRA gangs, to wit, the bit about clocks and winding and hearing them strike.
Mugs Baines interrupted me.
"You picked a bad rhyme at the end," he said "Instead of 'I came to hear it strike,' you should have put 'I came to hear it struck."
Ah yes.
The old dilemma.
How to explain to him that this was a WB Yeats poem not one of mine.
Having already just cast doubt on his romantic notions that the 1916 Rising was the Revolution from Happy Land supported by all and sundry, with unicorns for armoured cars and lollypop machine guns and candy floss garottes, I thought it best not to shatter any more of his deeply held convictions at this point in time.
Let him think I wrote Yeats.
As bifurcated belief systems go, it was about as credible as everything else he believed about the heroes of 1916.
Sure what harm could come of it.

comparable crimes

Question: How long was Gerry Adams kept waiting by security men when he tried to gatecrash the White House for a Saint Patrick's Day ceremony last week?
Answer: About an hour.

Question: How long were widow Jean McConville's ten children kept waiting for their mother to come home after Gerry Adams and his IRA terrorist mafia kidnapped her, tortured her and murdered her in 1972?
Answer: Their whole lives.