rambles in erin

While the world seems to be focussing on the vicissitudes of President Donald Trump of the United States of America, Ireland's eyes are turned inward, as is our wont, to a more localised storm in an apocalyptic tea cup, namely the fate of one of our veteran journalistic controversialists, Mr Kevin Myers, a contributor to various national titles in our green and mafia infested land oh since Adam was a boy, who has been summarily dismissed from his latest sinecure at the Sunday Times newspaper for the heinous crime of referring to BBC television presenters Claudia Winkelmann and Vanessa Feltz as Jews.
In a storied career Myers has, over the past half century, worked for the Irish Times, then for the Irish Independent and latterly for Britain's Sunday Times who have just given him the boot.
Cards on the table.
I'd regard him as a left wing, liberal, atheistic, abortionist, contraceptivist, anti Catholic, conformist, quasi fembo, pseud against the Bomb.
So we're not really pals.
But I do recognise in my more senile moments his manifold courage and vicarious accomplishments through a sustained and gregarious career in journalistic, literary, broadcasting and public life.
The Irish Independent Newspaper this week reported, rather glibly I thought, that Myers had been dismissed from the Sunday Times newspaper over concerns about supposed ('Supposed' is my word not theirs) anti semitic sentiments in a piece he wrote.
The Indo seemed pleased that he'd been fired. They exuded all the malicious pleasure of old friends seeing the downfall of one of their own, one who had formerly walked among them and had, needless to say, gone on to higher things.
The firing itself, well...
In an article on women's pay, Myers had dwelt rather goonishly on the Jewishness of two high paid women presenters at the BBC.
Now if he'd called Claudia Winkelmann and Vanessa Feltz, a pair of unwatchable leg waxing harridans overpaid at any price, I don't believe any reasonable person could have had a quarrel with him.
But the mention of Jewishness provided a pretext to fire him and so it goes.
I say pretext because I'm fairly sure the real reason he was fired was for daring to question the pieties of cultural feminism with regard to women's pay.
Women are to be regarded as underpaid, say the fembos, and there is to be no analysis of differences in circumstances or statistical glitches which might be facilitating the false impression that it is so.
The penalty for questioning this piety is.... well... look at Myers.
The Indo in its nudge, nudge, winkelmann, winkelmann, reportage of all this, also claimed a tad improbably to have only just discovered another supposedly offensive Myers article, one he'd written for them ages ago, and to have immediately removed it from their own website. The coy implication was that this article too contained something ripe. It had been sitting unnoticed on the Independent Newspapers website for eight years.
The Independent Newspapers website.
Where the tumbleweeds blow.
At least we know why it was unnoticed.
Arf arf.
Still I wish they hadn't removed it.
Now I'd quite like to read it.
Boys allanah.
In these harsh modern times it is so easy to take offence.
I'll have to ask for a Judges' ruling on this.
Judge Zaidan. Would you mind?
In the same edition they used to jeer at Myers for having the good taste to get fired from Rupert Murdock's cosmically awful Sunday Times (Bankrupt because of a sad advertising campaign whereby they urged people to worship their newspaper juxtaposing an image of a dominatrix style high heel shoe with their logo, bankrupt because of that and the fact that the Murdocks don't know how to run newspapers), the Indo noted in a separate feature piece that in Ireland the long term unemployed "are claiming benefits while pretending to look for work."
Ah yes.
That old chestnut.
Rather a blanket statement.
Touched a bit nearly upon my heart too.
Replete with irony of course.
For the Indo is labelling Myers an anti semite.
And at the same time the Indo itself is exhibiting the most blatant anti dolerism.
There's a yet deeper irony if we look for it.
Here is the news folks.
Every single employee of the Irish Independent, and its associated titles The Sunday World, The Evening Herald, and the Whatever Whatever, is subsisting entirely on social welfare benefit.
I am asserting explicitly that the Independent Newspaper group has been able to continue trading solely because the Irish government nationalised a bank that went bust lending to it, and then allowed that bank to cancel Independent Newspapers' billion dollar debts.
This is a newspaper group that has been subsidised by government to the tune of a billion quid of my money.
Okay citizens.
Our money.
Let's be clear.
They're all on welfare.
Indo Journalists, its management, its staff, its shareholders, its board members, the janitor, the quite professional friendly girl who answers the phones (and who should be in charge in my view), its owners and their cats Tiddles.
The difference between them and people on social welfare benefit is that unlike the honest unemployed who might bring in eight thousand pounds a year while searching for work, the staff at Independent Newspapers get paid two hundred grand a year each, to do nothing except produce a newspaper that nobody buys and whose website nobody visits.
Independent Newspapers survived the public backlash against its thirty year culture war with Christianity, the public rejection of its feral hedonistic anti Catholicism, the public repudiation of its malign hatred of priest and nuns, survived the public rebellion against all of this I say and the evaporation of its readership, by the ingenious strategy of refusing to pay its billion dollar debts to Allied Irish Bank.
Allied Irish Bank went bust because Independent Newspapers refused to repay its debts.
Prime Minister Enda Kenny nationalised Allied Irish Bank when it was bankrupted by Independent Newspapers refusal to pay its debts.
Prime Minister Enda Kenny then permitted Allied Irish Bank to cancel Independent Newspapers' billion dollar debts.
Here is the news.
These guys are all on social welfare.
I mean I don't want to go casting no aspoyshuns.
What I mean is I really don't want to insult the unemployed by comparing them to this shower.
But Allied Irish Bank is bust because Independent Newspapers took a billion off it in loans and paid the money to itself, its owners, its managers, its board members and its staff (Sing along now) in inflated salaries, bonuses, dividends, pensions and other fripperies that they weren't really earning.
The purely fictional profitability of the Independent Newspapers group was floated on billion dolllar borrowings that the group never repaid.
Once more from the top.
The Irish government of former Prime Minister Enda Kenny nationalised Allied Irish Bank because it had been bankrupted by Independent Newspapers' refusal to repay its loans.
No less than three billionaires held controlling interests in Independent Newspapers but the government did not dare to suggest the Denis O'Brien, Tony O'Reilly or The Other One, should pay their debts out of their own billion dollar fortunes.
Instead Prime Minister Enda Kenny used the Irish people's money first to purchase the worthless bankrupt Allied Irish Bank and then to allow Allied Irish Bank to cancel Independent Newspapers billion dollar debts to it.
Hilarious no.
And this week Independent Newspapers is accusing long term unemployed people of drawing benefits while pretending to look for work.
Oh come on.
It's kind of rum folks.
I mean I always said Independent Newspapers would go bankrupt on their anti Catholic agenda alone.
But it's like there's so many reasons they're bankrupt.
Lack of taste. Lack of principle. Lack of humour. Lack of courage (as exemplified by their failure to defend the unborn). Lack of honour (as exemplified by their failure to warn about the Jihad threat to the human race). Lack of democratic spirit (as exemplifed by their failure to represent the vast majority of the population who want our borders enforced, IRA gangland destroyed, and Muslim immigration ended permanently). Lack of integrity. Lack of discernment. Lack of anything in common with the nation to whom they are trying to sell newspapers.
Ho hum.
Theoretically there is no business model on earth that can save this newspaper group.
You know.
Maybe they should hire Myers again.
I hear he's available.
And at least he might just make them interesting again.