the sicilianisation of ireland

1. The IRA is the presiding mafia in Ireland.

2.. There are more than 100 international mafias quartered here, including Cosa Nostra, Ndrangheta, the Camorra and other Italian mafias, as well as Chinese Triads, Mexican Zetas, MS 13, Nigerian devil worship rings, the Russian mafia, Tinker gangs, Eastern European gangs, Al Qaeda, Isis, the Muslim Brotherhood and other associated Muslim gangs, and many, many more international mafias. All trade here with the permission of the IRA.

3. Most countries have a presiding mafia, that is to say a mafia from whom other gangs seek permission to do business within the territory of that country. This is a system mobsters have devised internationally over the past fifty years to prevent costly wars among themselves. In Ireland, as stated above, the presiding mafia is the IRA.

4. The IRA is divided into a cell structure of  mobs, often built around a single family of drug dealers such as the Kinahan Gang and the Hutch Gang. The IRA's cell groupings includes such thugs of convenience as the INLA, the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA, and various other drug dealing factions. Some of these groups are currently engaging in a turf war with each other.

5. The IRA has successfully subverted and controlled Ireland's trade union movement. It has also had substantial success in infiltrating and subverting the Judiciary, the media, the civil service, and more recently the police, and the country's main stream political parties.

6. The IRA's principal source of income comes from addicting Irish children and adults to drugs thereby condemning them to a vastly truncated life time of misery searching for money to pay the IRA for drugs.

7. The IRA's proxies in the Irish parliament are currently pushing through legislation to legalise drug use in Ireland.

8. The IRA's formal political front organisation is the political party styled Sinn Fein.

9. Anathematise the IRA.

10. The wars of the future will be mafia.

to the overthrow

the worm things from the soft earth
in the rainfall night crawl forth
onto pavement doorstep or road
into the concrete certainty of death

they do no think but they know
that in a darkness yet to fall
there will be an overthrow
and those who rule will crawl

and those who crawl will rule
though tonight in their impossible thousands they die
crushed under wheel trampled underfoot
conquered by a nation that knows them not

advertising slogans for my new play boom titty boom boom

1. The tide of laughter which swept Termonfeckin is here.

2. If this one doesn't amuse you, you're a ****ing ****.

3. Er, that's it. (This is an actual slogan.)

considerations of time

The age of the universe such as we can conceive of it is in no way an article of belief in God.
I was watching a comedian who thought he was  mocking Christians by claiming that a Christian had told him the universe was 6000 years old and that God had put dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith.
Of course the story was most probably made up.
But the counsel du jour for the comedian would be against mockery as a modus for discerning the truth of anything.
To discuss the age of the universe (or indeed to discuss anything) we must first be on civil terms with each other.
Time is undefined.
There is no consistent scientific definition of what it is in essence.
We don't know what it is.
We don't even know for sure that it exists.
We attempt to conceive of something called time because we consider there is an order, logic or consistency in events perceived in existence.
The apparent consistency itself leads some to suppose time itself is a medium.
I suggest it is not a medium in the sense that it cannot be traversed to previous events.
Time travel is not possible because the past no longer exists in the expansion and the future does not yet exist.
Time such as we live in it cannot be traversed. It can only be experienced. We cannot affect it or manipulate it, slow it down or speed it up, or alter the rate of our passage through it in any way.
Contentions about the age of the universe have a certain piquancy.
What we call time may not always have passed at a constant rate.
Let's return to our mocking comedian who suggests through ridicule that the only credible serious minded attitude for a thinking person is to believe that the universe must have an age consistent with whatever contemporary scientists who by no means always agree with each other about this or anything else, notionally claim it is.
In my life time the most credentialled scientists stated ether that the universe always existed or that it was many hundreds of billions of years old.
Now they say the universe is between eight and 24 billion years old.
Their margin of error for themselves, meaning the amount of years they were wrong by in their previous estimate, exceeds exponentially any possible error in the estimate of those who have claimed a 6000 year old universe.
The difference between 6000 and 24 billion is far smaller than the difference between 24 billion and an eternally existent universe or one that is hundreds of billions of years old.
The imaginary Christians being mocked by the funnier than he intended comedian were actually closer to the mark by modern scientific estimates, than the best scientists of 20 years ago.
We should be conscious of this as we communicate on these matters.
We have no confirmation that if time exists, it has always passed at a constant rate.
Close to event zero, time may have passed quicker than it passes now.
If event zero is conceived as a cosmic explosion bringing observable galaxies into existence, that is to say bringing physical existence as we know it into existence, it is not out of the question that the closer we postulate towards event zero, the quicker things are going to be happening.
The universe may under some metric proofs by induction perspectives be imagined as being 24 billion years old.
But the first 23 billion 999 million 994 thousand years may have passed in the blink of an eye.
Who knows?

looking for answers

"God doesn't answer prayers," said Ron.
I didn't rush to reply.
I listened to my heart.
If God wanted me to say anything, I was waiting for a prompt.
Nothing came that I recognised as being from the boss.
So I said nothing.
But the contention stayed with me returning to my consciousness at odd moments all the past week since he said it.
Occasionally I weighed it. Occasionally I contested it. Occasionally I just brought the argument to God.
Finally this afternoon after a sea bass dinner in Nathalie Collins' restaurant in Newbridge, I once more raised the subject directly with the Deity.
"Well God," I said, "if you do answer prayers as the Christians claim and as I believe, I'm asking for a sign. Give me a sign today. I know I don't have a right to a sign beyond the right you give me. But I'd really like one. Just so's you know."
A few hours later I wandered into the Dominican church.
Father Philip was saying mass.
I betook myself to a pew.
After a bit we got to the sermon.
It began word for word: "Thomas Aquinas tells us that God answers prayer. He teaches us that it is a part of God's providence that certain things will be accomplished on earth only through prayer."
This got my attention.
At the end of mass, right after the ceremony of Communion, the silence in the church suddenly deepened into a silence beyond silence.
The presence of royalty was tangible.

first principles

The most profound and beautiful sense of peace I ever felt, came following the worst sense of despair I ever felt.
It happened in Italy in the dulcet winter of 1992.
There was a strange educative quality to the thing.
The peace which seemed to flood every aspect of my being and every aspect of everything I could conceive of in existence, was of itself and dependent upon nothing, yet it could not have been so wondrous had the earlier grief not been so awful.
My despair was turned to joy after I spoke the prayer ritual known to Catholics as the rosary.
I thought to myself at the time: If people knew about this the whole world would be praying the rosary and no one would ever fear hardship or misfortune because they would know the glory God brings from it.
The Lord turns to the good all things for those who love him.

if james healy had been a dark brooding pseudo iconic musician of the 1960's

There are things known.
And things unknown.
And in between...
... are the Feldwebels.

why was joanne hayes never charged with the murder of the baby judge kevin lynch's 1985 open tribunal of enquiry established that she strangled

"If what you say is true James," said Rowena, "why was she never charged with murder?"
I pondered the question.
"There was the media campaign from feminists and the Irish Times, and RTE, and Independent Newspapers," I mused. "Often the Department of Public Prosecutions feels itself more accountable to those power brokerages than to any law making it illegal to murder children. The Department of Public Prosecution is certainly far more likely to heed the Irish Times than it is the Irish people."
"Oh come on. If she'd really strangled that baby, she'd have been charged."
"That's not how it works in Ireland. Malcolm MacArthur was never charged for his murder of Donal Dunne. MacArthur was captured in 1982 hiding in the apartment of Ireland's then Attorney General Patrick Connolly. So that one was a high society cover up. Nurse Noreen Mulholland never faced murder charges for her slaughtering of 77 year old John Gethings and 80 year old Seamus Doherty at Naas hospital in 2003. Judge Frank O'Donnell set Mulholland free when she was convicted of the paltry charge of assault. Mulholland's forwarding address is in Armagh by the way. So that one was an IRA cover up. Shall I go on?"