Party Political Broadcast on behalf of LID

Party Political Broadcast on behalf of LID (Liberal Irish Democrats)

We, in the newly formed party LID, appeal to all debt fearing people living in the Republic of Ireland or abroad in tax havens to support our Party at the forthcoming General Election. Here are our policies and promises

1. If elected we will rename the general election. Hence forward it will be called the Election of Generals. We realize the plain people of Ireland are looking for Generals, for leaders in thought and action.
2. Our lovely lady candidates will be chosen only from model agencies and from the Rose of Tralee pageant. In line with our political partners in Italy we wish only attractive lady candidates to grace our TV screens. Life is tough enough we feel without having to watch ugly politicians.
3. We will cancel all foreign debt immediately. We will write a polite but firm note to the Germans by way of apology.
4. Similarly we will cancel all bank debt with immediate effect. Of course we feel sorry for savers, but if they cannot be bothered spending money then they will hardly miss it.
5. We will cancel all unemployment. With immediate effect all people without a job will report to their local county council with a shovel and will be given jobs around the area.
6. In the words of the Gospel ‘All potholes will be filled in, all gardens will be tidied, all graffiti will be removed’.
7. Overseas students of the English language will be welcomed and put up in subsidized accommodation in our surplus hotels.
8. Nama will be closed down over a period of three weeks. Everything it owns will be sold off between now and Christmas.
9. The Department of Happy Marriages will ban divorce and outlaw affairs, especially Foreign Affairs, which will be overseen by the department of the same name.
10. The Irish language will be banned in public unless people can show they can speak it properly. The Gaeltacht will be closed down officially next spring and the Bean a ti will be encouraged to take in Chinese students.
11. Every garden will have to possess a vegetable patch on pain of being forced to eat fast food takeaways.
12. The department of Health will be closed down. No one will actually notice for a few months but the savings will come in handy immediately.
13. The Department for family names will outlaw the cruel practice of calling children ‘Bertie’.
14. We will consider becoming an overseas province of China if they promise to give us lots of money like the Europeans – we will also consider overtures from the USA, Australia, Canada and any other country which still has some money.
15. We will leave the EU before they leave us, probably by summer next. We will still have good relations with people we fancy, the French above all. Europe will hardly miss us. We won’t miss them. The Eurovision is overrated as is European Football, Euro Disney, Euro star and Euro.
16. We will consider proposing Sarah Palin as our Presidential Candidate. We feel she would be the perfect person. She is after all very pretty. And when she is not keeping an eye on the Russians from her kitchen in Alaska, she can keep an eye on the British from the Aras (The President’s Residence in the Phoenix Park)
17. We will cancel the tourist/travel tax immediately and replace it with tourist stamps that can be redeemed at any hotel or restaurant.
18. In a drive to reduce imports we will ban the import of wine and give every family a home brew kit and fire extinguisher.
19. To prepare for Global Warming we will issue every family in low lying areas a canoe and a flare.
20. All national hospitals will be shut down and local hospitals will be given extra resources
21. All prisons will be shut down. All prisoners will be made do community service instead of serving time in prison. Dangerous prisoners will be sent to Spike Island where they will have to cook and wash for themselves.
22. We will introduce legislation to force politicians to tell us what they do in their spare time. This should lift the lid on everything. It’s not for nothing that our party is called LID and our members are called LIDERS (for pronunciation imagine you are in Spain Or Greece on holidays with Shirley Valentine).
23. Our Party was formed from the very brightest young minds in the other political parties. If our party is small it speaks volumes about the others
24. Vote for LID. Vote early and vote often!

Whither the Irish Catholic Church?

Sallynoggin Church viewed from Glenageary Avenue.

We watched an interesting program last night on RTE on the state of the Irish Church. The program was well made and the participants were excellent. The only problem was that it lasted only an hour when three hours would not have been sufficient. As a result we got mostly soundbites when we might have hoped for more reflection and analysis.

All participants, lay and clergy, were agreed that the Church must change. And no doubt it will. The problem for many Catholics liberal and conservative is what will it turn into? There would appear to be two possibilities with very little possibility of a middle way.

The first would see the Church shrinking to a size perhaps less than 10 per cent of what it is now. Parishes would be amalgamated and would follow demographically what has happened to a certain extent the Catholic Church on the Continent and the Anglican Church in UK. It would become more conservative and hold to its exclusion of women in the priesthood and the admittance of gays as full members of the Church. It would be theologically tight and would not suffer the doubts of many individuals and religions. It would no longer be the religion of the masses except perhaps in some emerging countries of the third world.

The other possibility is that the Catholic Church effectively converts to Protestantism - it embraces a more democratic process, welcomes women as priests, Bishop's and perhaps as Popes. Why not? It dumps clericalism. It embraces gays. It comes to terms with birth control. It rediscovers Vatican 2 and turns its back on the last hundred years of theological conservatism.

It ends up where many Protestant denominations are today.

The question for people like me is ' why wait?' Over recent weeks I have been learning about the Society of Friends and they seem to be where I would wish the Catholic Church to arrive. It seems of little import whether people leave and wait for the Catholic Church to arrive, or stay with the Church and help it along the road. An equally reasoned argument can be made for both stances. At the end we can only obey our conscience as best informed.

I believe at the end of the day religion is not about numbers or power but about people and something we try to define as God as we stumble out of darkness towards the light in all humility.

Istanbul - where East meets West

I spent a very short but memorable night in Istanbul last summer. I was returning to Dublin from Antalya where I had been attending an international conference of Amnesty International as one of Ireland's three representatives.

Our initial expereinces in travelling to Antalya should have prepared us. Turkish Airlines must be the nicest people to fly with but also one of the most seemingly unpunctual - and yet everything gets done in a slow, courteous and measured way. It reminds me of the West of Ireland in the fifties. I can never see a merger with time-table obsessed Ryanair

We arrived in Istanbul 'only' an hour late. A US colleague who was flying onward to Washington was beginning to hyper ventilate. But he got there , in the end. I did not know what to hope or expect before arriving in Turkey. During the week in Antalya I had been struck by the genuine hospitality of the people. They seemed untarnished by the harshness of commercialism or even their own precarious careers in the most volatile of industries - tourism.

We arrived at our modest two and a half star hotel in the centre of Istanbul beside the blue mosque just as the lazy languid light was fading in the soft blue sky. We quickly unpacked and rushed to the rooftop restaurant in time to see the sun go down and take a few photos of the mosque beside us. We heard the call to prayer as we sipped a gentle gin and tonic. The sacred and the profane seemed to mix serenely.

Istanbul was a revelation. I found it as Mediterranean as Nice or Barcelona but with the added zest of the Middle East. The scents and the perfumes were excitingly exotic. I was reminded me of the heady giddiness of seeing Paris for the first time in 1968. We wandered through the streets after midnight feeling totally safe and unthreatened. Our female colleague was at ease and joined us in buying attractive souvenirs that were ridiculously cheap.

Maybe they have got the balance right in Turkey between the religion and the state. I was a supporter of Turkey joining the EU before I set foot in the country. Having mets i's people I am one hundred percent convinced it is the right thing. If Israel can take part in the Eurovision why cannot Turkey join the EU? People point out to her human rights past. I lived in Spain less than forty years ago in the time of Franco and things were not great. In neighbouring Portugal things were not much better. They are now leading lights in the battle for human rights.

I also believe in the value of a secular state. I applaud the decision of the French to ban the burkah. I believe it is a medieval form of oppression on women - particularly on the women who defend it. While I believe in 'live and let live' we have to defend certain fundamentals.

The vast majority of Muslims are decent honorable people - as are the majority Christan's and Hindus. What has been done in their names has not always been the best. One of the big challenges of the modern world is to help religions reconcile with the founder's at times conflicting messages and interpet their charism in the light of modern science and insight.

I was truly excited by Istanbul and its people. I would love to go back. I can understand why people who have bought holiday homes in Turkey return every year. I hope we can support the Turks in their wish to come closer to the West - it's clearly in their interest - it is even more in ours.

Discovering Dublin - Hello Arthur

Since Lucy's operation three weeks ago she has been only able to eat mash and has has hardly left the house. Not surprisingly she is developing mild symptoms of cabin fever despite being quite the sweetest and most patient human being in the world. Enough was enough! After an encouraging meeting with her surgeon this morning we got the blessing to break out.

We would first attack the Guinness Brewery. I had brought Mexican tourists to St. James Gate perhaps forty years ago. It was cute then and interesting and very seventies with a pint at the end of the journey.

Nothing could have prepared me for the space age Guinness Store we discovered. We booked on line and got a ten percent discount and avoided the queues when we got to the store ( there were none). We parked the car in a convenient, monitored and totally free car park beside the store (is this the only thing in all of Ireland that tourists can get for free?).

Guinness are very good at a lot of things. They make a very fine porter. Their ads are some of the best in the world. And the storehouse is one of the best tourist attractions I have visited anywhere.

The old brewery has been tastefully remodelled - keeping the old and adding intelligently the new. It was very well attended with accents and languages from all over the world.

I would be telling a lie if I did not confess to enjoying the observation tower the best. We did not make the mistake of stopping off on the floor below to pull our own pint and drink our poorly pulled pint in drab surroundings. We ascended to the seventh and top floor with its uninterrupted views over Dublin and its circular bar counter in the middle of the floor.

I struck up conversation with Alex from New York. He had one of those interesting lived-in faces. He knew his Guinness well. Like me he was mildly disappointed with the quality of the Guinness on tap. We both agreed it was good without being great. He was staying in a hotel on St Stephen's Green so I drew him a map of Dublin 2 and pointed out where he might get some nice pints. I fully expect a complementary pint from O'Donoghues, Foleys and Doheny and Nesbitts when I return.(some hope!!)

The biggest and most pleasant surprise of the day was that of Lorraine drinking her first glass of Guinness ever. She loved it. She felt it was more ladylike to ask for a glass rather than a pint. Mind you, it did not prevent her from finishing her glass and then my pint. She has not forsaken her first love, wine, but she will include Arthur in her circle of friends.

The circle of life once again is complete. I started drinking Guinness in a pub in Churchtown when first 'going out' with Lorraine. My father had tired of our two hour phone calls and banished me to the Glenside Pub which had a coin operated phone very handily beside the bar counter.

It was great being a tourist in our town and we are committed to visiting our home town through tourist eyes more often.

A tourist in my own town - Discovering Dublin

Who needs an alarm when the dog can wake you at 5.30 on a Saturday morning? Feigning sleep I tried to get another ten minutes of much needed rest. But Ruby was having none of it. Eventually I gave in to the inevitable and rose to let her escape into the garden bathed in early morning light.

The sun was rising unsurprisingly in the East and was shining through the kitchen window at an angle peculiar to early morning. It danced on the dresser and lit up the glasses. It was a sign from God. No going back to bed.

I quietly fed the bicycle through the kitchen and gently placed it in the back of the Volvo saloon. Thank God for Mr. and Mrs. Volvo and their clever off spring who designed a car that allows you to collapse the back seats in under twenty seconds and develops space big enough to hold a concert in.

I drove to Sandymount Strand where the public car park boasted a smattering of white vans . They all seemed to be driven by Polish builders and their helpers, drinking steaming coffee and munching sandwiches ahead of a a busy days fixing Mrs Murphy's kitchen. What will we do when the Poles go home? God forbid that we Irish might have to fix our own gutters and drains.

Somewhat unsteadily I cycled at a leisurly pace towards the Poolbeg lighthouse. I was passed out by young men and women in Lycra looking very professional. I was nearly passed at one stage by a jogger but my pride spurred me to up the pace. I was reminded of the Scots author who recounted how one stormy day while walking he passed out an elderly gentlman cycling into the wind. I passed through the Irishtown nature reserve and looked back at Dun Laoghaire with its twin church steeples and Killiney Hill with cloudy nightcap still adorning its head. I suppose if you are wealthy enough to live in Howth or Killiney you have to put up with the odd mist. It is God's way of showing he has a sense of humour.

As I made my way to Poolbeg Lighthouse I reflected that despite living in Dublin for nearly 59 years this was the first time I had seen the city from this angle. It struck me that with a bit of money and imagination this area could be a fantastic place to live and bring up children. Why not build low rise apartments within two miles of the city centre rather than exile people sixty miles outside of Dublin and expect them to commute every day?

The famous/infamous Glass Bottle Site might indeed have been a very good idea, if only someone had paid the correct price for it. Amazing to think that the development of Poolbeg may never go ahead not because no one was prepared to spend money on the site but because they paid too much. I am sure David McWilliams will be able to exlpain that.

Back to my central theme. This is the year to rediscover Dublin - or indeed to discover it perhaps for the very first time.

Compassion is at the heart of being Irish

Chesterton tells the slightly implausible but interesting allegory about a child who is reared in a big house and who when he leaves it for the first time gains perspective only when he walks down the driveway and looks back and for the first time realizes how big the house really is.

In a sense we do not really miss Ireland or know what it really means in our lives until we leave it. Nowadays some of the angst is reduced because thanks to Ryanair of Aer Lingus we can be back home within a few hours. Being a child of the fifties who visited the gaeltacht at the end of that decade I had the dubious privilege of knowing what emigration looked and felt like in the west of Ireland. On the way to school in Connemara I passed houses where all the occupants had left and were now lying derelict.


I left home in 1969 with the intention of never returning home. I spiritually left Ireland on the 1st of August to join a Mexican Order. I called a few of my best friends around to the house at the end of July and told them casually I was off and away and might never see them again. To their eternal credit they did try and visit me in the seminarian fortress on Leopardstown Road and went as far as bringing girl friends to visit the incarcerated until the practice was discouraged.


When I landed in Spain I remember for the first few weeks missing BBC TV and Cadburys chocolate. After a year in Spain I travelled to Italy. Sad to confess I did not miss Churchtown where I was reared. I missed the West of Ireland where I had spent every summer holiday as a child.

What I missed most was the element of compassion in the Irish psyche. I found that Irish people cared. Not that we are alone. But our compassion that extends to complete strangers is quite unique. This compassion manifests itself initially in plain curiosity. It is impossible to pass a person on an Irish country road or in a small village without some form of a recognition - a greeting or even a nod of the head. City and suburban life is reducing perhaps this intimacy although Dublin is regarded as a remarkably friendly city.



We may need to rediscover that sense of community and self reliance that disappeared not only in Ireland but throughout Western Europe over the past twenty years when as a society we became the equivalent of social drug addicts. We simply passed to the State. i.e. to complete strangers the entire responsibility of education, caring, and maintaining the young and old and sick.

As I studied and travelled it struck me that all cultures have their strengths and weaknesses. The Spaniards struck me as direct, at times brutally so, and fun loving with a keen sense of the picaresque and the whimsical (not unlike the Irish). Spain of course is not a single country - it is a series of countries and there are huge regional variations. Similarly in France. I was impressed with a country in tune with its culture, and confident in its past. In Italy I found a family oriented society. It seemed Italians would never utter a sentence if a paragraph could do. They seemed to love to talk and occasionally to listen.

Compassion in the Irish soul may date back to Famine times and the shared memory of suffering, loss and support. It may find its roots in the Christianity that we Irish embraced so willingly and exported so effectively in the golden years of monasticism between the 6th and the 12th centuries. This physical and spiritual outpouring found a reprise in the missionary, teaching and mideical efforts of the early 20th century. It may date back to our Celtic and preceltic roots. Or it may be a mixture of all of the above.

Other cultures - particulalry the Moslem religion - have long and worthy traditions of welcoming strangers and giving them sustenance when they arrive on the doorstep by chance . But whar seems unuusal and radical to me is that a child sitting at a school desk in Gorey Co. Wexford will decide improabaly to devote some or all his/her life to people in Africa or South America she/he has never seen.


I am proud of the relief efforts of thousands of young Irish aid workers over the past fifty years. My sister Kate spent three years in Bangla Desh with Concern. I have a fondness for Gorta and the work it does in the Third World by helping the poor to upskill and to lose their dependent on the West. I hate the culture of dependence that we have encouraged. I love the Gorta maxim, 'give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime'. I am impressed with Trocaire which does terrific work in areas of social justice. I served briefly with the Irish section of Amnesty International which traditonally punches above it weight. I welcome the newer arrivals on the chairity scene - the Niall Mellon foundation that builds thousands of house in S Africa and the Haven charity set up by Leslie Buckley to assist the people of Haiti and countless tiny charities including the project to build an orphanage in Lesotho run by Acara. Lest we forget, these latter are children of the Celtic cubs. Not everything we did in the past decade was bad!!



At a time when we despair of our leaders in the Church, in politics, in business and in finance we can always fall back on our inner resources and the deep and tried and trusted reservoir of human emotion and compassion that has served us so well. In Ireland we don't have a monopoly on compassion but for me it is the word that more accurately describes our core value - ahead of drinking and poetry and music and literature - themes for another day.

Demon Drink

Cannot live with it, cannot live without it.. Drink has been a good friend for most of my adult life. But now I am learning to live without it. Not through virtue but out of necessity. The medicines I am taking for a broken, well if not broken, certainly challenged, heart do not sit well with alcohol.


My first encounter with alcohol was entirely unintentional. 'A likely story', you may say. I was eleven and staying for three months in the Connemara Gaeltacht. The mother of the man of the house died. Strangely I do not remember her alive, just dead, lying out on the kitchen table. The wake became a party. I cannot remember if the deceased lady stayed for the party or was moved to another quieter room. I was promised a glass of lemonade by the kindly bean an ti (lady of the house) Cait Bean Ui Welby.

Normally she was very attentive. She had reared ten children to see them all emigrate so she kind of adopted any of the Gael Linn students who stayed with her for three months. While other Gael Linn students in other homes practically starved and had to fight for food round the table, I was spoiled rotten and was treated to as many as eggs were as laid that day - typically three eggs - and six sausages and boiled potatoes and warm freshly baked bread.

Anyway she was busy that night tending to friends and neighbours. After a few hours of waiting for the lemonade that never came, I decided to help myself. I poured a glass for myself and knocked it back. Within minutes the room was revolving. I had just drunk a glass full of 90% proof Poiteen neat. It was only years later that I put two and two together and decided I must have finished off their stock of poiteen that night.

Some weeks later I made my confirmation in Carraroe, County Galway, af ew miles from where I was staying. My class mates in Dublin were making their confirmation in Churchtown so I made mine in the local Church. I took the pledge in Irish - promising to avoid alcohol until the age of 21. Some years later I concluded that because I had taken the pledge in Irish, it did not really count.

I did not take great advantage of my self awarded dispensation because the next time alcohol touched my lips was on my 17th birthday. I spent the summer of 1968 in Paris working in the De La Salle hostel for Brothers from all over the world. Unused to alcohol, two glasses of wine were enough to send my head swimming. I remember stumbling back to my quarters on the Rue de Sevres feeling that Paris seemed so gay and exciting and full of possibilities.

My drinking career suffered a significant hiatus for the eight and half years I spent in the Seminary. However between the age of 30 and 55 I tried to make up for a lifetime of abstinence. I remember or half remember a weekend in Puerto Banus where we did not sober up for three days and various golf excursions where as the drinking improved the golf disimproved in direct correlation.

In pre Celtic tiger times, drink was an agreeable crutch in business. Three or four pints in the eving were a pleasant way to end the day's work. The last decade in Ireland became a time for deals that demanded ferocious working hours, often three or four days in a row followed by a celebratory drink that became a necessity.

We are a great country for drinking. I mean that in the best possible way. Enter a pub in Sydney, or London or Paris or Berlin and you do not have the same sense of fun and animation. The Greeks may have given us philosophy and the French may have given us wine and cheese but the Irish have given the world the Irish pub. I don't mean the 'Irish' pub in Warsaw owned by a Russian and manned by Poles, all good people, but a real Dublin pub that sells real Guinness or a a pub in the West of Ireland where traditional Irish music is played at the drop of a spoon.

I will miss those nights of quiet pints of Guinness where we ended up hugging friends and complete strangers. I am not sure if I am ready for the life of sobriety that involves a sensible glass of sweet sherry that lasts the night. I will miss the madness. The generosity of spirit.

Looking back on a life time of drink there are very few pints I regret. My family will be mightily relieved that my cheeks will not shine red and ruby and acquaintances both male and female with be spared bear hugs after midnight. Leaving drink is like leaving a good friend. There have been good days and bad days but the good far outweigh the bad.

Onto the next chapter of an unrehearsed life...