The Keane Edge
by Brendan Patrick KeaneRSS 
Recent Posts
- Exorcism of my inner Peter King
- Gas question: why give Ireland's enormous wealth away? the Norweigan alternative
- Bashing the Irish -- a break neck run down on Ireland's history of betrayal
- Stephen Fry to appear on Gaelic soap opera Ros na Rún
- Stolkholm Syndrome infects Dublin
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The head of Ireland's energy department, John Mullins, warned in September that Irish people were being forced to decide between paying their mortgages or their heating bills. He lamented having to shut off gas connections all across the country in the middle of winter, but expected to do so anyway.
Ireland is set to experience another record cold winter this year, as it did last December when temperatures dove to their lowest level in 65 years.
Ironically, Ireland has plenty of natural gas to heat its population, and bring enormous wealth to the state. The irony is that Irish politicians do otherwise, preferring to sign away these profits to multinatinoal corporations.
Hugh Roe O'Donnell (An Ó Domhnaill)
After Kinsale the sovereignty of Ireland sailed to Galicia or "Gael land," to regroup and try again. They established an Irish College at Santiago de Compostela. O'Donnell was poisoned on-board a ship and died en route to ally with the King of Spain. He was one of countless Irish leaders that were physically assaulted or murdered in the pursuit of compliance and assistance in the cessation and usurpation of Irish nationhood.
Daniel O'Connell (The Liberator)
Among the greatest men of the 19th Century, O'Connell would be arrested sometime following his Monster Rally at Tara to Repeal the 1801 law which dissolved Dublin's ancient parliament and made Ireland a province of the UK. He was arrested, and spent three months in jail, where his health was compromised, as happened to Oscar Wilde who wrote about horrible prison conditions upon his release. O'Connell died of cerebral softening in Italy shortly after he left prison.
Charles Stewart Parnell (The Uncrowned King)
Lots of Irish scandals riveted England in the late 19th century. Parnell was felled by his second big one. The Piggott forgeries became the basis of a media sensation which he somehow weathered to his vindication. It was the Kitty O'Shea scandal that brought him to insurmountable ridicule, alieved only at the time of his sickness and death.
Few men stoke my Anglophilia quite so masterfully as Stephen Fry.
The English actor will follow the trail of William Wilde, father of Oscar, to Connemara when he appears in the popular Irish language soap opera Ros na Rún. William, like his son thirty years later, became the subject of public ridicule amongst the social set following a trial in Dublin. The dejected doctor left the city and sought solace in Moytura House which he built on Lough Corrib, whence he collected fragments of Irish aural literature for the rest of his life.
The Irish economy is stuck in the euro, and has no control over its exchange rates, which means it has no way to ease financial bubbles. In the euro, Ireland must accept bubbles and suffer them, no matter how ridiculously inflated they become.
The Irish economy is stuck in the euro, and has no control over its exchange rates, which means it has no way to ease financial bubbles. In the euro, Ireland must accept bubbles and suffer them, no matter how ridiculously inflated they become.
Instead of finding an orderly way to extricate herself from this captivity, respectfully, and with guarantees to her eurozone captor, Dublin's politicians are suffering from Stolkholm Syndrome.
In psychology, Stockholm syndrome describes the paradox whereby hostages become enamored with their captors. The hostage is in terrible danger, but comes to love the source of that fear, viewing the captor's constraints as evidence that the hostage is better-off behaving. The captive even begins to love the captor, believing she won't be harmed, despite the conditions which point otherwise.
Experts in the country aped the happy talk about Irish de-regulation they read by bigger experts on TV for years. Self-congratulation on bubble pumping was all you got in Irish media. Condescension was the reward doled-out to doubting Thomases asking questions about a country that had become too expensive for normal Irish people to live in it.
The basic human instinct for self-determination and survival was replaced by trust in a compelling Celtic Tiger cartoon. Irish politicians should have been more heroic, intellectually, to see through the trickery. They were unable for lots of reasons. Some were probably bought. Others probably threatened. Most just believed.
The revolt against Irish romanticism led my editor Niall O'Dowd to declare "I find the use of the word Eire, very annoying. Ireland has not been Eire since the declaration of the Irish Republic in 1949. Why it persists I don't know."
Mr. O'Dowd speaks Irish and is responding, I think, to the thing Irish Irish people hate, and that's having their own humanity confused with fairy imagery. Turning a people into children or fairies or primitives or what have you, was a basic tactic of the psychological belittlement that must accompany physical subjugation.
That long history of belittlement, has left people feeling safer to reject Small is Beautiful ideas, in favor of Bigger is Better ones. By identifying only with the Big One, one feels more evolved, adult and powerful. Éire might be beautiful and all that, but it doesn't have the big brand identity of Ireland. In "Ireland" the Irish have a shot at respectability. In "Eire" the Irish are lost to an impoverished fairy land, or so the belittled thinking goes.
Salvatore Giunta was awarded
The Medal of Honor for Bravery on the Field of Battle by President Barack Obama last week and sat down with Stephen Colbert in an interview on November 18th to discuss the highest honor our nation can bestow on anyone.
"People call you a hero, do you like that?" Colbert asked him.
"I know a lot of heroes," Giunta said. "I serve with heroes. I can be with those guys, as long as...they call us all a hero."
"Now that you have that Medal," Colbert said "for the rest of your life you represent more than just yourself. You represent the Army, and what this nation considers the height of honor, of putting yourself in danger in a particular way, above the call of duty, as it says."
In the land of Óg, In the land of Óg, shee put on her arget brogue and crossed moy gal along the owen sally ; over the droghed dub down the brick boher boy into the caher glas of Oz.
Travelling Ireland means reading a landscape that talks two languages--one an original; the other, its slang-like echo. James Joyce was obsessed with the meaning and sound of Irish place-names. Using his namesake PW Joyce's references, logainm.ie and PotaFocal.com, I've tried to construct a short thematic "tour" through the vocabulary of the Irish landscape.
A traveller can learn to read Irish placenames as words from an environmental language. Irish can also tell secrets and summon sublimnity from the text of Éire's land--Éire was, afterall, a goddess before she was shrunk down into a fairy romance.
At her Belfast concert last Saturday, Lady GaGa waved an Irish flag; causing debate about the emblem's meaning, while invoking the rebel Irish strain in rock rebellion.
David Bowie made similar controversy at a Dublin concert a few years back, when he shouted Tiochfaidh Ár Lá (chukee owr law) on a live recording of "Rebel, Rebel." He stubbornly released the live-in-Dublin DVD including Irish phrase "Our Day Will Come," as a nod to the mantra of the Irish Civil Rights Movement and Republican struggle.
Paul McCartney's classic song "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" and John Lennon's two songs "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "Luck of the Irish" are but a few famous moments in the marriage of Irish spirit and rock renegadism.
One guy had a sign that said "Jon Stewart was my idea." Some people had t-shirts with George Bush saying into a talky bubble "I did it, but thanks for blaming it on the black guy." There was also a Viking long ship the length of a bus on-hand, manned by dancers in horns.
One guy had a sign that said "Jon Stewart was my idea." Some people had t-shirts with George Bush saying into a talky bubble "I did it, but thanks for blaming it on the black guy." There was also a Viking long ship the length of a bus on-hand, manned by dancers in horns.
For twenty bucks on Saturday, I got a Chinatown bus smelling like an old-school subway to Washington DC. Most of the people sharing this stank-on-wheels were going to the rally too. Traffic and the popularity of procrastination had it so that I and what seemed like a million other people got to the American capital about an hour after Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had already begun the March to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.
The crowd was so chock-a-block that it was literally impossible to make it close enough to the stage to see, let alone hear any of the shenanigans up there.
