The Keane Edge

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.

President Obama's choice of George Mitchell to ump the Israel/Palestine peace talks draws on Irish lessons for the Middle East.

The choice of Mitchell means Irish people are going to feel that the Middle East Peace Process is somehow their business too. [Irish Americans already feel that way, because of the American tax waterfall that pours into Israel each year.]

With the Irish involved on the outside looking-in, you'll see more Flotillas teeming with angry Irish mothers demanding medicine for the Palestinians.

The contradictions of Stephen Colbert's person/persona are as shifting as the perspective his character/self takes through the course of any show.

It's hard to say what "he" believes, because he can dart in and out of irony like a rabbit.

He (whoever) talked on the Tuesday August 24, 2010 show, with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic about the How & Why of Israel's "inevitable" strike on Iran.

Bloomsday got my summer mapped out. I perambulated New York, as though it were Dublin, reading bits of Ulysses aloud in Manhattan like Walt Whitman spouting poetry through Brooklyn, compacting the universe into one good day, like yesterday.

Leopold Bloom walks through Dublin seeing-through grand mythologies and exalting contemporary details mythologically. He stops in church and admires the spiel and razzle dazzle techniques of the priest, comfortably subsuming Catholic enormity into the integrity of his own honestly un-awed interpretation. And he finds madonnas for worship and wonders worthy of the saints that causes him to burst with the holy spirit on a Dublin beach.

The debasement of sacred things is redeemed by the exaltation of common wonders. The two meet in the paragraphs of Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus walks along Sandymount strand, blind, beholding immortal signs all about him; Leopold Bloom is walking towards him, admiring shop signs and newspaper headlines in words that will echo for all time from the 20th century to the future. When they collide everything collapses, before it is put back together.

The Israeli and the Irish governments are wrestling on the international stage, and it's not good for the Irish.

The media drama between the nations was set on the high seas when the Irish arm of the Free Gaza Movement stocked a harmless cargo boat with food supplies and famous Irish Civil Rights activists, including Nobel Peace prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire and set sail.

The purpose was to bring relief and attention to a civilian population enduring collective punishment in order that they "be persuaded" to "change their minds" as New York Senator Chuck Schumer recently put it so chillingly.