Cliché-Fest of the Vanities

As I'm writing, I'm listening to Philip King, Ed Walsh, Ruari Quinn, Ilonna Duffy, and Harry McGee on Marian Finucan's show. Oh, and I almost forgot - John Gormley. It's Saturday, 10th October at 12 noon. It's like a little microcosm of our society.

Ed Walsh is an academic who wants retribution - now that's a dangerous combination. It's one that I can absolutely understand, and I can feel his fury. His comments on Bertie in the Cupboard were the best I've heard.

You really get the sense of Ahern as Leprechaun, dancing on a cliff-edge. The exTaoiseach who spent years carefully weaving the rope that bound him to his brothers, who in their turn created the net that enmeshed (not to say ensnared) all of us. The net that binds all of us ultimately to him, and his ilk - the FF tribe. And there he is, dancing in delight at the security that rope gives him. He holds tight to the pot-a-gold that he helped fill as he granted constructive wishes; the heavy pot-a-gold that will pull all of us over the edge.

John Gormley - Is he an innocent abroad? A politician who should never have gone beyond the local council? Or an ecowarrior out of his tree? In any event, the feeling he engenders in me is that of self-preservationist dressed as a statesman, a bit player who's now in a panic 'cos he's seen how close to the cliff-edge we are. He was just out searching for pods of dolphins, ignoring the danger signs because he had a higher purpose. But I doubt he signed up for this...

Ilonna Duffy - mostly silent. I don't know enough about her, as far as I know she's one of that rare species - even rarer than Leprechauns: a successful Irish business woman operating in Ireland. She's probably pragmatically looking for the best position on the cliff-edge - and who'd blame her.

Harry McGee - deals in facts. They are devastating. He is the one who shines the spotlight on the facts. The facts tell the story themselves. The facts tell us that there was a culture of incompetence, entitlement, greed, waste... He's trying to tell us that the rope is tightening, that the dancing Leprechaun is looking into the abyss - I get the feeling that the abyss has been looking into the dancer for a long, long, long time.

Ruairi Quinn - is a sober and astute politician, long inured to opposition. He is the engineer who is trying to estimate the gradient of the cliff, the counter-weight needed, the depth of the foundation needed. He obviously doesn't trust the Leprechauns who said that this edifice could hold. He looks with a jaundiced eye when they say that they will lead the people along a four-year path out of the crisis. He's wise to the ways of Snake Oil salesmen.
Cow-cough-linehan is no Moses leading his people out of Egypt... and that took 40 years, not 4.

and Philip King - the poet, musician, visionary.
His views will be derided and ridiculed, and he will be called a pollyanna.
But he made a good point, that this state, and every other state, came about because of poets and visionaries. At the end of it all, if we have not been bled dry by the zombies, I hope that there will be some visionaries who will emerge. Why can we not see that we need the visionaries, the one's who look beyond the cliff, the breakers, to the clean blue ocean that could wash the filth away. Some will drown, but lifeboats can be built

This Government in Ireland in October 2010 want our blood. They've taken our money and our childrens' money. They've taken our time, our energy, our spirit, and now they want our blood.

I'd spill my own first.