Month: June 2006

Lo and behold, Dick O’Brien, myself and Tom Cosgrave, all old stalwarts of the blogging game have been added as contacts to Labour’s flickr page.

I promise, I didn’t ask! 🙂

It looks like it’s taken the former presenter of the terrible ‘Going for Gold’ to actually say what everybody else in the country has been thinking. Choice quotes:

“Mr Haughey was accorded a state funeral. A state funeral. This is the honour you accord to heads of state, who have been truly loved, or men or women who have led you through war, or by their dignity have exemplified all that is best in their nation,” he told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper.

“Charles Haughey exemplified all that was, thanks to him, worst in the Irish nation: trickery; smoothness; conceit; cronyism and downright abuse of power.”

“His rules were his own. His vanity breathtaking, his dismissal of enemies, either real or imagined, vicious.”

“To have accorded this man a state funeral is nothing short of a disgrace and one that makes me feel ashamed,” he wrote.

Haughey’s legacy would one day “hopefully” evaporate but the myths about him were spectacular.

“This is what makes the honour of a state funeral so repellent. From here on, such an honour is permanently devalued,” Kelly wrote.

It was incendiary stuff last night. Watch it here.

Oh and on the Week in Politics on Sunday, Vincent Browne made an ass of himself, in my humble opinion.

Even better was Michael Martin’s weird response to Sean O’Rourke’s question:

As someone who was at both events, in terms of the public response, how did Charlie Haughey’s funeral in North Dublin compare with that of Jack Lynch in Cork?

Prepare yourself for the waffle answer of the week:

MM: Well there’s obviously a different, different type of funeral involved in terms of the public reaction and so forth, it was a very impressive funeral I thought in terms of the content of the Mass itself and the liturgy, onto the music.

SOR: What about the public turnout?

MM: Well it would have been greater in the Cork context but you are talking about two different contexts … in terms of numbers and volume on the streets I would imagine…

SOR: Were you and your colleagues in cabinet somewhat taken aback by the numbers?

MM: No, not particularly. I mean it was a different type of funeral. What struck me about the one last … about Charlie Haughey’s funeral was the different types of people from different parts of the country. So for example I came across 4 people from Dingle, fishermen who actually on the day, or the evening before sorry, drove up from Dingle to be at the particular funeral. So he had a range of people making their way from all over the country to get there. The Jack Lynch, Jack Lynch was a huge popular hero across the country but particularly in Cork, because of course being the first Cork Taoiseach and outstanding politician and sportsman and so on like that.

It’s the context you see.

1 million people in Dublin, 1,200 people turn out for Haughey’s funeral.

Ah! Socialists have invaded Flickr.

Who will be on their contacts list I wonder…

I read in the Tribune on Sunday that Le Monde made a boo-boo with the following:

Citant Othello dans son discours d’adieu, “Charlie” affirme “avoir rendu quelque service à l’Etat”. Mais le dernier hommage pourrait revenir à Moira Geoghegan-Quinn, ancien ministre de son cabinet, qui décrit ainsi celui qu’elle appelait “Sweetie” : “C’était un personnage entouré d’intrigues, de mystères et d’argent, mais protégé par son populisme, son intelligence et son sens opportun du bon mot.”

Maire Geoghegan-Quinn was ‘Sweetie’, not Terry Keane? Or else my French is really bad.

Word has it in the Tribune that Quinn is consulting her lawyers.

…sick at the pathetic fawning interviews RTE has conducted in relation to Charles Haughey. Saturday View today was tantamount to this bullshit coverage I have watched and listened to over the last few days.

Vincent Browne has turned coat and now loves Haughey apparently.

But RTE are not alone. The Indo today made me feel even more sick. Pathetic. They gloss over the fact that no one turned up for the funeral too. Here’s some cringeworthy quotes:

Past Irish men and women and children from the four provinces – relatively few in number – come to pay their final respects.

Then the roof of the hearse, as measured and magisterial as the old Haughey when he would coast through rooms like Napoleon.

For Bertie Ahern did not come to bury Caesar. He came to praise him, and to ensure that the good he did would not be interred with his bones.

A radical reformer. A complex man, like WB Yeats.

Afterwards, Fr Eoghan walked over and hugged the Taoiseach. Caesar is dead. Long live Caesar.

Fucking pathetic. What unadultered and absolute bullshit.

More level headed coverage after I calm down.