Last Friday Norway’s government announced plans to ban trade with Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. This follows the example of Spain and Slovenia who have already taken steps to do so.

On the same day Taoiseach Micheál Martin declared that the EU’s credibility was being damaged by its failure to take sufficient action against an Israeli regime he accused of, “War crimes.”

Strong words from a man keen to position his country as being to the forefront of the European response. Yet the fact of the matter is that Martin’s government has put its own Occupied Territories Bill on the long finger for years.

Though that bill may finally go before the Dáil next month it will be in a drastically attenuated form. Martin proposes to make a distinction between “goods” and “services,” which wasn’t envisaged by those who campaigned for the legislation to be introduced.

His aim is to exempt “services” from the ban. Given that these constitute our majority of trade with the Occupied Territories, the effect would be to render the legislation largely meaningless.

The rationale behind the distinction became even clearer on Wednesday when the Dublin Inquirer revealed that Ireland’s exports to Israel of an electronic integrated circuit capable of being used in war soared from 520 million euros worth in 2021 to a billion euros worth last year.

These circuits are made by Intel, a significant employer in both the Israeli and Irish technology sectors. When Sinn Fein spokesman on Foreign Affairs Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire said in the Dáil that, “Civilians are still being killed and the expansion of illegal settlements continues. In such a context Ireland should not be exporting goods which can be used as weapons of war to Israel,” Martin’s response was telling.

“We have,” he said, “To take everything on board and be sensible about it.” A similar response was forthcoming when People Before Profit leader Richard Boyd-Barrett asked the Taoiseach if his government would impose sanctions on Israel.

“Tell that to the thousands of workers employed by Intel in this country? What happens there? What about what the US might do to Ireland if Ireland moves against Israel?”

Let’s for a second leave the question of Israel’s behaviour in Gaza (which I abhor) aside altogether. Let’s assume that Ireland’s position, ignoble though it is, is justified on the grounds of economic self-preservation. Let’s presume that Martin is right.

But in that case what’s the point of the Taoiseach’s criticism of the EU? Why does he want theUnion as a whole to do something which Ireland refuses to do itself? Does he believe that the EU shouldn’t use the excuse of taking everything on board and being sensible about while worrying about what the US might do to it?

The problem is that Martin regards his rhetoric on Israel as only tangentially connected with reality. Jobs in Intel are real. Irish economic self-interest is real. But words are just words. You can say anything and no-one’s ever going to hold you to them. It’s a guiding principle of Irish politics.

The doubling of '“dual use” exports to Israel comes at a time when EU countries have been banned from exporting such technology to Russia. Yet Ireland has still managed to not only keep trading with Russia but to provide it with war material.

An investigation by the US based Organised Crime and Corruption Recording Unit in conjunction with the Irish Times showed that the Augninish Alumina factory in Limerick is exporting the majority of its product to Russia where it’s smelted down to make weapons for use against Ukraine. The factory is owned by a Russian company whose majority shareholder is Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned oligarch with links to Vladimir Putin.

Martin’s reaction was to claim that a ban on such exports would hurt the EU which was a major importer of alumina from Aughinish. Yet a subsequent Irish Times story showed that so far this year 83% of the factory’s exports have gone to Russia and just 0.6% to the EU.

It’s pretty clear what’s going on at Aughinish. European Parliament Vice-President Pina Picierno has commented, “It’s unacceptable that while the EU is funding the defence of the Ukraine, a Russian owned factory operates undisturbed in a member state, serving the needs of the Kremlin’s military industry.”

Yet the government persists in the pretence that further investigation will be necessary and that, “action will be taken,” should this reveal what everyone already knows. Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke even threw in a bit about sanctions on Aughinish somehow affecting the supply of electricity to the Irish national grid.

The government’s prevarication is rooted, like its complicity with the export of military technology to Israel, in economic considerations. Aughinish is a major employer in Limerick. The grim calculus employed states that a Limerick job is worth more than a Ukrainian life. Just as a job in Kildare is worth more than a life in Gaza. Martin as good as said so in his reply to Boyd-Barrett.

It’s quite an achievement to find yourself contributing to both Israel’s war on Gaza and Russia’s on Ukraine. Yet the offence is compounded by the sanctimony of Irish rhetoric. Open cynicism in the Swiss mould might be preferable. It would at least be less stomach turning.

Then there’s our long-term acquiescence to the US military using Shannon Airport as a stopping off point on their various foreign adventures. And our government’s plans to cut financial supports to Ukrainian refugees, remove them from their current accommodation and possibly deport them back to the war zone.

The overall picture is a squalid one yet Irish politicians, and many of their voters, still have an idea of themselves as good guys. The phrase, “moral superpower,” even gets used unironically from time to time.

This can be explained by the belief that the country should be judged not on its actions but on its intentions. So you get anomalous occurrences like the FAI, which had campaigned for UEFA to exclude Israel from international competition, agreeing to fulfil its Nations League fixtures against that country.

Again, let’s not even go into the rights and wrongs of the situation. Let’s just focus on the profound illogicality of the FAI’s position. They’ve said that they must play Israel because they don’t want to lose the six points available.

Yet had UEFA agreed with Ireland and banned Israel, there would have been considerable disruption and controversy involved. The FAI thought UEFA should have been willing to endure that for the sake of principle. But it thinks six points are too great a sacrifice to make for the same principle.

Foreign observers may find such behaviour incomprehensible. That’s because they’re unaware of the sacred position accorded to rhetoric in Irish political life. This holds that saying something matters more than doing something. It’s also agreed that what you say doesn’t even have to sound true. A tiny grain of plausibility is regarded as sufficient.

Take the controversy about the Irish economy’s over reliance on data centres. Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment Darragh O’Brien answered criticism during the week by saying that the data centres are Ireland’s equivalent to the German car industry.

The latter employs 721,000 people while 3,000 people work in Irish data centres. But what harm? Wasn’t it something to say? Tánaiste Simon Harris’s ludicrous claim that data centres have created 876,000 jobs, instantly eviscerated by The Irish Times, was of the same ilk.

You’d hesitate to say that Martin or Burke or Harris or O’Brien are lying. The liar hopes to be believed. The Irish politician often doesn’t care whether you believe him or not.

His or her statements can be seen more as tactical responses to the truth. I once interviewed a novelist who said, “If they ever catch you out on a factual error, just say ‘Basically I’m a fabulist,’”. Irish politicians are fabulists par excellence. Every utterance is Magical Realism.

One classic example of this tendency occurred during the Mahon Tribunals into political corruption which ran from 1997 to 2004. It emerged that developers had paid large sums of money to politicians who helped them make even larger sums by voting in their favour on planning matters.

A series of politicians claimed that even though they had taken the money and made decisions in the developers’ favour,. they weren’t corrupt because, “No favours were asked for or given.” What appeared as bribes to the uneducated eye were actually “political donations.”

Their defence appeared to be that they could only be found guilty of a corruption if a letter saying, “Thanks for the money Frank. I did you that seventy grand’s worth of favours you asked me for,” could be produced. The general public found this very hard to swallow. The politicians knew they would. But the aim was not so much to say something people believed to be true as to say something they couldn’t prove beyond doubt to be 100% false.

People might have found Bertie Ahern’s description of his financial situation bizarre but could they prove he wasn’t telling the truth? Ahern resigned as Taoiseach because of the tribunal revelations but even though the final report found that he’d misled it he insisted that he’d been vindicated because the word “corruption,” was never used.

During the period of the tribunals I appeared on the RTE political debate programme Questions and Answers along with former Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald, long regarded as unusually honest for an Irish politician.

I observed, in response to a question, that we did seem to have a problem with political corruption. Fitzgerald was absolutely furious with me afterwards. How could I have said that there was corruption here, he asked. “You make it sound like we’re Italy.”

He was a bright man but he too had been suckered by the great Irish political word game into believing that it wasn’t really corruption if we called it something else. The Jesuitical behaviour over the Occupied Territories Bill and Aughnish Alumina is very much in the traditional grain of Irish political life.

This trademark slipperiness helps us create the image we want to present to the outside world. This may be an island but we’re not an insular people. How we’re seen elsewhere matters a lot to us.

James Joyce was sceptical of Synge’s romantic portrayal of Irish peasant life in The Playboy of the Western World, noting that Irish people in his experience were a much more hard-nosed and cynical lot. John McGahern, whose writings like Joyce’s are notably astute about the Irish character, had one of his characters describe the Playboy as, “awful eejity stuff.”

Yet Playboy endures and is playing at London’s National Theatre as we speak. Its picture of an impractical and dreamy nation goes down well with the rest of the world. The more austere observations of Joyce and McGahern don’t fit with foreign fantasy.

In reality, behind the pretence of Irish “Soundness,” the business of Ireland is business. The Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz once observed that the Russian was a very friendly person who could kill you if he fell out with you. Your typical Irish person is even friendlier but will stab anyone in the back if there’s money to be made from it, Including, as the rental crisis and the fact that Ireland is the most expensive country in Europe show, their fellow citizens.

Irish rivers are increasingly polluted because proper enforcement of environmental legislation might lessen the rate of agricultural profit, For all the talk of our mystical connection with the landscape, “you can’t eat scenery,” might as well be the national motto.

If Israel wants electronic circuits to help bomb Gaza, we’ll sell them. If Russia wants alumina to make weapons, we’ll see they get it. Why let someone else make the money?

Ireland has been reconstructed in the image of the Gombeen Man. These grasping businessman of old, willing to screw everyone over so they could make a profit, were once despised figures. Now they’re sold to us as role models. They might be running start-ups rather than hucksters’ shops but they haven’t changed much.

At home or abroad we tell other people stories in order to make a living. Sometimes it might seem that we’re getting high on our own supply and believing the hype. But we know. Deep down we know that who we are is not who we say we are.

We just don’t care.

It is a falsehood universally acknowledged that we have just lived through a golden age of television. The idea that The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad et al represented a new level of dramatic sophistication is one of the great cultural clichés of the age.

Yet it only makes sense when seen from a blinkered American perspective. Edgar Reitz’s epic portrait of several generations of German village life Heimat, made in 1982, is a far greater achievement than anything HBO ever managed. So is the less well known Heimat 2, set in the sixties and first broadcast in 1993.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder made two series, his adaptation of Alfred Doblin’s great novel of the 1920s, Berlin Alexanderplatz from 1980 and his drama of working class life in Cologne, Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1972-1973), which also top the best American production.

So does La Maison de Bois, a series about life in a French village during the Great War, made by another superb film director Maurice Pialat in 1971.

That’s not to deny the excellence of either The Sopranos or The Wire, though the latter went on too long and the latter collapsed into incoherence during its final series. They are both fine idiosyncratic achievements which bear the mark of their individual creators, the two Davids, Chase and Simon.

Yet a lot of the stuff overpraised in their wake is already dating fast. Most of them seem like relics of the Neo-liberal heyday of American confidence in which they were produced. Don Draper coming up with the tagline for one more tacky product, Walter White turning into a criminal superman, Matthew McConaughey seeking the dark source of ultimate evil, feel like fantasy figures for the office bound.

Who’ll ever again watch Westworld or Watchmen or Boardwalk Empire or Treme? How good can be something really be if you can “binge” it all in one weekend? Or text your way through it? Aren’t Succession and The White Lotus with their “Look at all these riches. Aren’t they terrible?” just as dishonest as those CSI episodes where the detectives find that the trail of the killer leads through a dozen lap dancing clubs.

The idea of those series as the apotheosis of television derived to a large extent from social media’s ability to make people become citizens of an imaginary America. We all became implicated in America’s business. Those programmes seemed important simply by virtue of being American. They felt like the repository of valuable news about the selfish giant to our West even if in reality far more Americans were watching NCIS and Grays Anatomy.

Now that the advent of Trump has shown how little we ever understood about the place, you’d feel slightly silly for wasting so much time and attention on these shows. We watched all those episodes of Vinyl, Nip and Tuck and In Treatment for nothing

House of Cards seems emblematic of the Prestige TV era. Overblown, over long, badly written and containing more hammy acting than a sty full of pigs playing charades, it paled in comparison with the original. Kevin Spacey versus Ian Richardson? No contest.

Placing the two series side by side illustrated an inconvenient truth. At its peak English TV outclassed its American equivalent. House of Cards was the product of the expertise accumulated from decades of high quality TV drama. It came near the end of the real Golden Age of TV, one which probably attained its apogee in the seventies and took place in Britain, largely but not exclusively on the BBC.

All that talk of The Sopranos etc, representing a new age of maturity for the medium, for example, looks pretty silly set next to the sustained achievement of BBC’s Wednesday Play/Play for Today strand between 1964 and 1984.

Director Ken Loach and producer Tony Garnett confronted homelessness in Cathy Come Home (1966) and illegal abortion in Up the Junction (1965). Cathy Come Home writer Jeremy Sandford created an extraordinary empathetic portrait of a homeless alcoholic, played brilliantly by Patrick Hayes in Edna The Inebriate Woman (1971).

Frequent Loach collaborator Jim Allen’s The Spongers (1978) about an unmarried mother struggling desperately to make ends meet, with its tragic ending, is one of the most profoundly moving things to appear on television. It is strong stuff even now as are the look at an industrial dispute from the inside in Colin Welland’s Leeds United (1974), the politically astute examination of racism in David Edgar’s Destiny (1978) and the shattering depiction at the treatment of a female cancer sufferer in Trevor Griffiths’ Through the Night (1975).

All this came at a time when radicalism in American TV was represented by Mary Tyler Moore being allowed to have boyfriends when she wasn’t married.

Political edge alone is not enough on its own but the famous left-wing TV plays also worked dramatically. Loach’s gifts as a director would become even more apparent during a movie career which has seen him twice win the Palme D’Or at Cannes among other honours while never compromising politically.

Edgar and Griffiths were two of the outstanding British playwrights of the era. Welland won the Oscar for best original screenplay with Chariots of Fire while Roland Joffe, who directed The Spongers, earned best director nominations for The Killing Fields and The Mission.

Then there was Mike Leigh, one of world cinema’s great modern directors, who cut his teeth In TV. His Nuts in May from 1976 and Abigail’s Party from 1977 were two of the very best Plays for Today. Keith Pratt, who browbeats everyone he meets on his camping holiday in the former and Beverley Moss, who terrorises her guests in the latter, pointed the way towards some of English film’s most unforgettable characters.

There was an awful lot of talent around British TV in those days. David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary of Cinema argues that it was effectively what Britain had instead of the movie industry which languished in the doldrums during the seventies.

Thomson mentions Stephen Frears as someone whose Hollywood movies never lived up to his TV work. That seems right. I love both Philomena and The Grifters but neither has anything like the emotional punch of Walter, his film from 1982 about a middle-aged man with learning disabilities institutionalised after the death of his mother.

A subject which in American network hands might have tumbled into mawkishness possesses instead, thanks also to an extraordinary performance by Ian McKellen, a powerful emotional truth. So does its sequel Walter and June, made by Frears a year later.

Walter was shown on Channel Four’s opening night in 1982. The BBC didn’t have a monopoly on great drama. One of the greatest, The Naked Civil Servant from 1975, was shown on Thames Television, one of several ITV networks in those regionalised days.

The sympathetic portrayal of flamboyant gay icon Quentin Crisp, less than a decade after homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK, was a political act in itself. Yet Jack Gold’s drama is true to its protagonist by staying very far from special pleading. (Crisp resisted attempts to dragoon him into the service of any political cause, gay rights included.)

John Hurt made his name with a brilliant performance and the film’s boldness makes it much less dated than all those self-consciously daring “gay kiss,” moments TV soap operas were still using to titillate the tabloids a decade later.

Objections to the Naked Civil Servant were muted compared to the media firestorm which greeted Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective in 1986 with its main character’s memories of watching his mother commit adultery.

In the words of the current cliché, “You wouldn’t get to make something like The Singing Detective these days.” Not because of the sex but because the idea of mainstream TV devoting six primetime hours to a metafictional examination of a tormented writer’s psyche would be unthinkable. The formal invention of the series as it slips from one world to the other makes your typical HBO dream sequence look pedestrian by comparison.

Before The Singing Detective came the equally brilliant Pennies from Heaven from 1978 with its innovation of having characters express emotion by miming to old songs later copied to great effect by French avant-garde director Alain Resnais in his multiple César Award winning On Connait la Chanson.

Potter’s genius was acknowledged even by those sniffy about the merits of television vis a vis cinema. His status as eminence of the TV screen was such that it comes as a shock to realise that he was only 59 when he died of pancreatic cancer in 1994.

He was not the only genius at work in those years. Alan Clarke, whose reputation grows with the years, was to directing what Potter was to writing, someone who boldlywent where others did not dare.

There were other parallels. Both suffered at the hands of the censors, Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle from 1976 was not shown till 11 years later. Clarke’ Scum from 1977 didn’t appear on TV till 1991. (Both became movies in the interim.) The fact that both featured rapes may have sealed their fate though the former’s attack on religion and the latter’s exposure of the brutality of the borstal system didn’t help them.

Clarke too died prematurely, from lung cancer at the age of 54 in 1990. His crowning achievement is Penda’s Fen, directed from the playwright Alan Rudkin’s script in 1974. To describe it as essentially being about the struggles of a teenage boy’s to come to terms with his sexuality sells it very short. It is also an epic fantasy on English landscape, music and national identity, a disorientating work of strange beauty like nothing else ever made for television. Yet this too was primetime viewing. Mired in this lowest common denominator age, the mind boggles.

The most likeable writer of the age was Jack Rosenthal who wrote a series of beautiful and funny dramas of which Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976), about a boy going AWOL on the day of the titular ceremony and The Evacuees (1975), about two Jewish brothers evacuated during the Second World War are probably the best known. Though The Knowledge, written for Thames in 1979, about hopefuls attempting to pass the London taxi driver exam warms the heart and tickles the funny bone just as well.

Scottish writer Peter McDougall’s territory and worldview were very different from Rosentha’sl but Just Another Saturday, from 1975 about an Orange march in Glasgow and Just A Boy’s Game from 1979, set over 24 hours in the life of a small town hard man, are masterpieces. Both were directed by John McKenzie who turned to cinema the following year with The Long Good Friday, propelled by a powerhouse performance from Bob Hoskins who’d been just as unforgettable in Pennies From Heaven.

There were giants on TV in those days. Including the young Keneneth Branagh who made his name in the three Billy plays by Graham Reid on BBC, explosively violent examinations of a Belfast family whose dysfunction seemed to mirror that of the society outside the house. Both McDougall and Reid are sorely under-rated these days and deserve a spell back in the limelight.

All the while BBC and ITV was also making the costume dramas which in their Masterpiece Theatre guise became the default notion of British TV for American audiences. It says a lot about the strength in depth of the industry at the time that the two greatest, Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel In The Crown, were made not by the BBC but by Granada, ITV’s Manchester based station.

BBC did manage to make the greatest comedy of all-time Fawlty Towers, whose final series aired in 1979. That was the same year they produced Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy which, in combination with its sequel three years later Smiley’s People, takes the palm as the finest ever espionage drama. From Alec Guinness’s performance on down, the adaptations of John Le Carré’s novels had a precise rightness which typified BBC in its classic era.

The reliance on the single drama as flagship largely ended with the seventies. But the two outstanding achievements of the eighties, Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) and Edge of Darkness (1985) seemed rooted in the old Play for Today tradition. Literally in the case of the former, which derived from a play in that series.

Alan Bleasdale’s brilliant depiction of the horrors of unemployment is something you can’t imagine American TV going near. The use of the nuclear industry as the backdrop for a conspiracy thriller in Edge of Darkness, written by veteran writer Troy Kennedy Martin, would also have been unthinkable.

Looking at Edge of Darkness during a recent re-run I was struck by how much it diverges from the genre template with its strange nods to mysticism and then unfashionable ecological concerns. It is at heart, like all its peers, the vision of an individual rather than that of a system. Perhaps that was what made British television the best in the world back then. Its work has not been surpassed since.

Edge of Darkness, like Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven, was granted the dubious tribute of an inferior Hollywood remake. A more generous tribute was paid to Alan Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad by the great American film critic Pauline Kael who described it as the finest hour of television she’d ever seen.

An Englishman Abroad, directed in 1983 for the BBC by John Schlesinger seemed like a breakthrough for Bennett after a decade of consistently good but more low key work which began with A Day Out in 1972. An overlooked gem about a cycling trip taken by a bunch of friends before the Great War, that debut TV play now seems a compendium of Bennett preoccupations in microcosm.

Eight years after An Englishman Abroad came A Question of Attribution, a companion piece in that it focussed on the exiled Guy Burgess’s partner in spying Anthony Blunt. Also excellent, it proved to be a TV swansong for Bennett who subsequently devoted himself to cinema, theatre and the diary which, excerpted in the London Review of Books, cemented his national treasure status.

Bennett may have moved on at the right time. BBC continued to make fine TV in the nineties but it seemed less individual and less distinctive. The highly praised Prime Suspect, Cracker and Between The Lines were all very good but there was a hint of genre constraints being applied. These days such constraints are universal in British television. The cop show reigns supreme.

Our Friends in the North from 1996 may have been the last great BBC series in the old style. Peter Flannery’s series is recognised now as a masterpiece but at the time the station seemed slightly embarrassed by it. There was an appetite for something a bit slicker, a bit less political, a bit more, well, American.

That cultural cringe has set in hard over the past couple of decades and you sense that those now working in the field are in thrall to the idea that the HBO series really did represent the ultimate in TV drama. A welcome new diversity in terms of race and gender (Play for Today was an almost exclusively male genre) has unfortunately coincided with a sameness of production. There seems a lack of variety in the way writers from all backgrounds are allowed express themselves.

A kind of globalisation of taste has taken place. The European series which pop up on our screens now have a distinct American sheen to them. Russell T Davies It’s A Sin on BBC in 2021 was a return to classic form but pickings are thin these days.

My conviction that British was best doesn’t come from any sense of local patriotism. I’m Irish and far from unthinkingly Anglophile. (I’m currently checking to see if Elon Musk had any tickets left for his flight to Mars just in case England win the World Cup.)

But credit where credit is due. The luckiest part of my childhood was being born in a place where we were able, by use of illegal deflector systems, to abstract the BBC and ITV signals beamed to the North of Ireland. Counties close enough to the border had multi-channel TV denied to the rest of the country.

That television we were stealing was the best in the world. You can keep Walter White, Don Draper, Al Swearenegen and whatever the pair in The Americans are called. We had Yosser Hughes, George Smiley, Philip Marlow, Ray Winstone as Carlin and Alison Steadman as Beverley. We still do.

Ttwo BBC series are perhaps, though not very famous, my personal favourites. They are Days of Hope from 1975 and The Lost Boys from 1978. The first is a Loach/Allen collaboration which follows a working class family from the First World War to the General Strike (and includes an episode in Ireland which prefigures Loach’s later The Wind That Shakes The Barley). Its outlook is obviously Marxist yet it has an intelligence and humanity which lift it far beyond the limits of agit-prop.

The Lost Boys, written by Andrew Birkin (brother of the more famous Jane), is about the relationship between JM Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies family who provided his inspiration for Peter Pan. It, like Days of Hope, so meticulously captures the milieu involved that watching the events portrayed almost feels like living through them. It shares with it a sense of haunting loss for opportunities and roads not taken, though those roads would have gone in very different directions.

Sean Day-Lewis, half brother of the more famous Daniel, wrote in the Daly Telegraph of The Lost Boys, “I am sure that such excellence is beyond any other television service in the world.” The Sunday Times wrote that Days of Hope, “was so manifestly superior to what we normally see on television that criticism was temporarily disarmed.”

They were right. The BBC in the seventies was the real Peak TV. American television was only trotting after it.

Am I right or am I right?

Sporting clichés can be very misleading things. The most damaging one in Gaelic football is the declaration that a player through on goal is embracing, “The Wise Option” when he fists the ball over the bar.

It makes little sense. Goal opportunities are not so common in the game that they can be casually spurned. So why not gamble on scoring three points in one fell swoop rather than settling for one?

Yet for decades we’ve heard pundits praise players who opt for a point. A special sanctimonious note usually accompanies the praise, a kind of verbal pat on the head to the player for chickening out. The idea that playing safe is the best option chimed in with the timid conservatism which had choked the game in recent decades.

You could almost detect a hint of praise for the modesty of players who decided not to draw attention to themselves by going for goal like some Flash Harry. The truth is that an inter-county player should back his ability to beat an advancing goalie with the ball in his hand from fifteen or twenty yards out.

Sometimes you see players go for points when trying for a goal would actually be easier, putting on the brakes and twisting their bodies into the proper position to waft the ball skywards with their hand when rattling it with their foot would have been the more natural movement.

Perhaps all this Wise Option propaganda weighed on the mind of Mayo’s Sam Callinan when he raced clear of the Tyrone defence with two minutes left in Omagh. Not only was he through one on one against Niall Morgan but Tommy Conroy was hovering on the edge of the square.

The wing-back could have gone for goal himself or he could have squared the ball to Conroy for a tap-in. Mayo would have been three points clear and almost assured of victory. Instead young Callinan bowed to conditioning and fisted the ball over the bar.

A minute later Tyrone won a free from two point range which Niall Morgan slotted over the bar. They won by one. Mayo should have triumphed by the same margin. Let us hear no more of The Wise Option. It’s done enough damage. Maybe it’s time to give the fisted point its marching orders altogether.

Another sporting cliché is what you might call The Teleological Fallacy. It holds that a team which wins a close game has done everything right and that the game was composed of key moments which, examined in retrospect, pointed inevitably to their victory.

A related theory regards the preparation of gaelic football teams as the most precise of sciences. Nothing can be left to chance and the accumulation of small details can see a team through in the tightest of finishes.

This derives in part from the film Any Given Sunday and Al Pacino’s famous statement that American Football is, “a game of inches.” But in reality this only applies to American Football. It is literally a game of inches because a team must move the ball ten yards in four downs to retain possession. You can lose a Super Bowl because the chains come out and show that you have fallen six inches short of the requisite yardage.

Other games are a bit more fluid than that. They’re less regimented. The best laid plans go astray more often. Sometimes a team just gets lucky. That idea may be anathema to those who think you can prepare for everything. But sometimes stuff happens which no manager could have expected.

On hearing, for example, that Louth manufactured a winning goal in the last second against Armagh, you might think that the Wee County had got everything right in the final crucial moments. You’d imagine that this last goal resulted from that ability to calmly execute under pressure so vital in such situations.

You’d be wrong. Here’s what actually happened. Armagh had looked to be in control for most of the second half but had failed to put Louth away. This was due in part to an atypical sloppiness on the part of the favourites (at one stage three Armagh forwards were through on goal with the Louth keeper stranded but managed to lose the ball to the one defender in their way) and in part to the great pluckiness of the apparently outgunned underdogs.

Armagh were holding on to a two point lead with under two minutes left when Stefan Forker’s ill-advised shot for a point was blocked down. Louth had the ball near their own end-line and a hundred seconds left. They moved the ball with commendable speed and precision to set Ciaran Byrne galloping down the middle with seventy seconds on the clock.

Then disaster. Byrne collided with team-mate Kieran McArdle who was travelling in the other direction. Circus stuff. Armagh had the ball back and the jig looked up for Louth.

They quickly won it back around half-way and five passes brought them to within fifty yards of the Armagh goal. Now was the time for those cool nerves to kick in. But they didn’t. Louth spent seven passes and the fifty seconds remaining on the clock going sideways so that as time ran out they were still fifty yards out.

When Sam Mulroy got the ball in the last second he had no option but to lump a hopeful ball forward under pressure. It was immediately apparent that the ball would drop short into the arms of Armagh keeper Ethan Rafferty.

The delivery was a gimme for any inter-county keeper. And Rafferty isn’t just any inter-county keeper, he’s famous for his ability under the high ball and had demonstrated it to spectacular effect earlier in the game.

Yet as this utterly routine shot dropped towards him Rafferty managed somehow to misjudge it and effectively throw the ball into his own net. You could kick similar high balls into him every day for the rest of the month and he’d catch them all. But he botched this one with the result that Louth won by a point.

Fair play to Louth. They are a wonderfully gutsy team and upset Dublin in a similarly thrilling manner. But the manner of their victory is something no manager could have legislated for. Had Rafferty caught the ball chances are we’d be talking about Armagh’s canny game management and their ability to do just enough. They might well be the bookies favourites for the All-Ireland title.

This reverse means they’re faced with the hard route to the final. Though the freakish nature of their defeat means you’d be very reluctant to read too much into it. Sometimes the universe’s tendency towards chaos just asserts itself.

One venerable cliché which has thankfully been put to bed is the one used for years to justify football’s apparently inexorable progress towards becoming the most boring field game in the world.

Remember, “The game isn’t changing, it’s evolving.” All those insistences that the worst games you’d see in your life were in fact, “Grimly compelling.” And the pundits who’d mock “traditionalists,” for not admiring the dreck served up most Championship Sundays.

That was just two years ago. Yet it seems like a lifetime because the radical changes to the rules brought in by Jim Gavin’s famous committee have turned football on its head. It’s providing at least as much excitement as hurling at the moment. This year’s championship is an unpredictable and exhilarating masterpiece of suspense.

Cork’s victory over Donegal on Saturday was even more unlikely than Louth’s triumph against Armagh. No-one had expected anything for them except the most fruitless marathon trek possible. But they came from five behind in the second half to win by one.

The identity of the main man behind this resurgence seems significant. Steven Sherlock is a prodigious talent who has been running up huge scores in Cork club football for years. There is no purer striker of a ball from his hands or from the ground. It’s an aesthetic pleasure to see the way he connects with it. The St. Finbarrs man’s impeccable technique enables him to score from the unlikeliest distances and angles.

However, back during the “grimly compelling” days Sherlock’s opportunities to transfer his club form to the inter-county stage were limited. There was an idea that he might struggle, that the purity of his talent would struggle to impose itself in a world of blanket defence, glacial attacking build-ups and half-forward lines chock a block with auxiliary midfielders.

The classic nature of Sherlock’s talent seemed almost to make him suspect. He is not particularly quick or strong. He’s just a tremendous footballer and that didn’t seem quite enough in an era where the constricted nature of the game favoured athletes over artists by a considerable margin. Even the greatest of them all David Clifford struggled to make his mark in the nightmarishly negative 2024 championship which proved to be the final straw. Even the “Football is evolving” lads had given up by now. Evolution had created a creature with an elbow growing out of its arse.

There were few more powerful indictments of the old style game than the fact that there was no room for someone like Sherlock to thrive. Now at last he is free. It was the two pointers he rained over, a pair from play and another couple from frees, which got Cork home in Ballybofey. His belated inter-county apotheosis sums up how the game has changed.

All that seemed to be solid has melted into air. Football’s reinvention has caused counties to heed the better angels of their nature. Few people would have predicted that the four automatic quarter-finalists would be Cork, Louth, Tyrone and Galway. Few would have chosen Westmeath and Roscommon as likely provincial champions either.

Yet counties who spent years playing safe in the hope of keeping the game tight against what they regarded as superior opposition have been freed by the game’s renaissance. They have found the spirit of adventure to be not just aesthetically rewarding but pragmatically justified.

There’s a topsy turvy democratic feel about this year’s football championship, a feeling that no team can be taken entirely for granted and no result predicted with certainty. Almost everyone remaining will feel that if the breaks go their way they can go very far indeed.

In the new age bravery is the most important virtue. Armagh might have been home and dry long before Rafferty’s mistake had they not seemed to err slightly on the side of caution in the closing stages. Game Management seems an option of rapidly diminishing value these days. The games need to be played out to the full.

Mayo too may have been undone by lapsing into old habits at the moment of truth. Callinan’s miss was a player error but Andy Moran’s decision to introduce his old team-mate Aidan O’Shea seemed a hostage to fortune. The new style game with its increased pace and perpetual motion can be a cruel environment for veterans. O’Shea, great warrior though he has been, found it so.

You could point out that Tyrone’s Darren McCurry is 33 and has never looked more sprightly than he did after being sprung by Tyrone manager Malachy O’Rourke in the second half. But McCurry’s virtues, like Sherlock’s and Clifford’s, are ideally suited to the new dispensation.

An adept of attacking invention it has been his fate to spend most of his inter-county career being pulled and dragged while trying, like some ancient miner in the Yukon, to produce the odd nugget of gold amid all the dross. Now he too has been unshackled. The man they call “Dazzler” sparkled at Omagh with a series of wonderful points, taken from angles, struck with defenders on his toe or while off balance, which underlined the most important thing about Gaelic Football 2026.

This is A Beautiful Game.

There seems to be a growing acceptance among political and media figures that attacks on immigrants as a whole in response to crimes committed by a single immigrant are, if not entirely acceptable, at least somewhat understandable.

That’s obviously nuts. What responsibility does an Ugandan nurse bear for the crime of a man from Sudan? Yet too many people appear to accept without question the idea that the burning down of the former’s house is the logical conclusion of a stabbing carried out by the latter.

This was the mentality of the lynch mobs which once flourished in the American South with their fondness for visiting violence upon the Black community in general for transgressions perpetrated by one of their number.

We saw it in Southport two years ago when a local mosque was attacked, leading to riots in other English towns and cities, in the wake of the murders of three children by Axel Rudakabuna. In Ballymena last year an alleged rape by Roma teenagers was followed by riots and attacks on members of that community. And over the past few days a stabbing for which a Sudanese national has been charged led to serious riots in Belfast with arson committed against houses inhabited by immigrants.

Accepting such “retaliations” as inevitable slants both media and political reaction. Riots are portrayed as resulting from peaceful demonstrations which somehow got out of hand, even when there’s plenty of evidence that the violence was planned beforehand.

The violence is the point. Men with criminal records, domestic violence is often a particular penchant, tend to be wildly over-represented in the riots. Those organising them are often linked to far right extremism. The pretence that these are spontaneous expressions of community outrage by “decent people” should collapse in the face of such evidence.

It doesn’t. Even those who decry the rioting can fall into the trap of accepting the presumptions which underlie it. Much play was made of the fact that the Southport rioters had been misled by Fake News which said the murders there had been committed by a Muslim.

It shouldn’t have mattered even if they had been. Murders by one Muslim should not make it open season on mosques. That the Ballymena rape allegations turned out to be false showed the dangers of mob hysteria. But even if they hadn’t been, it wouldn’t have justified the violence which drove the majority of Roma inhabitants out from the area.

There are echoes of the way the Ku Klux Klan sought to instil terror in Black communities by collective punishment. Non-white immigrants in particular are effectively treated as a kind of hostage population whose right to a peaceful existence can be revoked at the whim of the majority community.

It’s instructive to compare the reaction to the stabbing of Stephen Ogilvie with the reaction to the recent death of Yves Sakila in Dublin. The film of that incident is even more harrowing because Sakila died after being pinned to the ground by a group of security men.

The Congolese community to which he belonged are obviously both sad and angry but their recent protest calling out for an inquiry into the killing was a model of dignity and decorum. Violence was conspicuous by its absence. This was a model of peaceful demonstration which puts the Belfast rioters to shame.

There have been plenty of other stabbings and murders in Britain and Ireland this year and there will be plenty more. Almost all of them will be treated solely as matters for the criminal justice system. No wider meaning will be ascribed to them, no riots will break out because of them.

Only crimes by immigrants provoke such reactions. It seems that, as in the Deep South, an attack by a Black person on a white person is experienced as such an inversion of the natural order that it falls outside the bounds of normal judicial redress. Some kind of extra vengeance is required, some lashing out at anyone whose skin is a different colour. The rioters feel entitled to it.

The pogrom in Belfast and the riots in Southampton following the conviction of Vickrum Singh Digwa for the murder of Henry Nowak are described as protests but what is their desired end point? A granting of permission to resume the racism of an earlier era? All white areas of cities? All white countries? Or merely an acceptance of the right to terrorise non white people whenever you feel the emotional need?

Someone who pinpoints houses where Black people live so they can be burnt down seems to have more on his mind than legitimate concerns over the proper functioning of the immigration system.

A Times editorial explaining what happened in Belfast as the result of worries about immigration levels was a classic of its sneaking regarder genre. In reality immigration into Northern Ireland is low by Western European standards with the percentage of foreign born residents in the Republic of Ireland for example around five times higher.

The rioting is largely driven by people for whom any level of immigration will be too high. Their concerns can never be fully assuaged. Immigration has decreased dramatically in the UK in the last couple of years. Yet there’s been little reaction by anti-immigration campaigners to what they might have been expected to greet as a victory.

Instead their focus has moved on to questioning the legitimacy of those born to immigrant parents. This would, strictly speaking, include King Charles, whose father was Greek, but Reform, Restore and the right wing of the Tory party have horses of a different colour in mind.

The revival of interest in Enoch Powell is telling. Powell was a pariah for decades and deservedly so. His “Rivers of Blood” speech wasn’t just incendiary but dishonest (some of the details were made up.) Yet the Spectator recently praised him as a prophet traduced by wokeness while that old National Front war cry “Enoch was right” was echoed by Loyalist spokesman Jamie Bryson.

The fantasy being peddled by the likes of Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, Tommy Robinson and others is that the clock can be turned back. It is a Make Britain White Again campaign (echoed by those of the same ilk in Ireland.) “Send them back where they came from,” rhetoric once the sole preserve of fringe movements like the British National Party has elbowed its way into the mainstream.

It’s a fantasy because the declining birth rate in Western Europe means that immigrant labour will remain indispensable. The care and hospitality sectors would collapse without it for starters. Yet the idea of mass deportations is a potent rallying cry among those for whom the sight of even one Black face on the street is enough to ruin their day.

The new climate licenses the kind of rhetoric we heard from Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister who described the attack as resulting from the importation of, “an alien culture which thinks it’s acceptable to try and behead someone.”

Allister should be more careful about ascribing barbarism to an entire culture on the basis of one individual’s behaviour. The Ulster Protestant community which he represents produced the Shankill Butchers, who murdered at least 23 people during the Troubles, torturing them, cutting their throats through to the spine and mutilating their bodies.

It would obviously be unfair to suggest that the Shankill Butchers were typical Ulster Protestants (even if their commitment to sectarian violence had a certain Traditional aspect.) A politician from a state unfairly demonised for years as a hotbed of psychopaths should go easy on the generalisations.

I was an immigrant myself. In London during the late eighties and early nineties, a period when the IRA were still carrying out bombings in England. I didn’t think that justified anyone physically attacking me, saying that my entire culture was sinister or suggesting that everyone who spoke with the same accent as I did should be treated as a potential terrorist.

By and large that didn’t happen though things had been more difficult for the Irish community in the seventies. But the occasional encounter with someone who felt I owed them an apology for something I had nothing to do with gave me a strong distaste for the idea that all immigrants are fair game when one of their number does wrong. It’s a monstrous idea and no-one should give it the time of the day. It’s not one bit “understandable.”

The situation in Belfast was exacerbated by local factors. The idea of burning out your enemies has roots in local Loyalist culture. It happened to Catholic families in 1920 and in 1969. The extent of the rioters’ connections with the Loyalist paramilitary organisations treated with kid gloves by the PSNI in recent years is unclear. British media coverage didn’t always make the almost exclusively Loyalist dimension of the riots apparent.

Yet the temptation to mount our moral high horse in the Republic should be resisted. The burning of buildings earmarked for refugee accommodation has become a trademark of our own far right. One such attack on an IPAS Centre being used in Drogheda could have ended up killing a number of children.

We’ve had our own riots and it may be that what happened in Belfast will down the line be portrayed as evidence of the need for further clampdowns on immigration by a government already inclined in that direction.

On the other hand perhaps the blatant racism displayed in Belfast will function as a road to Damascus moment for those who’ve been flirting with that side of things. Seeing where this stuff ultimately leads and what it looks like when it happens should give some of our politicians pause for thought. Who wants to be on the same side as the Enoch admirers and the Farage fanciers?

There are lessons to be learned across the political spectrum. Those on the left inclined to excuse anti-semitic attacks because, “feelings are running high,” might reflect on their own tolerance for the idea of communal punishment.

It’s also time to reconsider the notion that racism is essentially a conspiracy promoted by capitalism’s elite to keep the working class divided. This primarily economic explanation is very congenial to people of a left-wing disposition. It makes us feel righteous but explains very little.

The truth is that Racism has strong roots in European culture, dating back at least as far as the justification of slavery and imperial conquest through the claims that the victims of Western behaviour were genetically and culturally inferior.

Such beliefs continue to be embraced by some people who’ve never known a hard day in their life. The visceral reaction which makes them shudder with distaste at the sight of a Black people in an ad or a mixed raced couple on the street or a non white person wearing an Irish jersey will not be banished by economic policy. Their racism is real and it’s their own.

A protest of Indian immigrants against racist attacks in Dublin last year was addressed by a left-wing politician who told them the problem stemmed from the frustration of people worried about the housing crisis and marginalised by the government’s economic policies. I’m not sure I’d have been impressed by this attempt, well meaning though it was, to tell victims that their attackers are victims too.

It reminded me of Ralph Ellison’s scathing portrayal in Invisible Man of communist activists’ attempts to use Black frustration with the racist system for their own ends. And of Eamonn McCann, in the peerless War and an Irish Town, telling a woman in Derry to remember that British soldiers were working class lads and getting the answer, “Your working class lads threw my mother down the stairs.”

Not everything can be manipulated to fit the Procrustean bed of class politics. Racism is a problem big enough to be regarded on its own terms. Those at the sharp end of it know those terms best of all. It’s time we started not just asking them about their experience, North and South, but listening to and learning from them as well.

We might hear what it’s like to be scapegoated for acts which have nothing to do with you. And what it feels like to hear your fellow citizens shrug their shoulders and say, “them’s the breaks,” in response.

If you tolerate this your city will be next. There will be two, three, many Belfasts.

Richard Thompson playing 1952 Vincent Black Lightning is one of the great live musical experiences.

It begins with a passage picked on acoustic guitar, fluent and fleet, quietly virtuosic, the sound of a traditional tune about it. That ballad flavour will run all the way through the song. The guitar drives forward, sets the scene and then, “Says Red Molly to James, that’s a fine motorbike. Now a girl could feel special on any such like.”

So their story begins, an epic of love, speed and death unfolding in less than five minutes yet containing volumes. You see in your mind’s eye the two youngsters meeting in that moment as James replies, “My hat’s off to you. It’s a Vincent Black Lightning 1952,” and the grin on his face as he quips, “Red hair and black leather, my favourite colour scheme.”

This is the world of the bikers, those once totemic outsider figures who stirred a desire for freedom in everyone who watched their convoys sweep by the on the road. Not the American world of Brando in The Wild One, Easy Rider and the Hell’s Angels, but the English equivalent. The one of Sidney J.Furie’s 1964 movie, of The Leather Boys with its Kenneth Angeresque homo-eroticism, of the sinister motorcyle gang in Joseph Losey’s The Damned from 1962, of the bikers from Thom Gunn’s great poem On The Move, “In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,” who know that, “One is always nearer by not keeping still.”

And most recently of the movie Pillion, a tender sado-masochistic love story adapted from Adam Mars-Jones’ novel Box Hill. And it is to Box Hill that Red Molly and James take their first ride, the same Box Hill where Emma Woodhouse finally goes too far, insults Miss Bates and draws the wrath of George Knightley. A very different world from that inhabited by Thompson’s duo though Jane Austen might well have admired the economy and skill of the writing.

“Down to Box Hillll, they did Riiiide.” The drawing out of those syllables lending a momentous flavour to their journey and also an ominous undertow which lets us know something is in store for our starry eyed pair. In ballads something always lies in wait for young lovers.

More brilliant picking and you can practically feel the wind blowing through the hair of the duo as they tear through the Surrey countryside. That’s when James confesses to Molly that he’s a “dangerous man,” a modern heir to the highwaymen who once terrorised the roads round London.

Dick Turpin, the most famous of them, robbed a coach at Barnes Common, just a few miles away from Ladbroke Grove where Thompson grew up a couple of centuries later. The folk milieu where Thompson cut his musical teeth teemed with songs of highwaymen, poachers, pirates, deserters and other reprobates from the old weird England.

The finest highwayman song of all may be Allen Tyne Of Harrow (Valentine O’Hara in its Irish version) whose hero, “robbed Lord Lyons on the king’s highway with his pistols ready loaded,” before, like Turpin, meeting his inevitable fate on the gallows. Its definitive version was sung by Peter Bellamy, earlier a member of The Young Tradition along with Royston Wood who later sang backing vocals on Thompson and his then wife Linda’s magnum opus, I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight.

The Newry Highwayman, whose exploits, “I robbed Lord Baldwin I do declare and Lady Maunsell up in Grosvenor Square,” have been sung among others by the Dubliners, Makem and Clancy, Solas (most memorably of all thanks to brilliant vocalist Karan Casey), meets a bad end too. It’s an occupational hazard.

But what can a poor boy do? James tells it straight, “I robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine.” He’s 21 now and maybe he’ll make 22, “I don’t mind dying but for the love of you.” But if anything happens he wants her to have the bike.

We know something will happen, not least because while Richard Thompson may not be a dangerous man he is a merciless songwriter. The guitar hurtles on, the playing as brilliant as anything from a John Fahey instrumental tour de force. Is that unease you feel as the break continues for slightly longer this time?

Fuck it. That’s what I felt the first time I heard the news that Young James Adie had been shot while attempting an armed robbery and is doomed to die, and how I feel every time I’ve heard it since. A shudder, a shiver, a cold feeling in the stomach. “Come down Red Molly to his dying bedside,” has the profound archaic gravity of something from the folk tradition.

A country song might focus on the tragedy and perhaps turn mawkish in the process. But the genius of Thompson is that two moments of great exhilaration lie ahead. In the midst of death we are in life. The first sees James attain nobility. “Says James in my opinion there’s nothing in this world beats a 52 Vincent and a red-headed girl.”

Then in a beautiful simple gesture, he slips her the keys, and tells her excitedly, “I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome, coming down from heaven to carry me home.” Thompson stretches out “home” like a gospel singer and this moment, the emotional highpoint of the song, has lifted audiences everywhere for decades as it did when I saw him in Galway last week.

It’s a moment of transcendence which seems to capture something of the spirit which propels the biker down the road at top speed (even if James hasn’t actually been killed on the road.) It once inspired bikers like those in Gunn’s poem and Furie’s film to take huge risks as they sought to hit the “ton” on the road.

The same spirit brings people back every year race in the Isle of Man TT, though there are few more dangerous sporting events on earth. The most successful rider in the race’s history is Michael Dunlop from Antrim, whose father Robert, brother William and uncle Joey, a former world champion, all died in bike accidents.

It’s difficult for most people to imagine what keeps someone on the road after such tragedies yet Michael Dunlop, aged 37, won three more races in the TT this year and set a lap record in one. “I don’t take fear into consideration. Fear stays with you forever. So I don’t do fear.”

That might make Dunlop seem insensitively macho but he’s actually spoken movingly about his struggles with severe depression after his father’s death. He also won his first ever race at the prestigious North West 200 at the age of 19, two days after Robert’s death and the day before the funeral.

What drives a man like that? James Adie would have known and so perhaps would all the bikers, even those who’ve never raced, whose lives have been illuminated by the allure of the Vincent, the Norton, the Ducati, the Harley and their successors.

James leaves Red Molly, “his Vincent to riiiide,” and Thompson leaves it at that. She’s on that bike in the imagination of the listener. It can feel like there’s a final verse missing, a consoling coda which catches up with the girl in black leather as she remembers her dangerous man. People have even contrived endings to the song which do just that.

But Richard Thompson knows what he’s at when he turns a song. Nothing keeps its fascination like an ending which refuses to give us what we want. Or what we think we want. We think we want Ilsa to stay with Rick but if she had, Casablanca would be just another movie. Tragedy and the bitter-sweet last longest.

Thompson’s catalogue of songs matches that of any English songwriter. Dimming of the Day. Wall of Death. A Heart Needs A Home. Galway to Graceland. Waltzing’s for Dreamers. Night Comes In. Withered And Died. The Great Valerio. Beeswing. There’s a couple of dozen more classics on top of that at least. Yet Vincent Black Lightning 1952 feels like the pinnacle of his achievement.

That was how it seemed in Galway where he performed with an energy and rigour astounding for a man of 77 years. The song seemed a perfect showcase for his talents, the extraordinary facility on the guitar, the songwriting craft and a voice, which if never beautiful, has lost little strength over the years.

The song’s status has developed over time. When the outstanding album Rumor and Sith came out in 1991, it was I Feel So Good which initially attracted most attention. 1952 Vincent Black Lightning wasn’t even a single then yet now it’s probably his most popular song. In 2011 Time picked it as one of the 100 greatest songs since the magazine’s foundation in 1923. That seems fair enough.

It’s a brilliant performance both musically and lyrically yet its appeal may also lie in the fact that Thompson is telling us a story, like some bard regaling an audience round a campfire back in the early epic days of narrative. Even when you know the story there’s still something compelling about it.

That story quality derives from the folk music in which Thompson is rooted, In Galway he talked about going as a teenager to the Marquee club in London where both The Who and The Yardbirds had residencies, the latter featuring in succession Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.

Thompson had the chops to follow any of that trio to arena rock stardom. The tortured eloquence of his electric guitar playing is one of the wonders of the instrument’s history. He could sound avant-garde enough to comfortably fit into Sonic Youth and heavy enough to do a stint with Sabbath.

Yet he took the folk/rock route with Fairport Convention and even when folk tunes per se vanished from his repertoire he still seems informed by them. In 2018 he waxed lyrical to music website The Quietus about sixties folk pioneers The Watersons, who he described as, “geniuses.”Mike was, “one of the truly under-rated singers,” Lal, “should be an honorary Bronte,” and Norma was, “the greatest living English person bar none.” (These are all solid judgements.)

In the brilliant playing of 1952 Vincent Black Lightning you can hear echoes of those other guitar geniuses of the Folk Boom, Davey Graham, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. It’s also inimitably Richard Thompson. He is both sui generis and Primus inter pares.

The story element is there in Beeswing, with its tale of the laundry girl who refuses to give up her freedom, in Galway to Graceland, with its heroine driven wild by yearning, and in Waltzing’s for Dreamers’ Chekhovian sad sack, “who bet hard on love and I lost everything.” There are others.

These are great short stories but 1952 Vincent Black Lightning is a myth, a legend, a ballad and the greatest English movie never made. Thompson is the singer of tales and this is his finest.

James Adie and Red Molly live on. Their road goes on forever and their party never ends.

Limerick’s Munster final hurling win over Cork was the team’s Ali in Kinshasa moment, its Elvis 1968 Comeback Special moment, its John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn moment.

Late in your career, the old greatness has largely gone, the years weigh heavier and everything’s more of an effort these days. What remains must be gathered together to make something new, prove that rumours of your demise have been exaggerated and remind everyone that once you were the best ever to do it.

There’s something moving about seeing a team, like an artist, rage against the dying of the light in this manner. It’s why Limerick’s victory was greeted with so much fervour by players and fans you’d swear they were bridging a massive gap rather than winning a seventh provincial crown in eight years.

Limerick’s two rivals for the title of greatest team in GAA history also managed a second coming. Kerry footballers, foiled in their bid for five All-Irelands in a row in 1982 and Munster final losers in 1983, came back to win three on the trot from 1984 to 1986. Kilkenny hurlers, denied five in a row by Tipperary in 2010, rebounded to win four of the next five.

Neither team was as good as they’d been in their imperial pomp. But they were still better than everyone else. The years had cost them quickness but added guile. Their Late Style confirmed their greatness by drawing on the treasures they’d built up at their peak.

There were moments yesterday which illustrated vulnerabilities once unthinkable in a side that rode roughshod over almost all opposition for half a decade. William Buckley easily sidestepped and outpaced Sean Finn to point in the 17th minute. Robert Downey outfielded Gearoid Hegarty on the half-hour and burst away to strike a wonderful point. Aaron Gillane found himself in scoring positions but either hesitated or shot off-target.

This kind of thing did not happen to Finn, Hegarty or Gillane in their heyday. Such incidents fuelled the idea that hurling’s arrow has begun to point in the direction of Cork. Limerick are hanging in there but tomorrow belongs to the Rebels. There was a distinct, “the past is yours but the future’s mine,” tinge to Cork’s determination to run at Limerick and spread the ball wide to take advantage of their superior pace.

It’s a wise tactic. Cork have the legs on Limerick’s veterans at this stage. The suspicion was that they also have their number. A Cork win yesterday would have made it five out of six (one shoot-out included) in the championship. Like all ageing greats Limerick’s stars might have taken the field wondering if this is the day the competitive obsequies would be pronounced over them.

They were visibly hanging on in the first half with Downey’s point leaving them six points down after half an hour. Yet they rallied to cut the deficit to just two by the break. That four point burst proved crucial because three minutes into the second half, Cork’s greater speed was again evident when they cut through the middle for Brian Hayes to find the net while on the ground. The home team could apparently beat Limerick sitting down.

Eight points might have proved an insurmountable gap but five, with a strong wind behind the visitors, was manageable. Just about. They would not forge ahead till the opening minute of injury-time, the first time they’d held the lead since the fifth minute.

It was a grind. The days of Limerick surging irresistibly clear of strong opposition have probably gone for good. This time they had to do it the hard way with the breaks going against them. A Peter Casey shot was blocked on the line by Cork sub Cormac O’Brien in the 57th minute. Four minutes later Aidan O’Connor, who had a patchy day on frees, made a hash of one from an easy position which would have cut the deficit to one.

That O’Connor reacted by scoring a fine angled point shortly afterwards says much about his character. Cork pushed it out to two again with three minutes left. Thirty seconds later Limerick moved up a gear in the old style, Colin Lynch’s pass and Adam English’s run giving Hegarty a sight of goal. You could almost see the net dancing already but Cork keeper Patrick Collins deflected the shot wide. There would be no shortcuts for Limerick, their comeback would have to be eked out point by point.

Diarmaid Byrnes converted the 65. A trademark Kyle Hayes gallop set up Hegarty to level as normal-time ended. A minute later Hegarty found Peter Casey on the right wing and Ireland’s unluckiest hurler swung over a superb lead point. Cork levelled but then Hegarty broke the ball to Casey who struck again.

You half-expected a repeat of last year’s extra-time but Limerick monopolised possession and won most of the 50-50 clashes in the final nerve-wracking moments Even then they made it more difficult than it would once have been. David Reidy shot wide while Hegarty hit the post with an easy point opportunity.

Cork’s complaints that referee James Owens blew the final whistle when they were in possession ring a bit hollow when he’d given them two and a half minutes over an already generous period of injury-time to equalise.

The old guard had come good when it mattered. Hegarty was everywhere during that frantic denouement, having earlier kept Limerick in the running with a superb first half goal, catching a long free and despatching it to the net in the retro fashion of Ray Cummins or Tony Doran.

Byrnes is more vulnerable to speedy opponents these days but he was colossal in the final 20 minutes and a monster free he landed from deep in his own half in the 58th minute was crucial. Nickie Quaid, the oldest of them all, rescued his side with superb stops from Diarmuid Healy in the first half and Mark Coleman in the second.

Has the game seen a better keeper than Quaid? It hasn’t seen many better corner-backs than Finn who, as so often before gradually came out on top in his individual duel and popped up on the ball in the Cork half deep into injury-time. Lynch and Hayes can’t break free from opponents with the old ease but played crucial roles at the death.

The presumption this time last year was that both teams would subsequently meet in the All-Ireland final. Dublin put the kibosh on that and Galway will not be an easy opponent for Cork in the semi-final after the Rebels defeat Offaly in the quarters.

But the probability is that we’ll see another round of the GAA’s most compelling current rivalry next month. Cork will hate to have lost a final at home but they might not be overly despondent about their future prospects. The rain at times turned the game into the kind of slog which probably suited Limerick better.

On a sunny day with a less slippery pitch the Rebels will have a better chance to utilise that edge in speed which lies at the heart of their gameplan against Limerick. Of course you never know what the Irish weather will do down the line.

On the other hand you could argue that Limerick might benefit from a less strict refeeree than James Owens. After, correctly, giving Cork an early penalty when Kyle Hayes perpetrated the kind of foul on his namesake Brian which defenders often get away with under the high ball, the Wexford referee apparently felt compelled to continue taking a hard line on physical contact.

This gave the game a stop-start feel which meant that while it was tense and absorbing, it was not exhilarating in the way that might have been expected. Limerick are not a dirty team but they do appreciate a certain amount of latitude which was not forthcoming on this occasion. A more lenient referee might be to their advantage.

As Cork manager Ben O’Connor will remember from his own playing days, narrow defeat in a provincial final is not a bad motivating factor at all. Cork should also have Darragh Fitzgibbon back in harness should the teams meet again, something in itself probably worth a couple of points. Limerick should field a better version of Gillane who’s never seemed as out of sorts as he did here on his return from injury.

You can’t really say the Rebels blinked given that they held a slim lead for so long against the breeze. Alan Connolly and Shane Barrett seemed unable to get into the game but Healy’s terrific performance feels like a landmark in the development of a fine young player. A full-back line which has endured some horrendous afternoons at Limerick’s hands had the better of exchanges this time.

The problem for Cork is that should the two teams meet again it will be in an All-Ireland final. Events have confirmed that the only game Cork could possibly have lost to Tipperary last year was the decider. What demons remain from that debacle will only become clear when they get back into Croke Park.

All the “this time, it’ll be different” talk surrounding Dublin before the Leinster final proved ill-founded. The 14 point defeat by Galway might not have been quite as big as the 20 point trouncing by Cork last year and the 16 point loss to Kilkenny the year before that but seemed even more disappointing given prior expectations.

Dublin appear trapped in a no man’s land just behind the elite. They can catch big teams on the hop but at the price of alerting their next opponents. Thus forewarned the bigger guns see off the Dubs with ease. Dublin manager Niall Ó Ceallacháin can only hope that Clare are moved to underestimate them by Saturday’s result.

Galway looked very good. To watch Micheál Donoghue patrol the sideline, Daithi Burke and Padraic Mannion dominate at the back and Conor Whelan and Conor Cooney pick off scores up front was to be reminded of a time when the Tribesmen were a match for anyone.

They’ve clearly underachieved in recent seasons but it requires a very large act of faith to imagine Galway as All-Ireland contenders. Leinster looked weak this year and though the undoubted firepower of the province’s new champions gives them a puncher’s chance in the semi it would be surprising to see anything but a repeat of the Munster final on July 19.

That Saturday’s win was Galway’s first in a Leinster final since 2018 underlines how badly the county had lost the plot in recent years. These have, after all, been years of historical futility for the Eastern province. Munster teams have now won eight All-Irelands in a row, a run of geographical dominance previously only witnessed in the 1890s. Galway are unlikely to redeem the honour of their adopted province.

John Kiely and Paul Kinnerk will fall to the task of planning the comeback victory which will further cement their side’s place in the pantheon. They’ll know that the team’s resources will have to be shepherded in a way they didn’t have to be a few years back.

Because eventually even Cody’s Kilkenny and O’Dwyer’s Kerry, and Elvis and Ali too, suffered a final Gotterdammerung which conclusively signalled the end of their era. There’s a sense that Limerick may be nearing the verge of the abyss and that Cork are their potential heirs.

But you can remain a frustrated heir for a long time if the monarch is stubbornly bent on survival. Ask King Charles. We probably won’t be able to decipher the meaning of the Munster final until season’s end. Glorious Last Hurrah? Or Turning Back Of The Tide?

All will be revealed in due course. Yesterday Limerick steadied themselves in the saddle, shouted, “Fill your hand you son of a bitch” and rode right at Cork with all guns blazing.

In hurling the Wild West is still where the action is. It takes True Grit to prosper there.

Ireland apparently aims to be the same kind of EU Trojan Horse for Silicon Valley as Viktor Orban’s Hungary was for Russia.

That seems the obvious conclusion from the text accompanying the photo Minister for Foreign affairs Helen McEntee posted of herself alongside Meta Director of Public Policy Dualta O Broin on Friday. “Great to meet Meta yesterday to discuss priorities for Ireland’s upcoming EU presidency. Our discussion focussed on strengthening European competitiveness, reducing unnecessary regulatory complexity and creating the conditions for innovation to thrive.”

Your first reaction might be to wonder what business Ireland’s upcoming EU presidency is of Meta. Why on earth are we discussing our “priorities,” with an American company and presenting this discussion as though they’re our presidential partners?

We’ve been assured that this presidency is a very important thing yet here we are presenting it as an opportunity to do the bidding of a private business.

This might not matter so much if the EU’s priorities coincided with those of Meta. In fact the two entities are at loggerheads. The EU is currently battling with the company over what it sees as Meta’as transgressions against digital privacy and child safety on social media as well as breaches of competition rules which saw the company fined almost 800 million Euros two years ago.

McEntee’s gushing contribution feels like a declaration that Ireland has chosen Meta’s side in the battle. The language is telling. In the eyes of the Tech companies, almost all regulation counts as, “unnecessary regulatory complexity.” “The conditions for innovation to thrive,” is also code for the kind of untrammelled environment which allows Meta to do whatever it likes.

The public nature of this declaration makes it unusual. But the declaration itself will hardly surprise our EU partners. They’ve already noted Ireland’s tendency to act as Big Tech’s not so secret agent within the community.

As the excellent EU Observer website has noted, “Europe’s digital enforcement crisis is essentially an Irish digital enforcement crisis. The country that hosts almost every American tech firm’s European headquarters is also the country that has decided not to police them.”

Under EU law the country where data is held must enforce laws on GDPR and the like. By allowing the American companies a virtual free hand in these areas Ireland is letting down not just itself but the rest of Europe. We’ve used our putatively regulatory role as an opportunity to protect and curry favour with Big Tech.

Few people have done more to raise awareness of this problem than Johnny Ryan, head of the Irish Council of Civil Liberties’ Enforce unit which attempts to force those companies to comply with the law.

Ryan recently warned that Ireland’s Presidency, with its opportunity to set the agenda on digital legislation, will be a dangerous moment for the EU. McEntee’s cringing vow of fealty to Meta would seem to confirm his worst fears.

It seems that Ireland is not just going to, as Ryan says, “sell out Europe,” we’re discussing the best way to do it with the buyer. You can see why Ryan and officials in other countries want Ireland to be stripped of its regulatory role. That we now apparently feel emboldened to say the quiet bit out loud bodes very ill indeed.

Ireland’s policy towards Big Tech can be summed up by the words of the Dead Kennedys, “kiss ass while you bitch so you can get rich but your boss gets richer off you.”

But aren’t we doing well out of it? All those continentals whose data is being illegally used by the tech companies might not be very happy but a state’s gotta do what a state’s gotta do, right? McEntee’s Meta meeting might be a spectacularly ignominious display of forelock touching even by the sycophantic standards of Irish politics but after all you can’t eat dignity. Does it really matter as long as that lovely Tech money keeps rolling in?

Perhaps it does. Last week also saw the United Nations warn against countries adopting an unbalanced attitude towards the building of data centres. They noted that in Ireland data centres already account for 21% of electricity use here (the same amount as used by all urban areas) with the figure projected to top 30% in the near future. “It’s a concrete documented example of what happens when AI infrastructure growth outpaces energy planning,” said the UN.

Just two days earlier the government had published a report on data centres which, in the words of Labour Party Climate spokesperson Ciaran Ahern, “might as well have been written by the tech companies themselves.”

It included a claim that data centres “help secure” 876,000 jobs that was so obviously risible the Irish Times demolished it the following day in an editorial entitled, “How not to make a case.”

Our government’s reaction to the UN report was to follow the lead of Samson in the Book of Judges and smite its enemies with the jawbone of an ass, Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment Darragh O’Brien claiming that our data centres are the envy of the world.

Maybe O’Brien will do for Energy and the Environment what he did for Housing when he was the minister responsible. Last week he revealed that Ireland’s forthcoming failure to reduce our Carbon emissions sufficiently by 2030 will result in fines of between 8 and 26 Billion euros being imposed upon us by the country by the EU

Data centres will have contributed to those emissions thanks to what the Climate Change Advisory Council calls their “cannibalisation” of renewable electricity. While all other Irish electricity use has gone up by just 7% since 2015, the consumption by data centres has risen by 463%.

Irish electricity demand rose by almost three times the EU average last year thanks to data centres. At the same time the country fell 60% short of the target for an increase in renewable electricity which would enable emissions to be reduced by the planned rate.

The rise in data centres has also led to a shortage of grid capacity which as Sinn Fein MEP Lynn Boylan noted last week makes it even more difficult to build new houses in Dublin.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that data centres pay half as much for electricity as ordinary Irish citizens. The consumer’s subsidising of the data centres contributes to Ireland having the highest electricity bills in Europe.

It’s a recipe for disaster. Those EU emission fines place a big question mark over the economic value of data centres. As someone noted during the week, we’ll soon be told that we need more foreign direct investment to pay the fines incurred by foreign direct investment.

There are other drawbacks to our dependence on Big Tech. The government’s prolonged refusal to pass the Occupied Territories Bill, banning trade with businesses in Israeli settlements declared illegal by the UN, stems from a fear of alienating US capital.

There’s something fundamentally undemocratic about the fact that public opinion, which would have strongly backed the bill, is seen less important than the feelings of a few large American companies. The attenuated bill which may be passed next month makes a dubious distinction between “goods” and “services’ which will allow Ireland to continue importing the latter.

Those services, which account for 70% of our imports from the territories include components used in IT. Ireland, for all its anti Israel rhetoric, is that country’s second largest export market. Government rhetoric on the issue is rendered largely meaningless by this fact. The use of Shannon Airport by US Troops is another issue where our dependence on overseas capital has been judged to make an ethical foreign policy impossible.

Things are bad enough as they stand but the indication is that the influence of the tech lords will increase rather than decrease here. The proposals of think-tank Progress Ireland, founded by billionaires John and Patrick Collision, have proved alluring to a government so bereft of ideas it makes a perfect tabula rasa.

The Collisons, who founded internet payment company Stripe, were protegés of Elon Musk and Palantir Founder Peter Thiel. Progress ideas already adopted by Micheál Martin’s government include allowing property owners to rent out sheds in their back gardens with minimal oversight as a “solution” to the housing crisis and limiting judicial reviews of large infrastructure projects.

The bizarre sight of the government suggesting that the time had to come to end the state’s ban on nuclear power can also be put down to Progress. The Collisons are vocal nuclear power advocates and last month their think-tank called for “small modular reactors,” to be built here.

Progress’s latest hobby horse is an attack on EU environmental regulations which includes the argument that developers should be allowed to destroy wildlife habitat if they promise to “rewild” elsewhere. You can imagine how that one would work out in practice.

Such suggestions owe much to the “abundance” agenda being pushed in America by people much exercised by the idea that China gets things built much quicker than the US does. As has been pointed out, one of China’s big advantages in this area is that it’s a dictatorship which can over-ride local concerns to an extent impossible in democracies.

The Abundance people’s impatience with any curbs on state power can seem very high-handed. Like the Robber Barons of old, the new plutocrats appear dismissive of the idea that ordinary citizens should be allowed equal say with the rich. There’s an obvious fascist ring to the rhetoric emanating from Thiel, an influential figure in this milieu.

Extreme scepticism is advisable when looking at any critique of state dysfunction whose implicit endpoint is an increased role for the likes of the Collisons. Beware of geeks bearing gifts. Big Tech is causing enough problems here as it is.

When People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy brought up the inordinate role being played by Progress in recent government policy Micheál Martin’s response was to remind him that the Collisons had once won the Young Scientist Award. The Taoiseach seemed to think this answered all criticism.

Last weekend at the Hay Literary Festival in England. Sarah Wynn-Williams, whose memoir Careless People is an invaluable exposé of how Meta does business, was due to take part in an onstage conversation with journalist Carole Cadwalladr and academic Tim Wu.

Instead, because of an injunction taken against her by Meta, Wynn-Williams was forced to sit in silence on stage for an hour. Even that might not placate a company who’ve sought to legally prohibit her from, “appearing in public in a place where she should know her book is available for sale and her presence might draw attention to it.”

Wu noted correctly that “Some of the worst abuses of our time,” come from, “a class of companies that have assumed the sovereign effect and seek to exert their power in the same way that some of those despotic foreign states do.”

Yet this is the kind of company that Helen McEntee, in our name, stands shoulder to shoulder with while Ireland fights tooth and nail to protect it from proper scrutiny. This is the team Ireland has chosen to play on.

These are the people we protect to such an extent that the state once battled in court to refuse eight billion euros in tax that Apple owed us. If we took it, the government said, the tech companies would leave and then where would we be. The courts made us take the money. Big Tech is still here. But all they have to offer is money. Any advice they give should be treated with the same kind of contempt they feel for the rest of us.

A vision of Ireland where young people sit in the dark in someone else’s garden shed while asking AI when the latest patriotic outage will end and if the fall-out from that exploding reactor has cleared yet doesn’t seem particularly inviting.

But what do I know? I didn’t even enter the Young Scientist competition, let alone win it.

Into the Woods becomes a big Hollywood movie. Adam Driver sings Being Alive in Marriage Story and Scarlett Johansson sings You Could Drive A Person Crazy. Daniel Craig sings Losing My Mind in Knives Out. Hugh Grant trips the light fantastic to Rain on the Roof at the end of Paddington 2. Saoirse Ronan finds and loses love during a school production of Merrily We Roll Along in Lady Bird. Send In The Clowns turns up in Joker. Richard Linklater is working on an epic movie of Merrily We Roll Along. Criterion re-release DA Pennebaker’s documentary on the making of the Company cast album.

A new Broadway version of Merrily We Roll Along gets a cinema release and wins best musical revival at the Tonys in 2024, emulating the triumph of a highly praised Company two years earlier. In London, lauded versions of Follies, Company and Into the Woods win Olivier Awards. Lin Manuel Miranda and other brilliant composers leading a creative renaissance of the musical pay due tribute to Sondheim’s influence. Jarvis Cocker sings I’m Still Here in the HBO documentary Six By Sondheim. Sara Bareilles does Into the Woods on Broadway, Jake Gyllenhaal does Sunday in the Park with George.

The man himself’s two volume set of collected lyrics, with his own copious annotations, is recognised as one of the great artistic autobiographies. A new major biography by Daniel Okrent hits the shelves in the US this month where it will join James Lapine’s superb memoir of working with Sondheim tocreate Sunday in the Park With George, Putting It Together, and sundry other works in the ever expanding catalogue of Sondheimiana.

This is the Age of Sondheim. It’s not that he was ignored before. Broadway aficionados recognised him as the towering figure of the musical. But now his reputation seems to have breached containment and entered the mainstream. He’s gradually being recognised as one of the late 20th century’s major artists. This confirms the long-time conviction of Sondheim’s admirers that anyone who saw his shows and heard his songs couldn’t help but fall in love with them.

I’m one of those admirers. Which is why two months ago I got up at six in the morning to take a train from Munich to Paris where I took another train to London so I could see the Bridge Theatre production of Into The Woods winning rave reviews in the English media.

The early start and all that travel left me slightly light-headed and the approach to the theatre, across an illuminated Tower Bridge which in the pouring rain itself looked some giant fairytale prop, lent an added air of unreality to the evening. I couldn’t have been better primed for Into the Woods.

The Bridge is a marvellous venue, the first commercial theatre to be built in London for eighty years and its airy, shiny newness seemed to add to the sense of anticipation obvious in an audience which seemed slightly younger than you’d get in the West End. The joint was buzzing.

“Once Upon A Time,” and off we went. By the time the interval arrived I could have cried with happiness. So much wit, so much verve, so much pathos, so much brilliance, so much fun and above all so much ceaseless invention. As always with Sondheim, there was the sense of abundance, of marvelling at his ability to do things so well in so many different ways.

The opening scene is a kind of bravura firework display, like A Weekend in the Country from A Little Night Music, only even more complex. It’s like Sondheim’s version of those scenes from a heist movie when the mastermind assembles his crew for the robbery.

The number is a masterpiece of compression, the plot unveiled and launched, myriad characters introduced, all this happening in between 12 and 14 minutes depending on the interpretation. It’s a great mini-musical in itself. You can feel Sondheim at the height of his powers delighting in his abilities.

We’ve met the vengeful manipulative witch, the good hearted baker and his yearning wife, beleaguered Cinderella and her obnoxious trio of persecutors, dim bulb Jack and his cranky mother, gaily gluttonous Red. The quest begins, driven on by those familiar propulsive chords which bring us along with them through the trees.

On we hurtle. Ahead lies Hello Little Girl's Company of Wolves sleaze, the ingenue ingenuity of I Know Things Now, the OTT oneupprinceship of Agony, the tour de force of Giants In The Sky. Cows will be exchanged for beans, capes will be found and lost, people will fall in love or think they have, hair will be cut, grannies and wolves killed, slippers fitted and a happy ending attained.

There’s hardly time to catch a breath. And while we look at all these Grimm tropes with a knowing eye we’re also enraptured by that old childhood desire to know what happens next. One more song and one more twist before bedtime. Please.

The first act of Into the Woods may be the most dramatically and formally perfect thing Sondheim ever wrote. Musical theatre offers few more exhilarating experiences. So it’s not surprising that some people find the second act anti-climactic. The downbeat turn of the plot has something to do with this but it’s also true that, after all the earlier movement and variety, the second act largely consists of people tramping round gloomily in small groups.

Gerald Mast, in his excellent history of the musical Can’t Help Singin’ from 1987, argues that the story or “integrated” musical will always “run into trouble into the second act. The difference between utter failure and resounding success is disguising the difficulty of tying up a complicated plot with very little musical twine.”

It can be a problem. One reason Wicked: For Good met with such a lukewarm response, and the big reason a sequel seemed ill-advised, is that almost all the good stuff is in the first act. Even Sondheim devotees will admit that Sunday In the Park With George tails off considerably after the interval. He knew the problem himself, joking that his entire career had been an attempt to fix the second half of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Allegro.

The second act of Into the Woods is saved by the quality of the songs. No One Is Alone is one of the best Sondheim ever wrote and Children Will Listen one of the most beloved. No More, the extremely touching duet between the baker and his long lost father, may be one of the most under-rated. The combination of all three meant I was on the verge of tears again as the second act ended. Only this time not because I was happy. Not just because I was happy.

They’re songs whose hard earned wisdom you grow into. No More’s, “The farther you run/The more you feel undefined/For what you have left undone/And, more, what you’ve left behind.” No One Is Alone’s, “People make mistakes/Holding to their own/Thinking they’re alone/Honour their mistakes/Fight for their mistakes.” Moments in the Woods’, “Oh, if life were made of moments/Even now and then a bad one/But if life were only moments/Then you’d never know you had one.”

They give the lie to the idea of Sondheim’s brilliance as essentially cold hearted. Yet the pathos is always accompanied by humour. Sondheim’s Wodehouse like eye for the quip is evident in lines like, “There’s a lump on her rump/big enough to be a hump.” “He has a charm for a prince, I guess/Guess?/I don’t meet a wide range.'“Life is often so unpleasant/You must know that as a peasant,” “There’s a dwarf standing guard,’ and others.

Those lines always draw laughs. Their author never forgets that musical is short for musical comedy. A Little Priest reveals Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett as raving psychopaths, and it’s very funny. Could I Leave You is a scarifying portrayal of marital disillusion, and it’s very funny. Its Follies stablemate Buddy’s Blues leads up to a harrowing breakdown, and it’s very funny. Sondheim knows there are few better sounds than an audience laughing in unison.

Lyrics are only half the job of course. How strange that old complaint about Sondheim, the one he bring up himself in Merrily We Roll Along, “There’s not a tune you can hum/There’s not a song that goes bum bum bum di dum,” seems now. Send in The Clowns. Losing My Mind. Being Alive. Good Thing Going. Not A Day Goes By. No One Is Alone. Not While I’m Around. Finishing The Hat. They all seem pretty bum bum bum di dumable to me.

I’m biased because over time I’ve realised that Stephen Sondheim means more to me than any other creative artist, more even than Kurosawa or Dostoyevsky or Bowie. I’ve also realised that I never feel more at home than when I’m watching a musical. There’s something wonderful about being among people who’ve come to see a show and are watching a cast whose motto is, to quote an early Sondheim lyric, “Let me entertain you.”

To really get Sondheim you need to really love musicals. You meet the odd person who regards him as an anomalous colossus redeeming and dignifying an otherwise trivial form. Just like you meet people who think Johnny Cash is the only country artist worth listening to, that Planxty are head and shoulders above all else in Irish traditional music and that you can cover jazz by purchasing Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme.

But, though Sondheim sometimes chafed against the restrictions of Broadway and sought to bring the musical places it hadn’t been before, he never condescended to the genre. Leonard Bernstein knew where the musical was capable of going but it was the kid he hired to write the lyrics for West Side story who eventually brought it there.

Bernstein couldn’t help feeling he was doing the musical a favour by writing a few of them and that there were more important things he could be doing. He could only ever see the musical as classical music’s underprivileged cousin.

Sondheim on the other hand admitted that opera bored him stiff. Musicals were what he loved. In 2000 he made a fascinating list of the songs he wished he’d written for the New York Times magazine. There are a few famous ones in there, Let’s Face the Music and Dance, Every Time We Say Goodbye, The Trolley Song, but many come from shows of surpassing obscurity, Donnybrook! 70 Girls 70, Panama Hattie, History Loves Company, Starting Here Starting Now, Kelly, forgotten by all but the most dedicated musical fans. Sondheim remembered them. And when you listen to the songs on the list, you realise that he was right to pick them. They all have something special. He knew his Broadway onions.

Rent once billed itself as, “the musical for people who hate musicals.” That musicals don’t go that route these days owes a lot to Sondheim’s influence. Hamilton is great and its introduction of a hip-hop/R and B flavour was novel. But it’s also very much in the Broadway grain. As Lin Manuel Miranda himself noted, its composer also had the songs from Hello Dolly played at his wedding.

Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, Fun Home, Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, Hadestown and others gave the musical a cultural cachet it hadn’t enjoyed for decades. It could no longer be dismissed, with a mocking flourish of jazz hands, as the apotheosis of cringe. Sondheim played a major part in that process.

It wasn’t just that his work provided a bridgehead against the onslaught of jukebox musicals and Disney adaptation. When Sondheim died in 2021, the New York Times described him as, “theater’s encourager in chief.” He mentored Miranda and Rent composer Jonathan Larson, dispensed helpful advice in reply to tons of letters from young writers and performers, regularly attended performances of new work where he was never stingy with words of encouragement. This was a very generous genius.

Into The Woods at the Bridge was a superb production brilliantly directed by Jordan Fein and with one extraordinary performance. As the witch Kate Fleetwood, a Tony nominee for Macbeth who also starred in the remarkable musical London Road, gave Stay With Me an emotional resonance I’d never heard before. Her, “Who out there could love you more than I? What out there that I cannot supply?,” seemed infinitely more poignant than selfish.

Maybe it had always been there and I’d missed it. I listened to Bernadette Peters original broadway cast recording and found it there. But Kate Fleetwood had added something extra all the same. That’s why musicals are revived and why we keep going back to them. There’s always something new to hear.

Walking back over the bridge, I decided that Into The Woods was my favourite Sondheim show. By the time I hit Tower Hill tube station I’d changed my mind. There’s Follies. Sweeney Todd. Company. Sunday In the Park With George. Merrily We Roll Along. A Little Night Music. The Gate Theatre’s production of Assassins in 2018 was one of the best things I’ve seen on a Dublin stage. I need to listen to Pacific Overtures again.

My favourite Sondheim is the one I’ve seen or heard last. He left us with God’s plenty. There’s a great little story by Scott Fitzgerald called Three Acts of Music which ends with a nurse realising she wasted her time with a man but taking consolation from the music which accompanied their affair. “But she wondered how those composers had lived. Youmans and Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern and she thought that if any of their wives turned up in this hospital she would try to make them happy.”

All of us who love art know the feeling of gratitude towards someone whose work has meant something special to you. I always hoped I’d bump into Stephen Sondheim so I could say a quick thanks.

Maybe I should have written a letter. Like the one I’m writing now.

Blame Irish Water. They were repairing a main on the boreen where my mother lives and I was waiting for a bus into Galway when one of the workmen offered me a lift. He was from Westmeath and a half hour later we’d touched on every match I’d ever seen the county play, recalled their history and predicted their future. (I put his hunch that they’d win Leinster down to absurd optimism.)

How many conversations like that have I had over the last forty years? This was supposed to be my great sportless summer yet when I meet people sport is still what they want to talk about.

Jim Bouton, the pitcher whose Ball Four is one of the finest sporting memoirs ever written, concluded his book by observing, “You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way round all the time.” Your work becomes part of you even when you make sure to have a life outside it.

Bidding farewell to the midland optimist, I realised that I missed the kind of games we’d been talking about. The GAA championships are as much social phenomenon as sporting event. By ignoring them I’d be cutting myself off from a side of Irish life I loved and also from my own past.

I wasn’t ashamed of the work I’d done for the past four decades, I’d just grown tired of it. But the more I thought about it, I realised that I was tired of the job and the papers I worked for rather than tired of sport per se.

All the same I had written a long Farewell To Sport on Substack and I didn’t want to go back on my word just like that. So I hung tough and resisted sport’s siren song. Sort of. Like a clandestine boozer sneaking surreptitious sips from a hip flask, I watched the last ten minutes of both Cork’s win over Limerick in the Munster hurling championship and Roscommon’s upset of Galway in the Connacht football final.

I’d wondered if quitting the job I’d done for the last twenty years might enable me to start enjoying sport again. It did and quicker than I’d imagined. I wanted to watch sport again. I want to write about it again too. On my own terms.

This may demonstrate a lamentable lack of integrity on my part. I’ve u-turned quicker than a boy racer doing doughnuts on the road outside Skibbereen. I’m become the George Bush of sportswriting. “Read my lips, no new columns.” But what can I do? I’m not a politician or a pope. I’m allowed to change my mind.

So it’s back to writing about the weekend’s sport for readers on Monday. That’s in addition to the writing on politics and culture which I’ve enjoyed doing so much since moving to Substack. I’d never have had the chance to do them if I hadn’t struck out on my own. Sport will be an additional string to the bow rather than the whole shebang.

Mayo’s match against Monaghan in Clones seemed like an ideal reintroduction. They’re two counties whose football championship exploits usually lift the heart. Mayo with their never-ending quest for Sam Maguire which sometimes seems like the hunt for the holy grail and at other times like the futile wanderings of a band of conquistadors looking for El Dorado in a Florida swamp.

And Monaghan with their perpetual battle against demographics which sees them continue to stay in elite company years after everyone expected them to drop back to a more logical level. Monaghan sit 28th in the population rankings, between Sligo and Fermanagh. Like Roscommon they do better than they have any right to.

The hallmark of both teams is effort. If God loves a trier, these are his chosen people. The easy style and class of Kerry or Galway is rarely in evidence. A few anomalous individuals aside, Mayo are characterised by athleticism and Monaghan by determination. The sense of players getting the maximum out of themselves contributes to the passion with which both teams are followed.

When Ryan O’Donoghue put the visitors 11 points clear with 20 minutes left it seemed like this match would fly in the face of what you anticipate from these two counties. You expect Mayo to make life hard for themselves and you expect Monaghan to leave everything on the pitch. Things were disappointingly routine.

Enter Bobby McCaul. They stopped making full-forwards like this long ago. Seeing this towering youngster take his place on the edge of the square and Monaghan lash high ball into him was like hearing that Hay Wrap was still number one.

Everyone’s become much too sophisticated for this Bomber Liston/Kieran Donaghy routine. Yet the kid, who just two years ago was a secondary schools star with Our Lady’s Castleblayney, created chaos.

He soared to win the ball, he fielded it with one hand, he forced a fine save from Mayo keeper Jack Livingstone, he hit the crossbar, he burst through three men to kick a point.

And in the 55th minute he out jumped defenders like an under 16 ringer in an under 12 match to field a long delivery from another sub Stephen Mooney. On landing he rattled the ball past Livingstone. There was still seven points in it but the tide had turned. We had a game and we’d have a finish.

Young McCaul looked a cult hero in the making, the kind of player you can’t wait to see again and again. But with 12 minutes left he landed awkwardly and was stretchered off with what looked a bad knee injury. Football can be a cruel game and you’d hope the lay-off isn’t too painful or too long. We need to see more Bobby McCaul.

Even that setback didn’t halt Monaghan’s gallop. With seven seconds left they’d narrowed the gap to one point. Mayo just needed to avoid disaster from Livingstone’s kickout. He drilled it down the middle and their 18 year old corner-forward came back to field it and end the game.

That’s not normal 18 year old corner-forward behaviour but Kobe McDonald isn’t a normal 18 year old corner-forward. His debut senior season has been attended by hype unseen since David Clifford’s arrival from the planet Krypton. Like the Kerry prodigy he’s lived up to the billing.

When McDonald took possession 22 minutes into the game two things came to mind. One was that he wanted to do something special and the other was that he’s the cut of his father when he’s on the ball. He duly eluded a couple of defenders before arrowing a sublime two pointer between the posts. It had an uncanny resemblance to Kieran Mc’s opening point in the 2004 All-Ireland final.

It was a good day for the kids. McDonald’s 26th minute goal, a volleyball style spike at the far post, was created by another gifted teenager Darragh Beirne’s run and pass. The combination of the under 20s with the ever excellent O’Donoghue gives Mayo a full-forward line of rare potency.

Beirne will probably be helped by passing under all those radars aimed at McDonald. O’Donoghue’s late point, scored when Mayo were under the cosh, proved to be a match winner. His two pointer on the stroke of half-time was a classic example of a star player taking responsibility on himself. He’s still Mayo’s leader.

Their problem is at the other end where a porous defence allowed Monaghan in for half a dozen clearcut goal opportunities. They only escaped ultimate punishment thanks to a string of fine Livingstone stops.

Andy Moran’s decision to bring in a championship debutant goalkeeper instead of Rob Hennelly was a brave one which proved correct. His decision to drop Aidan O’Shea and Paddy Durcan, very good when introduced as a sub, after the team’s terrible performance against Roscommon seemed like a declaration that reputation matters less than form on his watch.

Boldness may turn out to be a Moran trademark. A terrific league campaign raised expectations before the Connacht semi-final brought things crashing back to earth. Mayo aren’t the finished article but they’re a much more attractive side than they were under Kevin McStay.

They hadn’t looked far off the pace in 2024 but last year McStay seemed to regard the new rules in the same way that Archbishop John Charles McQuaid regarded Vatican Two, as a minor adjustment which need not inconvenience the old way of doing things. The men in green and red treated two pointers with the suspicion of conspiracy theorists looking at vaccines.

This year extracting the maximum benefit from long range is team policy with McDonald, O’Donoghue and Jack Carney raining over two pointers. Under the old scoring system Monaghan would actually have nicked this game by one.

The heavy weather Mayo made of Monaghan might prompt a dismissal of their chances this year. Yet the teams which went so close under James Horan and Stephen Rockford weren’t renowned for the ease with which they put away weaker opposition. Mayo teams always seem determined to offer their fans the full Croaghpatrick experience.

There’s a lot to like about this side, McDonald in particular. We should cherish him while he’s here because this will be a one and done season. You can’t blame him for accepting an offer to play Australian Rules with St. Kilda. You can’t blame any youngster who does it and there’s no point pretending we can stop them.

It’s just a particular pity in McDonald’s case, that’s all. Think of everything we’d have missed if Clifford defected down under at the same age. That Mayo have already lost Oisin Mullin to the game down under can only exacerbate their native conviction that somebody up there has it in for them.

I’m almost sure that my portfolio includes a confident declaration that we’d never again see smaller Leinster counties beat Dublin like Laois and Westmeath did back in the noughties. Yet Louth’s win over the Dubs means the formerly invincible ones have lost to three Leinster opponents in the last 12 months.

It’s amusing to recall that one objection to the new rules was that they would enable Dublin to amass even more monstrous tallies against their provincial rivals. The prophets of doom expected them to be going for 12 in a row by now. Demography turned out not to be destiny after all.

Armagh continue to chug merrily along and look a much better team than they were when winning the final All-Ireland under the old rules. Something similar happened after their previous dalliance with Sam Maguire. The Armagh team of 2004 and 2005 was much stronger than the one which triumphed in 2002.

They might have left a couple of All-Irelands behind them back then. Kieran McGeeney is hardly a man in need of extra motivation but you’d imagine he’ll be keen to avoid a repeat underachievement. It’ll take a very good team to beat Armagh.

My Westmeath acquaintance was also preoccupied with the mistakes of the past, regretting that his team seemed to take their eye of the ball after the historic 2004 Leinster victory. He should have been pleased by their battling victory over Cavan. Mark McHugh, the type of intelligent player who always seems cut out for management, is joining Páidí O’Sé in the pantheon of Lakeland legend.

Isn’t football enjoyable these days? My post-traumatic stress disorder from the 2024 Kerry-Derry quarter-final has almost left me, commentators now longer have to describe boring matches as being “like a game of chess,” and the blanket defence is a nightmare from which we’ve managed to awake. A wonderful beauty has been born.

Not to sound culturally chauvinist or anything but there was more entertainment in Clones on Sunday afternoon than there had been in Budapest on Saturday night. It’s good to be back.

Whatever you do learn nothing appears to be Sinn Féin’s motto in the immediate aftermath of their catastrophic showing in the Dublin Central and Galway West by-elections. They’ve plumped for self-justification rather than self-examination. Their first instinct is to lash out rather than look inwards.

The tendency is most spectacularly evident in a Substack post by Chris Hazzard, their MP for South Down. He dismisses critics of the party’s recent rightward shift as members of a metropolitan elite out of touch with a more authentic working class represented by Sinn Fein.

This elite apparently includes the Social Democrats, who defeated Sinn Fein in the Dublin Central by-election, and the Labour Party who finished far ahead of them in Galway West.

One problem with Hazzard’s broadside is that it doesn’t sound very different from the kind of thing Fianna Fáil would come out with in the 80s and 90s. Back then campaigners for changes to the Republic’s antediluvian laws on contraception, divorce and abortion would be castigated as, “trendy liberals” (the use of the term Dublin Four was optional).

One-time Tánaiste George Colley’s dismissal of Irish feminists as, “well-heeled articulate women,” was a classic of the genre. These people, Fianna Fáil implied, knew nothing about the working class which voted overwhelmingly for that party.

This line of attack remains popular on the right. The Reform party in Britain and conservative columnists in Ireland love caricaturing left-wingers as latte sipping snobs out of touch with Ordinary People.

It’s odd to hear such rhetoric from a putatively left-wing party and Hazzard is not the only Sinn Fein figure to deploy it. It’s odder still to hear the party’s harder line on immigration defended by the statement, “our commitment to community safety is rooted in the protection of our people.”

The implication that immigrants pose a threat to community safety from which Our People must be defended would not be out of place in the mouth of a DUP representative. If Hazzard didn’t mean his words to come across in that way, it’s a very clumsy bit of phrasing on his part.

There is at times something tremendously comical about his intervention. Heady invocations of Latin American revolutionary figures and the ANC sit oddly with Mary Lou McDonald’s refusal to criticise either Gerry Hutch’s suggestion that Africans should be interned in camps or Bertie Ahern’s singling out of them as uniquely undesirable immigrants.

Hazzard’s declaration that, “the path to power does not run through the studios of the corporate media or the university lecture halls of the metropolitan elite,” would probably sound great shouted off the back of a lorry to a bunch of admirers.

The thing is that Hazzard isn’t just a Queens University Belfast graduate, he’s apparently working on a PhD from QUB. He has not only spent time in the lecture halls of the metropolitan elite, he’s presumably hoping to spend even more time there in the future. (I didn’t go to university myself but it seems very nice and I wouldn’t blame anyone who went.)

While the Duke of Hazzard was sweating over his schoolbooks at Queens, Daniel Ennis, who won Dublin Central for the Social Democrats, was trying to make a living as a League of Ireland footballer. It requires a certain chutzpah to portray Ennis and Labour’s Galway West candidate Helen Ogbu, who first experienced Ireland as a Direct Provision Centre inmate, as creatures of the Metropolitan Elite.

Hazzard’s piece followed a more thoughtful defence of Sinn Fein on Substack by Sean Mac Bradaigh. The former An Phoblacht’s editor’s points about the party’s long radical tradition and strong working class base are well made. It’s also difficult to argue against the contention that any left of centre coalition without Sinn Fein would be a diminished thing.

The headline on Mac Bradaigh’s post, “Why Sinn Féin’s left-wing credentials are not up for debate,” is unfortunate. It gives the impression of a wish to close off rather than encourage argument on a subject which, like or not, will be debated quite a bit. No party enjoys the luxury of being automatically taken at its own estimation these days.

Sinn Féin are understandably proud of their links to a socialist republican tradition. Yet it’s those very links which make the party’s recent rightwards move on immigration so surprising. It’s hard to imagine James Connolly, himself the son of immigrant workers, approving its silence over the statements made by Hutch and Ahern.

The party does enjoy a higher level of working class support and membership than the other left (ish) parties. That’s not unimportant. Left-wing parties without substantial working class input will always run the risk of being criticised for dilettantism. But you can’t justify policies simply by invoking their (supposed) popularity with the working class.

The Rassemblement National (formerly Front National) wins more working class votes than anyone else in France but few people of a left wing disposition would argue that this places their stance on immigration above criticism. Their political opposites La France Insoumise see one of their main tasks as challenging the RN in this area, and have enjoyed some success in doing so.

Some Sinn Fein members will clam that there’s nothing at all right-wing about the party’s attitude towards immigration. They’ll ask what’s wrong with a managed migration policy. They’ll mention the huge profits made by some rich scoundrels from IPAS centres and wonder why anyone would have a problem with communities being consulted before such centres are placed in their locality.

Grand. But when you refuse to call out the Ahern and Hutch comments or when you accuse your critics of being in favour of “open borders” and you use words like “protection,” in connection with immigration you’re sending out a signal and you know where you’re sending it. We’re all grown ups, there’s no point feigning innocence on the subject.

Let’s take immigration out of the equation altogether. That still leaves the other high profile shift in the party’s position during the run-up to the by-elections, one which probably cost it far more votes.

It’s difficult to see why Sinn Féin refused to support the Social Democrats’ Dáil motion which would have ended the situation whereby many women who receive a diagnosis of fatal foetal abnormality have to travel abroad for an abortion. It would also have repealed the three day waiting period required by women seeking an abortion in Ireland.

The three day waiting period is an insult to Irish women. It’s “Calm down dear, now you’re getting emotional,” in legislative form. The fatal foetal abnormality rule heaps extra stress on women at a horrendously trying time. It’s an act of cruelty.

There are very few people whose vote to repeal the eighth was influenced by the three day waiting period or who wanted women with a fatal foetal abnormality diagnosis forced abroad. Those in favour of such things belonged to the pro-life camp. Scrapping measures which reflected the timidity of a Fine Gael-Labour government rather than the will of the electorate would have caused little controversy.

But when the Social Democrats sought to correct these anomalies in the Dáil, Sinn Féin Health spokesman David Cullinane described the motion as having “no democratic legitimacy,” before the party abstained on the vote.

It seemed an inexplicable decision. On immigration Sinn Féin may argue that they’re responding to concerns within the communities they represent. Immigration is a political issue at the moment, if not as great a one as the “studios of the corporate media” would like it to be.

However it’s hard to believe that there’s any significant groundswell of opinion demanding that abortion be made more awkward for women. The issue isn’t a live one anymore but Sinn Féin felt it justified burning some political capital.

Why? Pandering to anti-immigrant feeling might find spurious justification on chauvinist (They’re not Our People) and pragmatic (They don’t vote) grounds. Women, on the other hand, generally do vote and surely belong to all but the most insane definition of Our People.

Sinn Féin partisans have offered no explanation for the party’s position on the matter. Accusing Social Democrat and Labour supporters of liking Avocado Toast won’t really suffice in this instance.

The most likely explanation seems to be that Sinn Fein opposed the abortion bill as a performative way of distancing themselves from the centre-left. Cullinane might as well have been singing, “I don’t need you anymore,” like Cher in Believe.

A desire to remind the Social Democrats who’s the boss could also have been involved. That kind of hubris can backfire badly. It was similarly high-handed behaviour by the government at the beginning of their current term which made the various left of centre parties draw closer than ever before.

The presumption on Sinn Féin’s part may have been that the Social Democrats and Labour would put up with this treatment because they’d tiptoed around the bigger party up to this. Yet both parties have been emboldened by their by-election performances to finally criticise Sinn Féin.

Holly Cairns’ comment, following Ennis’ victory, that the Social Democrats are a party which sticks to its principles no matter what people say on social media, was an obvious shot across Sinn Féin’s bows. The days of her party keeping schtum in the name of solidarity seem to be over.

Yet it’s telling that the Social Democrats still negotiated with Sinn Féin and People Before Profit in an attempt to find a left-wing candidate for the Senate seat vacated by Galway West victor Sean Kyne. Labour leader Ivana Bacik’s plea for Cairns’ party to join with her party alone is a political dead end which should be shunned. A coalition between Sinn Fein and other leftish parties remains the only prospect of a social democratic let alone socialist government in Ireland.

Such a coalition is devoutly to be wished. The record homelessness figures of last week, Simon Harris’ blithe dismissal of the idea that there’s a housing crisis and further rises in electricity bills due to consumers subsidising data centres show that removing Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael from power is an urgent priority.

Attacks on government housing policy, by Eoin O’Broin in particular, remain the most impressive thing about Sinn Féin. The hope remains that on this most important of Irish political issues they represent the prospect of real change.

The smaller parties need Sinn Féin but the need is mutual. Those by-elections showed Sinn Féin faring worse than expected from the Vote Left Transfer Left strategy. A section of voters obviously does feel that the party’s left-wing credentials are up for debate.

This should be a worry for a party which at recent elections seemed to have overcome the transfer toxicity of old. The defeat of Independent Ireland’s Noel Thomas in Galway West because of transfers from liberal voters who obviously decided even Fine Gael was preferable shows the dangers of being associated with that particular brand.

Sinn Féin’s immediate reaction to the by-elections may simply result from pique after two disappointing defeats. But they’d be foolish not to take the lessons of those defeats on board.

A shock loss to the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton by-election should have been a wake-up for Keir Starmer’s British Labour Party. Instead they chose to double down on attacking not just the Greens but their voters. The result was further humiliation in the local elections soon afterwards. Sinn Féin should beware of following. a similar path.

Political parties don’t like criticism. Sinn Féin may have a particular problem in this regard. The unique political configuration of the North, where voters are divided into two mutually exclusive blocs, creates a tendency to regard critics as either enemies or traitors.

The inconvenient truth is that much of the current criticism comes from people who do believe that Sinn Féin belongs on the left. They’re just not prepared to simply take the party’s word for it anymore.

Can you blame them?

The Granta short story scandal isn’t really about Artificial Intelligence, it’s about Artificial Judgement.

Much fun has been had at the expense of Jamir Nazir’s prize-winning story Serpent in the Grove since the revelation that it was almost certainly composed with the help of AI. People have chortled away at lines such as, “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men,” “Call her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain decided to take a name and keep it,” “The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.”

How did the judges not spot that the Large Language Model involvement? How could they be so blind? Wasn’t it obvious?

Well, no. Not really. One reason “benches become men” kept being repeated is that most of the story is the kind of thing usually lauded more than denigrated.

Lines like, “First good rain after dry is a forgiveness the sky gives itself” and “Doing is a treacherous bridge: you step on and it carries you to a side you didn’t mean to reach,” often elicit the same kind of praise, “Sublime - yet precisely evocative - conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy,” that Nazir received from the jury which made him Caribbean section winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

The writing is terrible but the mockery showered upon it contains an element of gleeful relief. People are laughing at something they’re not normally allowed to laugh at. The most troubling issue is not that an AI story has won a prestigious prize, it’s that it’s done so by imitating a particular brand of awful writing.

The blurry lyricism, the heavy handed aphorisms, the embarrassing attempts at earthiness weren’t invented by the unfortunate LLM. They read like they resulted from it being fed a diet of the kind of stories which win such prizes.

Don’t mock the judges for being deceived by AI, mock them for their lack of taste. Nazir’s story isn’t that obvious an imposter to anyone who’s read other stuff in the same vein.

Could you honestly tell the difference? For an experiment I used an AI to begin a novel in this mould. “They arrive at dawn in their geography of hats. A dark field of figures, straws in motion, bending towards the docklands.”

OK. “Geography of hats,” is a giveaway. It has the tell-tale imprecision of the AI generated images from Nazir’s story.

Except those sentences aren’t generated by an LLM. They’re the start of a well regarded novel, This Side of Brightness, by a well regarded writer, Colum McCann. The difference between lyricism and imprecision can be in the eye of the beholder. There are plenty of good writers whose stylistic flourishes can be made look silly if quoted in isolation and painstakingly parsed for literal meaning.

Nevertheless The Serpent in the Grove is not a good story and the fact that it received an award probably has something to do with its region of origin. Those of a particular conservative literary bent would argue, and have done so, that this success to some degree discredits post-colonial literature as a whole. “Look! There are no standards. They’re just pretending this stuff is good out of Wokeness. Hand me down my Heller and my Hemingway.”

The agenda behind such arguments is pretty transparent. Yet there is a kernel of truth in the idea that extra-curricular factors were applied in this case. It’s been most interestingly addressed from a different angle by the writer Lina Abushouk in an article entitled, “How to read postcolonial literature,” on the website Africa Is A Country.

After noting the “incomprehensible metaphors,” and “stilted writing,” of Nazir’s story Abushouk moves on to the question of how anyone could have given it a prize. She sees the language used by Sharma Taylor, judge for the Caribbean section, as a giveaway.

“If these feel like vague and uninspiring platitudes it’s because they are. It’s like someone put postcolonial keywords in a blender and served up the slop. What they reveal is a critical vocabulary which has become entirely decorative - terms like ‘richly evocative’ ‘sensory detail’ and ‘melodic voice’ floating free of any engagement with the actual sentences on the page.”

Though Taylor is a Black writer from Jamaica, Abushouk sees the current controversy as an example of, “how elite metropolitan literary institutions have read -and misread’ writing from the postcolonial world.”

She brings up the example of Amos Tutuoula’s The Palm Wine Drinkard. When Tutoula submitted his novel to Faber in the fifties he wanted the editors to correct the mistakes which had resulted from his imperfect knowledge of English. They refused to do so, feeling the mistakes gave the book a “primitive” quality. This wasn’t what the author was striving for but it’s how the book ended up being seen.

Abushouk is surely right in discerning parallels with how in the current case, “incoherence was so readily legible to the judges as postcolonial seriousness.” A condescending, “this might seem crap by normal literary standards but by THEIR standards it’s great,” seems apparent.

It’s the kind of condescension mercilessly lampooned by Percival Everett in his novel Erasure, later filmed as American Fiction, whose central character is a Black writer who finds his intellectually sophisticated writing falling out of favour with publishers who think it’s, “not Black enough.”

Frustrated, he writes a barely literate satire of the kind of “Authentic Ghetto Novel” favoured by publishers (Push by Sapphire seems one obvious target). It confirms his worst suspicions by becoming a huge critical and commercial success. (An LLM could probably turn out something like the parody novel in Everett’s book, which begins life as My Pafology before being renamed Fuck. But it could never produce anything like Erasure.)

There’s also been plenty of online criticism of the way a particular clichéd vision of Asian-American life has become flavour du jour with publishers. Something like The Serpent In The Grove (whether created by AI or not) could only prosper in a milieu where work is sometimes judged by extra-literary standards.

Tom Crewe’s famous demolition job on Ocean Vuong published last year in the London Review of Books was particularly devastating because the reviewer, through copious citation, essentially allowed the novelist to convict himself.

No opinion of Crewe’s could have been as damaging to his target as the mere presentation of such deathless gems as, “The liquid coming down in white strings, like a tablecloth in a nightmare,” “The most useful thing you can do with empty hands is to hold on,” “Blood so red, so everywhere, it was Christmas in June,” “I wanted the world to fall, like a screw in a guillotine,” or “The work somehow sutured a fracture inside me.”

Any suggestion that the reviewer might have been putting the boot unnecessarily could be countered by pointing out that after all Vuong did write this stuff, along with dozens of other examples quoted by Crewe. Whereas when Ken Waldo of the University of Washington wrote to the LRB in defence of Vuong’s “singular beauty” , Crewe retorted correctly that Waldo hadn’t produced any examples of what he was talking about.

In the current climate people might wonder if a machine hand had been at work in a novel pock-marked with such sentences. But Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous dates back to 2019 when AI didn’t really have the capability for such contributions. The writing is a poor thing but Vuong’s own.

Vuong, like any writer, could only do his best. The puzzling thing, as Crewe pointed out, was the nature of the praise his writing received. “Thank you Ocean Vuong for this brilliant and remarkable novel,” said Michael Cunningham. Max Porter described it as, “a gift to the world.” “Vuong expands our sense of what literature can make visible, thinkable, felt across borders and generations and genres,” Ben Lerner chipped in helpfully.

Ah now. What’s going on here? You can’t imagine Lerner, a notably precise and intelligent novelist, allowing any of the sentences quoted by Crewe to besmirch his own work.

Even allowing for the fact that blurbs rarely show the writer responsible to best advantage, there’s something odd about the gushing quality of both these recommendations and of the reviews which greeted Vuong elsewhere. They are, to use an Irish phrase, “Too sweet to be wholesome.” There’s the sense of people trying too hard. This is not the language of criticism but of atonement.

There was some pushback against Crewe, though less than might have been expected because he’d prosecuted his case so well. It was notable how little of it had to do with the writing. Instead it took the line that there was some easier non western standard by which Vuong’s writing might be more kindly judged.

This is the kind of condescension which Percival Everett finds so galling. Everett’s James is the outstanding English language novel of the current decade. It needs no special pleading, Neither does the outstanding French language novel of the current decade, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men. In fact both books contain within them a critique of such condescension.

Those who disagreed with Crewe because they’d been emotionally moved by Vuong’s work were on more solid ground. It’s no small thing to produce something which affects so many people on that level. Hanya Yanigahara’s A Little Life did likewise. Yet it’s hard to disagree with Daniel Mendelson’s New York Review of Books piece from a decade ago which did to Yanigahara what Crewe did to Vuong.

You can see why such books might cast a spell on readers just venturing into literary territory after being reared on the more emotive side of Young Adult fiction. Kerouac and Salinger have an effect on us as young readers which can be hard to credit looking back. But the more outlandish praise of Vuong and Yanigahara from putatively serious critics seems to have a certain bad faith at its core.

Cultural condescension isn’t the only culprit. The overwhelmingly positive nature of the contemporary modern book review has been noted before. Perhaps literature is in its “poptimism” era where the commercial success of writers is being reviewed along with the quality of their work.

There may also be a feeling that with literary fiction seeming increasingly embattled its exponents need all the help they can get. Is there any harm in being as positive as possible?

Maybe there is. Ambitious younger writers can look at the kind of work popular with publishers and critics and tailor their work accordingly. Clichés are perpetuated. “Postcolonial slop,” and other offences harden into orthodoxy. The strongest writers will push against this but others will end up being bitten by the serpent in the grove.

It’s disquieting that computer aided writing can win literary prizes. But it’s infinitely more disquieting that the type of writing which wins prizes is so predictable in its tropes and its language that it’s so easily reproduced by mechanical means.

In 1943 two aesthetically conservative Australian poets created a fictional alter-ego Ern Malley and sent poems under his name to the country’s leading modernist literary magazine. The poems were a skilful imitation of the modernism they despised. Their purpose was to prove that the editors would be unable to recognise genuine work from parody in this style.

They were proved right. The magazine, Angry Penguins, published a full issue dedicated to the work of this new genius. Jamir Nazir might perhaps be seen as an Ern Malley for his times.

His motivation might have been monetary rather than aesthetic but, in revealing the standards by which literature is often judged these days, he may have done us all a favour.

In the end, the best protection against being fooled by a manipulative use of AI is just to be honest about what you like and what you don’t. That’s the human way of doing things. A lot of modern literary judgements by comparison seems driven by an unacknowledged internal algorithm. They might as well be produced by machine.

It’s time to pull the plug. It’s time to suture the fracture within us, smile like sunrise over a sink and scotch the serpent in the grove.

On Saturday afternoon, to no-one’s great surprise, John Stephens achieved the worst result in Fianna Fáil history. His 4.2% vote share placed him 10th of the candidates in the Dublin Central by-election.

In former Fianna Fáil heartland Galway West, Cillian Keane managed a historically terrible 9%. That his fourth place was probably came as a relief to the party shows how far their expectations have fallen.

The idea of Fianna Fáil slumping to this level would once have seemed as inconceivable as the arrival of invaders from an alien galaxy. The advent of social media and Artificial Intelligence are only mildly disorientating by comparison.

Fianna Fáil were not just the kingpins of Irish politics but one of the most successful political parties in Europe. After taking power for the first time in 1932 they held on to it for all but 10 of the following fifty years. They could only be ousted by the formation of coalitions between their rivals.

At every election from 1932 to 2007 Fianna Fáil were comfortably the most popular party in Ireland. It seemed as much a law of nature as a political fact. The rain would fall and Fianna Fáil would rule. If the party weren’t in government, they felt like the government in waiting.

A friend of mine used to insist that, “If you’re a real Irishman you vote Fianna Fáil.” I knew what he meant. Fianna Fáil’s perpetual dominance meant that for many people they’d become a signifier of Authentic Irishness.

Their original leader and long-time presiding spirit Eamon de Valera once said that when he wanted to know what the Irish people he wanted he just looked into his own heart. That might have been the quintessential Fianna Fáil statement. Their TDs didn’t think they were representing Ireland, they thought they were Ireland.

Certain parties in other post-colonial countries also managed to pull off this identification of themselves with the nation. Congress in India did so for decades but the outstanding example may be the party which held power in Mexico from 1929 to 2000.

Its name, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, might have fitted Fianna Fáil too. A party formed by members of the losing side in the Irish Civil War and propelled to power by an electoral appetite for change gradually came to embody a peculiarly stagnant conservatism.

You’ll still hear the odd suggestion that the party needs to “return to its radical roots.” But those roots have not been in evidence for many decades. When the Labour Party made a leftward turn before the 1969 election, declaring that, “the seventies will be socialist,” Fianna Fáil employed classic “Red Scare,” rhetoric against them.

The same bottle was uncorked when the party opposed the 1973-77 Fine Gael-Labour government’s introduction of a Wealth Tax. In the eighties it placed itself alongside Ireland’s religious right by opposing the coalition’s attempt to legalise divorce and liberalise the country’s contraception laws.

For anyone of my generation the idea of Fianna Fáil “radicalism,” seemed a sick joke. The party’s traditional core vote might have included small farmers and the small town working class but it did little to improve the lot of either group. For the first half-century of its independent existence, Ireland was an economic basket case from which large numbers of people were forced to emigrate.

Even some mild overdue economic expansion in the late sixties didn’t prevent the country from being by some measure the poorest in the European Economic Community it joined in 1973. The hopeful seventies were followed by a disastrous eighties marked by high unemployment and emigration.

So why did Fianna Fáil remain so popular? One reason may be that the party didn’t stand for very much. Fianna Fáil’s unique selling point was that they won elections, Fine Gael’s was that they weren’t Fianna Fáil. The parties shared a similar economic outlook. The right-left divide evident elsewhere in Europe was almost entirely absent in Ireland (with Labour, who ran a distant third at elections, settling into a kind of dispirited centrism.)

Fianna Fáil won because they’d always won. In a largely conformist society, people liked to be on the winning side. To this day, opinion polls can play an outsize role in Irish elections. The surprisingly good showings of Labour in the 1992 and Sinn Fein in the 2020 general elections owed something to encouraging early polls which became self-fulfilling prophecies.

Family allegiances also played a large part. People voted Fianna Fáil because they were Fianna Fáilers. Progressives would bemoan the continued hegemony of “Civil War Politics,” but the Civil War mattered little to most people. Fianna Fáil represented the comfort of the familiar in a society suspicious of novelty and aided in this by the decimation of younger generations through emigration.

One result of the party’s monopoly on power was that it attracted people who wanted to get ahead not just in politics but through politics. A go-getter would have been foolish to go anywhere else. (A similar phenomenon was apparent in another historically dominant party, Italy’s Christian Democrats.)

This resulted in the party eventually becoming notorious for political corruption, especially during the eighties reign of Charlie Haughey, a Taoiseach so crooked his grave should have been dug with a corkscrew.

Corruption was not exclusive to Fianna Fáil but the party provided the lion’s share of politicians questioned during a series of tribunals which exposed municipal corruption in Dublin during the nineties.

It didn’t seem to matter. The party motored on and presided over the economic boom of the Celtic Tiger years, their embrace of the business sector and of economic neo-liberalism bringing them even further from those legendary roots. When they won a third successive election in 2007 they seemed as strong as ever.

Catastrophe loomed. The government had no control over the 2008 world financial crisis but made its effects infinitely worse the following year. The decisions to guarantee the liabilities of the nation’s banks and to spend billions to try and cover the losses of the largest two proved disastrous.

They led to an economic crash, the prospect of national bankruptcy and an International Money Fund bail-out, on condition of painful enforced austerity, in 2010. The bail-out was seen as a national humiliation. Fianna Fáil had finally found a situation it couldn’t wriggle out of.

The mood of national fury was encapsulated by a TV appearance when incandescent former Labour leader Pat Rabbitte lambasted government minister Pat Carey in a manner reminiscent of a greyhound cornering a hare on a coursing field. Carey visibly cowered as Rabbitte repeated the words, “You should be ashamed.”

The moment was unprecedented. Fianna Fáil had never really had to answer for anything or been in a position of weakness. A canvasser for the party arrived at my door before the 2011 election. “Please don’t give out to me,” he said wearily, “I’ve had people shouting at me all day.” It was like seeing a former aristocrat searching the bins for food after the Russian Revolution.

2011 was an election like no other. Fianna Fáil dropped from 78 seats to just 20 as their vote fell from 41.6% to 17.4%. They hadn’t just fallen behind Fine Gael for the first time, but, unthinkably, behind Labour too. It seemed not just a discredited but a broken party. There seemed a very real prospect that, just when we’d developed a taste for it, we might not have Fianna Fáil to kick around anymore.

Yet they came back. Slowly and not to anything like their previous heights but significantly. They moved back into second at the 2016 election. In 2020 they joined with Fine Gael to form a coalition government. It was hailed as a historic compromise but, to no-one’s surprise, the putative rivals have proved very comfortable in each other’s company.

The parties are united by a determination to keep Sinn Féin out of power. Their efforts looked likely to be in vain for much of that government’s lifespan with Sinn Fein comfortably leading the polls, rising as high as 36% in 2022.

Yet those numbers began to drop and when Sinn Fein reached the crest of their slump, the government called a perfectly timed election. An administration which had seemed like the lamest of ducks for most of its reign did well enough in the 2024 election to ensure they could return with the support of some conservative rural independents.

Most pleasing for Fianna Fáil was the fact that for the first time since the crash they were back in their old position as most popular party in the country. 21.9% might have been laughably low compared to the glory days but it was more than anyone else could manage.

Micheál Martin, whose history as a senior member of the government responsible for national bankruptcy might have seemed to disqualify him from high office, has been Taoiseach on and off (thanks to a rotating system devised with Fine Gael) for six years. Fianna Fáil, like Japanese Knotweed, has hung in there and survived.

The Irish economy, thanks to the government policy of providing the most hospitable possible environment for American capital, has recovered. Yet the bullish confidence of the Tiger era has not returned and the country is in the throes of a housing crisis. Rents have risen higher than anywhere else in Europe over the last decade, prices have soared, homelessness has increased drastically and young couples forced to live with their parents have become emblematic figures of the age.

There’s also been a sharp rise in the cost of living. Ireland has become a country where impressive GDP figures, distorted by American companies registering profits in Ireland to benefit from the low corporate tax rate, can’t disguise the feeling that everyday life is becoming more difficult for many people.

Fianna Fáil’s poll ratings have slumped to 17% and the disastrous by-election showing confirms their recovery as a shallow and vulnerable thing. The mystique conferred by perpetual victory once lent the party a kind of impunity which cannot be recovered. Fianna Fáil are just another party now, one deeply unattractive to most of the electorate.

In Nabokov’s Lolita the narrator Humbert Humbert explains his hold over the titular character by stating, “You see, she had nowhere else to go.” Fianna Fáil’s attitude towards its supporters was a similar one. They were Fianna Fáilers, who else were they going to vote for?

The problem now is that there are plenty of other places to go. The fuel protesters who brought the country to a standstill recently seemed a classic old school Fianna Fáil constituency, small rural businessmen from the agricultural sector. Yet the government seemed entirely unable to connect with them.

Dublin Central was once the fiefdom of Bertie Ahern, an adept at the traditional Fianna Fáil skill of welding disparate elements together in an electoral alliance. Such gifts seem useless in a more fragmented political landscape.

The party is searching for a new direction and the latest reverses will increase internal doubts about whether Martin is the right man to steer them towards one. His survival thus far owes much to the uninspiring nature of his possible replacements.

Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan is a barrister from affluent South Dublin with a fondness for macho rhetoric on immigration who inflamed the fuel protests by saying he’d called out the army to deal with the protesters. (His statement was the first the army had heard of it). Darragh O’Brien is another ambitious Dubliner whose tenure as minister with responsibility for housing saw the crisis spiral completely out of control.

Dara Calleary, the favourite of the party’s rural wing, had to resign during the Covid crisis when he was discovered to have joined other politicial and legal figures at a dinner during a period when the government had forbidden such gatherings to the general public.

That this triumvirate of posturing, incompetence and shiftiness represents the alternative to Martin speaks volumes about the lack of talent on the Fianna Fáil front bench. That they’re all men is also telling. A photograph of young Keane after his selection in Galway West surrounded by a posse of men in identikit suits captured the current stodgy face of the party.

Lucky in the quality of his internal opponents, Martin also benefits from the less than convincing nature of the opposition. Independent Ireland seems best placed to surf the wave of rural populism epitomised by the wave of fuel protests. Yet though it includes several former Fianna Fáil representatives there’s an amateurish feel to the party which may limit the extent of its rise.

Sinn Fein once seemed the obvious heirs to Fianna Fáil but their by-election performances were almost as poor. Losing to the Social Democrats in party leader Mary Lou McDonald’s home constituency of Dublin Central was a humiliation. Their seventh place finish in Galway West, where they’d topped the poll at the general election ,was a catastrophe.

Once seen as leaders of the Irish centre left, Sinn Féin are apparently attempting a pivot towards becoming the kind of dominant catch-all party they are in the North. Yet their swing to the right on immigration and refusal to support a Social Democrats Dáil motion liberalising the country’s abortion laws have proved counter-productive.

Labour in Britain are just the latest centre-left party to find that such moves can cost you more votes to the left than you gain from the right. Whether Sinn Fein follow Labour in doubling down on a losing strategy out of stubbornness remains to be seen. But they’re also suffering from the perception that the party is increasingly guided by expedience rather than principle.

Social Democrat leader Holly Cairns was probably alluding to this when she commented after their Dublin Central victory that her party had stuck to their ideals regardless of what was said on social media. It was a stunning triumph yet the impression remains of the Social Democrats as a small party ultimately seeking partners to their right.

Fine Gael did surprisingly well in the by-elections but the high profile of their individual candidates, a reigning Lord Mayor in Dublin Central, a former minister in Galway West, helped. They are running as poorly in the opinion polls as their coalition partners.

Separate Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael parties seem oddly superfluous at this stage of the game. There’s a sense that Irish politics is currently becalmed before some fundamental realignment takes shape.

In the famous words of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born. In this inter-regnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Symptoms don’t get much morbid than government by the zombie remnant of a party which once personified political power in this country.

On it stumbles, rotting but determined. Like the zombies in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead drawn back to the shopping mall they remember from happier days, Fianna Fáil homes in on Leinster House without much idea of what it’ll do when it gets there.

Micheál Martin and his men are The Walking Dead. The blind urge for survival is all they have left. That and the desire to get in a last few bites and feast on the flesh of the country.

Old habits die even harder than zombies.

Every French novel ever written matters less than the novels of Virgina Woolf. The entirety of Latin American fiction is worth less than the work of Toni Morrison. Japanese, Arab, Chinese and Scandinavian literature don’t matter at all. Neither does anything written east of Vienna or west of St. Petersburg. Spanish and Portuguese literature combined matter less than WG Sebald.

That’s if we take the word of the Guardian’s much ballyhooed 100 best novels list published last week. What matters is literature written in the English language. It accounts for 78 of the novels chosen, the bulk of which come from England or the USA.

There is no room for two of the great fictional achievements of the 20th century, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters or Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy. Tanizaki’s compatriots Yasunari Kawabata and Murasaki Shikibu (who might be said to have started the ball rolling with the Tale of Genji) are missing too.

Not long ago many people would have agreed with the historian Eric Hobsbawm’s contention that the Latin American novel was to the 20th century what the Russian novel was the 19th.

Yet, if the Guardian list is anything to go by, that achievement has been largely forgotten. It’s represented solely by its figurehead Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, often regarded as the precursor to the Boom which followed.

Of Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Clarice Lispector et al there is no sign. No sign either of Machado de Assis who came before or Roberto Bolaño who succeeded them. Post-Colonial literature, of which the Latin Americans were once regarded as the vanguard, got pretty short shrift too.

In a colder clime, the two great epic Scandinavian novels, Halldor Láxness’ Independent People and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter don’t make the list either. Their authors are in good absent company. They can sit it out alongside Joseph Roth, Elsa Morante, Thomas Bernhard, Tayeb Salih, Eça de Queiroz, Benito Pérez Galdós, Qian Zhongshu and the other losers.

Apart from Kafka, who wrote in German, Eastern Europe and the Balkans are apparently of little interest. Milan Kundera, Magda Szabo, Ismail Kadare, Bruno Schulz and Nikos Kazantzakis go unrewarded.

Most striking of all perhaps is the almost total eclipse of French literature. A best 100 novels list which can find room for Dracula, The Talented Mister Ripley and The Go Between while excluding Balzac, Stendhal and Les Misérables merely renders itself ridiculous.

That there’s no place either for Zola, Camus, Duras, Céline, Perec, Yourcenar, Les Liaisons Dangereuses or La Princesse de Clèves suggests a, perhaps unconscious, antipathy towards French literature among those polled. The French refusal to render sufficient homage to the Anglophone world may play a part. There’s a certain polite strain of English xenophobia based almost entirely on a feeling of cultural inferiority vis a vis their immediate neighbours to the East.

Despite France’s reputation for chauvinism, when Le Monde polled readers for their 100 books of the 20th century they selected a mere 51 books in French (still a bit high in fairness.)

A more interesting poll is that conducted by the Norwegian Book Clubs who, in 2002, consulted 100 writers from 54 different countries for their best books of all-time list. The diversity of voters perhaps gave a truer picture of what the canon looks from outside the Anglosphere. Just 29 of its top 100 were in English. That seems fair enough.

The Norwegian list contained works in 22 different languages compared to the nine represented in the Guardian poll. The former did have the advantage of not restricting itself to novels so that some epic poems made the cut. But the disparity is striking all the same. The Book Club poll’s global reach makes it much more interesting. The list provides readers with a chance to broaden their horizons.

Some pundits are quick to say that none of this matters, lists are silly, everyone has their own taste, nothing to see here etc. Congratulations. You have established yourself as the sensible guy in the conversation. Pat yourself on the back and get out of the way.

Lists are arbitrary but they can be illuminating about the cultural context of the times in which they’re created. The very preponderance of lists in the current era perhaps indicates a combination of cultural exhaustion and canonical anxiety.

If people can expend acres of virtual ink on knocking lumps out of each other over the New York Times best 30 living American songwriters list or the best picture at the Academy Awards, a best novels of all-time poll can probably bear a little scrutiny. What are the Oscar nominations after all except one more list?

One excuse being made for the Guardian 100’s strikingly Anglocentric nature is that the individual contributor lists are much more varied. This is like arguing that the American people aren’t responsible for electing Donald Trump because Kamala Harris got more votes than him in Massachusetts. The overall result is what really counts and the story it tells is a dispiriting one.

There’s been considerable lip service paid in recent years to the idea that we should read more foreign language books. Readers have been berated for their failure to do so, there has been an increased focus on the work of translators and publishers such as Fitzcarraldo, And Other Stories and Tilted Axis have been deservedly praised for bringing a wider range of translated fiction to the public.

Many readers would feel this is a good thing and that a monolingual diet needs to be leavened by books from different literary cultures. But what the Guardian list shows is that when push comes to shove the preference is still overwhelmingly for books in English. The ordinary reader might expect better from those polled, authors, critics, academics, the gatekeepers of literary culture, than a retreat to the familiar and the comfortable.

The surprisingly narrow nature of their collective taste may not be unconnected with wider currents in contemporary society. What was the vote for Brexit after all but a turning away from Europe and an expression of English exceptionalism? Isn’t Donald Trump the personification of an American belief that there is nothing to learn from anywhere outside the USA?

It’s doubtful that anyone polled cast a vote for either Trump or Brexit yet the zeitgeist can still leave its mark. An age where the gap left by the decline of Neo-liberalism is being filled by competing nationalisms encourages parochialism.

The American tendency to flatten complexity which means Portugal, Iceland and Albania can be seen as practically identical because they’re all in Europe seems in evidence. In the top 100 the entirety of Africa and Asia is reduced, Han Kang aside, to members of the Commonwealth. There’s an, “OK, I’ve said it. Our literature is just the best,” vibe.

Any defence of the list on the grounds that English language novels really are just the best brings to mind Amit Chaudhuri’s rebuke of Salman Rushdie for stating that all the best Indian fiction was written in English. This was very convenient for Rushdie, said Chaudhuri, when he hadn’t read any of the other stuff.

It was Chaudhuri too who, when asked in the Guardian, to name his most under-rated writer answered, “Everything not written in English is under-rated.” He was proved right last week.

Saul Bellow once questioned the validity of literature outside the West by invoking the absence of a “Zulu Tolstoy.” There may not be a Zulu Tolstoy but you could argue for Mahfouz as an Arab Tolstoy and Tanizaki as a Japanese Tolstoy and it still seems their achievement isn’t fully recognised.

To question the primacy of American literature, or TV or cinema, is to invite rebuttals which often, despite their ideological contortions and sophisticated surface, don’t in the end amount to much more than a repeat of the Team America World Police lyrics, “America fuck yeah. Comin’ again to save the motherfuckin’ day yeah.”

The Marxist critic Mark Fisher once observed that people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Some people may feel the same when it comes to imagining a world without overpowering American cultural influence. The omissions the Guardian actually spotlighted were not of foreign language novels but of Bellow, Roth and Updike along with such books as To Kill A Mockingbird and Grapes of Wrath.

These authors and books increasingly look like period pieces, relics of a time when people felt it crucial to read big American novels in order to take the temperature of the world’s number one superpower. Specifically American preoccupations could be regarded as possessing universal relevance.

The decline of the US, exacerbated but not entirely caused by Donald Trump, makes keeping up with its cultural news seem less important. What was the point of reading all those oversized American social novels which arrived every year garlanded with blurbs, the size of the advance trumpeted as indicating their importance, when they singularly failed to predict the rise of Orange Don or anyone like him?

Roth, Updike and Bellow novels come from the bygone age when the much mourned, “Cultural Centrality,” of the American novel conjured up pictures of dyspeptic businessmen reading a writer profile in Time or a short story in Playboy while waiting to commit adultery with their underpaid secretaries.

One area where the Guardian poll does score over its Norwegian precursor is by containing over three times as many female writers. That percentage could have been profitably increased by including Memoirs of Hadrian (and The Abyss too), The Lover, Arturo’s Island, Kristin Lavransdatter, The Door and the Hour of the Star ahead of Catch-22, Ragtime, Blood Meridian, A Farewell to Arms, Return of the Native and Disgrace.

Such alterations might prevent the impression that, as the former editor of Sight and Sound Nick James observed about cinema, when audiences say they want diversity, they mean they want works about race and gender in English. Experiencing another culture seems less important to them.

Does it matter that the list is so restricted? The Guardian editorial, in saluting number one choice Middlemarch, said, “It has much to teach us about sympathy and tolerance.” Perhaps it does but there’s something tiresome about this perpetual insistence on viewing art in moral terms. As Oscar Wilde pointed out, aesthetic qualities are ultimately what matter most.

The main argument for broadening your reading is that it makes it more interesting. Just as it’s more interesting to live or holiday in a country other than your own. The experience may leave you with greater empathy for other cultures but the journey will be more enjoyable if not regarded as merely instrumental to that purpose.

I don’t believe those polled by the Guardian should have consciously tried to include more foreign language books. The most honest response to any request for a top ten is to just put down your favourites. It’s just a pity these favourites were largely written in one language.

When anyone has acknowledged the bias against foreign fiction, it’s been accompanied by the familiar lament that not enough is being translated. This, despite the valiant efforts of smaller publishers like the ones mentioned earlier on, is true. Yet the classic works omitted from the top 100 for anyone have been translated many times.

The one group of people who probably benefit from such lists are younger readers. Had the Guardian’s 100 been a bit more adventurous it might have sent them on more rewarding routes than the well-trodden one towards which they’re currently being directed.

There’s nothing, with the exception of Catch-22 (Anyone who thinks that hasn’t dated horribly hasn’t read it recently), on the list that isn’t well worth reading. I sympathise with the contributors as they’re assailed by the usual accusations of pretending to like the named books just to look clever.

Like the people convinced that those who vote for La Règle du jeu in the Sight and Sound Poll secretly prefer Star Wars, a surprisingly sizeable contingent apparently believes that people who’ve devoted much of their lives to writing, reviewing and studying literary fiction don’t really like it at all.

It’s very odd. Foodies after all are not generally attacked on the grounds that deep down they prefer McDonalds. I respect the opinions of those polled, I just wish their taste was a bit less parochial.

In the end, to paraphrase leading American critic Jeffrey Lebowski, “it’s just my opinion maaan.” Analysis of such polls will always be subjective rather than objective. That’s part of the fun.

Novels are always worth arguing about. Why read them otherwise?

Bertie Ahern is worried about Africans. He doesn’t think Ireland should let people from The Congo come here. There’s too much people here from that kind of place. Young Muslims worry him too.

We know all this because he was captured on camera saying so while campaigning for Fianna Fáil in the Dublin Central by-election. If someone you knew came out with this stuff it’s fair to say that you’d draw a definite conclusion about their beliefs.

However Bertie, in a quickly arranged attempt at damage control, assured people that he, “opposes racism in all its forms.” So that’s OK. Hang on, I didn’t get all of that. He, “Opposes racism in all its forms . . . but . . .” Oh.

“He opposes racism in all its forms . . . but it’s a sad day when you’re jumped on for talking about immigration.” Sad indeed. Let’s remember the real victim here. But he’s still sorry, right?

Well he, “regrets if anyone was offended,” which is a kind of half-hearted apology that implies the fault lies as much with the listener as the speaker. And he remains keen to stress that, “these are real issues. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in talking about what the people are talking about.”

So perhaps it’s worth taking a closer look at what he said when asked about immigration policy by a voter. “The ones I worry about are the Africans.” Why? Is there something which distinguishes the Africans from any other group of immigrants?

He elaborated on his worries by stating, “We can’t be taking in people from the Congo and all these places. There’s too many from those places.”

Really? At the 2022 census only one African country features in the top ten of foreign born residents of Ireland, Nigeria in 9th place. South Africa’s 16th position makes it two in the top twenty. (It’s not clear whether Bertie is talking about Congo or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. No matter. Neither were in the top 40.)

Even then there are three times as many Indians as Nigerians in Ireland and five times as many Poles. The 2022 census showed that the total population of Black African and Black Irish was 67,547. The total Asian population was 186,321. The total number of white people born outside Ireland was 502,081.

Yet Bertie thinks there are too many people from Africa in the country. The only conclusion which can be drawn is that he feels something specific about Africans makes 67,547 of them much more problematic than a larger number of Asians or Europeans. Again, something specific comes to mind here.

In trying to weasel out of things Bertie said he named the Congo in particular because the war there which could result in people fleeing to this country. This would be apparently be a bad thing. Yet he told his doorstep interrogator that he had no problem with the number of Ukrainians who’ve come here precisely because they were fleeing a war.

So why the welcome for a large number of Ukrainians and the fear of what would, be given the distances involved, a much smaller number of Congolese? Perhaps he’s paying a tribute to African resilience by suggesting that they’re better able to cope with the rigours of battle and should stay put in the war zone.

The person who quizzed Ahern, secretly recorded him and put the clip up on social media seems to have been of a far right disposition. Their next step was to bring up the question of Sharia Law coming to Ireland. They must have been pleased to hear a former Taoiseach answer this question by revealing his different worries on the Islamic issue.

“I don’t worry about this generation of Muslims,” he explained, “The next generation when the kids start growing up, I think that’s when the problem will be.” This is a pretty remarkable statement from a putatively respectable politician and Ahern’s clarification justifying it by reference to Islamist incidents in France and England made things worse.

One of the main reasons Islamism has found France a fertile recruiting ground is the country’s bloody colonial history in Algeria, something which has no equivalent in an Irish context. Another is the isolation of immigrant communities in marginalised suburbs on the edges of major cities, a mistake the Irish government will hopefully not repeat.

The growth of Islamic radicalism in England owes something to the UK’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq and its support of Israel. Neither of those factors are applicable here either. Yet Ahern is portraying an entire generation as a potential powder keg.

His emphasis on “kids” has a sinister echo of Israel’s tacit justification for the killing of children in Gaza. They’ll probably grow up to be terrorists anyway so what’s the problem?

It’s hardly surprising that Dr. Umar al-Qadri, chief Imam at Dublin’s Islamic Centre of Ireland, took exception to comments he described as, “an insult to all immigrants.” Ahern’s response was telling. “I’m very disappointed that he ran to RTE to make his comments,” he declared before berating al-Qadri, an outspoken critic of Islamist violence, for his lack of gratitude. It suggested wounded amour propre rather than proper remorse.

His defence that immigration is what “The People,” are talking about is striking too. Invocations of The People are rarely a good sign and this latest effort flies in the face of declarations from the candidates in Dublin Central that immigration isn’t figuring as an issue at all.

Other defences of Ahern have focussed on the fact that he didn’t know he was being recorded. That’s true but it hardly affects the substance of his remarks. You can’t film someone making bigoted remarks if they’re not making bigoted remarks.

The suggestion that it’s OK because he doesn’t believe any of these things but would say anything to try and get a vote doesn’t say much for Ahern or those making it. In any case it’s irrelevant. Ahern’s private convictions are no concern of ours, it’s what he says in the political arena that matters.

He’s no longer a TD but he had ambitions to run for the presidency last year, is a member of the Council of State and was canvassing for one of the government parties at the time he made the remarks. Ahern is also fond of giving interviews about his thoughts on various political issues. He sees himself as a statesman, The latest contribution suggests he’s more greasy eminence than éminence grise.

Yet the comments are perhaps not surprising. “Worry about Africans” was perhaps the primary motivator behind the 2004 citizenship referendum put to the people by Ahern’s government.

This sought to end the traditional position whereby anyone born in Ireland became an Irish citizen. Donald Trump is attempting something similar in the US at the moment. You’d wonder if some of the Irish people criticising his move know we’ve already done the same thing.

The referendum took place after much rhetoric about “anchor babies” being born in Ireland to women from outside the EU eager to secure residency here. Minister for Justice Michael McDowell, who’s been calling recently for a harder line on immigration, said that such births accounted for up to half of non EU births here. It was generally understood that the women in question were African.

The referendum passed with a 79% yes vote. It’s a little remarked upon feature of the times that Fianna Fail’s overwhelming victory at the 2002 election was helped by the perception that they were “stronger on immigration” than other parties.

Minister for Justice John O’Donoghue favoured the kind of hard man rhetoric recently rediscovered by the current incumbent Jim O’Callaghan. TDs Noel O’Flynn and Ivor Callely made wild comments about immigrants and suffered no political consequences.

Around that time I appeared on the RTE political discussion programme and argued for a more liberal line on immigration. A government TD took the other tack (one of his arguments was that “a million Kurds” were heading for Ireland. They seem to be taking their time) As we had a drink afterwards he said, cheerfully, “I know you said what you had to say but you know as well that I do that a lot of those Blacks are c**ts.”

I won’t name the man because he’s dead now so what’s the point? There’s no need to upset his family. But this was not unusual private speech at the time. The IPAS centres system, lately such a point of contention, may have resulted from a feeling that communities would not like asylum seekers dispersing among them.

Things seemed to improve after that. The Citizenship Referendum became an embarrassing memory. As the Black Lives Matter movement grew in prominence, some people here seized on the idea that the Irish were not just good white people, they were the best white people.

A piece of doggerel by the singer Imelda May entitled, “You don’t get to be racist and Irish,” became popular. The results of the marriage equality and pro-life amendment repeal referendums copper-fastened the idea of Ireland as a bastion of liberalism in an increasingly right wing world.

This was heady stuff for a country characterised by conservatism for most of its independent existence. Yet the problem about self-delusion is that repressed truths tend to bubble back to the surface at some stage. So now we have Ahern once more haunted by the number of Africans and McDowell once again calling for drastic action on immigration.

The sad truth is that the Irish are no more immune to racism than anyone else. You can hear a drumbeat out there. The first Black woman to be selected as Dublin’s representative in the Rose of Tralee is being subjected to a concerted campaign of racist abuse. So was an Irish rugby international earlier this year. There were reports last week of children suffering racist bullying in Kildare. Comments like Ahern’s help legitimise this kind of thing.

“Bertie” is a pathetic figure in many respects. A man forced to resign as Taoiseach because of financial irregularities. A man subsequently found to have not told the truth to the tribunal which uncovered these irregularities. A man whose stewardship of the economy ultimately led to the country’s bankruptcy soon after he was succeeded by his protegé Brian Cowen.

And a man held in such contempt by the younger part of the population that in 2023 the brilliant Irish singer CMAT (pictured at the top of the column) declared, “If Bertie Ahern goes for the presidency of this country I will make it my personal fucking mission to stop him.”

This proved to be more than empty rhetoric. CMAT’s blistering Euro Country, with its lines, “All the big boys, all the Berties/ all the envelopes, yeah they hurt me. When I was 12 the das started killing/ themselves all around me/ and it was normal building houses/ that stay even empty now,`’ is probably the most effective cultural indictment of the Tiger era and the crash which followed. If it didn’t in itself banjax Ahern’s presidential bid it certainly didn’t help him.

Ahern is a relic of a sleazy old Fianna Fáil way of doing things. One reason people despise it so much is the suspicion that when those lads gathered in their boozy cabals nothing good was being said about anyone on the outside. Last week provided definitive proof.

It seems that in this Woke era you can’t call anyone a racist. The conservative English columnist Simon Heffer declared last week in the Spectator that Enoch Powell wasn't racist at all but simply concerned with the management of immigration policy.

The truth is that Powell was not only a racist, he was proud of the fact and said that, “Racism is the basis of nationality.” All kinds of right wing stuff with a fairly obvious slant is excused in this country too as being merely about the “management of immigration policy.” But “Ah sure you know the crack yourself” racism is still racism.

Thinking Ukrainians are OK and Africans are dodgy or that old Muslims are fine but young ones are a menace doesn’t actually seem like a reasonable compromise.

You might think certain things about people who talk like that. I couldn’t possibly comment.

You hear it and feel like you’re out on the road somewhere. On a strip of tarmac between the ditches in Sligo or Longford, Kildare or Fermanagh, Donegal or Cork. Heading for a fleadh, a match or some such dogfight. Motoring along with this powerful music that never stops. The sun shining in a way it sometimes does during Irish summers.

It starts with a strum, almost immediately joined by the drone of Paddy Keenan’s Uilleann pipes which then launch into the Kesh Jig. The beauty and the fluency of the playing already let you know something special is afoot here. Matt Molloy on the flute combines with Keenan while Micheál Ó Domhnaill’s guitar and Donal Lunny’s bouzouki drive things on.

After seventy seconds Tommy Peoples’ fiddle comes scything in and the effect now is of a pulsating communal exhilaration, the musicians revelling in their talent as you revel in the sound of Irish music played like it was never played before the Bothy Band hit on this secret formula.

Another minute and Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill’s clavinet cascades into proceedings to add another layer of bliss. The music hurtles on, The Kesh Jig having become the slip jig Give Us A Drink of Water, the band having struck the sweet spot where abandon and precision combine.

Suddenly the brakes go on. Molloy, with his wonderful purity of tone which makes it feel the wood of the flute is singing, plays the reel Flower of the Flock with Keenan’s drone as backing.

In thirty seconds Peoples and Lunny return as though joining him in a high spirited conversation on another reel Famous Ballymote with Tríona on the bodhran. And then Keenan is back and so is Mícheál and it feels like a pell-mell charge for the line but the presiding spirit remains democratic than anarchic.

This is perhaps the most perfect piece of music ever recorded by an Irish band. It lasts just four minutes and thirty three seconds but it also lasts for decades, creating a template which most leading Irish traditional bands still follow to some extent.

The Bothy Band found a way to preserve the spirit of individual expression, which Seán Ó Riada regarded as the most important thing in Irish music, within a group setting which gives that music the drive of rock and roll and the interplay of jazz.

It was a Eureka moment in 1975 and it remains one for all those who discover this music. Everyone remembers when they heard The Bothy Band 1975 album for the first time. It is Irish traditional music’s Sergeant Pepper, its Kind of Blue.

I was reared on traditional music. My parents met on the folk scene in Dublin in the nineteen sixties. My father, who was a good enough Sean-nós singer to feature on Raidió na Gaeltachta from time to time in the seventies and eighties, was a friend of Matt Molloy and other well known musicians. I owe my birth in South Sligo to the fact that he’d sought a job there because it was a hotbed of traditional music.

Much of my childhood was spent in pubs crawling round the floor and having the eyes cut out of my head with smoke while my parents listened to the music they loved. Like any spirited kid I rebelled against their taste and spent my teens listening to the post-punk and indie music of the late seventies to mid eighties. Irish music? Nein Danke.

I didn’t reconnect with it till I moved to London aged 20. Browsing through the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street I came across a large Irish section containing albums by many of the names I remembered from my childhood. Just when I thought I was out of the traditional racket, they dragged me back in. There was no escape after that.

I am not a musicologist. And I’m not a musician. I’m just someone who’s loved this music, that brief teenage interlude aside, for half a century. I don’t pretend to be an authority (I’ve never been fond of authorities).

The American poet John Berryman said about WH Auden’s literary criticism, “He is an amateur in the good sense of that sad word. He loves. He reports his love.” I’m an amateur too. And I feel about Irish music the way the great drummer Art Blakey felt about Jazz, “To pass through life and miss this music is to miss one of the best things about living.”

It doesn’t get any better than The Bothy Band. They’ve been overshadowed to a degree by Lunny’s previous band Planxty who more casual fans of Irish music tend to regard as its ne plus ultra.

In reality the Bothy Band are a step forward from Planxty and were probably intended as such by Lunny. For all their virtues Planxty had just one virtuoso instrumentalist, Liam Ó Floinn on the pipes. The Bothy Band had three in Keenan, Molloy and Peoples.

(An earlier version of the group, known then as Seachtar, also included the great accordionist Tony McMahon. I’d love to hear a bootleg of that band as I would to hear one of the line-up including the magnificent fiddle player Paddy Glackin who left just before the recording of 1975.)

Molloy would be many people’s choice as the finest of all flute players while both Peoples and Keenan are in the top bracket as well. Keenan’s free-flowing style of piping, deriving in part from the Traveller piper tradition whose most notable exponents were the Doran brothers Johnny and Felix, added to the excitement of the Bothy style.

Peoples’ rhythmic driving Donegal style also contributed to the debut album’s distinctive sound. His replacement by the equally talented Kevin Burke, who though born in England played in the more ornamented style of his ancestors’ Sligo, meant the subsequent two albums sounded subtly different. The third Out of the Wind Into the Sun is another masterpiece and the group’s most complex recording. But the lightning in a bottle excitement of 1975 remains unique.

It’s ironic that the band’s most important figure was probably the one whose own playing got least notice. Lunny never gave solo concerts or recorded solo albums yet remains a genius who catalysed the majority of what’s been most interesting in Irish music over the past half-century.

It was Lunny who’d devised the sound of Planxty and who worked out how best to deploy the talents of the Bothy Band before moving on to try and go a step further again with Moving Hearts. A kind of Phil Spector or Quincy Jones figure, his innovations can be taken for granted now that we’re familiar with the model of playing he created.

Yet, though Seán Ó Ríada was the great pioneer of group traditional music, his vision was very different from Lunny’s. The more classical Ó Ríada approach, as perfected by The Chieftains, was designed to win the music due respect in concert halls.

Lunny was keener to capture audiences who loved the fire and excitement of rock music. But he was also keen to avoid the kind of folk-rock being played by the likes of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span. He felt the backing of drums, bass and electric guitar weren’t suited to the particular subtleties of Irish music so he took a different road.

His solution has stood the test of time while a lot of seventies folk-rock, though still enjoyable, seems anchored in its era as firmly as the Prog music which was its contemporary. His use of the bouzouki as an almost percussive backing instrument has proved so influential you’d almost regard it as an Irish instrument at this stage.

(Whereas its use in Irish music stems from Johnny Moynihan getting one from a friend who’d been to Greece and playing the instrument sixties ballad group Sweeneys Men. If the friend had been to the USSR maybe the balalaika would be ubiquitous these days).

One advantage Planxty did have over The Bothy Band was the presence of Christy Moore as singer. They broke the mould when they made Christy and perhaps only Dolores Keane, singing with De Dannan at the time, Luke Kelly and Paul Brady rivalled him for vocal power and charisma.

Tríona Ní Dhomnhaill’s slightly mannered vocals have nevertheless proved highly influential on subsequent singers. I’m very fond of them and it’s impossible to imagine The Bothy Band without her thundering away on the clavinet, that electric version of a baroque keyboard instrument which was also used to great effect on Stevie Wonder’s Superstition and Higher Ground.

Mícheál’s vocal high point with the Band was his almost unbearably moving version of the Death of Queen Jane from the live Afterhours album which came out in 1979. The Bothies had broken up at that stage after four meteoric years. Burke and he would combine for a couple of wonderful albums, the first of which Promenade, includes the magnificent Lord Franklin.

He later joined with his sister in the New Age music band Nightnoise having moved to America where he passed away in 2006. Tríona recorded a classic album, Idir an Dá Sholas with sister Maighréad. Lunny was involved in that too as he would be with so many interesting projects, a brief reformation of Planxty for starters.

Molloy went on to worldwide success with The Chieftains while Keenan and Peoples came up with two of the finest solo albums of the nineties in Na Keen Affair (1997) and The Quiet Glen (1998) respectively.

Yet it’s probably for the Bothy Band, and 1975 in particular, that all of them will be most fondly remembered. The album has never lost its lustre or its ability to make people rethink their idea of what Irish traditional music can be. The excitement surrounding a brief 2024 reunion tour, like that which greeted a reunited Planxty some years previously, showed that the seventies are to traditional music what the sixties are to rock music. There were giants on the stage in those days.

The album’s pleasures are inexhaustible. There is the way Tríona’s clavinet vamp is answered by Peoples’ fiddle in the Green Groves of Erin before the band piles in at full power. The charming effrontery of her vocals on Do You Love An Apple where, “Before I got married I wore a black shawl but since I got married I wore bugger all,” never fails to jolt the first-time listener.

There’s the reckless enthusiasm, almost verging on camp, of the way that the band careers into the jig Coleman’s Cross after Keenan’s ebullient work on Patsy Geary’s, the pure sunny joy of Lunny’s intro to Navvy on the Line and the high speed virtuosity of the Laird of Drumblaire which follows Peoples’ solo brilliance on the Scottish slow air Hector the Hero.

Ní Dhomhnaill’s keyboard and Molloy’s flute give an almost baroque feel to The Butterfly, a tune written by the legendary Dublin fiddler Tommy Potts, which now sounds like a pointer to the musical adventures of the third album.

To round it off there is The Salamanca, a reel indelibly linked in my mind with childhood as the great musicians of South Sligo played it in Ted McGowan’s pub in Gurteen. The Salamanca which in its opening seconds sounds like the musicians are warming up before plunging into the music proper. The Salamanca turning into the Banshee, Matt and Tríona in dialogue with each other yet again, and then into the Sailors Bonnet with everyone playing as though they’ve just been told that this positively has to be the last tune of the night because the guards are knocking on the door and it’s almost turned bright outside.

That’s the end of the album. But as the Australian writer Patrick White wrote on the final page of his great novel The Tree of Man, “In the end there is no end.” Not while there’s music like this. Time cannot wither it nor custom stale its infinite variety.

FOOTNOTE: There’s superb live footage of The Bothy Band on YouTube playing at the Embankment in Tallaght which includes most of the numbers from 1975. However by this stage Peoples has been replaced by Burke so I’ve linked to the original versions from the album.

Last year Catherine Connolly won a stunning victory in the Irish presidential election. Her 914,143 first preference votes were the most ever secured, almost 100,000 more than Michael D. Higgins won in 2018 and over 200,000 more than he’d won in 2011.

Connolly’s was a left-wing victory. Not only did she not water down her core beliefs, the media harped on them during the campaign. Some pundits portrayed her as a kind of ball juggling Stalin.

Perhaps that’s why the Irish media immediately sought to diminish the significance of Connolly’s triumph. It decided instead that The Real Story of the election was the number of votes spoiled in apparent protest against conservative activist Maria Steen’s failure to secure sufficient nominations.

The increase in spoiled votes was striking. But even if we attribute the entire increase on the previous election to Steen supporters, it came to around 195,000 votes. Much less than Connolly’s but also considerably less than half the number secured by Heather Humphreys of Fine Gael after a disastrous campaign.

Yet while Connolly’s votes were being explained away as the result of weak opposition, Steen’s were greeted as, “a wake-up call for Irish politics.”

In what universe do 195,000 spoiled votes matter much more than 914,000 actual votes? In that strange world where elements of the Irish media try to will our own version of Reform or the National Rally into existence.

There’s little evidence that the Irish electorate hankers for a powerful far right presence in our politics. But the amount of pundits apparently eager to echo the concerns of such parties is striking.

In last week’s Times an alarmist Michael McDowell column, which almost entirely ignoring the crucial role of immigrant employees in the economy, informed readers that, “Decent Irish People have concerns about migration. If we don’t listen, populists will.”

McDowell’s column was a classic of the genre in its insistence that, “Politicians are often reluctant to speak out about migration for fear of being accused of racism.” This perpetual self-pitying whine about some mysterious ‘they’ who prevent the poor politician from speaking up has little basis in reality.

Simon Harris said the same thing before “speaking out about migration.” Fianna Fail’s Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan likes to “speak out about migration.” So does Sinn Féin’s Justice spokesman Matt Carthy. Independent Ireland and Aontú seem to speak out about little else. The papers too are full of people perpetually complaining that they can’t write about the thing that they’re always writing about.

McDowell’s invocation of Decent Irish People is interesting. I don’t have “concerns about migration,” and neither do many people that I know. Does this make us Indecent Irish People?

Or is the purpose of this designation to reassure people that these “concerns about migration” do not deprive them of their decency even when shared with the vulgar populists McDowell decries.

You might suspect that McDowell’s criteria of “decency,” takes education, class and income into account. His “Decent People” number echoes the pundits who positioned the fuel protesters as coming from some more authentic Ireland with its roots in agriculture. This latest intervention may be an attempt to construct an alliance between Bullshit and Cowshit.

The dreaded populists get to speak out too. Gangster and Dublin Central by-election candidate Gerry Hutch’s call for, “illegal immigrants” to be put in prison camps was largely treated as legitimate political speech. He was allowed to quickly answer any criticism in a Times story headlined, “Gerry Hutch rejects racism allegations. I have friends, Indians, Blacks, Whites.”

On Friday the paper told its readers that Hutch was, “In the opportunity space of Irish politics.” On Saturday it offered, “Gerry Hutch is a smart man. He knows what he’s doing.”

The level of coverage (even taking Hutch’s colourful background into account) is remarkable considering he has little hope of winning the seat. The favourites, Daniel Ennis of the Social Democrats and Janice Boylan of Sinn Fein, have been largely sidelined. Perhaps the inevitability of a left (ish) victory has made our media decide to portray Hutch’s campaign as The Real Story in Dublin Central instead.

The obsessive media belief that immigration is the big issue in Irish politics isn’t borne out by the evidence. Opinion polls generally show it trailing housing (the leading concern by a long way) the cost of living and the state of the health system as a concern among electors.

Boylan, a far more significant political figure in Dublin Central than Hutch, says immigration hasn’t come up as an issue during her campaign. Polls show it way down the list in Galway West.

The determined effort to make immigration the central issue persists nonetheless. A story in Wednesday’s Times by political correspondent Pat Leahy about a poll concerning attitudes to the EU was headlined, “Migration concerns undermine strong support for European Union in Ireland,” with the subhead, “More than 30% believe bloc moving in wrong direction, with respondents citing immigration control issues.”

A look at the actual poll figures shows that 26% believe the EU is moving in the wrong direction. Just 31% of those cited immigration as a reason. So treating this as a story about “Migration concerns,” requires a very selective reading of the evidence. It’s a choice.

So was the platforming of veteran shock jock and recent Independent Ireland election candidate Niall Boylan, much given to expressing '“genuine concerns” about immigration and inveighing against “wokeness”, on last Sunday’s Brendan O’Connor show.

Conservative columnists figure prominently in Irish national newspapers. The Iona Institute, which flies the flag for a brand of right-wing catholicism convincingly repudiated in the marriage equality and abortion referendums, is represented by columns for David Quinn in the Sunday Independent and Breda O’Brien in the Irish Times, where she’s sometimes joined by Maria Steen.

There are several other columnists who wouldn’t be out of place in far right outlets such as Gript or Spiked. Their serial complaints that critics of the US President suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome or that hounding trans women out of sport is a crucial issue seem oddly out of tune with Irish public opinion.

I’m not arguing for ideological uniformity or the exclusion of conservative voices. But the paucity of pundits on the left of the political spectrum in Irish newspaper is shocking. Gene Kerrigan’s Sunday Independent column may have been the last to consistently put a radical point of view.

Fintan O’Toole is a fine columnist but his worldview is largely anchored in centrist liberalism. There are very few voices who stand outside the hallowed political consensus which regards Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael as sole representatives of political legitimacy. Sinn Fein, the most popular party in the country, is almost always treated with suspicion by the country’s columnists.

Connolly’s constituency also goes largely unrepresented.. Left-wing politics, it seems, must be treated as suspect if not downright contemptible. It seems a bizarre move for papers keen to attract young readers. 900,00 voters, it appears, actually can be wrong. They just have to vote left.

The Quinns and O’Briens of this world are not the problem in this respect. They’re avowedly conservative writers whose positions are clear. More damage is done, on the immigration issue for example, by what we might call (to use a phrase from the Troubles) “sneaking regarders.”

They’re the ones who think that while the more extreme anti-immigration rhetoric is to be regretted, there are “genuine concerns,” to be addressed. They use the word, “understandable fears,” without wondering if it really is “understandable” to “fear” someone solely on account of their foreign origin. They seem convinced that there’s a Silent Majority of Real Irish People eager for a harder line on immigration and a less welcoming attitude to immigrants.

Some commentators believe these pundits have been deceived by social media with its barrage of right wing propaganda on the issue, the majority of which originates from outside Ireland.

There’s something to that. But the success of Fake News is partly based on the willingness of its target audience to be taken in. Propaganda works by bolstering or exacerbating an existing prejudice rather than creating one. Like a vampire, it can only enter if invited over the threshold.

The determination to make immigration top of the political issue pops derives to a certain extent from an uneasiness with housing’s current number one position. For most of our political commentators, the housing crisis isn’t a crisis. They own at least one house.

You can practically see the hackles go up when landlords are criticised. The housing crisis is a divisive issue and most pundits belong to the class taking the most stick over it. Immigration by contrast offers the opportunity to team up with your fellow native born Irish against the foreign hordes.

The average Irish political commentator prizes consensus above anything else. But they ignore the fact that while immigrants may be a minority they’re not an insignificant one. There are more foreign born people in the Republic than there are Catholics in the North.

Age contributes to pundit blindness on this score. Irish political commentary may not exactly be a gerontocracy but it’s hardly brimming with young diverse voices. The most prominent pundits grew up, like myself, in a monocultural Ireland which was a very cold house for anyone diverging from the norm. They’re still inclined to think of minority rights as a gift dependent on the paternalistic good grace of the majority.

Younger people tend to take a different view. My childrens’ generation went to school alongside people from other countries. They had classmates who could come out as gay without fear of physical abuse. They knew trans people.

This is what they regard as a normal society. The idea, advanced so often in the Irish media, that "wokeness has gone too far,” would seem laughable to many of them. They realise, as young people always realise, that the clock cannot be turned back and that any attempt to reinstate old prejudices is ultimately a losing battle.

Conservatives know this of course. The rightward turn is an attempt to try and future proof societies against the more tolerant attitude of younger people. Ireland’s 1983 pro-life referendum was a classic example. Its proponents explicitly declared the importance of copper fastening the ban lest it be overturned by a changed future society. That worked for a while but eventually it failed.

What about the argument that “respectable” politicians can draw the sting from populist politics by moving rightwards to meet it? England has served as a laboratory for this idea in recent years with Keir Starmer seeking to woo Reform voters by addressing their concerns.

The result? Reform won the biggest share of the vote at last week’s local elections while Labour slumped to their worst ever showing. Why vote faux right when you can vote far right?

Among those elected for Reform were a candidate who’d referred to shooting “Pakis,”, one who’d declared his delight on hearing a Sikh woman had been raped, a holocaust denier and a man who’d called for Nigerian to be melted down and used to fill pot holes.

The party’s triumph was celebrated by the Daily Telegraph with the headline, “Sick of being dismissed as a racist, Essex Man has turned to Reform,” (neatly summed up by the brilliant English novelist Hari Kunzru as, “Sick of his racism being called out, racist man votes for racism.”)

This idea that far right views on immigration can be gentrified through going halfway to meet them is becoming prevalent here. It leads to such odd formulations as, “You won’t change people’s minds by disagreeing with them.”

The truth, as shown this week for the umpteenth time, is that pussyfooting around such rhetoric not only legitimises it but emboldens its proponents to keep going further as the far right grows in power. That should be a warning to our Sneaking Regarders.

Unless of course that’s what they, consciously or not, wanted all along.

Rory Gallagher Irish Tour ‘74 is the best rock movie ever made, a masterpiece by one of the finest of all documentary makers about a magnificent musician.

Its greatness lies in the way it captures something essential about not just Gallagher but about the playing and watching of music. It’s as thrilling now as when Tony Palmer decided the footage he’d shot was so good he’d turn his planned TV special into a film instead.

The movie hasn’t dated because Rory Gallagher hasn’t dated. That’s remarkable because the type of blues based rock he played went out of fashion a long time ago. Swept out of the limelight by Punk, it retained a loyal fanbase but attracted few new enthusiasts.

Gallagher is different. His reputation has grown over the years. The American critic Robert Christgau’s praise of Gallagher for, “avoiding the lassitude of John Mayall, the boogie boredom of Savoy Brown and the power madness of Foghat,” provides a partial explanation.

The reputation for dullness enjoyed by the practitioners of what us old timers once called, “heads down no nonsense boogie,” was not entirely undeserved. This stuff was a tough grind for a generation raised on the quick fire excitement of Punk and New Wave.

Gallagher soared above all that. He could rock out with the best of them but there was a lightness, a lyricism, a variety and a joy there which meant he was never boring. His was an art of the rapier rather than the bludgeon.

It was true to the spirit of the Bluesmen who inspired him and whose subtlety was often lost when their music was turned into stadium rock. Gallagher’s admiration for the roots of the music he played never faltered and it made him a worthy heir. The man, appropriately enough, had Taste.

He was close to the height of his powers in 1974. At the start of 1975 the Rolling Stones considered him as a replacement for Mick Taylor who’d just quit the band. He went as far as jamming with them in Rotterdam before the idea fell through. It’s an intriguing proposition to imagine him with the Stones but Charlie Watts’ suggestion that playing third fiddle to the big two wouldn’t have suited Gallagher seems fair enough. He liked to do his own thing.

And he did it superbly. Palmer’s documentary opens with shots of waves crashing off the Old Head of Kinsale before he cuts to Gallagher playing Walk on Hot Coals, one elemental force giving way to another. The number is like a compendium of rock guitar technique and Gallagher practically makes the instrument sit up and beg.

Yet as Palmer’s camera closes in, there’s also the impression of a man engaged in a private dialogue with the guitar. Performance is directed outward but artistry often turns inwards. One of the film’s great merits is that it shows us the artist as well as the performer.

Gallagher was famously shy and apparently even the few brief conversations with the director were reluctantly embarked upon. That works to the movie’s advantage. The modern rock documentary’s garrulous interviews rarely do more than prove most musicians are more eloquent with instrument in hand. Nothing Gallagher says could be as interesting as what he plays.

Waiting to go on stage in Cork as the “Rory, Rory,” chants ring round the hall he cuts a withdrawn and anxious figure, the last man you’d expect to hold a crowd in the palm of his hand. But the transformation as he lashes into Tattoo’d Lady is almost immediate and there’s a beautiful moment a couple of minutes in when he smiles wryly to himself. It’s the smile of a man exhilarated by the wonder of his own ability, a “Jesus, look what I can do,” smile.

Gallagher once said, “What I play is something that’s in me all the time. It’s not just something that I turn on.” The wish to express that something in themselves is what sent so many people on the road playing rock and roll. It’s the primary motive behind all art. Rory Gallagher’s smile is all about the moment when the internal dream achieves its ideal manifestation. To put it more simply, it’s about the joy of nailing it.

Irish Tour 1974 is full of joy. There seem to be as many shots of Gallagher communing with the band as there are of him facing the crowd. He never seems happier than when connecting musically with bassist Gerry McAvoy, drummer Rod de’Ath and organist Lou Morgan (the movie really brings home the extra colour Morgan’s bravura playing brought to the band.)

In those moments the movie is a paean to the specific joy of being in a band when comrades bring each other to new heights. The joy of the crowd isn’t ignored either.

Most striking is the proximity of the crowd to the stage and the unmediated feel to proceedings compared to our era when big gigs resemble a cross between a Broadway show, the Super Bowl and Triumph of the Will. (You can see the same thing The same thing in the Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars movie filmed the previous year.)

There is the band, the crowd, the music and nothing else. And it is enough. It is more than enough. The movie makes you wish you’d been there and captures Gallagher’s nature as essentially a live performer. He has this in common with many of the great jazz musicians, whose studio albums can never capture the magic of random nights when their improvisations reached new heights of inspiration that went unrecorded.

Gallagher’s freewheeling approach, his abundant inventiveness and the way he drew inspiration from both colleagues and crowd mean his very best moments may only live on in the memory of those who witnessed them live. The Irish Tour ‘74 and the Live in Europe album from two years earlier are probably the best recorded testaments to his genius.

Tattoo (1973), Calling Card (1976) and Top Priority (1979) remain fine records. Yet something like the moment in the movie where the band slows down and falls almost silent during Who’s That Coming before exploding back into life, Gallagher looking every inch the man doing the thing he was born to do, is not easily reproduced in the studio.

On stage he was imperious. Off stage he found things more difficult. There’s a moment when, speaking about Cork, he says, “If you want to meet someone you know more or less where to find them. If you don’t want to meet someone you can go where you won’t meet them. Which is kind of nice.”

It seems telling that not meeting people is the thing he appears to prefer. The alcoholism and addiction to sedatives which necessitated the liver transplant that killed him aged just 47 lend a tragically prophetic cast to the song Million Miles Away.“There’s a song on the lips of everybody/There’s a smile all round the room/There’s conversation overflowing/So why must I sit here in the gloom.” Alcoholism is perhaps primarily a disease of loneliness. The real killer is the way it ultimately exacerbates that loneliness to unbearable levels.

Retrospect lends a poignancy to the sight of Gallagher strolling the quays of Cork which would not have been obvious to the audiences of the time. But there are moments of hometown joy too. He seems tickled by the effrontery of the teenager who asks for his arm to be autographed (I know the man in question and the signature is still there, though it’s perhaps been touched up over the decades. He remains a worshipper at the Church of Rory.)

And there’s a lovely moment when, as he tries out instruments in Crowleys music shop of McCurtain Street (the street where he grew up) he happily confides to the salesman, “I got the bottleneck,” as though there’s just the two of them there.

There is Cork and then there is Belfast where he plays the Ulster Hall because, “I lived there for a while and I learned a lot from playing in the clubs there so I have a certain home feeling for the place.” It was no small decision. There hadn’t been a rock concert in the city since the previous summer.

“I don’t seen any reason for not playing Belfast. Kids still live here. They can get tired of records,” Gallagher told Melody Maker and the gig went ahead even after the city was rocked by ten explosions the previous night. Gallagher’s low key explanation notwithstanding, the journey was not without risk for a musician from the Republic as the murder of three Miami Showband members the following year by Loyalist terrorists proved. The cutting to jeeps laden with British soldiers during Going to My Hometown underlines the fraught atmosphere of the times.

He triumphs in Belfast and Dublin. Bullfrog Blues, the number which ends the movie, shows the sheer power of Gallagher at full pelt. Big as he was in Ireland, he was bigger still in Europe, a legend of live performance. My brother was working in a pub in Cologne in 1995 when a quartet of tearful leather jacketed German rockers came in to tell him, “Rory has died.” The same brother later drank in the Rory Gallagher pub in the Lithuanian port town of Klaipéda.

Some musicians are admired. Some are respected. Rory Gallagher was loved. There’s an almost proprietorial protectiveness surrounding his legend now. People regard him as a gentle soul and that makes his fate all the more tragic. He didn’t seem like one of life’s hellraisers.

The affection also stems from the idea that he was one of us. Clive James said that the great appeal of Bing Crosby was that he sounded like men think they sound when they sing in the shower. Rory Gallagher made you feel like you could pick up the Stratocaster and in no time at all be playing like him.

You couldn’t of course. There was only one like him. But that down to earth quality was in contrast to the self-conscious virtuoso vibe of Prog and to guitar heroes who liked to let you see what all these pyrotechnics were costing them.

Gallagher made the difficult look simple. Which is one definition of genius. As a jazz critic said about the great Pat Metheny his music was imbued with the spirit of a kid with a guitar slung over his shoulder walking along on a fine summer’s day.

The paradox is that the Blues lay behind everything Gallagher did. He tells Palmer that he doesn’t want to be thought of as a, “Top of the Pops man.” “I could write a top twenty song but I don’t think that’s important.” He doesn’t want to play the big arenas he witnessed when supporting Deep Purple and The Faces in the USA because that would require a different kind of show to the one he likes to do.

Commercial considerations never meant much to someone who if he was still around would probably be placing an even greater focus on the blues, folk and country he loved. He’d probably be playing acoustic more often, perhaps following the gentler directions explored in the eponymous 1971 debut solo album which now seems an intriguing road not taken.

The one moment where he really lights up when talking in Irish Tour is when he talks about the different guitars played by the old blues, country and street singing musicians. But he didn’t see the Blues as a museum exhibit. Two of his great live favourites, Messin’ with the Kid and Too Much Alcohol, came from the seminal 1966 Chicago/ The Blues/ Today! album. The originals by the Junior Wells Chicago Blues Band and JB Hutto and the Hawks respectively are heartily recommended.

The romance between young white European musicians and the Blues was one of the great cultural love stories. Rock’s sixties golden age was to some extent created by young record collectors keen to play something which sounded like the music they loved.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ epochal meeting at Dartford train station where they bonded over the records Jagger was carrying seems symbolic in this respect. Their love persisted. Stanley Booth in his book on the group (the best rock bio ever written) describes Richards painstakingly taking down the words of obscure blues songs from a poor quality tape at a party during the legendary 1969 tour.

Something in the Blues spoke to youngsters all over Britain and Ireland and one of them was the kid reared in Cork and born in Donegal (I’m not getting into that controversy) who it gave the chance to express something which might otherwise have lain dormant within his soul.

Out of it he wrought powerful, soulful, beautiful music which moved millions. His guitar was a Lyre of Orpheus for a modern age. There are statues of him, pubs named after him and streets named after him but his finest monument is Irish Tour ‘74. Nobody could wish for a better one.

FOOTNOTE: Rory Gallagher and his fans are blessed by the fact that the movie was directed by Tony Palmer. Palmer’s incredible career includes both a fifteen hour TV series on 20th century popular music, All You Need Is Love (1977) and a seven and a half hour film about Richard Wagner starring Richard Burton, Wagner (1983). A prodigious output of over 100 documentaries includes two regarded as among the best ever made on classical music, A Time There was (about Benjamin Britten, 1979) and At The Haunted End of Day (about William Walton, 1980). Take any chance you get to see anything from Palmer’s oeuvre. It’s all good.

We’re also blessed by the trojan efforts Donal Gallagher, who produced Irish Tour ‘74, has made to honour Rory’s memory since then. It’s an inspirational tale of filial devotion. We would all be lucky to have such a brother.

Sinn Féin announced their departure from progressive politics last week first with a dog whistle and then with an alarm bell.

Mary Lou McDonald’s praise for “The Lads With The Tractors,'“ and assertion that their blockade of O’Connell Street made women feel safer announced the party’s determination to throw its lot with the fuel protesters.

Her sunny portrait of the protest weekend contrasted with the experience of the Muslim Sisters of Éire group which has for years been providing meals for homeless people in O’Connell Street. The Muslim Sisters endured the nightmare of being attacked by racists who’d arrived in the area to support the protests.

Challenged on this point during an interview by Gavin Reilly on Virgin Media the Sinn Féin leader blithely declared that “everybody knows,” these activists were a small minority. She repeated her line about, “The Lads With The Tractors,” (a phrase obviously considered to have box office potential), making the city safer.

These are questionable assertions. The protests shouldn’t be characterised as far right. They’re driven by discontent about rising fuel prices. Yet their two most high profile leaders James Geoghegan and John Dallon were scheduled to appear at an event (subsequently cancelled) alongside far right Dublin councillor Gavin Pepper who has, among other things, called for mass deportations of immigrants.

After McDonald’s Virgin Media interview Pepper agreed with her comments on the programme’s Facebook page. Immediately below his posts was one which read, “Hardly a foreignor (sic) in sight. Couldn’t believe it was Dublin.”

Misspelt though the post might have been, it did capture an essential point about O’Connell Street during the protests. It wasn’t a welcoming place for immigrants. The Muslim Sisters of Éire’s experience showed that.

So when a political leader praises the “safety” of the city that weekend they are, perhaps inadvertently, betraying their belief about whose safety really matters to them.

Further evidence of Sinn Féin’s attitude on such matters arrived the day after McDonald’s interview. The government’s announcement that it would stop providing accommodation for Ukrainian refugees was criticised by both Labour and the Social Democrats as well by the Irish Refugee Council.

Sinn Féin on the other hand didn’t just welcome the decision, its deputy leader Pearse Doherty criticised the government for not taking it sooner and said the party had been pressing for this move for some time.

The sight of the government, Sinn Féin, Aontú and Independent Ireland on one side with Labour and the Social Democrats on the other was a pretty stark illustration of the differences between the parties on immigration. Sinn Féin is making common cause with parties of the right rather than those of the centre-left.

This isn’t particularly surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention. Last year party Justice spokesman Matt Carthy criticised government policy over IPAS refugee accommodation centres for ignoring “genuine concerns” in communities and said the party, “hadn’t been vocal enough on migration.”

That kind of rhetoric made it clear that Sinn Féin was keen to adopt what it described as a more “common sense” view of immigration. In doing so the leadership may have been reflecting the opinion of the party at grass roots level.

Several of the party’s local representatives have supported protests against immigrant accommodation, Roscommon TD Claire Kerrane called (in a subsequently deleted Facebook post) for immigrants who commit crimes to be deported. Tipperary TD Martin Browne addressed a meeting in Roscrea protesting against asylum seekers being housed there.

In polls Sinn Féin tends to have the highest percentage of voters with a negative view of immigration. So perhaps there’s nothing remarkable about the party adopting positions which are closer to that of Independent Ireland than to those of the Social Democrats. The rightward shift on the issue also mirrors that of the two government parties.

What is remarkable is the attitude of Sinn Féin’s putative partners in a left-wing coalition, the Social Democrats, Labour and People Before Profit. It’s not so much that they refuse to criticise the party’s position on immigration, it’s that they’re pretending not to notice it.

Some outside apologists affect to believe that there’s “a battle for the soul of the party” going on within Sinn Féin. But there’s little evidence of dissent within the party over the new hard line on immigration.

The more common defence of tiptoeing around Sinn Féin on the matter, occasionally spoken but more often left unsaid, is that such differences should be swept under the carpet in the interests of coalition building.

This is a venerable line on the Irish Left, one used by Labour traditionally and the Green Party of late, to justify the selling out of core values while in government with either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael.

Such compromises, usually defended on the grounds of “realism”, have generally proved disastrous for the parties involved and resulted in their decimation at the following general election. But the victims of such catastrophes could at least point to getting some, if not much, legislation passed. They also got to ride around in state cars for a bit.

By contrast, the centre-left’s current caution around Sinn Féin seems to give them the worst of both worlds, responsibility without power. The Social Democrats and Labour are behaving like the junior partners in a coalition which only exists in their minds.

There were hopes that it might exist in reality when the opposition parties were drawn closer together by the government’s high-handed treatment at the opening of the current Dáil. It appeared as though Irish politics was finally moving towards a right-left divide.

Such hopes have been comprehensively scotched over the past week. The fuel protesters, essentially a movement of self-interested small businessmen, are unlikely allies for a left-wing party. Talk of socialist unity rings hollow when Sinn Féin are lining up alongside Aontú and Independent Ireland.

The appetite for self-delusion is understandable. An alliance with Sinn Féin held out the opportunity of creating a broadly left-wing government for the first time in the history of the state. You could argue that such an unprecedented prospect justifies a certain degree of sacrifice.

But this sacrifice will probably be for nothing. It seems increasingly obvious that Sinn Féin’s sights are set on a coalition with Fianna Fáil, preferably as senior partner.

A partnership with one large party rather than three or four smaller ones would be pragmatically preferable for Sinn Féin. It might also be temperamentally preferable.

I don’t mean to insult Sinn Féin by casting doubt on their left-wing credentials. It’s merely a statement of observable political fact. Most politicians in Ireland like to be considered more left-wing than they are (and even the right-wing ones hate being called right-wing.)

A classic example of this was Bertie Ahern’s claim to be a “socialist,” which he justified in the terms, he liked to see business booming so money could trickle down to the less well off, of classic Reaganism.

Sinn Féin is not traditionally left-wing. The current party descends from the Provisional group which split from Official Sinn Féin because it disapproved of the latter’s left-wing turn. The phrase, “Godless Communism,” saw some use at the time.

The republican movement did turn to the left in the eighties when a younger leadership cohort from the North, developed an interest in Marxism. Its councillors in the Republic tended to represent working class areas so marginalised that the idea of Sinn Féin as “enemies of the state” was seen as a recommendation rather than a drawback.

It remains strong in those areas and its policies on housing and health are to the left of the two main parties. But it’s worth remembering that the party’s main priority is a United Ireland and that everything else is largely a means to that end. Criticisms of the party for being unprincipled might meet with the counter-argument that the big prize of a United Ireland is surely worth an odd bit of Machiavellianism.

Sinn Féin’s ambition is not to become the leading party of the Irish Left. It is to become in the Republic what it is in the North, a dominant catch-all party. It is to become the new Fianna Fáil.

To do that it must get into government. Just four years ago, with the party at 36% in the polls, Mary Lou’s accession to the Taoiseach’s office seemed an inevitability. Yet when the election the party had longed for finally arrived in 2024 the party’s support had slumped. So much so that it celebrated its 19% vote share as a gallant fightback.

Conventional wisdom says there’s a ceiling to Sinn Féin’s vote because some voters can’t forgive it for being the de facto political wing of the IRA during the Troubles. That didn’t stop the party attaining the 36% figure in 2022. It seems odd that Sinn Féin aren’t coming anywhere near that figure at the moment, given the rank incompetence and cynicism of a hugely unpopular government.

The party’s biggest problem may actually be the perception that it’s willing to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds in search of public approval. This is a relatively new phenomenon. Sinn Fein used to be regarded as more principled than the two main parties.

Its perceived idealism was a big part of its appeal. Even the refusal to disown the more sulphurous elements of its past could be seen in those terms. Sinn Féin was the party whose TDs took the average industrial wage and remitted the rest to the party. You knew where you stood with them.

No more. It’s telling that whenever we discuss Sinn Féin these days we presume their policy is driven by expediency rather than principle. We proceed from the belief that they’ll be guided by their perception of what will play well with the electorate.

That would explain the embrace of the fuel protests and the new line on immigration. Other straws are blowing in the wind. Health spokesperson’s David Cullinane’s welcome on social media of a UK court ruling that men and women must be defined by their biological sex was an example.

Cullinane’s apology for any offence given to trans people seemed very new model Sinn Fein. There’s a lot of walking back after you get the benefit of putting an idea out there. These days Sinn Féin seems shifty. In a very Fianna Fáil way.

Sinn Féin’s move to the right risks alienating younger progressive voters. That’s where the alliance in the Dáil with the Progressive Democrats, Labour and People Before Profit comes in handy. As long as these parties refrain from criticising Sinn Fein it can maintain the fiction of being left-wing. Their main use is not as allies but as camouflage.

The irony is that the reluctance of these parties to challenge Sinn Féin ultimately makes its move towards Fianna Fáil more likely. Sinn Féin might have more respect for the Social Democrats and Labour if those parties started winning enough of the younger vote it takes for granted to become serious rivals. By pretending Sinn Féin aren’t moving right, its centre-left allies are enabling and perhaps even exacerbating the process.

Another irony is that the populist line on immigration may not even be that popular. A survey last week found that belief in the positive effects of immigration has actually risen from 64% to 66% over the past year. Could it be that the main parties have misjudged public opinion by placing too much emphasis on the view of a noisy minority which is over-represented on social media?

If that is the case, who’s going to represent the 66%? Not Sinn Fein apparently. The next election promises to be a race to the bottom on immigration. Mary Lou and her Merry Lads seem determined to win it.

Comedy is the most successful, the most beloved, the most overlooked and the most culturally specific of movie genres. It can also be one of the most surprising and rewarding.

Part of the appeal of foreign language movies is the sense of being granted a brief entry into another culture. In addition to their artistic qualities, they also transmit a sense of empathy. They do for me anyway. And when I watch a foreign comedy I have the sense of laughing along with an audience separated from me by a large stretch of distance and time.

It’s a good feeling which is reflected in the way I talk about the movies involved. I’m less likely to describe them as great movies (though some are great) than to say that I’m fond of them. They’re movies which inspire affection.

They’re also essential parts of their national film traditions. Knowing them prevents filmgoers (like my younger self) idealising France, for example, as an arthouse nirvana whose audiences spurn the shallow delights of Hollywood for more intellectually nourishing fare.

A list of the top 100 grossing French movies of all-time (adjusted for inflation) contains nothing by Renoir, Godard, Truffaut, Bresson, Rohmer, Varda or Rivette. The entire top 10 is comprised of comedies, most largely unknown outside their home country. 15 of the top 20 and 35 of the top 50 are comedies.

Our received notion of French cinema is not entirely false. The country still possesses the most intellectually stimulating film culture on the planet. Nowhere can you see as many good films from a variety of places and times as you can in Paris.

But unless you take into account the movies which have attracted the biggest domestic audiences, your understanding of not just French cinema culture but French culture in general is only a partial one.

During the sixties when the outside world’s idea of a French cinematic icon would have been Jean Paul Belmondo, Jeanne Moreau or Catherine Deneuve, the country’s biggest box office star was Louis de Funés, a middle-aged actor with the look and manner of a gravely exasperated businessman.

De Funés was a comic genius. His two most popular movies, the second world war spoof La Grande Vadrouille and the crime caper Le Corniaud which both teamed him with the equally great Bourvil, a phlegmatic foil for the hyperactive De Funés, still stand up pretty well.

Both pale by comparison with Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob, a 1973 movie which unleashes the pure unfiltered essence of De Funés. Utterly unencumbered by good taste, the manic romp’s highlight is a legendary sequence where De Funés, a businessman disguised as a rabbi to escape from criminals, takes part in a traditional Hasidic dance and grows more manic as it goes on.

The movie was unusual in attracting some attention in the USA where it was nominated for a Golden Globe. For the most part De Funés remained unknown in the English speaking world. Gérard Oury, who directed the star’s three greatest hits, never makes any list of leading French directors.

This raises the question of whether such neglect is deserved. These comedies were very successful but are they any good? The answer, as always, is that it depends which movies you’re talking about.

The most avid partisan would struggle to construct a case for the likes of all-time top tenners Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu, Les Bronzés 3 and Taxi 2. They make American Pie look like The Tree of Life.

But Intouchables, the story of a rich white quadriplegic’s friendship with his Black carer is, for all its predictability, a skilfully constructed and very likable movie with a star-making performance from Omar Sy. Despite snooty Anglosphere reviews, the 2011 movie, directed by Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, struck a chord with audiences outside France, topping box office charts in Germany and Italy and inspiring remakes in Turkey and India.

Intouchables’ overseas impact may have resulted from its unusually good hearted nature for a French comedy. One of the Gallic laugh riot’s distinguishing features can be a level of cruelty and crudity, the former in particular, you don’t really find anywhere else.

Les Visiteurs and Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, both in the top ten, are good examples of the tendency to stop at nothing and spare no-one’s feelings in the process. So is 2021 Cesar Award winner for best film Adieu les Cons, a comedy road movie about a terminally ill woman and a suicidal man.

The cruelty reaches even greater heights in beloved French Christmas classic Le Père Nöel est une ordure (1982) which takes place in a suicide hotline office and includes jokes about domestic violence and mental illness among other things. Le Père Nöel epitomises the French love of going places comedies from other countries don’t dare. The movie makes a baffling watch for the foreigner, even without judging it by today’s more sensitive standards.

Generalising about national character is a dubious occupation yet watching such movies tends to confirm the suspicion that the French are not a particularly sentimental nation.

The 1988 movie La vie est one long fleuve tranquille centres round the discovery of two very different families that two of their children were inadvertently mixed up at birth. In Hollywood, the culture clash would probably result in the realisation, after some mishaps, that what the families have in common matters more than divides them and that each can learn from the other.

But in Étienne Chatillez’s film, the poor and criminal Groseilles make life a nightmare for the ultra respectable Le Quesnoys whose children start sniffing glue while their mother has a nervous breakdown and takes to the drink.

The film remains a cult favourite in France, partly because of a viciously accurate scene where a happy clappy priest delivers a performance to leave Folk Mass survivors everywhere cringing in recognition. The song Jésus reviens became a comic anthem and the internet abounds with cover versions of various hues.

There’s something impressive about Chatillez’s mercilessness. This tendency of French comedy to relentlessly pursues the implications of its scenario to the bitter end also typifies the films of its most successful director on the export market, Bertrand Blier.

Blier’s movies all begin with an outrageous idea. In Préparez von mouchoirs, one man enlists another to become his girlfriend’s lover and cheer her up. In Trop belle pour toi, a businessman leaves his extremely beautiful wife for his ordinary looking secretary. In Tenue de soirée, a burglar (played by Gérard Depardieu) falls in love with the timid male half of a couple whose house he’s robbing.

Those films never let up. Blier never tips you the wink that he’s just kidding. He’s a director so blatantly transgressive that contemporary accusations of being “problematic” can’t touch him. He’s gone out of his way to be problematic. It would be like tone policing the novels of William Burroughs. Being outraged means you’ve fallen into his trap.

That Blier made the movies with so much style and élan that they became international arthouse successes is perhaps the best joke of all. The cruelty of these movies is rooted to some extent in the old French battlecry, “Épater les bourgeois.”

Hollywood’s attitude might be that the Le Quesnoys are essentially decent people who don’t mean any harm. French satire tends to take takes a more Bunuelian, “The bourgeoisie have it coming,” line.

There’s more to French comedy than competitive cruelty. My favourite French films of recent years are a pair of comedies whose refreshing generosity of spirit never lapses into sentimentality.

Les combattants (2014), (released as Love at First Fight over here) about a mild mannered young man who falls in love with a physical fitness fanatic, and À l’abordage (2020), about three friends from Paris on a road trip to the South of France, are kind hearted intelligent movies which would brighten anyone’s day.

The latter’s director Guillaume Brac was also responsible for L’île au trésor, filmed at a water park near Paris and perhaps the most joyous documentary ever made.. Yet Brac’s work and that of Les combattants director Thomas Cailley have hardly registered here perhaps because our expectations of a French movie don’t stretch as far as their kind of comedy.

So it goes. Foreign aficionados of French cinema tend to be familiar with the great hard man performances of Lino Ventura in such classic crime movies as Le deuxième souffle, Classe tous risques and Le clan des Siciliens.

They’re less likely to know two films where he sends up his image and which gain hugely if you’re familiar with the French gangster genre. In Les Tontons flingueurs, directed by Georges Lauren in 1963, he plays a criminal trying to run the empire he’s just inherited while also looking after the high spirited daughter of the gang boss who left it to him.

Ventura’s world weary style, (his expression, like Robert Mitchum’s, is always that of a man who can’t put up with much more of this shit), gets used to brilliant comic effect. A scene where he and his sidekicks end up drinking a consignment of noxious bootleg whiskey is a joy. The film owes a great deal to the comic dialogue of Michel Audiard, father of Un Prophète and Emilia Pérez director Jacques. There’s also a fine performance by Bertrand Blier’s father Bernard.

The peerless Lino is just as exasperated and even funnier in L’emmerdeur (1973) when playing a hitman whose plans keep being accidentally foiled by a suicidal salesman staying at the same hotel. Making it even funnier is that Jacques Brel plays the pathetic salesman. Brel was the most Alpha of males (his reaction to developing terminal cancer was to sail his boat on a round the world trip) but he’s perfect in the role.

L’Emmerdeur was remade by Hollywood, poorly, as Buddy Buddy in 1981. The same fate befell another collaboration between director Eduard Molinaro and writer Francis Veber, La Cage aux Folles, whose original 1978 incarnation is grittier, funnier and somehow more truthful than its subsequent Americanisation as The Birdcage.

Veber had a gift for attracting Hollywood attention with Les Fugitifs (Three Fugitives) and Le Dîner des Cons (Dinner for Schmucks) among the other American adaptations of his work. His set-ups are always eye-catching. The assassin has to save someone’s life! The gay couple must pretend to be straight! Bring the stupidest person possible to a dinner party! The collaborations with Molinaro work best. Later on, especially after Veber started directing his own scripts, the movies sometimes ran out of gas once the initial premise had been worked through.

Another movie to get the Hollywood treatment was Un Éléphant ça trompe énormément, (remade by Gene Wilder as The Woman in Red.) This 1974 movie is the classic portrayal of France as a country where adultery is the national sport. Its protagonist encounters one farcical complication after another as he pursues the object of his affection.

Yet this rehash of familiar territory and its sequel Nous irons tous au paradis, where the adulterous boot is on the other marital foot, work because of the skill of director Yves Robert (whose La guerre de Boutons is one of French comedy’s biggest box-office hits.) The presence of Jean Rochefort as lead also helps. Rochefort, a man with the appearance and air of a doleful hound, later starred in Tandem, a 1987 Philippe Leconte movie which is probably my favourite French comedy.

A neglected classic, it tracks an egotistical radio host (Rochefort) and his faithful sound man (Gérard Jugnot) as they traverse France to record a travelling quiz show. It is very funny, very moving about male friendship, very astute about self-delusion and finally very uplifting as the characters realise (SPOILER ALERT) that the show must go on even if there’s no show to go on. Tandem is a movie I feel compelled to recommend to everyone.

The same blend of comedy, intelligence and pathos is present in Le Goût des autres, directed by Agnès Jaoui in 2000, whose complex plot centres on the efforts of an industrialist to develop an interest in culture and the snobbery he encounters from artists while doing so. Jaoui’s personal and professional partnership with Jean-Pierre Bacri, who plays the industrialist Castella, was responsible for a number of terrific screenplays prior to this, her directorial debut.

That Le Goût des autres, a huge commercial and critical success in France, didn’t make a 2019 BBC list of the best 100 films directed by women shows how comedy tends to be sidelined. Even when, in this case, it tackled issues of class and culture much more deftly than many self consciously serious attempts to do so.

Potiche (2010), directed by François Ozon, mines similar territory for laughs. It gets much less critical love than his acclaimed serious movies but this tale of an industrialist’s wife getting her chance to run the factory has a tremendous central performance by Catherine Deneuve who sinks her teeth in to the comic possibilities with great relish.

There are several unexpected plot turns as there are in Ozon’s Dans la maison from 2012 which combines French ruthlessness with the director’s trademark visual flair as a manipulative teenager turns suburban lives upside down.

Claude from Dans la maison is heir to the titular character from Jean Renoir’s Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932), a tramp who wreaks havoc on the bourgeois household which takes him in after rescuing him from the Seine. Four years later another legendary scoundrel blithely outlined his life of crime and dishonesty with disarming panache in Sacha Guitry’s magnificent Le Roman D’un tricheur.

Perhaps my personal favourite in this vein is Un drôle de paroissien, directed in 1963 by the remarkable Jean-Pierre Mocky who went to make a vast number of films on shoestring budgets. George Lachaunaye, played by Bourvil, is an impoverished aristocrat who, realising his upbringing has rendered him unemployable, supports his family by stealing from church collection boxes.

His battle of wits with a pursuing policeman reaches heights of inspired lunacy and the fact that Bourvil’s character is a devout mass goer who believes God is on his side sums up the general absurdist tone. It’s brilliant fun. As always moral judgement is far away.

French film comedy is an almost inexhaustible resource. I haven’t even mentioned Amélie (because you know all about that already.) Or those great critical favourites, the comedies of Jacques Tati which, apart from his debut movie Jour de fête, leave me relatively cold. I know it’s philistine of me but as the great American art critic Dave Hickey said, it’s only our bad taste that we can be sure is our own.) There are also the ones which have unaccountably slipped my mind while writing this.

The older I get, and the less amusing the world seems, the fonder I become of film comedy. Screwball Comedies seem like Hollywood’s finest achievement. Ealing Comedies have lasted the pace much better than all the social realist dramas of the British New Wave. Soviet Comedy, believe it or not, is a hoot. The best comedies of Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi and Pietro Germi do much more for me than the masterpieces of Antonioni and Visconti.

But the comedies I cherish above all are French. They have been good to me in times of need. Over the next while I’d like to take you through some of the best movies from that tradition. Your life will be improved by making their acquaintance, they will give your nerves a respite, make you laugh, sometimes make you think and unite you in comradely laughter with the world’s coolest nation.

You’ll thank me. Give it a shot mes amis.

FOOTNOTE: I’ve referred to the films by their original titles. They were usually released here under different English titles. Sticking all of those in brackets would have made things a bit unwieldy. You can google them.

Renters are second class Irish citizens. Everyone knows this. They only disagree about whether this status is deserved or not.

Tenants feel they’re entitled to more respect. Landlords view a lack of property as a moral failing which makes respect an optional extra.

There was a time when most Irish people never thought about the landlord-tenant relationship at all. It wasn’t an issue. In recent years people have been forced to take an interest. Rising property prices have increased the number of renters. Soaring rents and a shortage of properties have increased the parlousness of their condition.

Many of the initial articles which accompanied the media’s sudden interest in the situation of tenants can be summed up as, “Renting, long the preserve of scum, has now been inflicted upon nice middle class youngsters with good jobs.”

Journalists largely meant well and probably didn’t intend to be insulting. They saw the main problem as nice young people’s inability to achieve the holy grail of, “getting on the property ladder.” Renters rights did not enter the picture because it was unthinkable that the people who really mattered would end up renting long-term.

The expectation was that the government might bring in some kind of grant scheme which would lift those youngsters from the renting mire and enable them to purchase a first house on the cheap.

That didn’t happen. The atmosphere changed as more and more people who hadn’t imagined renting as part of their future found it becoming so. This new breed realised their position might be permanent rather than temporary and began to assume a collective identity as tenants.

This put things like landlord misbehaviour, rising rents and the condition of properties on the radar in a way they hadn’t been before educated people from middle class backgrounds entered the arena.

It should have been a good thing. Instead over the past year we’ve witnessed the classic Backlash against any marginalised group demanding an improvement in its situation.

This is not to compare renters in any way to an ethnic or sexual minority. But the mechanics of this latest Backlash were wearyingly familiar.

Landlords, along with their political and media advocates, quickly switched from a defensive to an offensive posture. They began to feel sorry for themselves and resentful towards their critics. You could hardly open a paper without them declaring their hurt at being “demonised.” Where was the due gratitude and respect? Who did ‘these people’ think they are?

I’ve lived in rented property all my life. The moves of my childhood have been followed by a similarly peripatetic adulthood. I’ve laid my hat in over twenty properties that I’ve called home.

This suited me fine (though the question was rendered largely academic as I’ve never been in a financial position to get a mortgage.) I have no great fetish about ownership. I’d have been happy renting for the rest of my life.

It had its drawbacks. I’ve inhaled so much mould and damp over the years that I’m probably part fungus at this stage. I’ve lived in houses where the stairs gave way under my feet, where turning on the bath sent water tumbling into the kitchen, where lifting the carpet disclosed a dead rat squashed pancake flat. I’ve come back from holidays to find that a landlord had bricked up the upstairs part of the house, “To prevent draughts.” I’ve lived in an estate where if someone had a shit two houses away it smelt like they’d crapped on your floor.

I spent a freezing winter in a house whose landlord had lied to me about it being centrally heated. I’ve woken to frost on the inside of windows, seen a microwave explode when I turned it on, waded through reams of overflowing sewage and dealtwith myriad blocked toilets.

But the condescension was always worse than the condensation. As a friend of mine says, there’s a “landlord face” which says that while you might try to make the place feel like home, you shouldn’t get too comfortable.

Renters are in the unique position where, despite having paid for a service, they’re not regarded as being fully entitled to it. Paying the rent has never prevented landlords nosing around the house, prowling around outside or arriving unannounced.

It’s as though you bought a pint and the publican came down when you’d finished half of it, “OK, I’ll just lift up that there and have a look at it, yeah, yeah, OK, I suppose I’ll have to let you finish it,” and did the same routine at the three quarter stage.

Tenants used to grin and bear this stuff in the spirit of Hyman Roth’s statement from The Godfather Part Two, “I let it go. And I said to to myself, this is the business we’ve chosen.” Landlords seldom crossed the line into outright disrespect because they liked getting your money.

Rapidly rising rents changed the dynamic. Since 2010 they’ve risen by more than 115% in Ireland. That’s four times higher than the EU average. Only Estonia, Lithuania and Hungary, all starting from a much lower base, witnessed higher increases.

So when landlords looked at tenants they suddenly saw not the 1000 euros a month they were being paid but the 1500 they might be getting. They began to think of sitting tenants as costing rather than earning them money. Resentment set in.

Not All Landlords. A few didn’t join the Gold Rush. But the majority did and the result has been misery for tenants. The number of people in emergency accommodation, 17,517, is a new national record (up 2,000 on this time last year.) Child homelessness has increased by 19% in a year. Many tenants are put to the pin of their collar to meet increasingly exploitative rents. That’s if they haven’t been forced out under some pretext so their successors can be immediately charged a higher rate or the property used for Air B and B.

Landlords justify their behaviour with reference to Market Rents as though this is some value neutral force of nature compelling them to seek more money. But Market Rent merely measures how much money it’s possible to extort from desperate tenants. It’s essentially an index of national rapacity. Nobody is forced to charge such rents. The only thing compelling the landlord is their own greed.

All this rack renting undermines the key pillar of Ireland’s self-image which states that We’re All In This Together. A more recent version is the idea of the Irish as Sound, a word denoting an unpretentious sense of decency and comradeship.

It’s difficult to reconcile such chummy delusions with the grim reality. Though there are occasional efforts to blame the crisis on Foreign Vulture Funds who bought properties and raised rents.

In reality most Irish tenants are exploited by other Irish citizens, the small scale operators cosily referred to as Mom and Pop landlords. We’re doing it to ourselves, we are and that’s what really hurts.

The division thus revealed is an inconvenient truth for a country which likes to believe it doesn’t have a class system. But there is a big dividing line in Irish society and it’s between those who own property and those who don’t. The gap will continue to grow because this year the government has abandoned all pretence of even-handedness to come down strongly on the landlord’s side.

This was to be expected. The number of landlords in the Dáil greatly exceeds the national average. Leinster House is packed with clients who regard the owning of multiple properties as the ultimate proof of success and seriousness of character. Tenants are conspicuous by their absence. Both government parties probably regard renting as a disqualifying factor for public office.

Our naive belief in Irish egalitarianism renders the blatant unfairness displayed a bit shocking all the same. The main effect (and main aim) of last month’s housing bill, despite vague talk of increased supply sometime in an undefined future, was that it enabled landlords to increase rents by whatever amount they wished.

Yet this pales into insignificance next to the government’s latest “housing” proposal. The plan is to allow property owners to rent out “Modular Dwellings”, (better known as sheds), in their back gardens to tenants who won’t be entitled to even the meagre rights currently available.

This idea was first floated as something which would enable parents to move children forced back home by the housing crisis into the privacy of the garden. The subterfuge didn’t last long.

Everyone knows the best way for the government to address the housing shortage is to build houses itself. It’s fervently opposed to doing so on the ideological grounds that nothing should be done in Ireland without private individuals profiting. This faith in the sacred nature of the bottom line has largely replaced Catholicism as the country’s official religion.

The Let Them Eat Sheds policy is on one level an almost comical expression of the government’s refusal to do the right thing. Yet there’s also something sinister behind it. The opportunity to earn rental money which the government intends to be tax free) is a bribe to the property owners whose votes kept the Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael coalition in power at the last election. The bribe will be paid by those who end up paying extortionate rents to live in (slightly) glorified Wendy Houses.

It means that the victims of the housing crisis are the ones being punished for it. Simon Harris and Micheál Martin probably regard this as a stroke of political genius. The shed scheme will turn even more property owners into landlords. It will also create a lobby opposed to the building of social housing for fear of their Modular investment being devalued. Our rotten government is seeking to turn a national crisis into a political opportunity.

Their blatantly cynical scheme is being unveiled at a time of revelations about landlords in Dublin packing immigrant workers twenty to a room into bunk filled premises with no planning permission. Those workers are usually made to sign agreements declaring themselves as “licensees” rather than tenants which strip them of any legal protection. The “licensee” dodge may be the next front in the landlord war to maximise profits. Imagine the condition of all those garden sheds rented out without any regulations to protect tenants.

No matter how well meaning other people are on the issue, only tenants know how awful the situation is at present. We have a dog in the fight. I can’t find a place to live myself. In December I left the house where I’d been living for seven years because the landlords told me they were selling it.

The rise in rents and shortage of accommodation make it impossible to me to live in Ireland. Only family commitments have prevented me from moving abroad already. I currently inhabit a strange and unsettling limbo as I mark time in my mother’s house with my books in boxes around me.

The response when I spoke about this on RTE’s Tommy Tiernan Show recently was exceptionally kind. There are good people out there. But some of them had the idea that I was appealing to be housed or that my primary concern was my personal situation.

That’s not it at all. I’m in my late fifties. If I have to throw some stuff into a bag and find a berth in the Balkans, so be it. I’m getting on in years and unlikely to ever rent in this country again. My predicament is irrelevant.

The real problem is that the current brutally unfair situation is set to become the norm for future generations. No-one in power is shouting stop. They’re doing their best to make things worse.

When I think of the politicians and landlords responsible and their apologists I remember a local radio show years ago previewing a GAA county final between two fierce rivals.

“What,” the host asked the father of several players on one team, “Do you think of Sunday’s opponents?”

“I hates ‘em,” came the reply.

“Ah you don’t really mean that of course,” said the host, “you mean that there’s a great friendly rivalry between you.”

“No. I hates ‘em. I really hates ‘em.”

Same.