Month: March 2014

Friday Night at Lawlor’s

On Friday I travelled all the way down from Mullingar to Dungarvan in County Waterford. Peig was looking after Saoirse so couldn’t go. Herself has banned me from driving the car, so I took the train and the bus, which was grand as I got in a few scoops on the journey down.

It is plain as the spots on my backside why EirGrid is losing the fight. It is because of these people in Waterford. As Saoirse would say, they are awesome. They were brave when EirGrid tried to bully them. They were clever when Eirgrid lied to them. They stood firm when Rabbitte told them to ‘behave’. And look who is still standing, Pat, but you should be losing your job soon, although if Shatter is anything to go by, the only way to lose your job in this government is to go into the ground. I know youse is never dismissed from the civil service, but these goings-on with this government is mental. Enough about the gangsters, I want to talk about the good people of the Comeraghs.

When the whole country was being conned, they supported each other and stood firm. True patriots. Real Irish. The rest of us should hang our heads like the snivelling wretches we are, especially me with my thirty pieces of EirGrid silver.

It was all happening at Lawlor’s Hotel in Dungarvan, and with my hand on my heart I can say it was the best time of my life. Who would have thought I would see heroism and know love at first sight, when I came down to hear about fighting pylons?

The place was jammed with good people. There was a short skirmish at the beginning with some politicians demanding the right to speak – and the place clearly marked a no-litter zone. Politicians belong in the grey bin – no chance of recycling there. In the end the cute hoors were given some time after the proper speakers and before question time. I could tell you what they said, but I couldn’t be arsed. Because that is when it happened. I saw Midi.

Midi, I still don’t know your second name because everytime I tried to speak to you, youse was surrounded by these big Comeragh Mountain Men. You don’t mess with those boyos.

Midi is magnificent. Like an Irish Mammy with pizzazz. When the cute hoors were trying to hijack the show, like they did on that march, Midi stopped them. She has a quiet don’t-feck-with-me voice and byjaysus, the politicians shut up and sat down like the bold children they are. My tips tingled when she spoke. It was like my first Valentines all over again. I was smitten, and I tell yees, if I was dirty years younger … ah never you mind, it won’t ever happen.

The first speaker was John McCusker of Comeraghs Against Pylons (CAP). A man’s man, a true hero. John showed EirGrid the finger, and then jammed it so far up their arse that they’re having nosebleeds in Dublin.

John told us about the long struggle against EirGrid, back to the days when a small group of people from Kilmacthomas started CAP after hearing the shocking news of what EirGrid planned. John spoke about the importance of community, of standing up for your family and friends, of keeping the country beautiful for our children and our children’s children. It was beautiful, and I was weeping into my pint.

John also told us about EirGrid and the lies they told us, and the lies they keep telling us. How Rabbitte refused to look at photos of our lovely countryside and what it would look like covered in pylons. John told us that Rabbitte was invited to this meeting but couldn’t be arsed to even reply to the invitation. The same with John Deasy, who has never shown support for this fight and did not reply to the invite. The people growled.

The next speaker was Thomas Kemp. A quiet, gentle man. I thought at the time that Thomas was a rocket scientist, but I see now that he is a nuclear physicist, a right clever bloke. Thomas spoke to us, not at us or down to us, like those ‘experts’ from EirGrid. And when Thomas spoke I understood – it all became clear to me. The cancer is caused by static electricity.

I remember as a chiseller at junior school when we would rub the plastic ruler against our socks and pick up pieces of paper and the hems of girl’s dresses. The teacher explained in science class that the ruler was electrically charged by the rubbing and so attracted stuff.

The way that Thomas explained it was the same thing. The particles coming off the pylons and the cables are charged and their static picks up all the pollution and pesticides, and so it turns into this sticky ball of poison which is carried by the wind straight to your house and onto your skin and into your lungs. Thomas told us this happens not when you are up and walking around, but when you are in your bed asleep cos then you are not earthed.

This was scary stuff, and you could have heard a pin drop as Thomas spoke in his quiet voice.

The third speaker was the man of the moment, Malcolm Brown, co-author of the Brown and White Report, Parts 1 and 2. They are on the Rethink Pylons website if you want a good read.

I was proud to hear that Malcolm had taken up my idea of burning hash in MoneyPoint. He didn’t say that, but sure, he used my idea. I didn’t care, it was enough to know that he read my blog, but perhaps you could have called me up and introduced me to the crowd, eh Malcolm?

Anyways, Malcolm explained that we can convert MoneyPoint to burn biomass, and that would cost a tenth of the cost of Grid 25, and would need no upgrade and NO PYLONS. Jaysus, you could have knocked me down with a baby’s headbutt. Why was this not being talked about in government? So simple, so much cheaper, lots of jobs, and no damage to the countryside. And also no rich wind industry, and perhaps there’s your answer – we should be looking at whose been promised jobs on the board of directors of the wind farms.

There were lots of good questions asked, with people showing that they knew much more about the lies than EirGrid and Rabbitte would like us to know, and both politicians, David from the Shinners and Paudie from the Blueshirts, admitting that they would not live next to pylons. Paudie kept telling us to follow procedures, and that the interconnector with the UK and France was a grand idea, but he was beaten, and he knew it.

Too be sure, twas a grand doo altogether. Afterwards in the bar having a few scoops with some mountain men, I was asking why would the Shinners be sticking with undergrounding when you would expect them to throw the Grid25 thing out altogether? A wag standing at the bar, and I say standing but he was swaying like a banshee on steroids, shouted out that the Shinners were not that keen on digging things up, usually the opposite, but this was all about laundering the bank robbery money through the wind farms in the North. Your man fell asleep in his pint, so I could not ask him where he got his info.

Twas such a grand party with such grand people that I was still in the pub on Saturday night. Jaysus, those people can drink. But here I am on the train, on a Sunday, back to Mullingar, thinking about biomass and Midi, but not in that order.

Projects of Common Interest

Image

My family have been around for a long time, and can be traced back to the founding Cistercian monks in Ireland under Clairvaux, with a mention again later of my great (x10) granda in Melifont Abbey: St. Pyloniuous of Uisneach.

But hang on Paddy, I hear ye say, how can you have a monk for a grand-da? The truth of the matter is that back then they drank and sang like the rest of us, then they shagged like the rest of us, and so had families like the rest of us. It is only the modern church that brought in these desperate rules about chastity – and look whats happened to them. Its not rocket science – if you don’t shag, you don’t produce.

Anyways, I stray off my intended topic, the family motto. One of the things you get when belonging to a very old family like the Pylons is a very old family crest and motto, and mine is: Si autem perseveraverit Patricius noster, et bene habebunt.

My ma and da didn’t have a clue what it said, and they couldn’t be arsed anyways. So when I was studying at Maynooth, I asked an old Humanities Professor to translate it for me, and I still have what he wrote: “If Paddy perseveres, he will find success”. You could have knocked me over with a shot glass when he told me that – it was all about me!

Not that it helped, as I dropped out of college about four months later.

In one of the letters sent by readers – and I must thank ye with tears in my eyes – the hundreds of letters written to me and Peig and Saoirse has made this whole struggle with EirGrid that much easier to bear. Theres even been letters to the aul horse and that feckin kitten! Thank ye truly. In one of these letters your wan said I should be gettin a job. I reckon it was wrote by me mam, but she denies it. Now let me just tell you missus that I’ve been for a job interview every day for the last four months but the bartender keeps saying that he don’t need an assistant, so what can I do?

Anyways, I was sitting and looking at the few pieces of silver that was left from the EirGrid payment and I knew that I needed a plan, and then it hit me – a fair for Paddy’s Day, in the back yard with The Pylon.

Sure enough, on Paddy’s Day I stuck out the poster over the old Sherry FitzG. sign that still stands outside the house – Paddy’s Pylon-the-Fun – and for five euros a head the kids could play their all day whilst their ma and da get peizheined with the drink.

Jaysus, the pylon looked grand. I covered it with all the small trees and branches blown off during the storm, and called it the Jungle Bunny Bash with the gossoons climbing all over the thing. I was wicked afraid of the leukaemia so I got the young ones to wear lead jackets from my mate at the refinery – told them they were astro-jackets from the space shuttle and they were delighted to wear them. It was brass monkeys up there so it kept them warm as well. I tied a long rope to the other side of the pylon so the chisellers could shimmer down that, and the old slide that Saoirse used to play with rested nicely on the struts. T’was grand altogether and the young ones had a fine old time and I made a few spandulix.

Later, after a few jars, I was watching your man Pat Shortt and laughin me head off and thinking how grand it would be if he could have Pat Rabbitte as a guest. We know that old Pat is always up for a laugh and he could be the guest in a comedy sketch about PCIs, which are Projects of Common Interest (when two or more EU countries get together and do projects stretching over national boundaries).

Now Pat and the EU Commission were supposed to tell us about these PCIs when they were still on the drawing board. Did they tell us? In me hole they told us! There are a shitload of them planned for all over Ireland which will make the countryside look like an industrial estate. http://ec.europa.eu/energy/infrastructure/pci/pci_en.htm

Pat doesn’t want us to know that. And nor does the EU Commission want us to know that, specially as it is controlled by the wind industry and possibly the Mafia.

http://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1178593/analysis—italian-mafia-turning-green

Anyways, better late than never. So I thought that Pat Rabbitte could tell the nation about all these PCIs on the Pat Shortt show. My sketch would be along the lines of your young wan with giant knobs sitting in a pub and Pat would wobble up to her and say: “Come back to my place and checkout my PCI”. And your wan would wrinkle her nose and say: “Whats a PCI?”. And Pat would say: “A Project of Common Interest, har har shlurp”. And your wan would slap him and then Pat could rub his cheek and explain into the camera what a PCI is and just how many there are planned for the Irish countryside. See – a bit of comedy with your education.

Brussels need to start some straight dealing when they make these plans to build monster wind-farms in Ireland, and the government needs to start telling us about all these deals it is doing on the sly, otherwise we might get to know another family motto: Lepus Fugax Veritati.

Up In Smoke

elephant pylon with hemp

Lately when I’ve got off the jacks, Peig would give out about the whiff and ask if I’d be eating elephant grass again. What are you on about woman, I’d say, this is feckin Ireland, why would we be needing grass to feed the elephants – is that shite circus back in town?

Herself: ‘Not elephants ye feckwit, power stations. The farmers were growing that, and hemp, to burn as fuel, it’s called biomass’.

Feeding elephants and growing dope – what would the IFA say about that? Probably like most of us when we get caught with the joint in the pocket – sure officer, that’s not what it looks like, it’s just straw for the horse.

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/clean-tech/item/34223-biomass-plant-in-midlands-t

Peig’s brother is a farmer in Limerick, and he be mad for the hemp – sure, your man can throw a party – but he was also using some of his bad land to grow this elephant grass, which apparently came out all watery and shite, not fit to run the Wonderly Wagon, nevermind a feckin powerstation. I remember saying to him at the time – to be sure, would not shite land give you shite grass? Your man mumbled something about using the good land to grow food and the feckin elephant could look after himself, but that was the hemp speaking. Did you ever see a Limerick farmer do the two-step to Bob Marley? Not a pretty sight, but in Limerick I would rather they be singin “We’re Jammin’”, then ‘we’re stabbin’’. To be sure, wouldn’t Limerick be the centre of the hemp industry anyhows?

http://www.seai.ie/Renewables/Bioenergy/Sources/Biomass/

The elephant grass industry is up and running in Limerick now, but the wheels are coming off. The government is so keen to give all the money to the wind farms that the elephant grass farmer is getting nowt.

A farmer was askin’ me in the pub t’other night when we were talking about hemp with its anti-cancer properties – with the money to be made with meat and dairy, why would ye bother if there’s no subsidy? The short answer to that question, I said, is that there will be no meat and dairy, or racehorses for Cheltenham, if there be pylons all over the countryside. Sure, with pylons around even the elephants will feck off back to India – they’d have more feckin brains than Enda and Pat combined, but Pat would still have the bigger arse.

http://www.limerickleader.ie/news/community/elephant-grass-biomass-industry-started-in-limerick-facing-collapse-1-4956643

Now I might only have two years in the college in Maynooth, and that was a while back, but this is banjax-logic: So its grand to pay the wind farms millions in subsidies, and pay them even more to turn off at night, when they cause an increase in CO2 emissions, catch fire, banjax the Grid, and make people go mad with the noise and the flicker? But where a farmer wants to grow an environmentally friendly crop like elephant grass, and a party-friendly crop like hemp, not to mention that lovely-lookin yellow of rape seed – all of which would run the power-stations and keep the locals happy with the smoke comin off it – imagine the smiles at MoneyPoint – you give him feck all? And when the wind farms are providing feckall jobs and importing the yokes and all the spare parts, you’d still not support your local farmer and those looking for jobs in the agri-industry?

Just how is that right, my fine blueshirted friends, with your shares and directorships in the wind industry?

Me on the jacks is nothing compared to the stink that comes off ye.

Proper Doctors

There’s two types of medicine – medicine that works, and medicine that don’t work. Just like there’s two types of doctors – the medical doctors, and the others.

When I fell off the pylon trying to rescue the cat, I landed on my back, but shoulder first, with an awful clatter. The shaggin pain was brutal altogether.  So I went to the hospital to see one of these chiropractors, I think it was. I waited in the sitting room for over two hours, with your wan in the other chair moanin about her neck and giving me the eye, and me getting water in them little plastic cups, splashin all over her dress like. When it wasn’t her the other old wan was dropping her cane, and me with the back having to pick it up. The other fella in there was texting fit to bust, probably to himself, just to keep his head down and ignore all around him. That left me to act the eejit to your two’s every wish.

Finally I was called into the Palace of Pain, with a hundred certificates on the wall, probably from the University of Lower Mississippi or just printed off Google Images – how would you know? Your man hummed and hawed for five minutes, made me take my shirt off and put it on again, and showed me a picture of a skeleton with scary eyeballs. That was it. He sent me on my way with a prescription for painkillers with a price so dear I said feck that and got three bottles of Paddy for the same money. Best feckin painkiller I know. If youre gonna cover the pain rather than fix the problem, at least make it taste good.

But of course when the Paddy ran dry, the pain was back, and I was dying, no two ways about it.

Peig is wicked into this ‘alternative medicine’, which is funny given her time at med school. I don’t go in for the crystals and the fairies at the bottom of the garden, but I was desperate with the pain. She’d heard about this fella all the way over there in Dungarvan. Fair play to her, she drove me all the way there, with me lying in the back seat, moaning like a rescue dog. 

His name was Patrick, just like that online bookie, in fact I tried to lay a bet but he’d have none of it. This fella is called an osteopath, and he laid me on the couch and twisted and turned and massaged me until I felt like one of those rubber bands. Jaysus, what a difference. Without a single drug and just a coupla scoops I’m now moving around again. I wouldn’t be able for the blocks, but I’m on my feet, ready to two-step to Garth Brooks at Crokers.

And that got me thinking about the different types of doctors, the ones with the PhDs and the medical ones. Sure what would your man with the PhD know about people getting sick from the pylon dust?  Peig scares the shite outta me with her talk of breast cancer and stuff, but she always gives me the links, even showing that men can get breast cancer from pylons. What?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23534787

http://www.dirtyelectricity.ca/breast_cancer_and_emf.htm

Now, I’ve been a Fianna Failure all my life, but walked away from the party when Biffo took over cos it was getting like the Sopranos with all these heavies walkin around doing dodgy deals. And then of course The Crash came and we blamed everybody we could point at, forgetting it was us who took out the credit card and bought all that useless shite we didn’t need, in between the holidays to Majorca. I wanted the FF boys to do something to restore my confidence because sure, even if you don’t like the cute hoors, they be the only ones strong enough to stand up to the Blueshirts. To be sure, the independent TDs do feck all, just claiming every allowance they can get their grubby paws on.

I heard on the FF grapevine (stupid feckin expression, sure, Marvin Gaye was no Irishman, that’s clear) that they will be callin for a moratorium on the pylons. That sounds like cute election spin to me and I’ll believe it when I see it cos I wouldn’t be buying a donkey from your man Me-Haul. I also see on their website that they be asking for Dr. Graham Roberts, who is a proper doctor, to be included on the Panel with your wan the Judge. Now to that I give the thumbs-up:

http://www.whitfieldclinic.ie/index.php/consultants/roberts-dr-graham/

We need a proper doctor to be on the Panel. Not someone with a PhD in rat’s bollocks, but someone who knows loads about Leukaemia and Pylonaemia and all those other horrible cancers, especially breast cancer in men, for fecks sake.. Eirgrid didn’t have any proper doctors when they thought up the Plan, so sure, what would they know? And the way your man Rabbitte is looking at the moment, he’d be needing a proper doctor too. If you can’t take the heat Pat, get the feck outta the kitchen.