BACKSTORY

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I am often told that I compress stuff too much, so much so that it becomes unintelligible to everyone bar myself. I am also told that I indulge in unnecessary and longwinded explanations, and when the addressee is female I end up being accused of mansplaining.

So just to be on the safe [?] side, I thought I'd better give some background to two images I tweeted today. The first relies on a perception of irony and the second on some local geographical knowledge along with no little scepticism regarding the achievements of our current Repulblic.

So to picture No.1 (above). I was reading Miriam Lord's account of yesterday's press scramble in the Oval Office when I came across her remark that, during the attempted ejection of the press corps, one journalist, Senan Molony, went for broke and uttered the R word. The President apparently then asked the Taoiseach in a whisper "Is he one of yours?".

It was a Carole Coleman moment which no doubt will have Senan join her in the list of White House martyrs.

I'm sure Senan will get due exposure in the Mail for his brave act. At least on this occasion the object of the remark was alive and in the room and could have answered the challenge. Unlike Albert Folens who had gone to meet his maker by the time Senan succeeded in broadcasting his flimsily supported and damaging Nazi accusation on the national media.

This is the resultant tweet. So go figure.

And so to picture No.2. We are a priceless country when it comes to street name signage. This is usually at its most acute where the Irish language is involved and I have referred to this on many previous occasions. On this occasion I'll leave the Irish alone, there's nothing wrong with it. Today I have a wider agenda.

In the course of my reading of our national history I have been very taken by how the English were blamed for virtually all of our ills, from the famine to the profusion of prostitutes in the area of Dublin then known as Monto.

Now there was probably some justification for those two observations. The English administration could certainly have responded better to the threat and fact of famine, but it clearly didn't suit their agenda or ideology at the time. That there should have been a profusion of prostitutes in a town boasting a number of barracks with a large military presence would not be unusual.

What really got me about all this though was the prevailing nationalist wisdom that once we got rid of the English the latent purity of the Irish race would blossom and we'd live happily ever after. Well we don't. We're no more moral than the next crowd and we have sections of our dearly loved people starving or homeless or both.

The street nameplates here encapsulate all of this for me. We sent the English back home so the Queen Square West plate was redundant. We replaced it with glorious bilingualism honouring one of the foremost heroes of the Rising. But it was a cheap plate, and the paint peeled, and that's how it looks today.

I posted the tweet with the text "No comment. Go figure.