Woe betide thyne Scumbags

Having nothing better to do these days due to the failing economy, I visited my good old parents for a cup of tea this morning. My mother is a very unique woman. Advancing in years, yet very healthy and by looking at her you can tell she makes an effort to keep herself well.  She eats well, gets out as much as she can, doing this and that as they do and regales me with all the inside stories on whats going on around the place. My father reads the paper and grunts at me. The silver-back of the family, so to speak.

Near where they live there are flats recently vacated under the buy fancy jeeps and paint regeneration on them scheme. Since they have been vacated they have become the usual target for all the usual sorts of shite that scumbags do to amuse themselves.  Last night, they went up on fire. (The flats, not the scumbags, unfortunately). A few weeks ago they were vandalised so the local council who claim to not have the money to demolish them put big railings around them. So, the scangers across the way stole a JCB, used it to tear down the railings and burnt the JCB before coming back to light up the flats when the fire brigade didn’t show to quench the machinery. They lit up the flats so they could molest the fire crew that arrived to put them out.  As soon as the engines came around the corner stones and bottles went flying at them. When they got out of the engines they found that the water main had been deliberately tampered with so they had to sit and wait and watch the flats burn while dodging missiles to wait for a tanker full of water to arrive.

Six engines (one draughted in from Ennis) and a water tanker. A massive yoke, so it was.

It would have cost less to knock the flats than to answer that emergency call. I’m sure of it.

These were not kids. These were pricks in their twenties with nothing better to do than harass a bunch of brave and hard working fire fighters out trying to make the scumbags in question shitty little lives safer. It galls me to think that, should any of these wankers become trapped or the victim of their own misadventures, they would fully expect these same men to come to their rescue, and come they would regardless.

A better man than me once suggested a pretty sure fire way to sort out a lot of these problems, and he in now way suggested the punishment of stupidity, rather, lets take the warning labels off of everything. Let the problem sort itself out. If they are out breeding us then surely we can educate our children to realise themselves that they shouldn’t use hairdryers in the bath, or whatever.

Just a suggestion.

Chew on it for a while and let me know what you think.

Limerick is now over run by scum, and there is nothing we can do about it. For my own part, I’ve given up despairing. I’m actually intrigued at this point and I’ll tell you why. The time is fast approaching when the government are going to run out of dole money. At the very least they will have to cut it significantly. Its only a mater of time before the whole scumbag culture implodes in on itself under the weight of a billion hoop earrings and dirty Nike Air Max.

I’m popping my corn and pulling up a ringside seat for these end times, or the Rapidture, as I’m going to call it. The four piebald horsemen of the Epoxy-clips will be bombed out of their heads on resin, and wont know whats going on. Then some lad with long hair will appear asking about Mount Olive and get the head digged off him by Olive’s brother and because he looks like a Muppet. Then there shall be a great tribulation, and Declin shall have lost sight of the bag of yokes he placed under the wheely bin only the night before, and verily, Tony shall smite his brethren who spake unto the social welfare of his cohabitation in his concubine’s council house.

A fitting end to a dramatic chapter, I feel.

The Joys of Parenthood, Vol 1

This used to be the subwoofer from my home cinema system.

Now its a handy storage box for megablocks and the likes.

At least its not going to waste I suppose.

End Game

I remember sitting home last year watching a rugby international and trying to get The Bean interested in it. Ireland were playing Canada in Thomond Park. Keith Earls scored a fine try the first time he got his hands on the ball in his first international. Outstanding stuff. Ireland trounced them in effective, if not rather an ugly fashion. Of course, The Bean was coming up on eighteen months old. Try as I might there were mega-blocks to be chewed, walls to be crayoned and many, many things to be thrown into the toilet. There just wasn’t the time for rugby in his busy evening which came to an end shortly after with bath, a visit to the tooth brush and an attentive tucking in.

In his cosy world he has no concept of the other thing that happened that night. Later, as he slept safe and sound in his warm bed.

A man. A short chase. A gunshot. Darkness.

We all awoke to the news. We were horrified. Somewhere inside of us we probably knew that this was going to happen eventually. It was only a matter of time before someone got caught in the crossfire. As terrible as the thought may have been, we got on with our lives regardless all the same, on many levels not really giving a shit because all this was happening in another world we never ventured into. Well now this world had ventured into ours. As unwelcome as it was uninvited. Like it or not we had death and violence thrust onto our doorsteps by people who were now testing new boundaries. Like a child will see how close he can get to the fire before he is told definitively to stay away, or gets burned, Limerick’s underclass were now in new territory. Right on the hearth, waiting to see where the heat was going to come from.

I’ve said many times before that criminals, like politicians, like bankers and builders, will operate within the parameters they are allowed to by wider society. Bear this in mind as you read on.

Maybe I was being overly optimistic at the time, but it seemed like the national outrage at the time might have started ringing bells in higher up places. In places with the tools to take action and try to close these people down. But, as it turns out all we had was the same hot air from the same people meaning the same thing.

Nothing.

In proof of this point, yesterday I drove past the funeral of a man who was shot in the back because his brother testified against one of the people involved in Limerick’s drug wars. After Shane was murdered we were promised action. All we got was a slap in the face from the criminals to remind of our place and the fact that there will always be ways for them to get to us should we be brave enough to take a stand. Shane died in a case of mistaken identity. They thought he was one of them. Last week Roy Collins was deliberately targeted as an outsider. As an innocent man. He was deliberately killed so that you, me and all our kind will know not to get in the way of the drug dealing scumbags who have now shown in no uncertain terms that THEY run this city, and they, and only they will be the arbiters of who deserves to live and die on their streets.

We heard the usual shit from the usual people but I have no faith in them anymore. I ‘m sure they’ll do nothing just as they have done nothing to save us from economic collapse, job loses and failing health and education services. As we have been told to tighted our belts to save ourselves from bankruptcy and reposession we will be told to bolt our windows and doors to protect ourselves from the scum that they allow to run our streets.

I’ve gone beyond being angry about it, and I think that’s the wider problem. We have accepted it. This is now normal behaviour from the criminal fraternity. Innocent people who want to protect their families, neighbourhoods and business interests are now legitimate targets. The boundaries have been extended and now society’s delinquents have a new field to play in which we, the wider society, have opened up to them through collective inaction.

Shame on us all.

The Red Machine Marches On

I got a phone call at nine in the morning. It was the hairdresser. Luckily I had been up since six anyway so the need to bate the head off him didn’t arise.

Well Doc. I have news.

Oh yeah? Whats that now?

Its my buddy’s birthday do today and he’s kinda after guilting me into watching the match with him in the pub, so I figured you might be the very man to take my ticket off me.

You came to the right person, says I.

So in I went to break the news to Mrs Orgasm. Sorry love, but you’ll have to do without my mug moping around the place today, following you around shopping centers and getting annoyed in lingerie departments. Unfortunately, you’ll have to spend this Easter Sunday completely without me trying to hurry you on and take the laser card off you.

Bollox. Says she.

So now we have one of those Guy Ritchie style cut scenes, like in Snatch, after cousin Vinnie says “Weah goin da Engalund” only you have brief cuts of me pulling on my jersey, turning the car key, locking the car up in town, a high speed clip of a pint being filled, me knocking it back, swirling crowds on Thomondgate and the scene ending with a BOOM and my arse landing in my newly acquired seat in the West Stand in Thomond Park.

Its not the worst seat in the house. The fact that its all the way down on the try line on the Ballynanty end is negated by the fact that its pretty high up which offers a good view of anything happening everywhere in the park.

Its 12.45. The teams are warming up, Munster right on front of me. They finish their warm up and the crowd roars as they head for the dressing room. However, O’Gara Breaks away from the team and canters towards the Ospreys, who are in a huddle under the posts on front of the south terrace. Ten meters inside the half way line. He stops. He waits.

The Ospreys break their huddle.

As they turn to jog to the tunnel their heads come up and at once they see O’Gara standing there, and as they see him he launches a drop goal over their heads, dissecting the posts perfectly.

He turns.

He nonchalantly jogs back to the tunnel.

He has thrown down the gauntlet.

What follows is eighty minutes of clinical vivisection of a visiting team. I cant remember seeing anything like it in recent times. Munster and Ireland used to have a habit of being flaky as favourites and coughing up dopey errors allowing teams to go 6 or 9 ahead in the opening minutes, forcing us to chase the game. On the bottom. Plucky underdogs. Where we liked to fight from.

Those days are gone now. Put to bed in Cardiff against Wales and tucked in this Easter Sunday in Thomond Park against a group of men who see themselves as the Giants of Welsh Rugby. I most definitely don’t want to get ahead of myself, but the Munster team I saw yesterday will take some beating by anyone. So bring on The Ladies I say. Croke Park here we come.

Your grandfather knew better

In other news, the recession can go fuck itself.

I’m sick of hearing about it. Every morning I turn on the radio in the car. Doom this. Gloom that. Woe betide us all for the taxman cometh and he taketh thine kidneys and deposit thee in a bath full of ice with a brief note outlining why you are there and a mobile for you to call an ambulance.

But wait a minute, I’m fucking poor anyway, and the more I think about it, the more I realise I’ll be devastated about having to miss all those nights out I never had in the first place. Not to mention all the holidays I didn’t go on and the swanky car, hefty mortgage and the coke habit I could never afford to begin with. I’ll sure be missing all those high class society parties I was never invited to and as for the fur coat collection I don’t have, like the peacocks that don’t live in the grounds that don’t surround the stately home I don’t live in, I guess not having it will mean I wont have to be gutted about the lot of it getting taken off me because of the recession. Me, you and most of the rest of us will have to make a few minor adjustments to settle back into a life less complicated by multiple credit cards, over draughts, whopping great mortgages on overpriced shoe boxes next door to someone the health board gave the house to for free and this insane competition to out bling our equally vapid and nouveaux pretentious neighbours.

I think the biggest problem we have to face is the fear we don’t know why we are feeling. Stop for a second. Take a deep breath, breath in some perspective. We are all borne from a very, very long line of very successful ancestors who we know all lived long enough to rear our more recent ancestors and that every one of them got the ride at least once in their lives, no doubt an epic success in itself in a time before dentists.

Now think about it.

You, your parents, your grand parents, their grand parents, their great great great grand parents before them. Your relatives who stayed put and had the wherewithal to get themselves through the famine, by hook or by crook. Your late relations who, generation after generation outsmarted the foreign armies and plagues that came to take those who would have no descendants. The people who bore your genes about the time Brian Boru was giving the vikings the jabs. The people who bore my genes about the time the pyramids were being built and before, and further back, a hundred thousand millenia ago there were creatures alive that went about their daily grind carrying the genes that their descendants would one day use to produce you and me, here today, geared up with all the smarts that got them all to where you are now.

And now the newspapers would have you believe that all that is going to fall apart because a few crooks raided the treasury.

OH NOES!!!

Come hell or high water we will survive by calling on the rights we have all inherited through the toll of the billion deaths that our lineage outsmarted. The radio and the papers can have their recession. They can keep their gloom.

I’m off down to the shop to buy an icepop.

Who wants one?

Good Vibes go Here

Its official, Paul Warwick will be staying on at Munster for another two years at least.

I’m absolutely delighted about this. Paul has been an instrumental part of the set up since arriving, and although it might seem he has the soul of a fly half, his strength, speed, tactical kicking, general cajones under pressure and his all too natural ability to slot over a sneaky drop goal from the pocket  has seen him excel at full back on the first XV.

I’m not too sure where the confusion came from, I’ve heard multiple rumors from multiple sources but none of them hold the kind of clout that would see me speculate on it. Regardless, this is definitely good news. However, I’m kinda hoping this isn’t an April fools day stunt on behalf of that most esteemed of sources, the Limerick Leader. They’d never, would they?

Practice Makes Perfect.

Writing isn’t easy, but I think like most things the more you do it the easier it gets. For me, its about laying out not just your opinion but your reasons for holding that opinion and writing it down for other people to read forces you to think around your own issue, back around the other way, in through the middle and then onto a conclusion, whatever that conclusion may be. In many ways its like laying out your entire mental process like a stall so buyers in the market place of ideas can come along and pick through what you’ve got, buy what they like and reject what they don’t.

Consider the birds.

I mean, they have lives, right? They have squabbles about shite between themselves, build their own houses, find a partner, have kids, the lot. Yet, no one in the flying community has ever (and I mean EVER) thought to sit down and write it down so that other birds could pick it apart and abuse them over it. I doubt they would even if they had thumbs. Which leads me on to the question as to whether they would have built cars or aeroplanes first had they risen to self awareness before our ape ancestors.

In conclusion, I have decided that the best way to practice writing about anything is to regularly write two hundred and fifty words about nothing., which I will hope to have achieved by the end of this needlessly padded out sentence.

Quitters Inc.

I finished my last pack of Benson & Hedges on Friday evening. I was having a beer at home and stepped outside the back doors to draw in the last of the sweet, sweet nicotine that I had in my possession.

Now, you can call me unpatriotic if you like but for some time now I have believed the price of a pack has been somewhat excessive, so I figured out a bit of a workaround for that one. I’m over and back to Italy a fair bit. Fags are cheap in Italy. The in laws visit us regularly too. So, legally, we have a quota which we don’t exceed which happens to keep me in smokeroos without ever having to go to the shop. The thing is, my latest delivery didn’t work out. So I’ve decided its a sign and as far as I’m concerned I finished my last fag on Friday evening. I generally don’t smoke over the weekend unless I’m in the pub, which I was for the match on Saturday but only for the one pint so I didn’t really notice any cravings or anything. Today will be the acid test.

I am stocked up with biscuits and Taytos, (not crisps mind you, but proper Tayto Cheese and Onion),  a pack of Baiocchi, a Muller fruit corner, a flask of Illy Coffey and a pocket full of change for refills. I realise that its only going to last a few days and if I can get to the end of this week I will have the hard work done. Hell, I’m already on day three technically speaking, but its always best to start new things on a Monday, so here it goes.

Wish me luck.

Christ, I’m starving…..

The Times they are a Changin’

Something remarkable happened to me today. I’ll tell you what in a minute. First, let me regale you with a bit of background.

When I turned 18 I was still in School, in my leaving cert year. My birthday is in January, so I had to slog out a few months of hiding the uniform under the jacket before I finished my leaving cert and went off and got a job for myself. I was an adult then, I felt I had reached the first step on the golden path to the rest of my life. I was 18, had a job, a few quid for my pocket and a bit of Independence. After that came a few absolutely insane years. There were broken hearts, hangovers, laughter, love, hate, the odd punch up and best mates to back me up. We’d do what we could to entertain ourselves and to not bother anyone else while never quite realising that this was the only chance we would ever have to do it, but making the most of it none the less.

When I was 28 I met the woman who would later become the mother of my son. I settled in nicely to this new life. Over the previous ten years I had gotten used to enjoying good things in moderation. My work life had improved. I had a good job with a reputable company. I had gone past trying to avoid eye contact with bouncers in case they asked me for ID or didn’t like my shoes or whatever and later I generally came home after the bar closed.  On Saturdays I would rise early to hit the local shop for breakfast materials and papers. Eat. Read. Go into town for a coffee. Back home for lunch, maybe a beer with lunch, find something interesting for the afternoon and a beer with dinner before socialising on a Saturday night.

Then The Bean happened.

A pint after work became home to give his poor demented mother a break. My lovely Saturday routine turned into an epic weekly struggle against puke, shite, nappies and drool on my best t-shirts. Socialising became trying to get in as much sleep as possible between feeds. Work was a daily challenge in the noble art of staying awake and not murdering people in the face to leave me alone. Our home became a bare, functional baby zone with anything of interest hidden well away from tiny, curious hands awash with broken CDs, scratched DVDs and foam corners on the fireplace.

But of course, as time goes by these things change too. The Bean Grew a little and changed from being a surprisingly small shit and breakage factory into a little man with his own ideas and things with stuff and that. Small shoes he takes pleasure in putting away, little shirts and jeans that he likes to get mucky and the odd worm he likes to eat if he can get away with it. The things I lived for in the past seem shallow by comparison with the pleasure I now gain from watching him discover the world and doing my best to help him where I can.

A newspaper. A pint of beer. A rugby match on the television in the local pub, maybe a glowing fire there in the winter. These are the small breaks from the bigger challenges that are the hardest yet the easiest things I have ever had to do. Hard to do yet a delight to achieve. Little smiles, soft hair, dirty hands and a cheeky laugh make everything worth while. It’s at this point I feel like someones Da. I feel like I have so much to learn but I think its the realisation of that fact that brings a certain amount of maturity and consideration into a persons life. I still study and I still feel like a young lad on the inside but the things that pleased me then don’t seem like they would be worth much to me now. Fifteen years have passed since I left school and set off on my adventure into life. I don’t feel very different, but things in life certainly make me feel very differently. I think I have settled into a life that’s very ordinary and pleasing in the most ordinary of ways. I now feel like the adult I felt I would like to be all those years ago. I am on my golden path.

So today, I went for my lunch and on returning to the car park I got into one of those situations where you have a person on either side of a door saying “After you…” and ”no no, I insist”.

Then this remarkable thing happened.

This other fella said to me “Go ahead there young man”

He was a man in his fifties or early sixties. Grey, a bit smaller than me and wearing a suit. Then I thought to myself how its true that you never appreciate the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded and are gone forever. It wasn’t anything like a sudden realisation, it was more like the resurgence of something that I had forgotten to remember. The problem is, people tend to mourn that loss long before it has come. A 25 year old will mourn the loss of his teens. And in my case I’ve realised that a 33 year old has been mourning the loss of his twenties for some time without ever realising that the things that are gone are not the things that I want anymore.

It takes time to mould a life around what makes you happy, and in doing so you take gradual steps on your way over the course of your entire lifetime, getting things right and righting the things you get wrong. Life leads most people on a journey of self discovery that leads you through the thick and the thin through a few toll booths manned by setbacks but in the most part you pay your fee and drive on through to the next set of gates which open onto a brand new highway, over time learning to have the exact change to help get you past the next set of barriers

What struck me was the fact that regardless of how I ever see myself, or how much I might think that I have gained or learned on my journey, to someone I will always be a young man, for a long, long time to come there will probably always be somebody older who thought they were past it when they were my age too. What happened today gave me a nice heady breeze in which to open my sail and enjoy being a young man, even if its just for one afternoon, after which I’ll arrive home to a much younger man to whom I’ll always be an auld fella.

For every action….

The Odd Balls

I’m really optimistic about the future of Rugby. Not just in Munster, or indeed Ireland, but the future of the game as a global sport. The 2009 Grand Slam has opened the doors for people who might in the past have seen Rugby as something other people looked at, or as an elitist game reserved for the public school parents and their offspring. Being a Limerick man I have a different perspective on it, but outside our fine city this seems to be the case. However I do think this myth is slowly but surely being broken down.

I have friends who are fanatical about soccer. Personally, I don’t get it. I have nothing against the game per sé but I could never see the point of getting behind a team from somewhere you’ve never been that’s composed of players who you will root against when playing for their national sides. But again, each to their own in that respect. Last Saturday I watched the Six Nations finalé in Nancy Blake’s and noticed a group of lads sitting in the outback wearing Celtic jerseys chanting “Come on you Boys in Green”. I thought it was fantastic. Ok, they method was slightly off but it was absolutely brilliant to see a group of people being opened up to something like this. In Limerick it’s the norm for as many people to own a rugby ball as own a soccer ball, but it was never the less encouraging to see people ignoring what might be seen elsewhere as a divide.

Sporting icons the world over seem to be something we see on television. Even here in Ireland, we see Eddie Irvine on his yacht. Roy Keane in his mansion in the UK. We see sporting heroes as something beyond and away from us that is far beyond the grasp of anyone but the most excellent usually personified by someone else, but certainly never ourselves. But since the phenomena of Munster Rugby and the Heineken Cup that has all changed. I regularly stroll past a certain Mr G Flannery in town. Ian Dowling and Barry Murphy like the odd tipple in a pub I myself frequent. Tony Buckley and John Hayes (jokes about him being outstanding in his field are BARRED)  live down the road from me, Paul Warwick not ten minutes drive away (my son has made friends with his dog, as you may know if you follow this blog). The evening after the Scotland match I had the honour of enjoying a pint with with Peter Clohessy, a man who’s fearsome legend spreads far beyond the boundaries of our fair Provence. Paul O’Connell goes to matches in Greenfields and sometimes has a scoop in Austin’s afterwards, not to mention Kieth Earls, Alan Quinlan, John Fitzgerald… take your pick.

These are the things that show us that you don’t need to be from anywhere in particular to become great. Kids who aspire to be stars can look to the people they see regularly in the street and see that through honesty of effort and truth to dedication they too can become legends, giving them the belief they need to carry them that one step further in order for them to know that they can realise their dreams. This is what rugby has done for us. Through the ups and the downs of life in Limerick we know that our children can see that there are possibilities undreamed of by other people in other places. They can see that there is more for those who would take it. And take it they can.

And take it they will.

It makes me proud to be an Irishman. Proud to be a Munster man, even prouder to be a Limerickman, knowing that we can hold this up to the world when they try to decry us. Stab City. We have shown that we can take a stab at greatness regardless of what picture people paint of us.

This is for all of us. It is for you, and it is for me. It is for our parents and our children. Something wonderful has happened right in our front garden and its about time people started to stand up and take notice of what It has to offer all of us. Here is the chance to basque in the glow of greatness and it’s been handed to us by people we see on the street each day. This is theirs. They are ours. We all stand as one, and forward we march into history.