Grin And Blair It

A degree of perplexity about the recent Channel 4 programme in which Gerry Adams travelled to Palestine hoping to find the real Jesus Christ. I think I have it sussed. Fella involved in a radical organisation, executed in gruesome circumstances, high-level tout believed involved, body never found despite many years searching.

I reckon Gerry wanted to be seen delivering on his promise to do all in his power to locate the remains of the Disappeared.

Skippy doesn’t know what way to turn. Tasmanian attorney general Lara Giddings laments, “Wallabies have been hopping around in circles after eating the plants.” Opium plants, that is.
It’s not only in Afghanistan that the red poppy blossoms wave their languid heads across meadows and field. Tasmania is the world’s leading legal producer of the plant, yielding morphine and heroin for medicinal purposes. But now the poppy is devastating local farming and native wildlife.
In Britain, 5,000 acres of arable land are devoted exclusively to the opium poppy. Producers are currently striving to increase harvests to meet the growing needs of the NHS.
Meanwhile, Western forces continue to incite the hostility of Afghan farmers through brutal, expensive and futile attempts to eradicate their only cash crop.
Here’s a scarcely original idea. Buy up the Afghan poppy crop at a fair price for medical purposes, providing the farmers with a reliable income, taking control away from warlords and Western criminals – and saving Skippy from addiction, disorientation and too-early death.
But hey, if everybody began thinking sensibly about drugs, Joe Duffy would be deprived of an opportunity to crank up hysteria. We couldn’t have that.

Bit of a barney in Britland last month with the unmasking of former cabinet members using their government contacts to tout for money from big business to manipulate ministers.
Incompetent Iraq-period Defence Minister Geoff Hoon, useless former Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt and bungling ex-transport supremo Stephen Byers were caught with their trousers down and their ethics up their arses flogging their services as hucksters to phoney consultants. Byers wanted between £3,000 and £5,000 per diem for his Del-boy assistance.
Nice to know that the Leinster House lot are no worse than their counterpart conpersons across the pond when it comes to slurping sleaze from the trough.
But now I find that no more a person than Tony Blair has returned to front-line politics. Amazing he can spare the time. There’s a two-year waiting list for his speeches, at £100,000 a pop; he bagged £200,000 for a chinwag with chief executives in China; picked up a £600,000 signing-on fee from the Washington Speakers Bureau; gives “confidential advice” for an undisclosed fee to Lansdowne Partners; pockets £1 million a year from the Kuwaiti royal family and something similar from South Korean oil outfit UI, currently bidding for contracts in Iraq; lifts £2 million from bailed-out bankers JP Morgan, £500,000 from Zurich Financial Services, an estimated £5 million via Tony Blair Associates, £1 million from a web of companies under general heading of Windrush and Firerush, collects a parliamentary pension of £63,486 plus £84,000 expenses, and has banked an advance of £4.6 million for his memoirs.
He has a tax-funded 24/7 £2 million-a-year “security detail” to deter citizens from pitch-forking him into the river.
The bare-faced cheek of the blood-soaked wretch knows no limit. But British politics offers him a platform again.
Well, let him slosh and squirm in the mire while he may. But can he stay out of jail for as long as Bertie Ahern? Come the turmoil, they will both be banged up. If they are lucky. Otherwise, like my Black Panther pal Billy X says – it’ll be up against the wall motherfuckers.
And So I Watch You From Afar stride onto the stage like serious men headed for work, open with a blast that might herald the apocalypse, then crank it on up and up.
My only version of the moshly manoeuvre these days consists of a gentle elevation to the balls of the feet before subsiding at the pace of a slow puncture. But 15 minutes in I’m streaked in rivulets as the steam condenses while the walls bleed bodily fluids and the Nerve Centre pulses from the shudder and slam.
Onstage, there’s choreographed madness, deftly-structured tunes holding miraculous shape as they’re tornadoed into an audience seized by dangerous delirium. Survivors stumble down the stairs in a dizzy swirl, wondering if we’ve just heard the sound of the universe exploding.
Another thing is that bassist Jonathan Adger is the spitting image of hard-tackling former Glentoran mid-field dynamo Chris Walker.

Would you not agree that the man who wrote that “Scholars still wonder today whether a conversation between [Garret] FitzGerald and President Mitterrand about the philosophy of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson helped save Ireland’s EC milk quota” must be so soft in the head he shouldn’t be allowed out on his own?
He’s John-Paul McCarthy, who’s some sort of academic at Exeter College, Oxford, which is some sort of bolt-hole for the bewildered.
Then there’s this. “Richard Bruton was the leading voice in pointing out that competitiveness was eroded by wasteful spending and lack of competition.”
Yup. Lack of competition could damage competitiveness right enough. And Richard Burton could have the giving of ministerial jobs in a Fine Gael-led government. So thank you, good night, and we will be in touch, Senator Paschal Donohue (FG).