Spare a thought for Marion Jones as the athletics gets under way in Beijing. Chances are, she’ll be watching from jail at Fort Worth. That’s if they allow television in the cells.

Bertie Ahern, I suspect, is sniggering at her plight.
Just a couple of years back, Marion was the fastest woman in the world. She won three gold (100m, 200m, 4x400m) and two bronze (4x100m, long jump) medals at Sydney in 2000. At world championship level, she took 100m gold (1997, ‘99), 200m gold (2001), 4x100m gold (2001), 100m silver (2001) and long jump bronze (1999).
With her beauty, grace, charisma and sunny disposition, she enjoyed huge earnings from product endorsement.
But she admitted last October that she’d lied in denying to federal prosecutors that she’d taken banned steroids in 2001 and 2002. Without waiting for a ruling from the International Olympic Committee, she returned all her medals. Her records were expunged from the record books. In March, she began a six-month sentence for misleading the investigation.
Marion leaned over the courtroom railing and cried onto her husband’s shoulder as Judge Karas delivered sentence. Earlier, she had pleaded with him not to jail her and separate her from her two sons, one of whom she was still breast-feeding. “Your honour, I absolutely realise the gravity of these offences and I am deeply sorry... I ask you to be as merciful as a human being can be.” To no avail.
Karas said he couldn’t impose a fine, because she no longer had any money.
The Fine Gael TD Leo Varadkar made the point in the Dáil: Ahern lied not to a private investigator but in public and on oath to a High Court judge presiding over a tribunal set up by the parliament of which he was first minister. He persisted with a series of cock-and-bull stories, each more risible than the last, in efforts to explain the huge sums of money which had come into his possession while he was Minister for Finance, finally resorting to the last-ditch dodge of every caught-out con-man: “I won it on the horses.”
But Ahern isn’t regarded in Ireland as a disgrace, much less locked up in Portlaoise or Mountjoy. He shows not the slightest sign of contrition. Why should he, I suppose, when ex-colleagues and current commentators dismiss his sustained displays of dishonesty with a calm equanimity which could easily be taken as approval? He’s widely tipped for a number of prestigious and lucrative international posts.
Aren’t we a grand wee country every time?
One of the points made by Judge Karas was that Marion “must have known that she was a role model for millions.” Was and is. She’s showing far better example than Bertie Ahern.

On July 30, the House of Lords ordered that Londoner Gary McKinnon be handed over to US marshals. McKinnon is now taking his case against extradition to the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg.
McKinnon, a UFO enthusiast, admitted having hacked into Pentagon sites, searching for evidence that the US authorities had covered up alien visitations. I suppose that believing in UFOs makes him a bit of an oddball. But then, think of all the people who believe in Bertie Ahern.
A Pentagon spokesperson claimed that McKinnon had done $700,000 worth of damage. Right enough, that would make a dent in the $31.6 million which, the Pentagon announced on August 4, it will pay the notorious Raytheon company for a new batch of Paveway II Laser Guided Bomb units.
Interestingly enough – well, I think it’s interesting – this was the bomb dropped by the Israelis on an apartment building in the south Lebanese village of Qana on July 30, 2006, killing 28 civilians, half of them children.
But the main point I wanted to make re. the proposed extradition of Gary McKinnon is – whatever happened to the British Government’s pledge not to extradite its citizens to countries which practice torture?

Further evidence of the amazing connectedness of things: part 97.
Arriving late at Glasgowbury hot-foot from a union executive meeting in London and thus in dire need of having my head shired, I drifted into the Eagle’s Rock tent to hear hard Belfast rockers Dutch Schultz.
Dutch Schultz was the German-American celebrity gangster shot dead at the Palace Chophouse in Newark, New Jersey, in October 1935 by gunmen working for Murder Incorporated boss Louis “Lepke” Buchalter who’d been hired by Mafia chief Joe Bonnano who had been alarmed at Dutch’s plan to assassinate New York State Attorney and future presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey on account of the heat which the hit would have brought down. Dutch lived for two days, during which a police stenographer recorded his every rambling word, lest he blurt out some useful info, which he didn’t. The notes were filed in police archives and not seen again until the late 1960s.
Dutch had been more than somewhat unprotected at the Palace eaterie on account of having fallen out with hair-trigger shootist Mad Dog Coll, last seen in Copolla’s Cotton Club, who had been born in Teach Hiudai Beag’s in the Rosses in Donegal, which years later was to nurture Clannad and Altan. Vincent, best and only buddy of Jack “Legs” Diamond, after whom Deep Purpleish LA outfit Legs Diamond is named, may have inspired the formation of the Donegal Mafia. Plus, he’s a second cousin of SDLP politician Brid Rodgers.
The record of Dutch’s last words eventually came into the hands of the most famous beat poet and novelist of the time, William S. Burroughs, and provided the basis for Burroughs’ unproduced screen-play, The Last Words Of Dutch Schultz. Check out the mind-blowing clip on YouTube.
Anyway, the band up after Dutch Schultz was blistering Belfast four-piece, the Beat Poets.