Rocking The Vote

I am writing this column on the run. What I’m running for is election to the Assembly in the May 5 poll on the People Before Profit ticket. We have all the best tunes. Happy Enchilada Diane Greer is on the PBP list for the same day’s council elections. Sean Pemberton, legendary leader of the much-missed Gradapenda Rosendale (gradapendarosindale.bandcamp.com) is our Director of Canvassing. Brian Faloon, former drummer with Stiff Little Fingers, is PBP Assembly candidate in South Belfast. Alternative Ulster indeed.

Our main rivals in Foyle are Val Doonican (the SDLP) and the Wolfe Tones (Sinn Féin). We are The Clash. Work it out for yourself, people of Foyle and South Belfast. And West Belfast (Gerry Carroll) and Mid Ulster (Harry Hutchinson).
It’s an odd business. I don’t think I am a natural. I was standing outside a shopping centre last Saturday handing out canvass cards and thrusting my paw at passers-by when it struck me that what I was doing was distributing pictures of myself to total strangers as they went about their business. Mad or what? But they tell me it has to be done, and I suppose they’re right.
 
There’s times I despair of the younger generation.
“Anti-monarchists out to wreck Royal Wedding,” read the headline in the Brit broadsheet above a story telling how members of the Black Bloc – “a feared anarchist group” – had made plans to “disrupt West End street parties” celebrating the bathetic buffoonery.
There will be few street parties anyway. Most British people couldn’t give a frig about the numpty nuptials. And with a bit of luck there’ll be hailstones the size of golf-balls shattering into jagged shards of ice as they splatter the bucolic faces of any straggle of Royalists who do venture out to slurp ale on the public pavement and slobber slurred choruses of ‘Rule Britannia’.
But – “feared anarchists”? Planning to... disrupt parties? Whatever happened to anarchists in the best tradition, who at times like these would skulk in waiting along the route of Royal cavalcades with an ominous object under a cloak and a cackle of laughter on their lips?
Mind you, things seem even worse in, of all places, Quebec, where past history might have encouraged us to anticipate a decent level of irresponsible extremism. The leader of the Réseau de Résistance du Québecois, Patrick Bourgeois (I’ll say nothing) has pledged to make the honeymoon visit to Ottawa “as unpleasant as ­possible.”
“We will hold sit-ins and street blockades and close buildings,” he threatens. Sweet Jesus. Is this the best the latest generation of anarchist revolutionaries can manage? It’s enough to drive you to Trotskyism.
I leave the last word on the yob wedding to the extremely wonderful Sue Townsend, begetter of Adrian Mole: “The monarchy is finished. It was finished a while ago, but they’re still making the corpses dance.”

The definitive song on the wrack and ruination inflicted on the land by the fraudster parasites and lying thieves of the banking mob, “The Money Man’s Dead”, written by Nonpareil Paddy Nash and performed by the aforementioned Happy Enchiladas, can be accessed at paddynash.co.uk/web/news.asp. Sharp as flint, funny as fuck.
“Does anybody know how it happened?/The money man’s dead...Who killed the money man?/They can’t blame the Taliban.”
 
My friend Gavin McDermott has just become the first Irish person to be convicted of piracy in 200 years.
You might assume that Gavin is, then, the Johnny Depp of the Foyle, swashbuckled and swinging from the yardarm with cutlass in hand, booty in mind and Keira Knightley engraved on his heart. Does he half-bestride the poop-deck of a three-master with peg leg, rakish eye-patch and Polly the Parrot squawking on his shoulder?
No. He’s a Derry dockworker who refused to go quietly when told he was redundant and instead occupied the hold of a grain ship at the Lisahally docks. Unloading had to stop. The PSNI scratched their heads, wondering how to get down there and, if they did, how they’d haul him (and themselves) back up again.
Eventually, Gavin clambered out. The problem was what to charge him with. He hadn’t hurt anyone or damaged property. Bringing work to a halt in an industrial dispute isn’t (yet) a crime in itself... Somebody eventually came up with the ruse of indicting him for piracy.
It is fair to say that magistrate Barney McElhone wasn’t entirely confident how to proceed when the case came to court. He’d never previously had an alleged pirate up before him. Possibly, he was nervous lest Gavin would lepp like a Depp from the banister of the box and arc high across the courtroom hanging from the chandelier to land on the bench, crying, “Aarrggh, me hearty!” 
In the end, Gavin was convicted of being a pirate and sentenced to be released. I’ve told him that now he’s established his piracy credentials in a court of law, he should apply for a start with the Rossport branch of Shell.

“I gave it to her out of a fatherly concern, so she could avoid any need to prostitute herself” – Silvio Berlusconi on why he paid £40,000 to an underage “exotic dancer” after she’d attended his innocent parties.
Yep. And that mobile ‘phone chap who’s become a billionaire gave the Minister in charge of awarding the licence a political donation so he wouldn’t be forced to turn to dodgy benefactors.