This is April 2010 and that’s the craic

Another reason to Never Ever buy the Daily Mirror

Summer is edging closer, and soon I’ll be finished exams. Outside, it’s no longer all that sunny, and the worry grows that we’ve had our share of nice weather, possibly for the rest of the year. Across the Irish Sea, on the campaign trail of what could turn out to be one of the most important British general elections since the Conservative’s famous and multi-consequential victory of 1979, the Daily Mirror has sent a journalist dressed as a chicken to cover David Cameron’s campaign.

Closer to home, in Dublin last Saturday, members of a small, unknown Socialist outfit along with others staged an occupation of Anglo Irish Bank on Stephen’s Green. In a country, apparently with “a lot of anger out there”, and “in need of change”, nobody noticed. Also at the weekend I have some vague recollection of having a conversation with an obviously very intelligent individual who has recently qualified with an Arts degree in English and something else. He laughed when I asked about jobs prospects. Meanwhile, everyone’s favourite bastard Michael Fingleton has become remarkably coy about handing back the €1m bonus he received for driving Irish Nationwide into the ground last year (for every €1 they were lending to mortgage holders, they were lending €4 to property developers. Yeah, think about that once more). Connacht Rugby are in a European Cup semi-final and have actually been playing decent rugby lately (Scarlet’s result discounted). There’s suddenly a lot of green around and everyone I know will be on holidays soon and I still don’t have a job yet, and then what?

Last year, my time was filled with the small matter of a Leaving Cert and a brutish 2,100km (I think) cycle from Tuam to Somewhere in northern Italy with two friends. I was kept busy, happy and chafed at all times. As it stands, I can’t afford to hit the road in a major way for the time being. Now, for some inexplicable reason, I see the summer stretching ahead of me like some long and weird haze, and I feel like the protagonist from L.P Hartley’s The Go-Between, and no, I haven’t a clue why. Potential employers won’t even take CVs – It’d only be waste of a CV if I was to take it son – dole queues snake longer and longer, around corners and down laneways and soon we’ll all be unemployed and we’ll have to live off chipped white cups of weak tea and glorious stories of when we could afford things like sirloin steak, not billyroll, and Smithwicks, not Dutch Gold.  Upon offering my services at a reasonably prominent Galway newspaper recently, I was asked did I want a box number for that or do you want to put your own number with the ad? I arched my eyebrow in what I hope was a blisteringly disapproving manner and left. This is where we seem to be in an Ireland which has sniffed wealth and liked it and now has been put back in our begrudging, inept place by the rest of the world and the free market and all the rest of it. Last week in Limerick I went to listen to the Daíl’s most recent departee George Lee talk about politics and really complicated economics and how crap and unfortunate we all are and I sat there as an eighteen year old male amongst the old professors and comfortable middle-aged couples wearing designer sweaters and concerned faces and I surprised myself by thinking…the man was talking some sense! By Jesus yes! Fuck the EU and their aggressive demands we repay the crippling debt that we can’t afford just yet! Follow the British example and the thinking of dozens of world-leading economists and let things settle first, that’d sort it! And then I remembered that Great Ideas never work, and that we Irish like to elect the sort of people who complain about the cost of running three houses simultaneously on a live State broadcast, as (quelle surprise) Fíanna Fáil’s Padraig Flynn did on the Late Late Show in 1999 and that it’s actually no fun at all when these people then make governing decisions for us.

But to hell with it. Those responsible for this whole situation may never be fully brought to justice, but I hope that they still have soul enough left to allow it haunt them for a long time to come. In the meantime, I can see a lot of cycling and wondering, pitching and crestfalling, freelancing and jamming and hoping (and possibly writing on Mixed Martial Arts – but that’s another long and dangerous story which will unfold in time). So here’s to that.

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Music this weather

The Cast of Cheers and their new, free, album Chariots. Pretty damn fine, and best of all, they’re playing in Tuam, yes Tuam, on May 22nd! (Woolstore, with So Cow, The Ralphs, Rural Savage and others)

Crystal Castles have a new album, called……Crystal Castles. Yes again. I don’t know what the hell to make of the new tracks I’ve heard, at times it’s like being on a sinking ship with loose steel poles and heavy yokes swirling around clobbering you as you soddenly attempt to reach the liferaft…but I’ve listened to them again and again so it must be pretty good!

As well as this, close your ears and beat your radios…because the Charts are still gigantically shit.