Captain Purplehead

I realise the title might be lost on those who haven’t seen the Great Escape but it is apt.
Ok, I know I’m not the first to comment on the strange decision to build a tunnel under the Shannon rather than a bridge over it. I’m not going to go into the ins and outs - pardon the pun - of this decision but I do have a question so this is going to be a rather short post. Well, at least I hope it is but, you know me, I tend to go off on one from time to time.
Right, so let’s go through the pros and cons of a tunnel rather than a bridge.
Cost: A bridge is a lot cheaper to build than a tunnel, so there’s no sense to the decision there, especially given the short distance that they needed to traverse. A tunnel cost significantly more than a bridge so I’m going to have to rule that, based on cost, this decision was idiotic.
Aesthetics: A bridge can become a gleaming and powerful monument with which to welcome people to our city. In the right hands, we could have had beautiful bridge built that would be the envy of everyone outside of Limerick. A tunnel can only be seen when you’re in it and they are dark and exhaust filled things. When you enter a traffic tunnel, your only burning intention is to get out the other side as quickly as possible. Right, so on an aesthetic level, the decision is also idiotic.
Functionality: Ok, a tunnel can’t generally deal with the amount of traffic that a bridge can so, again, the tunnel is off to a bad start. Ok, let’s face it; on a level of functionality, the tunnel is a ridiculously moronic decision.
Safety: Bridges are perfectly safe. Tunnels are notoriously unsafe. If you are in a tunnel and a fire breaks out, you’re most probably fucked as it is one of the most dangerous things you can experience. Of course, it’s not quite so bad if there’s a separate access tunnel for fire and emergency services. As there is no such emergency access tunnel on the Limerick one, you’re fucked if fire breaks out. The cost of building an emergency access tunnel was deemed prohibitive - a bridge must have been looking like a better option at that stage. So, from a safety perspective, this decision was not only stupid, it was fucking crazy.

Am I saying that the people who decided to build this tunnel are stupid? No I’m not but my question does lie in my belief that they are far from stupid.
I’ve done a little digging - again, pardon the pun - on this and, whilst I cannot name names, I will give a brief outline of some changes in personnel that have given me cause to wonder about this thing.
So, the engineer who was in charge of this and put it into motion is no longer employed in the position that led him to make this decision. He was, in fact, offered early retirement, an offer which he eagerly accepted. This meant that he was offered a generous lump sum and a fat fucking pension to vacate his job. So, has he now got his feet up in the Algarve? No, he now works for Direct Route, which is the company that was commissioned to build the tunnel.
So, basically, this was a very intelligent decision by a man with no ethics who wanted to become wealthy. Yep, it’s typical of this country.
Before I ask my question, I will ask that any of you who want to correct me in any of my assertions above, please do. I have omitted details of positions, committees and specific personnel deliberately so that people can fill in the blanks themselves. If anyone wants to name names in the comment section, I do not have moderation turned on here so I can’t really stop you.
So, my question is this, and please feel free to have a think about this as you walk down the tunnel on its opening day today. With all of our so-called concerned, learned and active local politicians constantly reminding us of how concerned, learned and active they are; how in the name of fuck was a disastrous decision like this allowed to be made and why isn’t there a calling to account over a definite conflict of interest and a decidedly unethical appointment. This needless tunnel has cost us €660m - after an initial estimate of €500m, so I would start fucking asking that question.

I’ve been hearing the words “culture” and “respect” used in the same sentence quite a lot recently and it makes me wonder how much you can actually get away with in the name of culture.
The thing that got me thinking about this is those horribly annoying vuvuzelas at the World Cup. Apparently they can’t be banned because they are part of African culture. Now, excuse me, but music is a rich part of African culture and their music is beautiful, colourful, full of energy melody and equal measures of hopeful and heart-rending harmonies. The vuvuzela, on the other hand, issues a monotone, which surely flies in the face of music itself. How can you have one part of a nation’s culture insulting another and still use the defence that “it’s part of our culture”?
FIFA are a ridiculous organisation and I expected nothing more of them than to cave and refuse to ban these fucking annoying plastic, droning monstrosities. They come across all magnanimous but really they’re nothing more than useless.
Another part of African culture is female genital mutilation. Often called female circumcision or introcistion, its sole purpose is to prevent the female from enjoying sex. There’s no other reason for it. Y’see, in a lot of cultures the men are terrified of women. They seek to dehumanise them to the point where they are nothing more than sexual aids.
Ok, so we don’t have people mutilating women’s genitals in the stands at the World Cup but it is another atrocity covered by the Culture defence. It’s our culture. We’ve been doing it for years. You can’t stop us doing it now. Ok, it’s the twenty first fucking century, you fucking moron. We no longer burn people for being witches. We no longer think the world is flat. Cop the fuck on.
Now, before you call me a racist for dwelling on African culture, please read on and try to get the point. Most Africans do not practice female genital mutilation. Most Africans that I’ve met are decent, hard working people. And the Culture Defence is not indigenous to Africa. We have it right here in Ireland.

The rural community have many bizarre rituals which they like to defend as part of their culture. Most involve cruelty to animals. We have coursing, which involves a live hare running from greyhounds, for instance, but I’ve gone on about that at length before and it does actually look like blood sports like this will be banned. Ireland generally has a terrible attitude towards animal welfare and welfare centres aren’t supported by the government.

The main thrust of this rant revolves around an incident that happened right here in Limerick a couple of weeks ago. So, while we’re on the subject of animal welfare, let’s get straight to the point and state that the travelling community have absolutely no respect for animals but they claim to need them as part of their cultures. Having been given houses by the Irish government, they insisted on using them as stables in quite a few halting sites. Ok, so it sounds nice to have a fully furnished home for your horse but that’s not really what the meant. They just wanted the shells of these houses for horses that they whip to within an inch of their lives. Right, so they were eventually persuaded to live in the houses, which I think is a terrible crime against their culture. They’re the travelling community. Giving them halting sites is fine. I mean, it’s better than when they used to just pull up outside your door and wreck your neighbourhood.

Ok, so at this point, the people who were hell-bent on calling me a racist are getting their comments ready. So, before I continue, let me just explain. I’m white and so are they. I choose to live in a house and respect the rights of those around me. They choose to live where they like and respect nobody. That is the main difference between us. Unlike those liberal clones in their leafy suburbia, I am not neglecting their right to be cunts and I’m not saying that every single one of them is a fucking criminal; just an abnormally high percentage.

So back to the point. The travelling community are renowned for stealing pet dogs, especially small dogs, so that they can give their own pit bulls and other neglected animals the requisite bloodlust for when they hold dog fights. This isn’t a rumour, ladies and gentlemen, this is a fucking fact. If you get there in time, you may be allowed to buy your beloved pet back but quite often it’s too late. Some pedigrees are stolen and sold on and, if they are chipped, the chip is crudely and painfully removed. Oh but its part of our culture? Fuck that for a culture.

So, I’m sure by now you’re curious about the aforementioned incident. Well, here it goes.
In plassey, quite close to one of their halting sites, is an industrial estate. It’s largely abandoned due to the Irish government’s culture of lining their own pockets and letting the country go to shite, so there are quite a few green areas. There’s also a route down to the river where people can go walking.
In full view of two companies that the government has yet to dispense with, two sulkies pulled up face to face. I should explain that a sulky is a horse drawn mode of transport that consists of two wheels and a couple of seats on a metal frame so that higher speeds can be achieved. On each sulky there was an adult male and a male child of around 7 years of age. Once the sulkies came to a stop, the two children were made to fight eachother. Now there weren’t any cardboard swords and tinfoil armour involved. This was a bare knuckle fist fight. This wasn’t handbags at twenty paces. This was a full on fist fight between two children. Within seconds, one child was on the ground and the other began to kick him in the head and body, all the while encouraged by the two adult travellers. It didn’t last long because some disgusted employees of both companies ran out and the children were roughly thrown back on the sulkies and the travellers - sorry, adult cunts - whipped their horses to life and vacated the scene. The child who was bloodied and beaten was then thrown from the sulky he was on and left to make his own way home.
Now, you try to fucking register your disgust about this and you’re told that bare knuckle fighting is part of their culture. Is it acceptable to nurture violence in kids? What fucking chance do these kids have?
There are no laws to stop criminality in Ireland but there are plenty to keep the innocent, hard working people on their fucking knees. This is a disgusting ritual that needs to stop.
Just because you’ve been doing something antisocial for years is no excuse. We can’t allow these rituals to be perpetuated, simply because we don’t want to offend someone’s culture.
I fucking guarantee you that, if there was a culture that requires people to be naked on the first fucking Friday of every month. You’d have fucking Nora and her knitting group garnering the support of the government to put a stop to it. Fuck’s sake. I’m sick of the Culture defence.
There are some parts of culture that connect us to our past and should be preserved but not if they are deliberately harming other people or being needlessly cruel to animals.
If part of your culture requires you to beat and humiliate children then fuck you and your pathetic fucking culture.
How long before some scumbag says, “But yer honour, my father and his father and his father’s father were all proud stabbers and racist. It part of me culture, boss.”?
Here endeth the rant.

Before I took to the seas, I was a normal Irish child. Ok, normal might be stretching it a bit but I did the things that normal Irish kids do. I went to school, for instance. In my school days, the only Irish history we were taught was that the British were cunts. I firmly believe you would have been allowed to say the word cunt only if you were alluding to the British occupation of Ireland.
The Catholic Church had a firm grip of the education system at that stage and you invariably had to be schooled by a priest at some point. No priest interfered with me sexually but they did abuse my little mind. “Eight hundred years of torture!”. “We had to teach Irish in ditches… you feckin pup!” The same rhetoric over and over again about how the British were cunts. Not a thing about how Dev was one of the biggest cunts who ever walked. Not a thing about how successive governments were raping us. Not a fucking thing about how the clergy were raping children. All we heard was that the British are cunts.
Having been born in London to Irish parents, I came in for a bit of stick for being a cunt myself but not so much that I got a complex about it.

To be fair, calling the British cunts wasn’t all they did. They also taught us that it is wrong to lust after anyone. I remember kissing a girl at a Redemptorist disco - yep, I’m not making that up - and a priest came over and slapped me across the back of the head. You dirty pair of feckers. Cut that out now! Y’see, the clergy didn’t like anyone to display an act of love. I was just a lusty young man, leading a fair maiden astray. I can’t imagine what that arse reaming fucker might have said if he saw what we were up to in the back of the bus… The clergy were, and still are, obsessed with sex. It’s apparently wrong unless you’re a priest raping a child.
On another occasion I was thumped in the chest by a priest for looking at a girl in my class. The fucker knocked me out of my chair. Now, I’m not saying that I suffered abuse at the hands of the clergy because I didn’t. I was one of the lucky ones who walked through that minefield relatively unscathed. What I’m saying is this. The education system and the clergy are responsible for bring up a fucking generation of sexually frustrated terrorists. What good have they done? The only thing they’ve achieved is to put God out of reach of poor people. Now I’m not going to go into a big theological discussion about what I do or don’t believe but I will say that, for a lot of people, all they have is their faith and nobody has the right to take that away from them. The thing is that they blame everyone except the church for putting obstacles in the way of their faith, when it is exactly that morally bankrupt organisation that has been doing it all along.
End of Rant.

I’m sick of the word, revolution. It used to mean something but now it’s spoken about with liberal appliance of fluff and idealism. It used to be a word that conjured passion and bravery. Now it’s just a word for the comfortably disenfranchised. It’s a word that’s spoken when you have to pay an extra ten cent on the pint. It’s nonsense unless it’s meant in anger and with purpose. Everyone wants to change everything. If I was Brian Cowen, I’d make drink tax free. In fact, I’d give a drink allowance, so that all the happy revolutionaries could stay happily in their state of flux.
Ok, Brian Cowen is a qualified idiot. He has sat his exams in front of all of us and we have done nothing but pander to the lethargy of his rhetoric. Brian Cowen isn’t fit to run a tap and we all know it but we do nothing but talk about the need for a revolution.
The fact is that, despite the fact that Fianna Fail were rampantly fucking up the country and we all knew they were, they still got into power in the last general election and they refuse to hold one since, as the breadth of their fuck ups approaches a dizzying expanse. The first thing we need is a change. Ideally a unity government would mean that they are all looking over eachothers’ shoulders. In essence, they would police themselves. The last time we had this was the Rainbow coalition and it worked.
So, let’s put reality aside and put on the hat of idealism.
If we are to have a revolution - and best of luck trying to find enough people in this waste of a country to have an effective one - what is our mandate? What are we looking for? What do we want from our revolutionary leaders and how do we achieve it?

So, maybe it’s just me but I would like to get the basics right first, i.e: Health, Education and Justice. No point storming the Bastille if you have no idea how you’re going to fix those.
Health: Before fixing the health system, we will need to generate some cash. So, the Senate would go and the bank guarantee would be recinded but let’s leave that aside. Ecconomics was never my strong suit so, let’s just say we’ve cleared the accounts of the crooks who have run this country for too long and we have generated a couple of billion to put into the health service.
The first point here is going to be an unpopular one but I would start by getting rid of the current unions. I wouldn’t be against the formation of a new one but it would have to set out on a no - whinging policy. If a nurse or doctor complained about having to answer a phone or pick up a biro, I would remind them of the amount of out of work nurses who would love a job and the highly qualified doctors who are painting houses around the country. If they continued to whinge, I would dismiss them and fill their position with a non whingey person.
Secondly, I’d work a type of triage with a difference. If you’re a scumbag and you’ve been injured in any gang-related activity, you forfeit your right to medical care. And don’t sit there bleeding on the steps either. Fuck off home out of it. If you are admitted wearing pyjamas and you haven’t been taken directy from your bed but from a shopping mall instead; fuck off home and take 50 ccs of cop the fuck on, you scobey cunt.
Seriously though, a change of management from top down in the health service is absolutely necessary. Too much nepotism and cronyism and a general lack in direction has royally fucked up our health service. I would get experts in from abroad, even from the NHS and get them to set out a template for us. The NHS certainly has its problems but it is vastly superiour to the draconian health system we have here.
So, as you can see, for a revolutionary, I really don’t have all the answers for the health system but I would find someone who has. Someone who really has. I would not entrust our health system to a fat fucking bint who has quite clearly ignored every piece of her GP’s advice and an overpaid professor who does fuck all. For those uninitiated, below is a picture of our minister for health.

and here in her public guise as useless fat cunt:

Hard to believe, isn’t it?

Ok, so we move on to education and there really isn’t a huge task here. Yes, Fianna Fail are doing a great job of fucking that up too but, similar to healthcare, I’d start by getting rid of the fucking unions who moan about everything. Improve conditions of schools. Hire more teachers. In fact, some of those out of work tradesmen would be put to work building these schools and they would work for what we pay them, not for what they feel like charging us. And there’s another thing; there would be a strict means test for people under 50 on the dole. If you’ve worked all your life and you get to 50 and find yourself unemployed, you have every right to relax but there are younger people out there who have no fucking intention of working. Every able bodied person would be put to work on roads, finishing buildings that have been abandoned by short sighted developers who have since been bailed out - those bail outs, where possible would be repossessed, along with all of their assets.
But Cap’n, you can’t make people work! Yes I fucking would! Oh, and if you fucking slack off, you’re sacked. NO MONEY! Get it? It just seems to me that we have loads of stuff that needs doing and plenty people available to do it but we can’t ask them to work for us. Bollox to that!

Law is next. Ok, this is fairly cut and dried. If you rape someone, you’ve given them a life sentence. Guess what you fucking get? That’s right. life. And not life in an entertainment complex with LCD TVs and pool tables. If you rape someone, you will do life in a jail. An actual jail. Yes! Revolutionary idea. As drugs will be legalised and carefully monitored, drug dealers will need to look for an alternate income. Yeah, but that’s going to be difficult because all of the fucking scumbag cunts will be in jail with the rapists! If we all know who they are, why are they still fucking up society for us?
A new crime of Scumbaggery will be brought into the modern judicial lexicon. If you are guilty of being a scumbag, you get a solid fucking hiding first and, if you persist in being a scumbag, you go to jail with the rapists and drug dealers. Oh and Fitzpatrick, Drumm, Ahern, Cowen and many many many many more fucking criminals who think they’re holier than thou. Fuck em. Jail!

Right, as you can see, this has meandered into a rant and I’m glad it has. I would be a shite revolutionary and so would most of the other fuckers who shout revolution. Yes, the constitution needs to be ripped up. From Dev to Cowen we have been balls to the wall with fucking criminal politicians, so proving that the system doesn’t work. Do we need a revolution? Of sorts, but we need to stop fucking shouting it from everywhere until we have an actual plan to do something when the revolution comes. We already had a revolution in this country and just look what it gave us.

What an uninteresting week it’s been. I’ll be first to stand up and say that, by and large, football is a much better game than rugby. However, on the evidence of the World Cup so far, no one would believe me. There’s a couple of reasons for the whole suckiness of the World Cup so far. Firstly, there’s the fact that the ball has been changed again and it is taking teams a while to get used to it. This happens in every World Cup and it sickens my shit every fucking time.
I’ll go as far as to say that Robert Green probably wouldn’t have made that hilarious mistake, if they hadn’t made a ball that moves around way too erratically and is lighter than its predecessor. How about changing the ball at the start of the domestic season? Much more leeway for fuck ups at the start of a season than there is in a tournament. Who am I kidding though. FIFA have never listened to reason and probably never will.
The soundtrack to this monotonous football is fitting, if insanely annoying. It is the Stadium Horn, otherwise known as the vuvuzela. It’s a horn that, when played, produces a drone in monotone. It’s a fucking wart on the arse of sanity and they won’t ban them because they can’t unless someone uses it as a weapon. I mean surely someone has shoved a vuvuzela up someone’s hole at this stage. Fucking things are like a constant swarm of bored to death bees. GGGRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!
Maradonna is as colourful as ever but, sadly, his team aren’t. Despite the fact that Messi shone, the Argentines merely lent a hand to the overall mediocrity we’ve seen so far.
Not to fear though, it always starts to get better in the second round of games and I’m still looking forward to a decent tournament.
Also this week, we are presented with a comedy of fucking idiocy from the Irish government… AGAIN!
Brian Cowen has said that he is determined to see out his tenure as Prime Minister because he wants to make the tough decisions that have to be made to get our ecconomy back on its feet. Well, at least he’s not making the easy decision to line his and his buddies’ pockets at our expense for a change but I just have one question. Last week, Brian Cowen said that there was no point in investigating the government’s role in the financial crisis because everyone knows that the fiscal policy they used was flawed and ultimately wrong. In short, they fucked up. Apart from his plea for no investigation into a governtment, in which he was the minister for finance at the time, being a load of old bollox, what makes him think that, if he made the wrong decisions all along, he’s suddenly going to get it right now? Sling your fucking fat hook, Brian.
So, the light at the end of the tunnel is that he faces a vote of confidence in his leadership, possibly leading to a general election that the country so badly needs.
Ok, if you’re the opposition, you’re rubbing your hands together and getting your wagons in a circle. Not the clowns on the other side of the Irish political fence, however. Nope, their deputy leader said that he had no confidence in his leader - the interminably purile Enda Kenny. What does Enda do, to the tune of “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to”? He sacks said deputy, Mr Bruton.
This all comes at a time when the Labour Party appear to be making ground on the inside. I think it might be a bit soon for them but everyone knows this country is badly in need of a unity government that we’ll never get anyway.
So there you have it. What a load of bollox this week has been. Bollox I tells ya.