My Day In Dublin At The Risen People

Well what a day I had in Dublin yesterday.  Every time I go down, although round here they say up, to Dublin, even though Dublin is south east of here, you never here of people in Manchester say go up to London but I suppose up to Dublin might have imperialist connotations.  Any way every time I go down to Dublin on the train you can guarantee on meeting an interesting person.  Yesterday, A young Asian couple with a young child got on the train at Mullingar and sat next to us, the train was crowded, it was red neck day in Dublin, when all the country people go to the big city in preparation for Christmas.  This couple picked the only two seats left and Helen, my lovely wife of over 40 years, started the conversation off by asking the couple how old the baby was.  She said he must be three months old.  The Asian woman was amazed, Helen was right to within a week but she would wouldn’t she having had many herself.

After pleasantries with the Asian lady who thought Helen must be a bit of a guru, the conversation lulled and I started telling Helen a story I had heard about ATOS, that scumbag French outfit employed by the Cameron government to assess the benefits people should get and Helen happened to ask about the doctors role in the story and I said ATOS think that all doctors are frauds.  The Asian lady picked up on this and said, pointing to her man, my husbands a doctor.  Well that got our conversation rolling and their was plenty of things I wanted to say but didn’t out of politeness and has the conversation continued during the 50 odd miles to Dublin, it transpired that the medical couple had friends round the corner from, where we used to live in Manchester and that she was a visiting consultant chemist to Astra Zeneca in Macclesfield and Alderley Edge, where I spent a good few years of my working life, tearing down buildings to make way for new ones that churned out modern pharmaceuticals and here I am getting it from the horses mouth that these new buildings themselves are about to be torn down.  Astra Zeneca are leaving Macclesfield and going to Cambridge.  Astra Zeneca employ half of Macclesfield so it looks hard for those Cestrians in the long term.

However we arrived at the Abbey Theatre, the venue for our day out to watch the play/musical by James Plunkett called The Risen People which eventually spawned Strumpet City some years later.  This production is an adaptation by Jimmy Fay of Jim Sheridan’s version of the original but before all of that sustenance was needed.  So having met my daughter in the lounge of the Abbey, who was in the company of some wandering troubadour from Cork, who works under the name of Himey, probably another bloody zionist, Cork is full of them.  Himey was shortly going off to a performance he was putting on at Dublin Castle, another musical entitled Murder On The Stage Of Government – English Style. It tells the tale in song, dance and joke of the murder whilst under interrogation of two Sinn Feiners by an Officer of Special Branch in 1920 at the seat of English power, the said Dublin Castle.

We went round the corner to Lanigan’s on Eden Quay, a favourite eaterie of mine where you can normally get a decent meal for around five euro.  Mine was Liffy cod and chips, good for the diet that I’m on because they indigent Liffy fish never grow to more than tiddler size, shrunk by the shit and chemicals that pollute the river.

However whilst in Lanigan’s, who should walk in but an old friend of mine, big in local politics and a big name round the Dublin area.  After introductions and a call for porter, we get into a huddle with his best kept secret of the week.  And this is where I get serious for once.  My friend, with no axe to grind, let me into a secret that every one in Dublin in the know is trying to keep a lid on.  Michael D. ie. Michael D Higgins, our President, is having a serious fling with his aide-de-camp, a senior and dashing military man and that this affair has met with the full approval of Michael D’s wife, Sabina and not only that but Michael D has had a liking for young men all his adult life.  Not in any way a paedophile  but anything 18+ dressed in a male tutu.

Now this is no flimflam that I am reporting here, this is an old friend, a politician and business man, I have known many years and a man who would never repeat spiteful gossip.  What I have written here is pure gold, from a man who knows and there we all were thanking our lucky stars that we had managed to avert that bald-headed ex-Fine Failer, Sean Gallagher, who ran a very close second to Michael D in the Presidential race, but some might say we have jumped out of the frying pan into the fire with our elected choice.  Personally I have no time for that line of thinking because I reckon all credit should go to Michael D for being able to rise it at 72 years of age and stick it up a young and scrawny military arse.  It is no wonder that Mary van Lieshout, the American Presidential advisor, jacked her job in last week, her fine face obviously did not fit.  It was a bit like putting a lamb into a stable.  Michael D answered his critics last week on a visit to Cork when he said “It is often pointed out that a donkey and its mate can stay together for years and that even a short separation can be very stressful”.  So it looks as though we have our answer, this aide-de-camp is going nowhere for a long, long time.

Anyway back to the story.The Risen People was a remarkable production, but I say that every time I go to the Abbey, but this performance must be the finest yet, with fantastic music and song mainly generated by Conor Linehan and is setting to music of Yeats angry poem September 1913, the star of the show.  The story was the class struggle in the early 20th century and has Helen succinctly said to me at half time “was it not ever thus” and as my daughter Paddy Jo said “yes but them days you knew your enemies”.  Of the very strong  cast, I thought Phelim Drew was the stand out but only because he got the best lines and had a lovely rich inherited voice.  The story of the Dublin lock out of 1913 which drifted into 1914 needs telling to as many people as possible and the Abbey are in fact taking this production out in January to Wheatfield Prison, Larkin Community College and Kilbarrack Community Centre.  I think it the most important piece of Irish history and in an indirect way favoured England’s cause.  The lockout was possibly the single most important reason why Irishmen in their thousands enlisted in the British Army in late 1914 and early 1915.  They swelled the ranks of a very depleted army that had undergone terrible slaughter in the early months of the war.

So all I can say is bravo to Fiach Mac Conghail and everybody at the Abbey and bravo Jimmy Fay, Conor Linehan, Colin Dunne and the cast for putting on such a wonderful show.

So that was that, I thought what a wonderful day and we experienced a pleasant journey back to Boyle, marred only slightly by Irish Rail not being able to find a driver for our train making us rednecks set off 30 minutes late but all that was offset by Helen’s suggestion that we celebrate the day with a bottle of wine and the end of our second week of diet.

Imagine my alarm when I arrived home and sat with my invigorating entree into an evening of booze, a glass of well diluted vodka and found out from a son of mine that Nelson Mandela was nothing but a zionist lackey.  I had issued words of praise for this supposed great man but then to find him linked to the New World Order came as a massive shock but there was worse, another child sent me a photograph of Mandela in his Knights of Malta ball gown.  Can you believe it, this African fraud is no better than Heinrich Himmler, George Bush and frigging Tony Blair.  (see my blog posting on the Papal Honours fiasco written some time in 2012). 

This morning I am in a much deluded world, I have no heroes left only my wife, who has offered to buy wine for the evening as recompense for my delusion.