A Rant of Epic Proportions

 

I’m in the mood for revolution tonight. And I’m not talking about an ‘oh, lets make some placards and hold a rally’ type thing. I mean a full blown ‘bring down the government, overhaul the entire system’ job. Peacefully, of course. In fact, in my new regime all those who even acknowledge so-called political violence as a means to an end will be rounded up for a little dose of re-education. Such braindeads are one of the reasons I’m in such a riled up mood this evening, but I’ll get back to that in a minute.

Anyway, it all started off this morning when I opened my local paper to discover a story on the removal of a local “eyesore”. Said “eyesore” can be seen in the photo above which I took during a lovely sea mist last spring. It looks even more beautiful during a high tide or bathed in evening sunshine and I had hoped to get more shots of it throughout the seasons, but now I’ll never get the chance. *sigh*

“It’s only a boat, not worth getting that worked up over,” I hear you cry, but no, it wasn’t only a boat!  It was local landmark, beached on some rocks just by the bridge that takes you into our wee town. For myself and so many others it was one of those little signs that let you know you were home after a long trip away. It had been there for as long as anyone I know can remember. And two days ago it was bought for five euro, demolished and carted off to be sold on for a healthy profit as scrap metal. So far the only people I’ve heard calling it an eyesore were those who took it away.

The story of this little boat, folks, represents all that is and has been wrong with my country for a long time now. For decades I’ve watched the majority of what made Ireland beautiful bring ripped apart in the name of “progress and prosperity”. Ancient trees disappearing in the night to make way for office car parks, charming cobblestone bridges being knocked down for roads that go nowhere, pre-Celtic monuments that have stood for millennia now being let fall to wrack and ruin. And don’t even get me started on the property boom, which has obliterated countryside and urban centres alike with some of the most tasteless buildings on the planet. Seriously, even the Soviets would have thought modern Irish architecture bland.

It’s not as though we don’t have planning and conservation laws, it’s just that if you have the right bank  balance or know the right people you don’t have to worry about them. In fact, from what I can see developers were, if anything, encouraged to flaunt them. Even funded! And they wonder why the country is going down the tubes. Forget global recession, this place is a mess all of our own making. We can moan about the bankers all day long, and rightly so too, but there’s so much more wrong here than just financial corruption. There is a deep rooted cultural and political apathy that is so pandemic I can’t see anyway of recovering from it. We don’t deserve to be prosperous if this is what we do with our wealth.

But then maybe I’m just extra mad today because right after reading the news about my beloved boat I got a text that instantly threw all my Halloween plans out the window. You see that little scary video I posted a few days ago was supposed to be a prelude to a month of terror and madness that I was going to bring to you courtesy of The Loom of Doom, a haunted house event I was supposed to be taking part in. (I was going to be one of the evil nurses!) Sadly, it has had to be called off, brought down in a tangle of red tape and over-priced bureaucracy. Instead of supporting such a positive and potentially lucrative event our local government system has instead made it economically unviable.

Well they’ve certainly shot themselves in the foot with this one. I was helping out with the show’s press work and I can tell you now, the media attention and public support for this project was phenomenal. It was being held in an old Fruit of the Loom factory that at one point not so long ago employed a vast proportion of the town’s population. When it shut a few years back the local economy was devastated, and the building has been lying empty since. The new owners had kindly donated it’s uses free of charge so that it could be put to some positive use, and the sense of community spirit didn’t end there. The entire thing was being financed by the organisers themselves though all profit was going to local charities, and everyone else involved (hundreds of people) were giving their services voluntarily. To top it off, tens of thousands of visitors were expected to descend upon the town in search of a good scare.

It was due to open on Friday and I’d been down looking at the sets and stuff a few times already. Oh my god, the quality of craftsmanship and artistry was nothing short of outstanding. It was going to be so super amazingly fantastic! I was going to wait till it opened to start snapping and sharing it with you, but now I’m not going to get the chance to do that now either. The only ones I have are the two I took to make the poster for the Facebook page I was helping maintain. Forget about how heartbreaking it is for those who put in so much effort, and about the bitter disappointment of those looking forward to attending, what about me and my blog?! I’m going to have to go find new stuff to post for these parties! *steam coming out ears while hammering at keyboard*

Right, I do realise that this has become my all time longest post and I do apologise for that, but I did mention in my opening paragraph that there was one other thing ragging me so I’ll just touch on it briefly. I’m not sure how clued up you all are on the whole Northern Ireland situation, but at the minute there are a bunch of absolute muppets going around trying to restart the whole thing.  I mean it, these people are not only bigoted, hate-filled, braindead shitheads (my polite term for them) but they’re actually even more dangerous than those who came before on account of their unfathomable stupidity.

What they hell are they fighting for anyway? Who exactly are they fighting? They’d probably spin you some bullshit about national self-determination or some such. Actually, they wouldn’t-  that’s much too complicated a term for them to understand. So what is it they want exactly? To ‘blow up Brits’? Yup, that’s more like their kind of language. Why exactly, I have no idea. Also, if that’s the case, then why did they blow up almost thirty men women and children in Omagh ten years ago? Three of those children were from my home town, which is in the Republic of Ireland, and two of them were Spanish. The rest were just locals going about their business, Catholics and Protestants alike, friends and neighbours.

I’ll tell you why they did it, because they’re idiots who grew up spoon fed nationalistic propaganda from a generation who are so bitter about the past they can’t let it go. Calling them misguided fools is much too soft, though, because last night they almost caused a repeat of the Omagh tragedy when they planted a car bomb just down the road from here in Derry. Right outside a bloody hotel of all places! There were American and Japanese tourists inside and everything. But that wasn’t their intended target, we’ll probably never know where was. Just like that Saturday afternoon in Omagh, this bomb had been abandoned in the wrong place. It’s thought those responsible were spooked by a police presence further down the road. So what did they do? They ran away and left it outside some busy shops and a building full of foreign nationals. Yes boys, you are true patriots.

Thankfully, the car was reported as suspicious and the surrounding area evacuated. It’s a miracle nobody was seriously injured. It’s still really very worrying. I don’t get spooked by terror warnings on the news and I don’t buy into media fear mongering, but when you realise there are idiots like this operating close by it is a little scary. Stupidity is a very dangerous thing, and when it’s backed up with explosives it’s lethal.  These people might be a tiny minority but even the littlest things in the universe can be deadly.

Anyway, sorry this post has been so, so long. When I said it was going to be ‘epic’ I didn’t really mean it literally! I think I just needed to vent a little. I’ll be back tomorrow with some lighter stuff but for now I need to go recover.