This article originally appeared in the New York ‘Irish Examiner USA’ for28th May, 2013

 

 

Honestly, I Was Never in a Foursome; No Matter What Alan Shatter Says!

 

 

“Don’t think of them as people:  think of them as flees on the body of a dog that has been run over by a drunken teenager with a girlfriend who has just given him the clap. It will help your perspective.”

                                    —Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Osterman Weekend’.

 

Okay, wait now, wait now…hold it for a moment.

No, there’s no way around it. I am going to have to do a complete U-turn on anything that I have written on Irish Minister for Justice Alan Shatter in the past.

What can I say?  I’m having a George Washington moment and cannot tell a lie: I now like Alan Shatter.  There, I’ve said it. And I can just imagine what you are thinking:

You, Brady, like the guy that you have called on many occasions Arrogant Alan?  You like the guy who has probably spent way too much time watching director Clint Eastwood’s boring and dull, yet worthy J.  Edgar?  You like the guy who probably spends his spare time reading about Cross-Dressing Hoover as he is affectionately known in Ireland?  You like the guy that you have repeatedly said could talk out of both sides of his mouth and lie unconvincingly out of both? You like the guy who probably sits there at night thinking about how easy it must have been in J. Edgar Hoover’s day as he lounged in a pretty pink frock whilst compiling and gathering files on those bastard journalists and those swinish American presidents and those damned neo-Commies who he felt that it was his moral duty to keep tabs on?

Well, yeah.  What is there not to like about Asthmatic Alan?

Look, in a week that has been filled with the pure horror of a man being chopped to death in broad daylight in an English street, Alan has given us something to laugh about again.  And for that I thank him.

Alan is there, in his own hermetically sealed time warp, compiling his pathetic little files and thinking:  If it were only in J. Edgar’s time I could have gotten away with it. Ah, they were better days.

Can you imagine him asking questions of me?

“Brady, is it true that you read the “The Communist Manifesto” when you were seventeen?”

“Well, yes Mr Shatter, I did; but in my defence can I say that I was very young at the time and—“

“Shut that big mouth of yours, Brady! You read it!  Now is it also true that you have admitted to being in a four-way with Christina Hendricks, Jennifer Lawrence and that green chick known as Rachel Nichols from the previous Star Trek movie?”

“Well, yes Mr. Shatter, but in my defence can I just say that was a dream I was having; it never really happened although I wish—“

“Shut it, Brady!  We have a file on you a mile long.  And now you have admitted to the depravity of interspecies sex as well!”

He’s got me, no question about it.  But he has still told a few pork pies himself…

I mean, he has admitted that he failed a breathalyser test because he is an asthmatic. Yeah, that’s right. He couldn’t complete the test because he has asthma.  Now let’s just leave aside the fact that no asthmatic in Ireland would be let off with that sorry excuse—they would have been made to take either a blood test or a urine one—so there was more to it than that.  I don’t know, maybe he was on the phone whilst driving.  Hell, why not?  Between himself, Luke “Ming the Merciless” Flanagan and Scruffy Mick Wallace maybe half of all our elected representatives are driving around with mobile phones glued to their shell-like ears in order to serve better their constituencies.

Ah, there you go: I’m laughing again.

Once again I am going to do a George Washington on you: when I first read the headline SHATTER ASTHMATIC I had only gotten in at half-six in the morning and was still pretty damned near blind drunk.  As I stumbled around looking for the light switch (or the three aforementioned ladies) that would take me to bed, all that was going through my head was SHATTER CHARISMATIC.  You see, I had thought for a moment that the Jewish Mr. Shatter had joined some sect that was weirder than Catholicism, Scientology and mad Muslimism rolled into one. Thankfully, that was not the case.  He is one of a kind after all, as it turns out.  He says:

“There was a queue of motorists and when I reached, like those before me, for my road tax and insurance disks; they were checked and I was asked to exhale into a breathalyser.

“I did do so but failed to complete the task due to my being asthmatic. I explained this to the garda. [For that read: I explained to the moron that he better know which side his bread is buttered on or he’ll be checking motorists at the North Pole after I make a phone call.] I also explained that I was on my way home from Dail Eireann and I had consumed no alcohol of any nature that day.

“The garda consulted with another garda and I was waved on.”

Do You Want to Buy the Brooklyn Bridge?

Remind me to try that one day:  on my way home from a hard day in the Dail, deciding how best to “cut the living standards of Irish people” as Pat Rabbitte openly boasted about doing; get stopped by the cops and explain to them that there is no real reason to drag me back to the station for the obligatory blood test because sure, Gob and Begorrah, that’s only for the peasants after all.  And I haven’t been drinking *burp*.

I’ve got a used car to sell. And the Ha’penny Bridge in Dublin as well.  Any takers?

Leave it to the spoilsport Niall Collins, Fianna Fail’s ‘justice’ minister, who would have done the same thing if he had not been in Opposition (and if he had asthma):

“It is incredible he did not release this information before now, particularly when he was busy giving out private information on Deputy Wallace as he believed he was ‘defending the role of the Garda Siochana.’  Why then did Minister Shatter not co-operate fully when asked to blow into the breathalyser by the gardai when he was stopped at a routine checkpoint?

“What are the other asthmatics required to do in similar cases?  Why did he believe that it was necessary to mention why he was returning from the Dail?”

As that great psychiatrist Doctor Hannibal Lecter would have put it:

“That’s very slippery of you, Clar—ee-ee-ice. After all, if you had been in power instead of being booted into Opposition what would you have done but lied your way out? Tell me what you see, TD Collins. Tell me what you see! Are the lambs still screaming for you?”

But if only Angelic Alan had just left it at that, with those savage sheep of the Opposition screaming at him.  But no.

In the mad, mad, mad world of Alan Shatter we always have to take it to the next level.

“There was no issue because I was driving along and a traffic garda was confused (!) about the issue.”

Well, they do get fierce confused, these low-life traffic garda.  It was left to TD Mattie McGrath to ask for a little bit more than ‘oh shucks these traffic garda don’t have a clue as to how to treat important people like me’.

Well, it turned out that it was:

“…an occasion when I was on a bus lane at about 11.30 am on Ormond Quay in Dublin some years ago. A garda on a motorbike stopped my car and directed me to roll down my window and informed me I should not be in a bus lane.

“I explained that the signature detailed that all vehicles could travel in it between 10am and 12 noon.  No more was said and he moved on.”

Leave it to an ex-lawyer to read the small print.

Now at this point I should just say that despite my admiration for Amiable Alan Shatter in giving us a bloody good laugh in a week that needed it, I do have a few friends in the police force.  I am not saying that the motorbike cop doesn’t exist, heaven forbid; but I cannot for the life of me find out who this ‘garda on a motorbike’ is.  Maybe he’s at the North Pole, who knows? Maybe he is not a figment of Alan Hoover’s imagination; I’m just saying that as of writing he might as well be Gandalf the Grey for all I know.

Mr. Shatter, now that I am one of your biggest fans, please tell me: who was the motorbike cop who bowed to your superior knowledge?

Listen, if it turns out that you are making the whole thing up then I sympathise:  I used to have an imaginary friend as well. Sure, it was when I was four years old, but what the hell—some of us never outgrow that kind of thing.  Maybe you’re one of them.

And now Amorous Alan has rereleased some piece of soft porn (sorry, I meant to say literary work of genius) that he wrote some years ago called Laura. I haven’t read it myself—come on; life is too short, especially since I haven’t even gotten around to Fifty Shades of Grey-Haired Politicians yet—but it apparently includes scenes of a raunchy nature between an Irish TD and his secretary.  And no, I am really not making this up as I go along.

Anyway, that is why Alan Shatter has become one of my heroes.  He will survive all of this, as I predicted last week; because he has weak, bought-and-paid-for crawlers like Doctor Dame Edna Kenny (who has a well-thumbed copy of the original publication) to back him up.

Dick Dastardly is Twirling his Moustache

But whether or not he survives this latest debacle is of no consequence:  he has no credibility anymore. He kind of reminds me of Dick Dastardly in the old Wacky Races cartoons.  If he would just grow one of those old silent movie moustaches that he could twirl around then he would be perfect.  There he would be, with his dog Muttley (‘Tiny’ Eamon Gilmore) tying Penelope Pitstop to the railings of some disused train track—and even managing to mess that up into the bargain.

No, it doesn’t matter whether or not Kenny backs him up when he gets back from lecturing the Greeks on how to survive an economic crisis (and what a short conversation that must have been!) he will always be seen as the guy with asthma who lectured a cop on how to do his job.

 

“The Irish are not neutral in the war on terror.  Ireland is in the firing line—that’s the reality”                            —radical Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary (Another Lawyer)

And so, reluctantly, to the horror of what happened in England this week.  I must confess that I immediately thought of Enoch Powell, the greatest Prime Minister that Britain never had, and his comments on how blood would run in the streets.  Well, he got that right; but decent man that he was, even he could not have imagined it to be this way.

I feel ill—physically ill—in even thinking about the sheer evil that landed on England’s doorstep last week. As to the monsters that carried out that evil I can only repeat what I said after the Boston bombings in this column at the time:

—————————

Everybody doesn’t like everybody.  The plain fact is that there are people who actually hate and despise our relatively simple way of life.  And I mean that just as I write it:  most of us live a relatively simple life.  I doubt that mine would be considered untypical.  I enjoy a pint in my local and enjoy a difference of view with others there.  We can do that here without killing each other, you know.  We can even have a laugh about our vastly different take on things.  In some countries—and yes, I’m looking at the guys with the towels and the beards—that wouldn’t be allowed.  In fact, just across the pond in England there have been two recent instances where Muslims have, during a university debate, attempted to segregate the men from the women.  And I’m talking here about non-Muslim men and women—in their own country! The mind boggles.  In the first shameful episode some saps were willing to stand for this.  In fact it was left to an American, who was due to be on the panel, to walk out.

I would love to see them pull that stunt here.  We’ve gotten soft but I surely hope that we’re not at that stage quite yet.

Another thing I love is going to the movies.  And guess what?  I can watch damned near anything I want to see. It can even be–*gasp*–a film that is critical of the Catholic Church.  I may have a snipe at mad Catholics but a lot of that is in fun and taken in the way it is intended.  Try that mellow joking approach with our Muslim brothers.  Try writing a colossally boring book that had a teeny little inoffensive (to us) passage in it like The Satanic Verses and you get a sentence of death slapped on you!  Draw a Danish cartoon that is funny—funny! —and you have more death threats!  Over a freaking cartoon!

Some people out there do not like everybody else.  They actually hate our easy-going lifestyles and our freedom of speech.  Nor can we even say that they are envious of it.  Personally, I would prefer this: that they are envious because they don’t live here and enjoy our freedoms. Instead, many of these warped, twisted nutcases live right alongside us. Many of them are even of the same nationality and enjoy all the freedoms that we do.  Yet instead of moving to wherever it is that they admire so much they choose to stay and fester in their hatred right alongside us, smiling in our faces and plotting our destruction.

At the moment, in Ireland as I write, there are over sixty known extremist Islamic activists who are being…uh, ‘monitored’.  That’s bad enough; but there are two who have just returned from Iraq where they have been fighting against us. And are welcomed back.

I’m not even going to comment on that. I think that says it all.

I first asked this question several years ago in another publication:  why is the Dublin Muslim convert Khalid Kelly (seriously, you couldn’t make it up) still walking the streets when all that this traitor has done is call for acts of terror to be visited on fellow Irish people?

Even after the soldier in England, Lee Rigby– who survived two tours of Afghanistan only to be butchered in his own country– was murdered and mutilated in a way that is just almost beyond comprehension, this pig of a man tried to justify it.

You tell me why he is still on the streets, and yes—inexplicable as it is to me—still getting converts to his—oh; wait while I get this out—faith.

Sure, I would be the first person to say that I have a lot of problems with the Catholic religion.  But the religion of Allah? Well, to you ‘moderate’ Muslims: it is up to you to weed out and REPORT the extremists that you know to be in your midst. Take a stand.  Grow a pair. Grow them for Allah; because something tells me that he wouldn’t have wanted this bloodshed either.  Catholic priests covered for each other over years and look where that got us.

I don’t believe in God; but the God that I don’t believe in doesn’t want us to kill each other.  The God that I don’t believe in doesn’t relish the fact that we’re still shedding each other’s blood in the 21st Century. The God that I don’t believe in was a complex man—but just a man—who has come to be known as the Christ. And in my heart I know that he would be horrified at what was done in his name.

In Sam Peckinpah’s anarchic masterpiece Straw Dogs there’s a line where Dustin Hoffman says that there has never been a kingdom with so much bloodshed as that of the Christ.  But he wouldn’t have wanted that; and I’m pretty sure that Mohammed wouldn’t want it either.

It’s time for me to be hosed down and put back in the straightjacket; so until next week please remember that you’ve never really read Macbeth until you’ve read it in the original Klingon.

Allah be praised; and he can contact me at chasbrady7@eircom.net or visit my Islam-friendly blog on www.charleybrady.com.