So farewell July, when our political classes finally abandoned the Constitution as a rulebook and Irish journalism took another two steps towards its much-deserved grave. One was the wicked destruction of the career of the rugby pundit Neill Francis and the other was the studied neglect of the Percy French Summer School.
The month began with Declan Ganley’s (barely reported) court case against the state for its draconian and unconstitutional closure of all places of worship last year. Constitutions are not mere consultative documents whose strictures may be ignored if the mood dictates. They are as absolutely binding over politicians and judges as is the diktat of any oriental despot over his subjects. And the one entity to which the Constitution of Ireland repeatedly admits its subordination is that of God. This is not some interpretation of mine. It is inescapably stated from the outset.
In the name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred,
We, the people of Éire,
Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ,….
And
All powers of government, legislative, executive and judicial, derive, under God, from the people, whose right it is to designate the rulers of the State and, in final appeal, to decide all questions of national policy, according to the requirements of the common good.
So, how could the state, bound as it is by these various declarations of subordination to God, unilaterally manage to shut down all places of worship, without consulting the acknowledged religious authorities that govern these chapels, churches and synagogues?
You might possibly think that the Constitution’s devotion to God and the Holy Trinity is anachronistic, sectarian, absurd and restrictive. Sorry, but your opinion is irrelevant, as is mine. State-constitutions are the inflexible frameworks within which all laws must be set, and ours raises godly authority above that of men while proscribing random deeds of authority by government.
Yet submission to “random deeds of authority by government” is precisely what has been expected of the governed for the past eighteen months. So utterly unquestioned has this become that Dail Eireann even voted to make it legally obligatory that the “contact details” – whatever in law they might be – of every single customer eating food be supplied to the owner of any premises providing it. Not even North Korea at its most rabid demands such information, and only the arrival of a sliver of common sense then reduced that mandatory requirement to the “contact details” of just one person in any single party.
Nonetheless, many absurdities still remain: a person dining alone must supply “contact-details”, while the five guests of the person with contact details need supply none – but of what possible use would such arcana be? And anyway, the sheer bureaucracy required to run any restaurant, café or pub would simply have paralysed it. Even now, the legal requirement that every single person must have an ID merely to enter any restaurant or pub requires passport controls on every door. These regulations, along with powers of expulsion, must be enforced by untrained citizens who could not possibly know or understand the law.
And try it with a party of Travellers. Go on. Tell a group of Travellers you’re not serving them because…..
That all this became law after a couple of hours of non-discussion by our TDs is terrifying evidence of how far down the road we have gone towards government-by-decree; only politicians doubly addicted to the crack-cocaine of arbitrary power and a star-wars level of annual state-expenditure could have authorised such insanity. Naturally, President Higgins, who adores big and intrusive government, did not even bother referring this arbitrary assumption of powers to the Council of State to assess its constitutionality.
Worse still, no government is obliged to consult the President or the courts whenever it wants to burden tomorrow’s generations with stupendous debts to pay for today’s policy-whims. Since the bailout of over a decade ago, our political classes have become inured to borrowing on a criminal scale, heroically shifting responsibility for our financial problems to their great-grandchildren, even as their own pensions (and those of the public service) continue to rise….
This staggering assumption of state-powers was simply taken for granted by our media, which meanwhile ignored the annual Percy French summer school in Roscommon, even though from July onwards newsrooms are howling like hungry wolves for soft copy. This year’s theme was the famine of truth now crippling Irish society; that this famine is wholly manmade was confirmed by the boycott imposed upon it by RTE and the main newspapers. I’ll deal with this in a later post.
It was weirdly apposite that at the end of the summer-school, and just four years after my own cancellation (see my “Fireman” post) Neil Francis suffered a comparable, if rather less internationally incendiary, career-ending. His termination was very publicly implemented by INM, which a couple of months earlier had similarly ended the career of Eoghan Harris. Naturally, INM remains silent – as indeed do all our anti-racist watch-dogs – about the deeply racist but still unpunished “I Hate England” column from INM’s very own journalistic Yahoo, Eamon Sweeney.
Francis’s downfall came after he had said during an INM podcast about the Lion’s tour of South Africa that the England and Saracens player Marcus Smith had a David Beckham haircut and an Oompa Loompa tan, a reference that initially baffled me. An internet check revealed that the Oompa Loompas were charming little brown creatures in the film Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. This was released when Francis, now in his fifties, was aged eight and they presumably imprinted themselves on his memory. Furthermore, Francis probably thought (and to my mind rightly) that the Springboks would physically dismantle any rugby player with a Posh Spice-designed tonsorial display and a midwinter, tanning-parlour skin-colour.
In fact, unknown to Francis, Smith is mixed-race English/Filipino, hence his “tan”.
Next thing: Racism! Boom!
Yet his (still unpunished) podcast editors, clearly knew that he’s not “racist” – the equivalent these days of denying the Blessed Trinity in Torquemada’s court – which is why they put up his pre-recorded observations online in the first place. Once the entirely imagined “racist” dimension had been spotted, the podcast should simply have been taken down and the whole matter forgotten. Instead, poor Francis was hanged, drawn and quartered by rugby’s panjandrums, followed by yet another peremptory dismissal by INM, where life must now be as terrifying as membership of Stalin’s politburo.
For Francis, an acute rugby-journalist, this is the end of his career with no prospects ahead. An array of government-funded NGO vigilantes is now poised to denounce anyone who now gives this poor creature a job – the Migrant Council, various equality commissions, the ubiquitously venomous National Women’s Council, and of course LBGTQRSTUVWXYZ.
Why the last lot? Oh, because the usual online vermin dug up an interview Neil did eight years ago with Joe Molloy, an achingly right-on radio presenter on the issue of why almost no GAA players had come out as gay. Molloy recited the usual agitprop folderol about 10% of the population being gay, so why had so few GAA declared their homosexuality?
To which I can only reply; A) Most of us are now as interested in other people’s sexuality, whatever it is, as we are in their bowel movements and B) that 10% is a bogus figure that comes from the hopelessly flawed Kinsey report of 1948, which was largely based on admissions by jail inmates. In fact, under 5% of the male population is gay.
In reply to Molloy, Francis made the very fair point that a survey of hairdressers about their sexuality would produce a different result from that of GAA players. Thereupon, he was vilified for “stereotyping”, as he was again last month when the usual scum dug up the old interview. (At least 60% of male dancers in New York are gay, hence their calamitous AIDS death toll, which back then gay activists never tired of telling us about).
And thus, poor Francis was instantly transformed into a racist and a homophobe, a sort of cross between a KKK Grand Wizard and Ian Paisley during his scintillating 1970s Save Ulster From Sodomy campaign.
This was a major story, providing dual insights into the dysfunctional values that now govern sport and the vicious modus operandi of the modern media – yet it was completely ignored by The Irish Times. I say this somewhat hesitantly: a word search for “Neil Francis” on the Irish Times archive produced nothing. However, I was not going to plough through the acres of Brit-bashing nationalistic drivel that now fill even the sports pages of that once-fine newspaper to confirm the accuracy of the IT word-searcher.
So, Neil, welcome to the Siberian gulag cafeteria. You have your Covid passport with you? Excellent. So how do you like your sphagnum & gravel gruel? Ice-cold, or on the rocks that you’ve just broken?