The Irish

He also doesn’t think Scotland should be independent

Yep.

The ‘Corbyn befriended the IRA’ thing is the haute-couture of British egotism. Never mind that Thatcher spoke to them first, or it led to the GFA - the spectre of the Paddywack Bogeyman has been conjured and that’s enough to frighten some people into the folds of Boris’s belly.

— Philly Byrne (@PhilipNByrne) November 13, 2019

I mean, the third one isn't a problem for a lot of the UK.

(autocorrect adding confusion to the second one?)

Paddywack Bogeyman?

I think these cunts need reminding that Martin McGuinness was deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland for 10 years. Hello?

https://cdn-02.independent.ie/incoming/article35355312.ece/6c932/AUTOCROP/w620/Martin%20Mc%2031%202%20INT_ED5_S01%20INT_ED6_S01%20Read-Only.jpg

They don't need reminding really, they just choose to ignore it.

I picked a random book on my kindle last night to cure my insomnia and it turned out to be Eamon Dunphy's The Rocky Road, not the football memoir mentioned upthread but his autobiography. I was quite struck by how perceptive and interesting, politically aware, cliche free etc.. his writing was - no typical footballer is this guy.

If we ever had a c/d thread Dunphy is classic all the way, his Rod Liddle bit is a meme in itself

https://youtu.be/EqjQSk1PQ4o

I'm aware this is not technically the "Ex-pats bristling at the British" thread, but still and all.

“Bó.....a word we can own” according to @NatWest_Help.

Brits....never not at it. pic.twitter.com/PpLGx2xpjB

— Stiabhaí Nics (@stephie08) November 28, 2019

the fuck

xp if it’s not it should be

fucking state of the explanation about the fada as well

Is it worth catching up on the Toy Show?

No

Toy show is horrible. Who is it now anyway that Tubridy creep, makes you nostalgic for even pat Kenny. Toy show has always been fascist spectacle. Seal Donnybrook in a big Ziploc.

Nobody did the Toy Show better than Gay, with his open contempt for the children.

otm.

the fuckin idea that its ever been about the kids, starting at nine pm and running until the drink runs out

it needs a bad santa reset sharpish, some real nasty scummer just going through the billy barry crew for shortcuts

Aren’t like 70% of viewers adults? You’re not getting children doing that application essay for tickets like.

100% of ppl under 30 doing *anything* are there because they were told to be

xp That reads slightly like you need tickets to watch the show.

Adults are in it for the swag, and that includes viewers spitting over what the undeserving audience get

the irish!

It's one of those Irish cultural touchstones that makes me absolutely ill. Sort of downwind of comely maidens. It's state TV that suggests corruption.

is there an irish cultural touchstone youd have positive feelings toward, and i ask with absolute non-zingy interest

No

THE IRISH

Jokes, plenty. Joyce, Beckett. The closest Ireland has to a national project of vergangenheitsbewältigung. What drives me nuts is the manic effort to sentimentalise everything in Irish popular culture. Fucking butter ads. I feel optimistic about Ireland. *About the young.* But there is a national kitsch that threatens to smother almost everything. I probably hate "reeling in the years" more than anything.

I like more blackboard-fingernail trad music than most people but I'm partly hypnotised by how much I dislike it at the same time.

Edna

and the way he might look at you

xp i kinda get that about the trad

also the politics of a good ceidhlin or readoiri would blast the skin off ye

I am probably not the ideal person to respond to this given how I am guaranteed to cry at the Going Back ESB ad from the 80s

we have a thread for this iirc

Just want to put out there that I was the only person in my class in TY to write an essay opposing trad, like to think I’ve improved since then though tbf that class was traumatic

xp sorry I didn’t realise the thread police were on the case

the thread policeman

thread was rly good iirc but is now all broken links ;_;

i went out and researched every criticism of hard times i could find, learned it all off and absolutely tore dickens to shreds in the LC, finished paper 1 with full marks iirc

essays fuelled by dislike are the good stuff

They are, but my teacher was a musician and she made me play Amhrán na bhFiann on the tin whistle every single class because I was our class’s worst player.

I did Portrait of a Young Artist instead of Wuthering Heights, which I hated, and also hated that but it was a way I could work.

mar dhea, a how-do leaving cert i call it where ye had choices but

^ ilxors who have met me will attest that this is the kind of thing i say under my breath a lot

I finished both papers with full marks, but you only get the medals for useful subjects! My friend got one for one of the sciences I think?

mar dhea, a how-do leaving cert i call it where ye had choices but

Lol the nostalgic ad totally summarises the augmentation of Dev hegemony with consumerist realism, such is the shallowness of contemporary Irish culture

we'll always have the anglo-irish idiom, if its all we have

i learned about the brown cow the morning of the paper and i felt it was just the right kind of chancer bullshit that a fella could really hang some quality answers on, god bless ya austie a mhic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiirccLoVkU

xp don’t know what this is so you learned sooner than me

the lost heifer i think i mean

Oh I see. He wasn’t on my syllabus. I was hoping on one of the four poets I did know (Plath, Yeats, Heaney, Bishop) and I had a choice between two I think. High risk strategy cos fuck knows I wasn’t learning Donne or Hopkins.

When the black herds of the rain were grazing,
In the gap of the pure cold wind
And the watery hazes of the hazel
Brought her into my mind,
I thought of the last honey by the water
That no hive can find.

Brightness was drenching through the branches
When she wandered again,
Turning sliver out of dark grasses
Where the skylark had lain,
And her voice coming softly over the meadow
Was the mist becoming rain

what i remember about this: