Back From the Dead (Shop Broken Into)

If something is there, why not steal it? Why invent, create or build something of your own if you can take what another has built from the ground up?

The reason this photograph is small is because its subjects are.

‘Let’s just loot everything and laugh!’

There was a moment or two there in late May when it looked as if the centenary month in celebration of Fianna Fáil and its founding ethos of chicanery and low-dealing would go unmarked, if not unremarked. There have, it is true, been episodes hinting at that tradition for duplicity and mendacity with a wink and a slap on the back. Bertie Ahern had it both ways on Muslims and Sharia Law, and got clean away with the idea that, in slagging off the Congolese, he was really worried about the quality of their accommodation. Next thing he is in Croke Park as an honoured guest of the Islamic Athletic Association. Win(k)!

But none of these was what might be called a spectacular act of dishonesty-with-a-smirk of the kind that has made Fianna Fáil’s reputation what it became. May entered its dying hours, and still no champion emerged of the underhanded arts with which the Soldiers of Destiny had graced our politics and public life for a century, rarely failing to step forward to do a truly indecent thing and walk off laughing and yahooing.

It came down to the final weekend, just three days to go, leaving mere hours in which those momentous events that began at 3.30pm on May 16th 1926, at La Scala Theatre in Dublin, with a speech by Eamon de Valera and free-admission for all, in which the party of all parties launched itself on to the turbulent waves of Irish realpolitik/doublethink. It seemed only riight and appropriate that this moment might be marked in a manner commensurate with the party’s dubious contribution to Irish life, culture and mores.

Up stepped the svelte figure of Sarah Ryan, able and unfussy accomplice/sidekick and/or partner-in-crime of John McGuirk, late of Gript Media, to assist in carrying out the symbolic, ritualistic stroke by which this sterling moment might suitably be signalled and honoured.

The celebratory event or incident needed to be something shady; something dark and even dastardly; something underhanded and foul in every conceivable way. But Sarah Ryan, who acquires her standing in this matter by virtue of being the great-granddaughter of a founding member of Fianna Fáil, who very likely was present at the La Scala meeting, a man who once bore proudly the name of James Ryan, and who begat a son called Eoin Ryan, who carved out a modest career as a Fianna Fáil senator in the 1970s, and who in his turn begat a son also called Eoin Ryan, a strangely decent and likeable man, who served terms as a Fianna Fáil TD for Dublin South East and later as an MEP for Dublin, and in his time would become even better known for being the father of Sarah Ryan, the woman who would outdo all the pantomine villians of a century of skulduggery.

The evidence indicates that all three of the aforementioned Ryan forebears were respectable and honest men, and this had the disadvantage that the record did not in any regard qualify their names to be used to celebrate the sly and underhanded manner of dealing with facts and reality which had become the stock-in-trade of Fianna Fáil in its hundred years of stroking. This required something else, something in keeping with a different kind of Fianna Fáil personality — perhaps along the lines of the ‘ethos’ of John McGuirk, who briefly laboured as a national Ógra (youth) organiser for the party, until required to resign in 2004, arising mysteriously from a leaking of emails, following which he briefly joined the party as an adult member, but was required to resign again in 2007 following another mysterious administrative misunderstanding. As things were developing, it appeared not that McGuirk was so much unqualified to be a representative of FF’s underhanded ethos, but that he may have been somewhat overqualified for such a position. Cometh the moment, cometh the sleaze.

This week McGuirk came into his own, manifesting the FF ethos in a manner calculated to bring a tear to the eye of the Long Fellow, of whom it was once enviously observed that, if he ate nails, ‘he’d shite screws’. With the clock ticking, it must be conceded, the adequate marking of the centenary of FF skullduggery presented quite the challenge, even for someone as twisted and nasty as McGuirk. That was going to require something way beyond the imaginations of such dynasties as the Ryans and the Lemasses and the Lenihans, even the Haugheys, the Burkes or the Flynns. But Sarah and her accomplice, McGuirk, were not lacking in resourcefulness or unscrupulousness, whatever may be said about their creative imaginations.

Determined to continue their cringe-inducing, flesh-crawl-initiating ‘banter’ despite their ejection from Gript Media, they put their minds to targeting and usurping the online platforms of an elderly man, a pensioner, who just three weeks earlier had announced that he was having to suspend all his platforms for the remainder of the summer in order to get appropriate attention and treatment for a serious though as yet undiagnosed illness. What could be more perfect for a couple of FF opportunists? They would simply move, cuckoo-like into the platform this doughty pensioner had created and pretend they had built it themselves.

The title of the platform included the name of the pensioner in question and the word ‘Unchained’, inspired by the Johnny Cash classic, which I invite you to listen to here, by way of a break from this sordid saga:

Ryan and her Highwayman companion saw their chance. Barrelling in like (Pee) Flynn, they appropriated the title, brand, and, to the best of their endeavours, the accumulated audience of the platforms built up by said pensioner, John Waters (for it is I), over a period of slightly less than six years, in the teeth of intimidation, censorship and lawfare, announcing that they were going to launch ‘their own platform’ under the same brand, title and logo as mine, and the usual to the begrudgers. Why not? Isn’t that the modern way? If something is there, why not steal it? Why invent, create or build something of your own if you can take what another has built from the ground up? In other domains, this is known as intellectual property theft, but in Fianna Fáil, the rule is: ‘What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is my own.’ This is the line that most rapidly brings a smirk and a chortle to every set of open-mouthed, toothless, watching FF lips from the stalls at the Árd Fheis. But why not, since all bets are off and everyone else has his head in the trough already? ‘Let’s just loot everything and laugh!’ This was the Fianna Fáil we remembered and relished — the pullers of strokes, the chancers, the hail fellows well met, the cute hoors with the tics and the twitches and the winks that could mean anything or nothing, and the trick was that no one could tell the difference either way.

This is no mean achievement for a woman of delicacy like Sarah Ryan’s, although it came easier to McGuirk, a man of no qualities. Far more significant is the contribrution and gracing aspect provided by his female accompice, who had been passing herself off as a nice girl next door. Here, she has won her stripes and stands, as a consequence of her pluck and nonchalance, as the fairy at the very top of the dung heap that is modern Ireland in the post-plague years, after a century of FF dominance. In her disregard for the fact that she had surrendered herself and her reputation in a moronic moment of vile plagiarism and passing off — to say nothing of daylight burglary — Sarah Ryan extravagantly imported the darkest elements of FF unscrupulousness into the second quarter of the 21st century, and set the bar for success in the century coming as well.

I do not think or mean to suggest that Sarah Ryan’s FF forebears would be proud of her. From everything I know about them — and I once knew her father slightly — they were upright men who would have had no truck with lowlifes like John McGuirk. In any event, such serious men were too solemn and earnest to be invited to participate in the vandalisation of Ireland or its transformation into a gay international disco and gambling casino. Times change and needs must. The gap cried out to be filled, and Sarah Ryan, by helping to conceive and perpetrate what can truly be described as an act of the purest Fianna Fáil crookedness and cunningness, boldly stepped over the corpses of her more reticent forebears to put the stamp of FF fraudulence on the month of its centenary celebration. In doing so, she perpetrated a theft as criminal as if she had broken into a bank and forced open an ATM with a screwdriver, not forgetting to wink at the unsuspecting security official on the way out. Thus, she has taken her rightful place at the very centre of modern Ireland’s metastasisation of evil, the driving dynamic of ‘progress’ in our sad country today.

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While I am here, I’ll give what information I have by way of update on my condition. There isn’t much. I still have no diagnosis, although there is all manner of speculation based on as yet inconclusively analysed blood tests.Some of the speculation is off-the-charts scary, but luckily there are voices of calm who say that blood tests have been known to be wrong. To a high degree, the delays are — predictably — down to the Third World condition of the Irish health services. i did encounter one doctor, a Syrian — one of the calmer observers — who has been conducting a thorough process of elimination, and he hopes to have more concrete information early next week, based on new blood tests he took last Monday. But, right now, I am none the wiser than I was a month ago, on May 1st, when my condition forced me to suspend this platform indefinitely, and cause me to carelessly leave it without a night watchman. I can report some slight signs of recovery, which I put down to the action of an antibiotic prescribed by the Syrian doctor for a non-specific infection he detected in my system. This appears to have prompted some slow improvement. But the word from everyone, calm and otherwise, is that this may be peripheral to the overall story.