The jailing of Andy Heasman on Friday exposes the consequences of a series of seismic shifts in the way Ireland is governed, administered and controlled under the heading of Freedom.
It was good to see a bit of normal, intelligent humour in the quote from 2010, 'He told the judge: ‘I just said “ah for fuck’s sake”, I didn't say scumbag. I wouldn't use language like that in front of a child.’ Cheered me up. But then, just 10 years later, everything got darker and darker, Kafkaesque, as we moved towards the revelation that, after his political trial, innocent Andy was imprisoned for saying 'fucking'. In the UK you can now get ten years in jail for lying about where you spent your holidays in order to avoid being sent to a detention centre (euphemistically referred to as a quarantine hotel). If that isn't bad enough, we now discover that in Ireland using the commonly-used adjective 'fucking' to show how strongly you feel is regarded as grounds for jailing you.
It was good to see a bit of normal, intelligent humour in the quote from 2010, 'He told the judge: ‘I just said “ah for fuck’s sake”, I didn't say scumbag. I wouldn't use language like that in front of a child.’ Cheered me up. But then, just 10 years later, everything got darker and darker, Kafkaesque, as we moved towards the revelation that, after his political trial, innocent Andy was imprisoned for saying 'fucking'. In the UK you can now get ten years in jail for lying about where you spent your holidays in order to avoid being sent to a detention centre (euphemistically referred to as a quarantine hotel). If that isn't bad enough, we now discover that in Ireland using the commonly-used adjective 'fucking' to show how strongly you feel is regarded as grounds for jailing you.