Cute Kerry boys will always take some beating

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

‘Kerry urges Nigeria to respect human rights as it pursues Islamist militants’ exclaimed the headline on the report by Associated Press – well, the Skibbereen Eagle keeping an eye on Moscow is one thing, but now the boys in the Kingdom look to have taken this responsibility as the global guard dog to a whole new level.

The Kerry in question of course was John, the US Secretary of State – although the yapping puppy that is Pat Spillane would undoubtedly have had a few words for the Nigerian half-back line if someone threw a few bob his way to say it.

And Kerry wasn’t the most bizarre name in this AP report, because the former Presidential candidate was directing his comments at Nigeria’s President – the wonderfully titled Goodluck Jonathan, who is indeed a person as opposed to a farewell greeting.

And in truth the Nigerian situation is nothing to make fun of, because they are responsible for gross violations of human rights over the last three years, including executions and kidnapping – particularly along their shared border with Sudan.

Still, it didn’t come as a complete shock that Kerry – the county – would have proffered some opinion on the state of the world, given that they do come across as a sort of superior race.

Maybe it’s the battle for supremacy with their near-neighbours across the county bounds in Cork, a tribe not renowned as a bouquet of shrinking violets in their own right – truly there is no place for the retiring types in the battle between the Kingdom and the Real Capital of Ireland.

But whatever the claims of the Rebel County, the cutest crowd of all are in Kerry – unless the Kerry you’re talking about is Kerry Katona, where you’d need a microscope to find signs of intelligent life – and they see it not so much as a subject for debate but as a birthright.

Perhaps it’s down to their footballing successes of the Seventies and Eighties, when they swept all before them and we loved them because they could beat Dublin. But there are times that it looks like Spillane, in particular, still thinks those days are ongoing.

The reality is that there’s a whole generation tuning into The Sunday Game who never saw him play, and they possibly think this is some forum for angry grey-haired men to spout on about the first thing that comes into their heads.

In fairness to Spillane, he comes across as just stark raving mad – not the sneering, nasty piece of work that Joe Brolly portrays, as he fillets some other poor soul before the eyes of the nation.

Pat, of course, is now the new Jobs Tsar for rural Ireland, which isn’t a bad move given that he can hold down any number of them himself, and all at the same time.

But, once Spillane starts spouting, what are the chances that foreign industrialists won’t quietly excuse themselves to go to the bathroom and make their escape from the tiny window over the cistern?

There must be a job spec for sports analysts somewhere in the bowels of RTÉ that insists they are at least semi-lunatics – what else could explain the continued presence of Spillane, Brolly, Hook and Dunphy on the small screen?

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.