No need for wait – it’s time for the 2015 DV Awards!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Take a deep breath, tuck in your tummy and prepare yourself. Unique and exclusive, daringly incomplete and utterly subjective, it’s time for the one and only awards show worth the paper it’s printed on.

Dwarlinks, luvees, welcome to the 2015 DV Awards!

Let’s get this party started with the Leo Varadker DV for Being Proud to Show Pride in Ireland which this year goes to … you! My heart filled with pride for Ireland back in May (which is odd because I’m English) when the people of this country became the world’s first to grant equal marriage rights to all. First a senior Cabinet Minister came out to the nation and then a plebiscite proved Ireland has moved into the modern world.

The devil lurks in the details though. A transgender friend of mine often complains about being included in the LGBT acronym, as she’s neither bisexual nor homosexual. A woman born into a man’s body, she wants to sleep with men, as any straight women might.

On the international front we had hypocrisy, hubris and a heck of a hullabaloo as democracy was killed in its birthplace. The Greeks voted in vast numbers for Syriza to govern them, but the the Germans told the EU (created to keep the peace and make sure neither Germany nor anyone else got out of hand and tried to rule Europe) that they didn’t care how the Greeks voted. The Greeks would do as they were bloody told. In an unfriendly match played regularly over the last 100 years, the final score was Germany 1 Democracy 0.

That situation’s far too serious to win a precious DV, so instead it goes to plucky idealistic cheeky buggers Syriza, who take home the Michael Lowry DV for Brazen Shamelessness for claiming the moral high ground by simultaneously looking for financial reparations for Nazi war crimes committed in Greece while reneging on debt payments to Germany.

Back home the Electronic Voting Machines DV for Excessive Waste of Public Funds goes to Eircode, those letters and numbers that each house now has, yet nobody uses because they are, frankly, useless. Apart from helping Irish Water to send you a bill, they fail almost entirely as a form of postcode. My ears were soiled by the sound of Alan Kelly on the radio claiming the system was ambulance-ready, followed by the Head of the Ambulance Service saying it was not in any way ready.

Why do they take us for such fools?

To read Charlie’s column in full, see this week’s Galway City Tribune.