Radical Galway politician got Ché Guevara inkwork in Cuba!

Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

A grey-haired, young-at-heart, left-wing revolutionary male politician in his sixties, with connections to the Labour Party and Galway, visited that socialist bastion, Cuba, recently and got a tattoo of Ché Guevara on his arm.

We sh*t you not.

Now, before you start writing letters to Áras and Uachtaráin, wondering if President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins has completely lost the plot, and is experiencing a mid-to-late-life crisis, it’s not him.

Though Mickey D fits the description of the tattooed tourist, he wasn’t the only one who visited Cuba in February.

Step forward one of El Presidente’s best buddies, City Councillor Billy Cameron: The 61-Years-Old Man with the New Ché Guevara Tattoo.

Comrade Cameron, who is the elder statesman of Labour in Galway West, now that Michael D is resident in Phoenix Park, has only gone and got himself inkwork on his left shoulder – it would have to be left, wouldn’t it? – while in Cuba.

The Bould Billy, whose day job includes selling stamps at the post office in Newcastle, has always had a soft-spot for Ernesto ‘Ché’ Guevara, an Argentinian Marxist revolutionary.

Sure, the radical postie even proposed the erection of a statue to Ché Guevara in Galway City, the home of his ancestors. But that idea was shot down by conservative Council colleagues in 2012.

Just over four years later, Comrade Cameron has got his permanent monument to the guerrilla leader but it’s stuck to his body rather than the city’s streetscape.

Comrade Cameron is a fan of body art – he apparently already has two other tattoos on his skin. One is of a red rose, his party’s emblem. That is on his neck, and so he can’t see it – it is visible only from behind . . . but let’s not go there.

The other is of Scottish soccer club, Glasgow Celtic FC, which he says is on his right shoulder. If he ever leaves Labour, the Shinners would welcome him with open arms.

But back to the new ink. Comrade Cameron, in a personal capacity, took a holiday in Cuba, to coincide with Micky D’s State visit to the land of cheap cigars and Castros.

Billy tells us he always wanted a tattoo of Ché Guevara, and he fulfilled that dream. But the question on everyone’s lips is: did Michael D get one, too?

“Dya know what,” said Billy, “I didn’t ask him. Maybe he got one of Raul!”

Now there’s a thought: Mickey D panned out, face down on a tattoo table in a back-street Havana studio with an artist pricking needles into his flesh, to ink an icon of his Cuban counterpart, and brother of Fidel, on a part of his body where the sun doesn’t shine.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.