Double Vision
What freedoms do we still have in this ‘free world’?
Double Vision with Charlie Adley
Don’t get me wrong – I’m very grateful to have the freedom to write this: to have my complaints about the government and the ills of western society published in a newspaper and then go to bed, without fear of police coming to take me away in the night.
No, they’ll come and arrest me first thing in the morning, six of them. That seems to be current protocol in Ireland, or at least it has been recently, for Irish politicians who dare to protest.
I’m not a hot-blooded teenager any more. In my youth I saw the world in black and white. ‘This’ was all wrong and ‘that’ was completely right, and anyone who failed to see the same truths as me bore the brunt of my anger.
One attitude that annoyed me more than anything else back then was the patronising tap on the head, followed by the assertion:
“You’ll grow out of it! Of course you feel like that now, but when you’re a bit older, we’ll see how you feel then, eh?”
Well hello! Here I am! There’s a lot more years behind me than I’ll ever have in front of me, but my ideals are still intact. Of course they’re tempered by a cynicism born out of decades of experience, but you’ll never take away my dreams.
If you give up on your dreams, they cease to exist.
These days I know why things happen when they shouldn’t, and why they don’t when they should, but that makes neither wrong right, nor me happy.
I’m just back from England where we celebrated my lovely Mum’s 86th birthday. Politics always has a place at our family’s dinner table, and there was much talk of the situation in Greece.
Londoners completely fail to understand how life is for people living in EU bailout countries. They repeatedly told me how Ireland is okay now; that it’s the southern European countries that have the problem.
I suggested that there’s more to life than growth in GDP. Unemployment statistics will never reveal the deep sense of injustice and anger we feel at having to pay off debts incurred by greedy speculators.
“Ah, but if you borrow money, you have to pay it back!” my family reminded me, ignorant of the fact that down on the street, we didn’t see a penny of those bailout billions.
While they mocked the naivety of Greek PM Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza government, I wondered what on earth has happened to democracy? What is the point in voting if the wishes of the vast majority are utterly dismissed, just so that Angela Merkel, Mario Draghi and Christine Lagarde are happy?
It seems to me that we the people are no longer served by the economy, but ruled by it. Europeans are no longer served by governments, but by the Troika and Free Market pirates. While democratically-elected politicians in Greece are being bullied by the ECB and intimidated by the EU, hypocrites like Enda Kenny talk pompously about how the Greeks should follow the Irish model.
Which model is that, Enda? Protect rampantly avaricious gamblers by screwing over the weakest, the ill, the young, the old and the disabled?
The Troika has gone to war with the poorest people of Europe, and now the people of Greece and Spain are demanding to be more important than the economy.
Our financial reality is that we the people are now irrelevant.
To read all of this article, please get this week’s Galway City Tribune.
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
The crowds that flocked into the centre of Dublin last weekend provided the clearest indication yet that, thank God, a cure had been found for Covid.
The masses dancing and hugging on the streets was vindication that all of the self-isolation had been well worth it, when you could now congregate as close as you like to each other, to your little heart’s content.
Or so you’d think.
One weekend of slightly relaxed licencing laws was all it took, and in the blink of an eye thousands of revellers were up and at it like this was Paris in 1945 after it was freed from the Germans.
The newly-imposed regulations for relaxation would suggest that all of these bouncy people at least had the benefit of a nine-euro meal inside them – how else could they get served?
So, we’d better brace ourselves for when they go out on an empty stomach.
Much has already been made of the fact that pub life will never be the same again – and that might well be the case.
Social distancing is bad news for the publicans, limiting their ability to wedge the entire student population of NUIG and GMIT into the equivalent of a phone box.
But it’s great news for curmudgeons – particularly for those whose capacity for imbibing alcohol is shot.
Advancing middle age has seen the tolerance of the early twenties reduced from the equivalent of a sizeable plastic bucket to an amount that once wouldn’t have even pass the standard definition of being out.
Three pints? That’s what you’d order when they rang the bell at closing time.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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Double Vision with Charlie Adley
More than any other time of the year, when we sit around our dinner tables on Christmas Day, we are aware of who is there and who is not. At the age of 17, having performed impressive acrobatics with my Yamaha 250, a saloon car, a ditch and a barbed wire fence, I spent six weeks in hospital over Christmas and New Year.
My femur was snapped in two, which is no mean feat with thighs like mine, and my tibia had a crack or two as well.
Bed-bound, with my leg in traction, I developed a bronchial chest infection after an emergency operation.
Every two seconds for six weeks I coughed in hacking spasms, thus shaking my smashed leg, which was hung in a sling, supported by a metal pole they had driven through me, just below the knee.
Suffice to say I came to terms with pain.
In our part of the ward, there were four beds and three bikers with broken bones.
There was Kev, who had fallen off his sleek and mean Suzuki GT750 (a two stroke 3-into-1, since you ask), and opposite us two was brick shithouse Yorkshireman Gary, ex-SAS, and mighty embarrassed, having survived several covert tours of duty in Northern Ireland, to have to admit to falling off a Honda 125.
Compared to the other patients in the hospital the three of us were well off.
We were not sick. We’d had our operations, and apart from antibiotics for wounds, and pain killers for broken bones, we needed very little medical attention.
We were young, male, bored, and allowed to drink beer. Naturally, we tried to attract the attention of the student nurses as much as possible, and equally, they were happy to have a bit of a laugh with lads who were not ill, physically, at least!
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Double Vision with Charlie Adley
Saying “I love newspapers!” feels these days like buying a ticket for the next David Bowie gig, but I do: I love them. When I read a newspaper, I’m not a slave to the algorithm. Were I ten years younger, I’d read all my news online, on apps that I’ve set to my personal preferences.
Even when I visit media sites I’ve never been to before, there are cookies and bots and gordknowswot working away to offer me more of what the algorithms think I want.
Every link off each page is tailored to please me, but that’s no good.
I don’t want to be fed things that only fit into my areas of interest and opinion.
Sitting at my living room table, mug of tea and two slices of toast (peanut butter, since you ask), and a paper – any paper – open in front of me, I can see the full wonder and horror of the world, as interpreted by The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Irish Times or Daily Mirror.
As I browse into the heart of the paper, far from major news items, I let my eyesight fall all over the place, because each page is full of varied items, and, here on page 14, I’ll find the big story that’s being buried: the story they have to report, but are under instruction to dampen down.
Also here are stories that no algorithm-driven link would ever lead me to. Quirky little tales, able to dissolve an adult brain in seconds.
When driven sufficiently doolally by what I’m reading, I tear that particular piece of madness out of the newspaper, placing it on top of the wobbly towering stack of other torn madnesses by my desk.
There are dark torn madnesses and fearsome ones, but today I’m in the mood to prowl the ones that force me to furrow my brow, gasp for breath, pout my lips and grunt “What the -?” at the universe.
Notes are seeds, from which every writer will grow different fruit. When that writer is working for the Daily Mail, the fruit need bear only minuscule relation to the seed.
To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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