BULLET-PROOF

There’s armoured cars and tanks and guns but did this guy think that wearing a Tyrone GAA All-Ireland winners’ jersey was enough to deter even the most aggressive enemy in the Georgia/Russia conflict, or is he just on his way to Croke Park?

Parish pump politics

THE British Conservative Party – which is rebuilding links with the Ulster Unionist Party  – has removed a posting on its official website by “a senior party member” in the Six Counties. The statement described the Orange Order as “a backward-facing, history-obsessed, parish pump society”.
Maybe the poster wants to add that the Orange Order is a BIGOTED, backward-facing, history-obsessed, parish pump society.

James Connolly’s schooldays

BACK TO SCHOOL looms but parents will be hoping they don’t get the same reception that James Connolly got back in 1911 when he was physically attacked in Cobh, County Cork, when he called for free school meals.
Sinn Féin Councillor Kieran McCarthy has had a motion unanimously passed by Cobh Town Council to issue a posthumous apology to the 1916 Easter Rising leader.
Let’s hope the lesson is not lost on Cork TD and Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe who wants to bring back college fees.

UDA snap handbagged

WHEN visual artist Jane Talbot took photos of her red handbag in various interesting locations she didn’t see the row brewing over one image in her exhibition at a Galway coffee shop.
Jane Talbot took snaps of her handbag at sites in Dublin, Cuba and New York but it was her picture of her bag placed at the corner of a mural dedicated to the UDA/UFF death squads in Sandy Row, south Belfast, that had customers at the Mocha Bean coffee shop boiling during the Earwig Tuam Arts Festival.
The manager got such a handbagging from upset customers that the picture was removed after a week.
A nonplussed artist declared: “I honestly don’t know what got up the noses of the customers in the coffee shop.”
Maybe the subtle placement of a handbag barely noticeable in a mural glorifying a pro-British, sectarian murder gang wasn’t totally to the taste of an Irish public less-discerning than a talented artist, Ms Talbot. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Torture at Chelsea

MY near neighbour, Matt Treacy, will most likely eschew the Anglo-Saxon soccer league’s new season. Therefore it is my revolutionary duty to remind any glory hunters (and former editors of this esteemed organ) delighted with Chelsea’s 4-0 drubbing of Portsmouth in their opening game of the Premier League that there is a dark shadow hanging over their team’s dressing room. Their manager: ‘Big Phil’ Scolari.
The Brazilian-born Gene Hackman lookalike is a bit of an oddball and has what charitable observers might call ‘a colourful past’.
He once said of the murderous fascist dictator of Chile, General Pinochet:
“Pinochet tortured a lot but there is no illiteracy in Chile.”
Next week: Phil Scolari says, ‘Fred West murdered many women but he kept a tidy house.’