The Julia Carney Column

Unemployed English Girl to Wed Soldier from Welfare Family

GUTEN MORGEN, meine freunde. Wie geht es lhnen heute? Yes, indeed, it’s time for us all to learn German. And I’d like to say I, for one, welcome our new overlords from Brussels and the IMF. Admittedly, I spent the weekend going through the Phoblacht archive carefully removing any articles that could be seen as being critical of the EU. Some of the stuff around the Lisbon referendum was perhaps a little over the top. But I know now that the EU is our friend, and if I’m not to end up in some sort of politically correct re-education centre, it’s time to mend my ways.

SOMEONE else mending his ways a little bit is Willie O’Dea. Since being diispatched from Cabinet by one Maurice Quinlivan, he’s scratching a living writing columns for the Sunday Independent. Though he prefers to think of “the freedom I gained by being involuntarily released from the bindings of office”.
Truly enormous levels of self-delusion here.
Anyway, the article is headlined, “It’s hard to admit it, but Fianna Fáil’s strategy has gone wrong,” which is true, if a little obvious and still falling short of the grovelling apology we deserve.
But what we have seen in these last few days is an end, for a generation, of any trust people might have in Fianna Fáil on the economy. It’s like Black Wednesday in England in 1992 when the Tories had to pull their currency out of the European exchange rate mechanism. They still haven’t quite recovered their reputation, however ill-deserved, for being able to manage an economy almost 20 years on.
It’ll take a similar length of time for Fianna Fáil to recover from this. Granted, it might be a little shorter because no one can think of Enda Kenny as Taoiseach and not want to curl into a little ball, but for the first time since they became the ‘natural party of government’ in the 1930s, the economic illiterates in Fianna Fáil are exposed for what they are.

RETURNING to Germans, William Windsor Saxe-Coburg Gotha has finally gotten engaged to Kate Middleton after stringing her along for a good eight years. Classy boy. Or as an English online newspaper put it, “Unemployed English Girl to Wed Soldier from Welfare Family”, which has the dual benefit of hilarity and honesty.
The Irish Independent, which devoted a mind-boggling eight pages to the engagement took a slightly more forelock-tugging line, and after a while it just got to be a little too much seeing allegedly hardened hacks going goo-goo over an English royal wedding.
The flatmate Roisín takes a different tack on this, though. While on an intellectual level she’s no fan of the English royal family, conscious as a Cork woman that they are our racial inferiors, another part of her took one look at Middleton in her dress, holding the arm of ‘Big Willie’ (as she is alleged to call her fiancee) with Diana Spencer’s ring on her finger and wished she too could be a princess.
I blame the fairy stories some parents read to us as kids. We’re told about handsome princes and beautiful princesses and we want to be that way.
Where are the republican fairy stories?
Why don’t we hear about Hansel and Gretel meeting Thomas Paine and, after a brisk overview of the evils of hereditary power and wealth, they go on a culling spree with a guillotine?
Instead of being the heroes, we need fairy tales that mark royals of whatever nationality as the villains, put down by all right-thinking people and baked in ovens like witches.
Still, while as republicans we wish nothing but pain, heartache and misery for anyone inbred enough to continue to believe in the concepts of royalty and monarchy, on a personal human level, I hope Kate and William will be very happy together.
And that when MI5 kill her they’ll make it painless.

FINALLY, I had a bit of a brainwave over the last couple of months.
Like any normal person I’m seized by a murderous rage whenever I see a Poppy but modern Irish society frowns on slapping Poppy wearers in the face and tearing them from their jacket. At the same time, giving them a dirty look or ignoring them doesn’t feel like enough of a response.
So I popped in to see Sinn Féin’s fund-raising experts with a suggestion. Next year, we launch the ‘Sinn Féin Poppy Appeal’. The idea is simple. You keep track of the amount of Poppies you see, not counting ones on the telly, X Factor hopefuls or ostentatiously worn by unionist politicians. I’m talking average punters in the street wearing Poppies.
Then, once Poppy season is over, you pay a fiver for each one you saw to your local Sinn Féin cumann. So this year I saw five poppies and my cumann gets €25. In the North it might be a bit more of an expensive proposition, so maybe just a quid there.
It’s a nice way to hit back against British cultural imperialism... and it has the added benefit that you start to avoid places where Poppy wearers might be about.