There were always rebels and rebellions...
Hello again. Maybe it would not be a bad idea to forget about turkey stuffing and jingling bells for a while, and apply yourselves instead to a surprising pure Irish historical reality. OK?
Ye need a diversion anyway and it is to be found here as always for you faithful regular readers.
I doubt if even the most fractious of you, and the best informed on political matters, will be able to take factual issue with what follows here, as we trudge down the centuries that have shaped our lives and times.
Accordingly, I attach my aging right auricle to perhaps the sharpest side of my tongue, which often tries to adhere to my left cheek, as I state that beyond reasonable doubt, even the ferocious raiding Vikings, in their era, failed to impose themselves on the Irish race, only being able to control a narrow coastal strip we know as the Pale.
Centuries later Cromwell attacked us fiercely but still failed to subdue the natives.
King William of Orange might have won the affray at the Boyne but he, too, never beat us down afterwards.
There were always rebels and rebellions. The dreadful Black and Tans, in their time, failed too and generated the fighting that created the Irish Free State in jig time, and our independence across three of the Four Green Fields ever since.
Is that again not a fragment of the pure truth?
Now, consider the incredible achievements of Minister Shane Ross in the modern era. Without firing a single shot from a Mauser or rifle of any kind, in just a few years in Leinster House, Minister Ross has taken total control of all rural Ireland outside the old Pale.
His policies, especially in relation to driving habits on what were once busy country roads, have saved thousands of country lives, maybe including yours and mine.
We need to retain our driving licenses to continue to exist in some fashion in rural Ireland, and the strict new Ross regulations, especially in relation to drinking and driving, or, more recently, increased penalties for speeding offences, means, quite properly I’m certain, in the interests of all country citizens, that the majority of our roads are eerily almost empty, especially once the business day is over.
And that is not the half of Minister Ross’s almighty success in putting manners on us rural dwellers. A lateral development due to our fear of losing personal transport, has led to the closure in recent years of hundreds of country public houses all along the Wild Atlantic Way and beyond.
Those were the pubs where we peasants were wont to congregate, sing rebel songs, drink far too many pints of porter for our own good, and loudly complain about government policies, especially in relation to prices for farm produce like beef and lamb and, indeed, seasonal flocks of turkeys and geese.
Nowadays, as you travel (carefully and soberly, for God’s sake) through the countryside, everywhere the For Sale signage swings and rusts outside the shuttered frontages of the pubs which, even up to the recent past, were the arenas in which our rebellions against political bosses frothed over the pints along the bar.
Is that not once again a folkloric class of a fragment of the purest of truths?
The lads who used to line up along the bars of the isolated country pubs, now trading no more, are not grateful enough, in many cases, to the farsighted Shane Ross’s tactics which have certainly saved many of their lives and certainly their driving licenses for cars, tractors, and farm machinery.
I’ve heard critics of the current policies suggesting that a significant percentage of those lads, afraid to venture out to the pubs as of yore, now are sitting at home, often alone and lonesome and depressed in themselves and drinking far more alcohol bought in slabs in supermarkets and off-licenses in the nearest large town, than they would ever have downed in what used to be their country pub, now closed a mile or two down the twisty back roads of the parish.
I’ve even heard it suggested forcefully enough that the statistics of the sharply reduced road fatality figures achieved by Shane Ross could also be related by somebody smarter than me to an apparently rising level of rural suicide rates amongst such decent folk.
Judge for yourselves.
There will always be critics out there. For myself, with my tongue still trying to adhere to my cheek, I would like to thank the mighty rural ruler for saving my driving license to date, and maybe even my life, on motorways that seem to get faster as I get slower, and for quietly succeeding in achieving the feat which defeated King William of Orange, Cromwell in his day, and the Black and Tans. Maybe that is the pure truth.
Ye can return now to getting the turkey ready for the big day or hanging up the Christmas lights and the tinsel decorations. I’m away to the pub for the rest of the night.
