A Red Baron, a black mood and a whitewash
It saw Romulus slay his brother Remus in 753BC to found the glory that would be Rome; it gave birth in 1509 to Henry VIII who would later unleash religious genocide in these islands; in 1918 it marked the demise of the dreaded Red Baron after he himself had notched up 80 kills in the Great Air War and in 1989 it saw the beginning of the seven-week student occupation of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square which would end in massacre.
And what did it deliver unto history in 2010? Well, Brian Cowen inched ever so slightly towards acknowledging outraged public opinion and murmured the mildest of rebukes in the Dáil against big salaries at the bailed-out banks.
