It Occurs To Me: A light-hearted look at 2024 - Part 1

                                                    The McLarnon: 1968  (January 2024)

I so enjoyed Peter Campbell’s feature on St Eunan's College’s first McLarnon Cup win in 1968 when they defeated St Malachy's, Belfast 3-10 to 2-5. I remember the day vividly, travelling from the college to Dungannon on the bus, hoping for a win, but just as crucially, buying a few packets of Spangles and other northern goodies. 

When Hughie McClafferty scored one of the three goals, (Enda Bonner scored the other two)  I cheered enthusiastically to see a Downings man hammer the back of the net. As I’ve written here before, Hughie and Martin Carney were two of the greatest footballers I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing, and to think that Martin broke through to the Senior team in Year 3. Looking at the photo on this page, I can recall each player with great clarity and I was equally proud of the Mc Intyre/Glen connection at the time. 

Martin Carney played in St Eunan's College’s first McLarnon Cup win in 1968 

Funny what sticks in your mind…we were only winning 0-4 to 0-2 art half time and it was very tense. Chas Maloney from Ardara was beside me on the sideline and was having palpitations. I foolishly raised his blood pressure by asking him some nonsensical question about how it might pan out in the second half and he turned to me with eyes blazing: “Will ye shut the f…k up, you silly wee bastard!”

On the bus back, I gave him two Spangles to suck and they did the trick. 

                                             Joke of the week  (February 2024)

I met an old friend in Cavan whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. Although I haven't grown in the few decades since we last met, he exclaimed: “Jasus Galligan…what are they feedin’ you in Donegal? The height of you! You could ate hay out of a loft!”

                        Poor politicians, the craythurs! (March 2024)

“Ah poor Leo, the craythur!” was one reaction last week from a lifelong Fianna Fail supporter, whose heart is so magnanimous, that everybody who bows out of politics gets equal sympathy. Many years ago, when Bertie Ahern got in a wee bit of bother about having no bank account and keeping the spondulicks in the wardrobe, the reaction was the same…”Ah poor Bertie, the craythur!” Although she’s no fan of Sinn Féin, when Mary Lou was discharged from hospital after an operation, she too got the ‘poor craythur’ treatment. There’s a bit of that old Irish ‘dacency’ left, thank God, but with the advent of social media and the angry keyboard warriors, it is fast fading. 

READ NEXT: Tributes paid to ‘true musical legend’ Dinny McLaughlin

The late Enoch Powell famously said: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” Was Leo “cut off in midstream at a happy juncture”? I don’t think so. One of Donegal’s most successful and wealthy businessmen, once famously jacked in his secondary education by marching out of his school and with a parting shot, promised: “F..k this for a game of soldiers, I’m away to make a lock of pound!” And he did. Leo more or less conceded: “F..k this for a game of soldiers, I’m just away!” In a fit of excitement, a lifelong Fine Gaeler rang me last week and with no sense of irony, announced breathlessly: “Jasus Galligan! Did you hear? Leo has abdicated!” I said I’d heard that he’s resigned but understood that abdication only applied to Kings and Queens, but when I read of the ‘coronation’ of Simon Harris in Athlone, I thought to myself…”Are they in Government so long that there is now a sense of Royal entitlement?” It won’t wash on the doorsteps during an election!

In Athlone, Simon Harris said “...the party stands for law and order, on the side of An Garda Síochána, where our streets are safe and crime is never allowed go unchecked”. Ah hello! Remember Helen McNamee’s walkabout in Dublin after the ‘law and disorder’ riots? In fairness, he also talked of a ‘reset’, something which Fine Gael badly needs, particularly in rural Ireland. So, good luck to him, but why am I confident that the day after the count in the next election, my very Christian Soldier of Destiny will be in contact again and uttering the immortal words: “Ah poor Simon, the craythur!”

                       There’s a great livin’ in dyin’!  (April 2024)

Coincidentally, I hit a pothole myself last week which shredded a front tire. When I was getting it replaced, another customer told me a lovely yarn about a relative of his who died in Cavan, and when the deceased’s wife got the bill for the funeral, she wasn’t happy. She accosted the undertaker: “That’s shockin’ ‘deah’ for an ould burial!” to which the laconic undertaker replied: “It’s the cost of livin’!”                                        

                                         Simon motoring nicely!

Wasn’t Simon Harris in great form at the Fine Gael Ard Fheis? God, such excitement! I don’t know whether he operates on petrol or diesel, but if it’s electric, the FG’ers must have tethered him to every charging point in Galway! 

                                                        Rock n’roll?

A local news station was interviewing an 80-year-old lady because she had just gotten married – for the fourth time. The interviewer asked her questions about her life, about what it felt like to be marrying again at 80, and then about her new husband’s occupation.

“He’s a funeral director,” she answered. “Interesting,” the newsman thought. He then asked her if she wouldn’t mind telling him a little about her first three husbands and what they did for a living. She paused for a few moments, needing time to reflect on all those years. After a short time, a smile came to her face and she answered proudly, explaining that she’d first married a banker when she was in her early 20s, then a circus ringmaster when in her 40s, later on a preacher when in her 60s, and now in her 80s, a funeral director.

The interviewer looked at her, quite astonished, and asked why she had married four men with such diverse careers.

She smiled and explained, “I married one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and four to go.”                                                          

                                        Mind your language!

I love this yarn from the US and it should be compulsory reading for fans of The Orange Menace, who may be the next President…God help us! (He is! We’re doomed!).

There's a queue outside an ATM and a woman is speaking on her mobile phone in a different language than the white man behind her. After she hangs up, the redneck says:  “I didn’t want to say anything while you were on the phone, but you’re in America now. You need to speak English.”

Woman: “Excuse me?”

Redneck: “If you want to speak Mexican, go back to Mexico. In America, we speak English.”

Woman: “Sir, I was speaking Navajo. If you want to speak English, go back to England.”

                               Liz Truss…another craythur!  (May 2024)

Staying with mad Tories, if you want a good laugh, may I recommend Liz Truss’s autobiography, ‘Ten Years to Save the West’ She should have named it ‘Seven Weeks to Make a Balls’. Anyone who says without any trace of irony, “Despite now being one of the most photographed people in the country, I had to organise my own hair and makeup appointments.” was destined for humiliation. When the Queen dies, she cracks up (not out of grief) and utters the immortal whinge: “In a state of shock, I found myself thinking: Why me? Why now?” How inconsiderate of poor Elizabeth to pass away while the other Liz tries desperately to get through to her beautician. According to the shortest lived PM on record, her pay was sh…e and her living quarters at No 10 would not “be rated well on Airbnb”, and was “infested with fleas”, thanks to Boris Johnson’s dog! More moans about the chimes of the clock on Horse Guards keeping her awake at night…I wonder did they go Tik Tok? 

Compared to Jacob Rees-Smug, Trussy pants is genuinely, if unintentionally, funny. Compared to most of us, they’re both ‘bun as cionn’.

         Dinny White Harra RIP:  The Choctaws and the Shandrums

I was re-reading a great interview with Dinny 'White Harra' McLaughlin by Martin McGinley, written some ten years ago, and was reminded of my own chat with the great fiddler in Radio Foyle many years before on the same programme in which Gary White Deer of the Choctaw tribe was my special guest. Midway through the Irish Famine (1845–1849), a group of Choctaws collected $710 and sent it to help the starving here. It had been just 16 years since the Choctaw people had experienced the Trail of Tears, and they had faced starvation ... It was an amazing gesture.

Dinny McLaughlin was better known in his native Inishowen as Dinny White Harra

By today's standards, it might be a million dollars, according to Judy Allen, editor of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma's newspaper. To mark the 150th anniversary, eight Irish people retraced the Choctaw’s Trail of Tears and Gary White Deer did the Famine walk from Doolough to Louisburgh in Mayo, which is why I was interviewing him that year. Anyway, during my chat with Dinny – in which he was hugely entertaining – I mentioned that he was better known in his native Inishowen as Dinny White Harra.

I thought nothing more of it till a wee Derry man collared me later and said how fascinated he had been by Gary White Deer but did I know what tribe Dinny White Harra belonged to? “The Shandrums,” says I (Dinny comes from Shandrum in Buncrana) to which he responded: “Jaysus…I thought he sounded local!”