It Occurs To Me: A kick in the Áras!

Director of elections for FF, and blue-eyed boy, Jack Chambers, has been shown to have feet of clay of late. As the Indo put it: “Fianna Fáil heir apparent Jack Chambers oversaw a campaign of public fiascos – there will be questions to answer.”
In the great western, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Fletcher (the baddie!) says: “There’s another old saying, Senator: Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.”

That’s what Chambers brutally did to Gavin, when throwing him under the bus.
And it’s not just the Jim Gavin balls-up…admittedly the budget was a coalition job, but Jack and Paschal managed to contrive a mixum-gatherum that certainly benefits you if you’re a landlord, construction developer or a fast-food guru.

The middle has been badly squeezed again, and it may be this anger which pushes Catherine Connolly over the Áras line.
As for the Heather Humphries campaign, Ivan Yates encouraging it to “Smear the bejaysus out of them!” is not only unhelpful, but crass in the extreme. Meanwhile, Heather slammed Joe Brolly’s “misogynistic” gesture on his podcast.

“I will stand up for mná na hÉireann against that type of intimidation,” she said, as he belatedly apologised for “childish, crude, and inappropriate gesture.”

Let’s be brutal here…this attention-seeking buck eejit mimicked oral sex in his since-deleted podcast video clip. Another aspect of the anti-Heather campaign which I do find disturbing are the social media digs because of her religion and background.

‘Jack Chambers, has been shown to have feet of clay’

As UCD historian Edward Burke said: “But what can associations a century or a century and a half ago tell us about a presidential candidate in 2025? Firstly, if we are to live in a ‘shared island’ that respects ‘green’, ‘orange’ and many other traditions and cultures, these so-called ‘gotcha’ moments in a Border county over alleged membership of the Orange Order decades ago should be self-evidently inappropriate. We can’t have a situation in Ireland where we talk about respect for traditions, a ‘shared island’ – and then launch a witch-hunt against a presidential candidate because her husband may have belonged to one of those traditions.”

It’s definitely the silly season. Cork North-Central TD Pádraig O’Sullivan declared: “I committed to a Fianna Fáil candidate. A Fianna Fáil candidate might not be in the race technically, but he’s on the ballot paper, and I’ll be voting for a Fianna Fáil candidate. I’ll be voting for Jim Gavin, and I don’t care what that looks like.”

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Longford Fianna Fáil senator Joe Flaherty told Shannonside radio station last week: “The unfortunate irony of it is that Jim Gavin is still on the ballot paper. And alongside his name is Fianna Fáil. So I’ll be voting for Jim Gavin. If Jim Gavin was still in the field, I would have still been voting for Jim Gavin. And as a Fianna Fáil man, and with a clear conscience, I’ll still be voting for Jim Gavin.”

Joe was a former newspaper editor…I thought he had a bit more wit! Mind you, he only had one term as a TD so voters were clearly not impressed either.

There is a lot of anger in the country…that will manifest itself loudly in the ballot box.

Surviving and forgiving
I had the privilege of meeting the late Jim Dixon many years ago. I mean “privilege” literally as he was a tremendously determined and courageous individual who had suffered horrific injuries in the Enniskillen Cenotaph bomb in November 1987.
Jim was laid to rest last week.

As he told the Belfast Telegraph in 2009: “I suffer horrendously every day, life is a living hell for me. My skull was fractured in a number of areas. My eyes were sitting down on my cheeks when the doctors found me. They had to put my eyes back into place. My mouth was blown out. My jaw was missing on the right-hand side. I was split open nine inches from my chin to my ear. My face and tongue were paralysed. I had nine broken ribs. My pelvis, two hips and one leg were smashed. Three surgeons told me I wouldn’t live. It’s a miracle I survived.

“The time I spent in hospital was horrendous. I was in intensive care for a very long time.”
His wife Anna was also caught up in the bomb: “She was off her feet and she was blackened all over,” Jim recalled. “It was nothing too serious, but the trauma was bad enough.”

At the time, we thought Enniskillen was a turning point but there was no ceasefire until 1994 and then, the horrific Omagh bomb in August 1998, which was the ultimate gamechanger.

Jim Dixon said: “I heard the news and knew that I had to be in Omagh. So I went down there that night and spent two and a half hours, and then also went on Sunday afternoon. Obviously I have a certain understanding of what the people in the hospital were going through. They were in shock, hurt and bewildered. I just told them to talk, talk, and talk. I won’t pretend it’s going to be easy for them, you can rebuild the body, but you can’t do that so easily to the mind. At Enniskillen we were told that if we just forgive the bombers, that will somehow help. But forgiveness is a gift you cannot give to someone who does not have repentance, and I don’t think it does make it better.”

Jim Dixon was originally from Clones, Ronnie Hill from Bray and Gordon Wilson came from Leitrim…suffering knows no borders.
Who could forget this from Gordon about his daughter Marie: “She said, [Daddy, I love you very much.] Those were her exact words to me, and those were the last words I ever heard her say. But I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge.”
Like Jim Dixon, Stephen Ross suffered horrific injuries: he was buried under the rubble, all of his facial bones were broken, the roof of his mouth was split open, he lost most of his front teeth, his left leg was broken in several places and his left foot was snapped in half.

After being airlifted to Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry he underwent a 4½-hour operation before being moved to intensive care for the first week. There he was located beside Jim Dixon, and his headmaster, Ronnie Hill, who would spend 13 years in a coma after he was hit by a wall during the attack – he died in 2000.

In an interview with Rodney Edwards in the Irish Times eight years ago, he recalled: “My facial bones were wired together in a metal cage which meant that I could not eat for 5½ weeks. My body weight dropped from 9½ stone to five stone. My chest hurt so much from being on a respirator for a week. Those first few days were the most difficult. I remember Mr Hill lapsing into a coma and Jim Dixon, who was in so much pain, pleading with the nursing staff to let him die. I had no knowledge until a week later of how many good people had died that day.”

“Forgiveness is like a key that opens a locked door,” he added.

The Nobel Peace Prize
Trump’s hatred of Barack Obama knows no bounds, in particular the former president winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”.

In 2018, Trump told his first-term cabinet he deserved the honour. As Time reported: “That was also the same year that it was disclosed that two nominations for Trump were forgeries. In June, he told reporters near his golf club in New Jersey that he “should’ve gotten it four or five times”. In September, he told the United Nations that he deserved the win. And a week later, he told generals and admirals summoned to Washington for a pep rally that denying him the prize would be “a big insult to our country”.

If this grievance feels familiar, there is a good reason: it’s a mirror image of his perceived slights from the Emmys. Trump never got over his zero wins for his turn as the host of The Apprentice. And for someone who awards himself club championships at golf courses he owns and prints fake covers of Time, the self-promotion is to be expected. As Time concluded: “But a Nobel Prize is in its own league. And unlike other trinkets that Trump secured through bravado and bluster, the international panel did not bend. No amount of bullying could buy Trump a prize for peace, an irony lost only on the President.”

In any event, whether it is the Donegal Person of the Year or a Nobel Prize, canvassing should always disqualify. Ah well, there’s some consolation for Trump…the runner-up award is the Nobel Pizza Prize, with sour grapes and humble pie added to

the pepperoni and taco cheese.
(As I write, he’s lapping it up in the Knesset…yes, it’s great to see all the hostages released, but far, far too late…nearly 70,000 slaughtered in Gaza, including 20,000 children. It’s all political theatre…his pressure on Netanyahu is purely motivated by Israel’s attack on Qatar, who are giving him a $200 million jet, a 5.5 billion golf course and a Qatar Air Force facility in Idaho. And…he’s waging war at home!)