Topics

Conor Lenihan trying to pull the wool over the Irish peoples heads re Bank of Ireland and the fact we where too stupid to realise that the Irish taxpayer wouldn't receive a dividend.
56.10 Minutes

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/player_av.html?0,null,200,http://dynamic.rte.ie/quickaxs/209-rte-saturdayview.smil



54.45 very funny comment from a bloke in Beumount re Willie O'Dea

Its snowing in Mayo, anywhere else!

http://www.rte.ie/news/2010/0220/odeaw.html

Ahern unfit to hold office, says Kenny
Saturday, 20 February 2010 14:25
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny has called for the resignation of Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern.

Mr Kenny has criticised the minister for his behaviour in the Dáil during the debate on the confidence motion in former Defence Minister Willie O'Dea.

Mr Kenny said Minister Ahern had 'sat there, defending him (O'Dea) laughing, sniggering and sneering . and he the Minister for Justice who oversees standards in high offices. He is unfit for office himself.'

AdvertisementHe said the Minister for Justice had brought politics in the Dáil to a new low.

However, a spokesman for Mr Ahern has dismissed Mr Kenny's comments as 'spurious issues' and said the minister was focusing on his job.

He said that today's call was 'part and parcel' of politics in a highly charged week.

Speaking in Monaghan at a cross-border policy meeting with business leaders and politicians from Northern Ireland, Mr Kenny said it had been a 'bad week for politics'.

Mr Kenny said that the row over the former Minister for Defence was never about Mr O'Dea, but about standards in office.

He also highlighted the differences between the Green Party and the Taoiseach about how Mr O'Dea left office.

Mr Kenny claimed that the Coalition is now seriously divided and 'incapable of telling the truth to each other, never mind the people of this country'.

Call for General Election

It was time, he said, for the Government to leave office and hold a General Election.

Mr Kenny was also asked if he would offer the Green Party a chance to participate in a new Government if they withdrew from the present administration.

He said that if the Greens had any sense of moral fibre they would 'remove themselves from the present Government and not be tainted by the self-preservation tactics of Fianna Fáil'.

In reply to repeated questions about why Fine Gael took so long to take action about the O'Dea High Court case, he said that was irrelevant and that the party had raised the issue in the Seanad and the Dáil.

This was an issue, he insisted, about standards at Cabinet and that was a matter for the Taoiseach to uphold.

Meanwhile, Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin has rejected Mr Kenny's call for an election.

Minister Martin said that the government was working well and the Government parties continued to work well together.

However, he said he accepts that O'Dea controversy has damaged politics.

I suppose there is no problem getting this thread started as it may be become relevant very soon.

I'm going for at least 3 seats for Fine Gael next time around.

1. Enda Kenny
2. Michael Ring
3. John O'Mahoney

now if FG got 4 that would be Michelle Mulhern

So lets say FF got 1, I would say Callery would get in.

Would SF have any chance of taking the 5'th seat in a 4 FG win (ie a FF wipeout) or in a 3 FG win would they be able to replace one of the FF'rs.

George Lee in Haiti on now.

Doh I mean George Hook 

I was just wondering lads what foreign countries (or state/province/semi-autonomous or breakaway region) do You admire (& no Norn Iron, Nordieland, Free State, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Ulster, Mayo, Dublin, Roscommon, Meath, the next village to yours answers lads, places that are not Ireland or a part of the Island).

For me in no particular order

1. Australia - Its a fantastic country, the bush is a great place to lose yourself an discover (no puns please)
2. France - Paris is the most beautiful city in the World, French villages and towns are so nice. The French people stand up to anyone and see themselves as equal to anyone. Bar a few bad examples like Haiti most of the French colonies/colonists adapted to their new homes and where far more willing to go native than the likes of the Brits, Portugeese, Italians, Dutch, Spanish, Belgians etc.
3. Scotland - There close historic links to the Irish, they are great craic, and its a beautiful country.
4. Japan - Really interesting history and they seem to live simutanously in the future. Their calini are hot.
5. Quebec - I love the way they defend their culture and have strove for their own idenity like us.

My Sub Argentina, well Argentina I find fascinating.

Forget that 6 Counties stuff, the REAL question is if Mayo should retake Ballaghaderreen by force or should we have a Referendum allowing the Mayo majority to vote for the lost Parishes to return to Mother Mayo. Should we open a Southern Front to retake Inishboffin and Inishshark? We should also prepare for Sligo to enter The War, under the delusion that areas South and West of the Moy or around its Mayo banks/shore would ever want to win less than a handful of Connacht Titles in 4 or 5 generations.

Maigh Eo abu, tiocfaidh ár lá.

Anyone else watching this, holy shite 

Just wondering is anyone else a fan of Still Game, love this show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5-z4iMBFZA

Have watched this a few weeks now, anyone else watch it. One week they explained Why Irish people where bad at sex and another week they explained the Catholic Church in Ireland. Next week they are explaining Nordies, can't wait. Monday night on RTE.

Looks like we might need a thread for this

Anyone else unable to use gmail. Is the site down?

What are the 5 biggest World Events of the last 30 years that you could not believe where happening or had just happened?

1. Coup in Moscow and Gorbachev kidnapping
2. Fall of the Berlin Wall
3. September 11'th attack on the United States
4. The St.Stephens Day Sunami
5. The Omagh Bomb

In the spirit of the wisdom of Facebook. Which Mayo town best represents your personality?

Sligo & Roscommon football followers wish they where really Mayo fans, discuss.

1. Tom Langan
2. Sean Flanagan
3. Ciaran MacDonald

'De Valera was a British spy'
Book claims national hero was 'turned' after 1916

By John Spain Books Editor

Monday October 26 2009

A NEW book to be published next month makes the shocking claim that Eamon de Valera, the founding father of the nation, was under the control of the British.

The book, provocatively titled 'England's Greatest Spy: Eamon de Valera', suggests that Dev was terrified of being executed after the Rising and was "turned" in exchange for his life. For some years afterwards, the book claims, Dev was under British control.

The 470-page hardback is published by Stacey International, a London publisher specialising in politics and history.

The author is retired US naval officer and historian John Turi from Princeton, New Jersey. He developed an interest in Irish history through his wife, who was born in Ireland. Turi has been researching his controversial book for a decade.

The case against de Valera by Turi is based firstly on a detailed analysis of Dev's emotionally stunted formative years.

He claims Dev was rejected by everyone in his early life -- his mysterious father in New York (in fact, Dev was probably illegitimate), his mother, his uncle in Ireland, who treated him coldly, even the Church, which rejected his ambitions for the priesthood because of his probable illegitimacy.

His miserable upbringing left Dev with an inadequate personality, Turi suggests, which made him susceptible to being influenced later on.

Turi is scathing about Dev's erratic behaviour during the Rising, when he was in charge of the men at Boland's Mill.

He stayed awake for days, became disorientated and issued confused, sometimes ridiculous, orders. "It was not just his tactics the men questioned," Turi writes, "they questioned his sanity as well."

Dev kept his men "sitting on their heels" while a short distance away at Mount Street Bridge eight Volunteers were trying to hold off hundreds of British soldiers.

In fact the men at Boland's Mill played little or no part in the Easter Week fighting, Turi says, because Dev was so exhausted and fearful.

At the end of the week, when word reached Boland's Mill of the surrender, Turi writes that de Valera "abandoned his men and slipped out of Boland's at noon on the Sunday, taking with him a British prisoner . . . as his insurance against being shot before he could surrender".

Cowardly

"De Valera the cowardly, incompetent, mentally unstable officer who deserted his troops was (later) repackaged as de Valera the lonely hero fighting valiantly against overwhelming odds."

What followed was also suspicious, Turi says.

Dev later claimed that he was tried with a number of other men and sentenced to death.

Turi writes: "Not one of the men allegedly tried with de Valera ever confirmed that such a trial took place, and there is no trace in the British Public Record Office of any trial."

He also quotes the flat denial by the army prosecuting officer, William Wylie, that de Valera had been tried.

Turi also considers Dev's fragile mental state and tearful collapse at Richmond Barracks the night before he was taken to Kilmainham, to where condemned prisoners were sent.

All the events indicate that Dev was terrified of dying, Turi suggests, and that it would have been easy for the British intelligence officer Ivor Price to turn Dev into a British collaborator. Major Price was "skilled at manipulating weakness".

Turi notes that Dev was the only one of four Dublin commandants not to be tried and executed.

He dismisses theories that Dev was spared because he was born in America or because the British realised that further executions would be a mistake; as others were executed later.

The only reasonable explanation, Turi claims, is that Dev was "turned". In all, Turi sets forth a dozen instances of what he calls "de Valera's machinations that aided and abetted British interests" to support this claim.

Collins

Some of this 'evidence' concerns Dev's activities in the US after he was released from prison -- which split the powerful Irish-American lobby.

Turi also says the British feared what Michael Collins might do in the North and used de Valera to engineer the situation that resulted in Collins's death.

Turi also calls Irish neutrality during the World War II "a hoax on the Irish people and a major boon for English interests".

His book, which ends with a call for a posthumous trial of de Valera, will be published in Ireland and Britain on November 30 and in the US next year.

- John Spain Books Editor

Irish Independent


Sounds like an interesting read. Might give this one a look when it hits the shelves.

Have to say I find some accents a real turn on and others a turn off.

For me its

HOT
Connacht, Derry, Donegal, Wexford, Cork, Clare, Welsh, Liverpool, Scottish, French.

NOT
Northside Dublin (the Knackery one, not the salt of the Earth one)
American
Strong Belfast

Might as well start the this tread, Irelands closest and most enduring rivialry will see the Joe Show V The Messiah.

That K*n+ Bertie Ahern is on the Late Late Show, 3 Fianna FAILures in less than 4 weeks, bloody RTE is up to its old tricks of media bias. Sure they the only shower even more out of touch than Fianna FAILure party with their excessive taxpayer salaries.