This post has very little to do with rugby (there is some connection), but I lost the plot after reading about David Frost’s ‘speech’ on Tuesday, in which he repudiated the world-beating, superfantabulistic deal that he and Spaffer Johnson negotiated and signed with the EU less than a year ago.
These morons have no understanding at all of Northern Ireland, and nor do they care to understand. They seem to be only listening to the DUP, who are in serious decline, and whose worldview is anathema to most of the population – a population who you will remember voted against Brexit.
Why do people vote for them, you ask? It’s not because they like them or agree with their politics or religious fetishes, but because they are (were!) afraid of ‘Them-uns’ getting in instead.
It’s true that the Republic of Ireland was rather priest-ridden in my youth, but those days are long gone after the Magdalene Laundries scandal and other events; meanwhile, you will still find signs on the roadsides in NI proclaiming things like FOR THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH, and other lovely, inspirational messages, while abortion remains next to impossible and same-sex marriage has only recently been forcibly imposed by Westminster. Many people in NI who might previously have supported unionism are reconsidering on the basis of these changes and non-changes.
The Belfast / Good Friday Agreement has effected an amazing alteration in the physical and political landscape. Gone are the metal detectors and the tanks of my youth; in their place is a vibrant (yes, an overused word, but it fits here) downtown Belfast, with plenty of two-way cross-border traffic, a great food / café / arts culture, and a general air of tolerance and co-operation. People in East Belfast are learning Irish and playing GAA sports.
Northern Ireland has seen some empty supermarket shelves, but primarily in those retailers who are English-based. Other businesses have adjusted, and are buying in from the Republic and the wider EU. There haven’t been any petrol shortages.
(As for ‘sausage wars’, no honest Irishperson buys the clearly inferior English sausages. Irish sausages are gorgeous, and almost certainly have a lower sawdust percentage [citation needed].)
So along comes David Frost, with the DUP cooing in his ear, to assert that the Northern Ireland Protocol – which, remember, he negotiated and signed and proclaimed to be the greatest deal ever – is not fit for purpose, mostly because it exposes that NI, which remains in the Single Market, is prospering much better than the rest of the UK. And he wants to scrap the whole thing, putting the entire peace process into question.
So in other words, the DUP would prefer to have the Northern Irish people suffer the same privations as those on the island of Britain, because that would make them more British.
It seems that most Northern Irish, of whatever persuasion, don’t agree. They seem to prefer the all-island approach that is clearly advantageous.
And here’s where rugby comes in. Rugby has been an all-island sport since partition, and has seen a massive benefit from that: not just in trophies and matches won, but as a unifying factor. (Football has been divided, with little success for either country.) Ulster has its nine counties, with Tommy Bowe, for example, from County Monaghan. We have punched above our weight for such a tiny country in which rugby isn’t even the second or third sport. We have, in good GFA tradition, fudged the ceremonials by doing two anthems. It might not be ideal, it may irritate others (sorry!), but it’s the best we can do for now, and it works.
The likes of Frost and Johnson are careless of this carefully-built cooperation, and willing to destroy it all on the altar of their own egos. They are willing to send us back to bombs and threats and check-points and feel-ups and knee-cappings and murders. They are willing to divide an island – yet again – that their predecessors have ravaged and pillaged and planted and starved. They are the greatest argument for a united Ireland in my lifetime, and I expect now to live to see it happen.
Onna telly this week
Friday 15th October
| Ulster v Lions | 19:35 | BBC2 NI / RTÉ2 / Premier Sports 1 |
| Dragons v Stormers | 19:35 | BBC2 Wales / Premier Sports 2 |
| Sale v Harlequins | 19:45 | BT Sport 1 |
Saturday 16th October
| Zebre v Glasgow | 13:00 | Premier Sports 1 |
| Brive v La Rochelle | 14:00 | FreeSports |
| Wasps v Exeter | 15:00 | BT Sport 2 |
| Treviso v Ospreys | 15:00 | S4C / Premier Sports 1 |
| Montpellier v Clermont | 16:00 | FreeSports |
| Leinster v Scarlets | 17:15 | S4C / TG4 / Premier Sports 2 |
| Edinburgh v Bulls | 17:15 | Premier Sports 1 |
| Munster v Connacht | 19:35 | RTÉ2 / Premier Sports 2 |
| Cardiff v Sharks | 19:35 | S4C / Premier Sports 1 |
| Toulon v Racing 92 | 20:00 | FreeSports |
Sunday 17th October
| Bath v Saracens | 15:00 | BT Sport 1 | ||
| Lyon v Toulouse | 20:00 | FreeSports |
Ovally Balls 
That squad won’t beat the Boks this November. No chance.
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It might if both Carberys play
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And the two conways and caseys
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Deebs – you may be right, but mostly because I don’t think they are playing the Boks?
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Do youse want the quiz answers?
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Is this some new form of Irish skullduggery? Slip in a few clones and hope no one notices
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If I were going to clone players, I’m not sure it would be any of those listed.
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“both Carberys”
Still not enough for a proper running of the Grand national.
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Voltaire, Cervantès, Ecco, Kafka, Beckett, Mann (?), Dostoevski (?)
Who plays flanker?
Great ATL, Thaum.
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Deebs – you may be right, but mostly because I don’t think they are playing the Boks?
Thauma wins the Internet!
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Flair is the only person on two sites to get Mann! The others were right with Tolstoy though.
1/ Voltaire, Candide:
He proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses.
2/ Cervantes, Don Quixote:
And so, after having composed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of names out of his memory and fancy, he decided upon calling him Rocinante, a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world.
3/ Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus:
I wish to state quite definitely that it is by no means out of any wish to bring my own personality into the foreground that I preface with a few words about myself and my own affairs this report on the life of the departed Adrian Leverkühn. What I here set down is the first and assuredly very premature biography of that beloved fellow-creature and musician of genius, so afflicted by fate, lifted up so high, only to be so frightfully cast down.
4/ Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum:
The sphere, hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir, swayed back and forth with isochronal majesty. I knew – but anyone could have sensed it in the magic of that serene breathing – that the period was governed by the square root of the length of the wire and by π , that number which, however irrational to sublunar minds, through a higher rationality binds the circumference and diameter of all possible circles. The time it took the sphere to swing from end to end was determined by an arcane conspiracy between the most timeless of measures: the singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane’s dimensions, the triadic beginning of π , the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself.
5/ Tolstoy, Anna Karenina:
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
6/ Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot:
Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.
7/ Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude:
Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
8/ Franz Kafka, The Trial:
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
9/ Andrea Camilleri, August Heat (a Montalbano book):
Nowadays, if a man living in a civilized country (ha!) hears cannon blasts in his sleep, he will, of course, mistake them for thunderclaps, gun salutes on the feast day of the local patron saint, or furniture being moved by the slime-buckets living upstairs, and go right on sleeping soundly. But the ringing of the telephone, the triumphal march of the cell phone, or the doorbell, no: Those are all sounds of summons in response to which the civilzed man (ha-ha!) has no choice but to surface from the depths of slumber and answer.
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Okay, so I’ll kick off the ignoramus stakes and admit that I’ve only read three of those. All in English.
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Also the inclusion of Frawley – who mainly plays 12 for Leinster but can play 10, gives you that second 5/8th option we’ve generally lacked. Now, it’s hard to see him playing ahead of Ringrose, Henshaw, McCloskey, or Aki vs the likes of NZ, but maybe worth a punt vs Japan or Argentina
Inclusion of H Byrne probably signals that we’re jumping over the Carty, Burns, Ross Byrne group. Other interesting selections – hooker Dan Sheehan (who’s had limited game time at Leinster with Kelleher, Tracy and Sean Cronin on the roster) and of course the return of Zebo.
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Thaum, I also had Marquez but forgot to write him down. Mann was pure guessing though, as I couldn’t finish any of his books.
Should’ve known about Tolstoi as someone mentionned happy/ unhappy but I can’t read cyrillic.
Anyone excited about the AI? To me it feels as if there’s been already too much international rugby this year.
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“Flair is the only person on two sites to get Mann! ”
Ah, that’s the French for you, cultured as fuck.
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Speaking of France, there was a worrying article on TV news here the other night regarding Eric Zemmour, who I gather is a right wing tv show pundit who is best known for anti-Islamist rhetoric. He is considering a run for the Presidency.
Flair, should we be concerned about this guy? During the article I thought he could probably split the Le Pen vote, which is what the BBC guy said more or less at the same time as I thought it.
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Not surprised hardly anyone would get the Mann book – he’s probably by now the least widely read of those writers and unlike most of the others it’s not from his best known work. There’s maybe enough there to guess what it might be about if you don’t know the character’s name I suppose though I don’t really feel I should have got it.
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My German is a lot better than my French, but there isn’t really an obvious giveaway in there like “des mondes possibles” for Candide.
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Well, I have read all of them, but that’s not surprising since I set the quiz. I do not read Cyrillic either, but thought as it is probably the most famous line in Russian literature and you can guess the happy/unhappy bit (as TomP did) that it was a fair question.
As for Mann, well you have to throw in at least one that’s really difficult.
Flair, I always look forward to Test matches (and then get grumpy when we lose).
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“As for Mann, well you have to throw in at least one that’s really difficult.”
I agree. I do think it’s about ten times more difficult than any of the others though!
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I’m more excited about the internationals than I am about watching our lot in the URC though it is a low bar. Still expecting similar results though!
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Virtually the only thing I can remember about One Hundred Years of Solitude is that virtually every other bugger is called something like Aureliano. Or at least that it felt like that.
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As far as 2 is concerned Sancho Panza is smashing up my living room right now. Howling Julio’s stopped howling and Heimats Zwei is now Heimats Drei and very much growing up, but Panza hasn’t changed. Don’t think he will to be honest, his brain’s not wired right as far as I can tell.
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I’m looking forward to the AIs, being the Autumn Internationals, not to be confused with the Artificial Intelligence the Boks deployed as a water boy recently. A very tight series win over the Lions was followed by a disappointing 4N in Australia (albeit we lost two matches to the final kick and won one the same way, bah!) so it’ll be good to see how we go against some of the top NH sides, who each provide a very different challenge to the Lions. I’d imagine that now that the bulk of our guys have played in Europe over the last month, either for our URC sides or in the other NH leagues, will stand us in better stead from a conditions and refereeing perspective.
After getting slagged off for most of the year about our playing style (some justified, some not), the Boks seemed to be getting a better balance of kick, bash and pass going in the last match against the Kiwis. Will we keep evolving that style? Will we revert to the uber-conservative style against the Lions? Will Morne Steyn come out of retirement again for one last hurrah at Twickers, to slot over an 82nd minute winning penalty? Will Rassie be warmly applauded when he runs onto the pitch to tend to a stricken Bok at the Millennium Stadium? Will the Boks communicate in English to confound the Scots and their Saffer contingent? So many questions, bring it on!
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@Deebee – The impression I’ve got is that the Boks often vary their game more against NZ because they know they have to to have any chance of winning, but that they’re usually convinced that the tedious shite will probably do for the rest of us (and they’re right more often than they’re wrong). Hope that changes, but don’t see the recent NZ game as any real evidence for that as it fits the existing pattern. I may be being unfair…
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You’re probably right CMW, we tend to keep it much tighter against the big sides and give it more air against the Kiwis and Pumas.
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Ticht, Zemmour is a dangerous extreme right arse hole who looks more presentable than Marine LePen but it’s the same shit in a silk glove. Since people look for ” new” faces, he may appear to some as a better alternative to Macron than Le Pen.
But he has no party ( same was said about Macron, though) and no experience. I doubt the French will go for him beyond the first round, we are a bit protected from totally stupid decisions by our electoral system. And Macron’s government has done a rather good job with covid. But who knows?
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@Deebee – Your last three wins against NZ are 31-29, 36-34 & 27-25. NZ win all the lower-scoring ones apart from the draw in 2019 so although it’s fair to say there have been some tighter games they haven’t really worked out for the Boks. NZ also win all the ones where only one team is high scoring of course. I don’t feel I’m really sticking my neck out to say that this is pretty different to the Boks’ record against anyone else. My instinct is that when teams are up against a side they normally lose to their occasional wins are most likely to be sneaking a low-scoring affair, but that hasn’t been the case with Boks-NZ.
You should stuff Wales whatever way you choose to go about it, but as a lot of accurate kicking from 9 will lead to loads of Wales mistakes that’s what I expect to see. I’m sure some of the resulting tries will be finished nicely.
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CMW, we haven’t stuffed Wales in a long time. I don’t think we will stuff anyone on this tour, to be honest. Will be happy with wins and some decent rugby.
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Although I prefer your version, obviously.
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Don’t think the Boks are alone in any of that where NZ are concerned. Even Gatland’s Wales tried to play a bit more on their last tour there, not that it did them any good beyond a couple of enjoyable first halves. Schmidt’s Ireland played a lot faster in the win in America and the last kick of the game loss a bit before though they did win playing something more like their own game at home the other time. England went for it in the World Cup game even though it didn’t really show as much as it could have on the scoreboard. Thought SA were a bit more adventurous than normal in their pool match too though didn’t get the points they might have and lost a game they could have won.
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@Deebee – When you look at what our players have been doing recently and what yours have then it would be surprising if it’s much of a contest. Of course Wales were going well back in the Six Nations so there is some hope, but realistically with the form of our teams three or even four losses look on the cards. We’ve either been dreadful or very good (with some luck) under Pivac. Guts say we’re on the way back to dreadful and our luck will be out.
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Pffft
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Pfffffffft
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Oops. Only meant the one
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@Chimpie – Which one do you think we’ll win then? Other than Fiji and even that’s almost always dodgy for us especially if we’re coming off the back of some ‘disappointments’. Bit worrying that Aus seem to have improved and you wouldn’t exactly be rich from backing Wales against them over the years in any case. The other two are clearly better teams.
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@cmw – yep, they seem to operate on the basis that – as you said – “the tedious shite will probably do for the rest of us” (case in point was RWC semi vs Wales – they seemed to assume they’d get over the line without playing expansive rugby)
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Ticht
endorsing Flair’s comments……..Zemmour is an un-elected ex-media chancer who sees an opportunity at the far right as Le Pen fades.
The main problem as I see it is that he is getting far too much coverage by the media, either through accident or design, so that a story becomes the story beyond it’s mass.
As Flair says, the French 2-round system will see him crash and burn even if he gets through round 1, which i doubt, as he is splitting Le Pen’s previous vote.
Apart from that, he is nasty…………………………
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What’s the world coming to when a wandering pfft-er has to explain his pfffts
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Bangladesh just qualified for the main event by thrashing PNG by 84 runs. So Scotland now HAVE TO win against Oman. Can they do it? Too many Saffer chokers in the side surely?
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Thought it was quite clear , Chimpster. You gave it a pfft, then changed your mind and gave it a PFFFFFFT. No explanation necessary about the two pffts, just about what exactly you were pfffting.
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Flair/Ticht/Slade – I read there’s a bit of a crisis in France with the ‘threat’ of Islamism occupying a lot political discourse. Is this overblown?
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It’s the national ‘bogeyman’………….
Inner city relations are pretty bad – based around the banlieus.
From my patch in the deep countryside, things don’t seem any worse than usual.
However, election season is looming and it is the first itch to scratch………….
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Wow. Scotland don’t bugger things up (sports section)!
We beat Oman by 8 wickety things in the pretendy cricket.
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Macron’s scratched the itch as well, Sladey. Pretty poor choices all round in your adopted land.
Only read reviews of Raphaelle Branche’s work but it seems have never got over getting kicked out of Algeria and never had a frank discussion of their deportment in the war – either in North Africa or at home.
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Since 2013 Wales have had a chance v SA and beaten them more often than not. We never have a chance v the Blacks. Australia, well, we turned we over the last couple of times. Not expecting anything too decent this Autumn but wasn’t really last 6 Nations and that turned out ok.
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Plus greetings from Seville. My first time here. Interesting place + lovely and warm.
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Loved Seville! We were there in July 2019 (temp. around 40 degrees). Stayed near the Metropol Parasol.
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I wouldn’t like 40 degrees. Better off on the coast in that case. We’re about 700 metres from the mushrooms, closer to the river.
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40° – the horror!
This would probably be a good time of year to visit.
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