Right-thinking people who live in glass houses

jd

from the wexford echo...
Right-thinking people who live in glass houses



SIMON

BOURKE

You have to laugh. I turned on the radio the other day and there was the voice of right-thinking Ireland, Pat Kenny, bemoaning the fact that some €300,000 was spent annually on cleaning up Ireland’s canals. Mgr. Kenny jumped to the conclusion that this outlay was spent entirely on removing supermarket trolleys, bicycles, dead horses, dead Ford Fiestas, bodies in suitcases, murder weapons and other working-class detritus. And the text of the day’s sermon (isn’t it always?) was: “O Lord, why should I, who keepeth your commandments, be forced to render unto Charlie to pay for the sins of the unwashed rabble?”. Pat’s error was quickly pointed out: 99.9% of Ireland‚s canal miles are out in the country and the vast majority of the clean-up money goes on removing natural stuff like mud, weeds, fallen trees, dead cows (not gang-related) - things of which the urbanised and urbane Mr Kenny could not be expected to know.

I presume they don’t clean up the whole system every year. Otherwise, I am sure, it would cost a damn sight more than €300,000. But whatever they spend and whatever they spend it on, it‚s worth every penny. The canal system is a magnificent resource - for fishermen, pleasure-boaters, swimmers and walkers, foreign or domestic. You can hop in a boat in New Ross and drive all the way to Donegal (which is more than you can do in a car), via the Barrow, the Grand Canal, the Shannon and the Erne.

And (whisper it), the odd supermarket trolley does far less harm than your average wash of slurry or silage run-off or phosphate fertiliser. What’s more, the townies make much better use of the canals than do the country folk. On any hot day, you can see the kids from Dolphin’s Barn, Inchicore and Ballyer swimming and splashing and diving and sporting in the Grand Canal. You rarely see people from Kilkenny or Carlow or Ross or Enniscorthy swimming in the rivers any more - either we’re far too civilised, or we’ve actually come to enjoy the eye-stinging sensation of swimming in chlorinated wee-wee.

And any evening, from Harold’s Cross bridge on out, you can see rows of anglers, most of them teenagers or young men (in other words, the kind of person Pat Kenny would like to see Œkept off the street‚), enjoying a healthy, harmless and free pastime.

Of course, it’s not what we called fishing. These lads use 20tf poles and 1lb breaking strain line and all the delicate skill and patience in the world to catch inedible 3oz fish. Then they throw them back again. In our day, the object was to get the biggest possible salmon or trout out of the water, into the frying pan and down the gullet in the fastest, crudest and most efficient way possible. Last year, when they were draining the River Nore in Kilkenny, they found quite a few unexploded hand-grenades under John’s Bridge. There was much speculation and hypothesis. The War of Independence? The Civil War? After all, there WAS a battle at John’s Bridge, between Prout’s Staters in Bridge House and the Irregulars in the Castle. Were the anti-Treaty boys lobbing Mills bombs down from the Castle walls? If they had asked me, I could have told them. People used hand-grenades for fishing in the Sixties: I remember it well. It was the best fishing of all and for drama, grandeur and eloquence, not even blue marlin hunting in the Caribbean could come close.

The working-class kids of Dublin make pretty good use of their canals; and they keep them pretty clean, too. After all, they are the ones swimming in there, not the likes of Pat Kenny. And as for the supermarket trolleys, well, everyone knows that, left to its own devices, an unwatched trolley will always find water. In fact, that’s what the trolley is trying to do when it refuses to go down the breakfast cereals aisle in Tesco or takes a sudden swerve to the left at Tinned Fruits in Caulfields. Certain primitive cultures use supermarket trolleys the way we use hazel rods or a dowser’s plumb bob.

But the thing that immediately struck me listening to Pat Kenny, and the biggest laugh of all, is that I can think of something that costs the taxpayer many times more per annum than €300,000 and is f***-all use to man, woman, fish or trolley.

Pat Kenny.

Yup, for the price of Pat Kenny, we could clean the canals three times year, run the Health Service and send every kid in Dolphin’s Barn to university and still have change for a government jet, albeit a two-door hatchback.

People who live in glass houses should not throw stones. When it comes to advising the taxpayer how to spend his money, Pat Kenny lives in the Crystal Palace.

Some people have a nerve.

Pimp Ninja

Great article JD. Thanks for bringing it, I would have missed it otherwise.

LastIrishMonkey

that was a nice read there was a lot of money went in the cork main drainge scheme i hope it will pay off for the fishing in the lee ***