April After Hours Beers (Poll closing today!)

Fizman wrote: »

Lads how do these meets work exactly?? Do people wear cute little badges with their usernames and so on? Have t-shirts with their avatar? Tell me they do.

Kevin Myers wrote: »

I bet you'll enjoy the 'After Hour's piss-up' though, won't you Agricola?

This is a visible reaffirmation that the Irish are a very troubled species. We are, after all, nine times more prone to schizophrenia, than any other people, and five times more likely to be alcoholic. Is it surprising that with this genetic disposition towards mental imbalance, that we seem acutely addicted to unreason and hatred as ways of managing our lives?

I get a sense of this from the anonymous, scrawled and venomous posts which I read here, in which the Famine and the Black and Tans were apparently features of the authors' childhoods.

These posts are not merely symptoms of a personal disorder, but evidence also of a larger social one.

Despair about the undignified conduct of the Irish people is what prompted a great reformer like Father Matthew to begin the Pioneer movement.

I doubt very much if Fr.Matthew would have believed it remotely possible that the self-same problems of public drunkenness and social disorder which had so appalled them in the 19th century would still convulse so much of Ireland in the 21st century, after nearly 90 years - that is, three full generations later.