Planet Rugby Forum

unseenwork wrote:I want a guaranteed position in RTE for Jim Neilly.

EverReady wrote:

unseenwork wrote:I want a guaranteed position in RTE for Jim Neilly.

Done and Julian can do all the announcing on the telly

iarmhiman wrote:Jim Neilly is fine.

Mark Robson can fcuk off though

iarmhiman wrote:Jim Neilly is fine.

Mark Robson can fcuk off though

unseenwork wrote:

iarmhiman wrote:Jim Neilly is fine.

Mark Robson can fcuk off though

Aye, Robson will stay over in England and they can suffer him.

Flametop wrote:Alright, hand over Bushmills and you’re in.

Flametop wrote:Ok, we’ll take the NHS then.

Winnie wrote:

Flametop wrote:Ok, we’ll take the NHS then.

Most of the people on the border counties already do

Winnie wrote:

Flametop wrote:Ok, we’ll take the NHS then.

Most of the people on the border counties already do

camroc1 wrote:

Flametop wrote:Alright, hand over Bushmills and you’re in.

It's already owned by Mexicans.

Flametop wrote:Ok, we’ll take the NHS then.

Winnie wrote:

Flametop wrote:Ok, we’ll take the NHS then.

Most of the people on the border counties already do

Hellraiser wrote:

Flametop wrote:Ok, we’ll take the NHS then.

The NHS's reputation is the result of a stellar propaganda job.

backrow wrote:its a shame Ireland didn't want to leave the EU also and join up properly with the UK again, liked how it worked so well in the past.
you speak da same lingo
like a pint
you sell and buy more from uk than EU already anyways
all that NI border faff would have become irrelevant

I should go into politics tbf

backrow wrote:its a shame Ireland didn't want to leave the EU also and join up properly with the UK again, liked how it worked so well in the past.
you speak da same lingo
like a pint
you sell and buy more from uk than EU already anyways
all that NI border faff would have become irrelevant

I should go into politics tbf

Lenny wrote:

backrow wrote:its a shame Ireland didn't want to leave the EU also and join up properly with the UK again, liked how it worked so well in the past.
you speak da same lingo
like a pint
you sell and buy more from uk than EU already anyways
all that NI border faff would have become irrelevant

I should go into politics tbf

And we really miss the abject poverty, disenfranchisement and the tenements. Those were the days. (Sigh)

Grey brick upon brick,
Declamatory bronze
On sombre pedestals –
O’Connell, Grattan, Moore –
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse.

This never was my town,
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades –
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.

The lights jig in the river
With a concertina movement
And the sun comes up in the morning
Like barley-sugar on the water
And the mist on the Wicklow hills
Is close, as close
As the peasantry were to the landlord,
As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,
As the killer is close one moment
To the man he kills,
Or as the moment itself
Is close to the next moment.

She is not an Irish town
And she is not English,
Historic with guns and vermin
And the cold renown
Of a fragment of Church latin,
Of an oratorical phrase.
But oh the days are soft,
Soft enough to forget
The lesson better learnt,
The bullet on the wet
Streets, the crooked deal,
The steel behind the laugh,
The Four Courts burnt.

Fort of the Dane,
Garrison of the Saxon,
Augustan capital
Of a Gaelic nation,
Appropriating all
The alien brought,
You give me time for thought
And by a juggler’s trick
You poise the toppling hour –
O greyness run to flower,
Grey stone, grey water,
And brick upon grey brick.

Nightmare leaves fatigue:

We envy men of action
Who sleep and wake, murder and intrigue

Without being doubtful, without being haunted.
And I envy the intransigence of my own
Countrymen who shoot to kill and never
See the victim’s face become their own
Or find his motive sabotage their motives.

So reading the memoirs of Maud Gonne,

Daughter of an English mother and a soldier father,
I note how a single purpose can be founded on
A jumble of opposites:

Dublin Castle, the vice-regal ball,

The embassies of Europe,

Hatred scribbled on a wall,

Gaols and revolvers.

And I remember, when I was little, the fear
Bandied among the servants
That Casement would land at the pier
With a sword and a horde of rebels;

And how we used to expect, at a later date,

When the wind blew from the west, the noise of
shooting


61



Starting in the evening at eight

In Belfast in the York Street district ;

And the voodoo of the Orange hands

Drawing an iron net through darkest Ulster,

Flailing the limbo lands —

The linen mills, the long wet grass, the ragged
hawthorn.

And one read black where the other read white, his hope
The other man’s damnation:

Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope,

And God Save — as you prefer — the King or Ireland.
The land of scholars and saints:

Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush,
Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints,

The born martyr and the gallant ninny;

The grocer drunk with the drum,

The land-owner shot in his bed, the angry voices
Piercing the broken fanlight in the slum,

The shawled woman weeping at the garish altar.
Kathaleen ni Houlihan ! Why

Must a country, like a ship or a car, be always female,
Mother or sweetheart? A woman passing by,

We did but see her passing.

Passing like a patch of sun on the rainy hill

And yet we love her for ever and hate our neighbour
And each one in his will
Binds his heirs to continuance of hatred.

Drums on the haycock, drums on the harvest, black
Drums in the night shaking the windows:

King William is riding his white horse back
To the Boyne on a banner.

Thousands of banners, thousands of white
Horses, thousands of Williams

62



Waving thousands of swords and ready to fight
Till the blue sea turns to orange.

Such was my country and I thought I was well
Out of it, educated and domiciled in England,

Though yet her name keeps ringing like a bell
In an under-water belfry.

Why do we like being Irish? Partly because
It gives us a hold on the sentimental English
As members of a world that never was,

Baptised with fairy water;

And partly because Ireland is small enough
To be still thought of with a family feeling,

And because the waves are rough

That split her from a more commercial culture;

And because one feels that here at least one can
Do local work which is not at the world’s mercy
And that on this tiny stage with luck a man
Might see the end of one particular action.

It is self-deception of course;

There is no immunity in this island either;

A cart that is drawn by somebody else’s horse
And carrying goods to somebody else’s market.

The bombs in the turnip sack, the sniper from the
roof,

Griffith, Connolly, Collins, where have they brought
us?

Ourselves alone ! Let the round tower stand aloof
In a world of bursting mortar !

Let the school-children fumble their sums
In a half-dead language;

Let the censor be busy on the books; pull down the
Georgian slums;

Let the games be played in Gaelic.

63



Let them grow beet-sugar; let them build
A factory in every hamlet;

Let them pigeon-hole the souls of the killed
Into sheep and goats, patriots and traitors.

And the North, where I was a boy,

Is still the North, veneered with the grime of Glasgow,
Thousands of men whom nobody will employ
Standing at the corners, coughing.

And the street-children play on the wet
Pavement — hopscotch or marbles;

And each rich family boasts a sagging tennis-net
On a spongy lawn beside a dripping shrubbery.

The smoking chimneys hint
At prosperity round the corner
But they make their Ulster linen from foreign lint
And the money that comes in goes out to make more
money.

A city built upon mud;

A culture built upon profit;

Free speech nipped in the bud,

The minority always guilty.

Why should I want to go back
To you, Ireland, my Ireland?

The blots on the page are so black

That they cannot be covered with shamrock.

I hate your grandiose airs,

Your sob-stuff, your laugh and your swagger,

Your assumption that everyone cares
Who is the king of your castle.

Castles are out of date,

The tide flows round the children’s sandy fancy;

Put up what flag you like, it is too late
To save your soul with bunting.

64



Odi atque amo:

Shall we cut this name on trees with a rusty dagger?
Her mountains are still blue, her rivers flow
Bubbling over the boulders.

She is both a bore and a bitch $

Better close the horizon,
Send her no more fantasy, no more longings which
Are under a fatal tariff.

For common sense is the vogue

And she gives her children neither sense nor money
Who slouch around the world with a gesture and a
brogue

And a faggot of useless memories.

Lobby wrote:

backrow wrote:its a shame Ireland didn't want to leave the EU also and join up properly with the UK again, liked how it worked so well in the past.
you speak da same lingo
like a pint
you sell and buy more from uk than EU already anyways
all that NI border faff would have become irrelevant

I should go into politics tbf

AS the EU and little Leo Varadkar are so keen on a frictionless border between north and south, I think the UK should offer to set the border in the English Channel as its preferred 'backstop'.

And one read black where the other read white, his hope
The other man’s damnation:

Hellraiser wrote:

camroc1 wrote:

Flametop wrote:Alright, hand over Bushmills and you’re in.

It's already owned by Mexicans.

It's actually gone to shit since Diageo bought them. They've run through practically all of their old stock and the new stuff is sub-par. I had a Powers rep tell me a couple of weeks back that he'd asked a current Diageo/Bushmills rep what the point of Red Bush was (it's bland and doesn't really fill a gap in the market palate-wise) and the guy literally told him it was for cocktails.

Nolanator wrote:

Hellraiser wrote:

Flametop wrote:Ok, we’ll take the NHS then.

The NHS's reputation is the result of a stellar propaganda job.

So it's not any better than the HSE?

Hellraiser wrote:

Nolanator wrote:

Hellraiser wrote:

Flametop wrote:Ok, we’ll take the NHS then.

The NHS's reputation is the result of a stellar propaganda job.

So it's not any better than the HSE?

Much of a muchness, but the Irish system is much more flexible.

MrDominator wrote:

Hellraiser wrote:

Nolanator wrote:

Hellraiser wrote:

Flametop wrote:Ok, we’ll take the NHS then.

The NHS's reputation is the result of a stellar propaganda job.

So it's not any better than the HSE?

Much of a muchness, but the Irish system is much more flexible.

The Irish health system is abysmal.

50 euros to see a doctor, and completely inferior flu vaccines for at risk populations.

Shocking

Hellraiser wrote:

Nolanator wrote:

Hellraiser wrote:

Flametop wrote:Ok, we’ll take the NHS then.

The NHS's reputation is the result of a stellar propaganda job.

So it's not any better than the HSE?

Much of a muchness, but the Irish system is much more flexible.

YOYO wrote:

backrow wrote:

Lenny wrote:

backrow wrote:its a shame Ireland didn't want to leave the EU also and join up properly with the UK again, liked how it worked so well in the past.
you speak da same lingo
like a pint
you sell and buy more from uk than EU already anyways
all that NI border faff would have become irrelevant

I should go into politics tbf

And we really miss the abject poverty, disenfranchisement and the tenements. Those were the days. (Sigh)

ah its all grand now, we all besties really.

It only got good after we left you pigdigs. I don’t think anyone has the appetite for more famine, while you lot use Ireland as a farmland to feed your masses, especially with Brexit on the horizon. That and all the other atrocities we had to injure under British rule. No thankyou.

iarmhiman wrote:Don't you get seen fairly much immediately in the NHS with little waiting lists.

Prescriptions are subsidised as well.