I love living near Croker. It’s close enough for us to hear the blood-curdling roar at the end of an All-Ireland Final but far away enough not to be annoyed by throngs walking by your front window, throwing empty Tayto packets into the garden.
Last weekend, the northside became a temporal anomaly where middle-aged Irish people rediscovered their youth and, from my Marino back garden, I bore witness to several thousand forty-somethings performing what anthropologists might call a ‘collective emotional purge,’ bellowing Champagne Supernova into the August night.
It was awful.
The fashion alone deserved academic study - bucket hats and parkas deployed with military precision, as if someone had issued a mass text: ‘Dress like it’s Rag Week in 1996 and you still haven’t gone to any lectures’.
Grown men wept openly at Wonderwall. Meanwhile, the women in attendance mostly maintained their dignity while simultaneously wondering how they’d married this thing now sobbing into his lukewarm Heineken.
I’m saying all this second hand of course, because I wasn’t there. I threw on a barbecue and enjoyed the evening sun with the kiddos in the garden but, the thing is, I never understood Oasis. While my University of Limerick contemporaries worshipped at the Church of Noel & Liam, I was the heretic in the corner wondering what everyone was on about. Have these people even heard of Pixies, like?
But I’ve mellowed over the years, like the Gallagher brothers, and sometimes you need to give the people what they want. And boy did they want it. Some of them were willing to pay over €500 a ticket for it. And if that’s the price of therapy for all the middle aged men of Ireland, then it’s a price worth paying.
Diplomatic dancing
Meanwhile, in Washington, poor Volodymyr Zelensky and his EU handlers arrived for what corporate consultants would call ‘a challenging stakeholder engagement’.
The European leaders deployed every trick in the ‘managing upwards’ playbook, a diplomatic dance so intricate it deserved its own David Attenborough narration. Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, seemed to have learned the most since his last visit - wear a suit, make some jokes and hand the President a personal letter, this time from Zelensky’s wife to Melania Trump. You know, completely normal stuff that we’d all do at a dinner party. The leaders of Britain, Germany, Italy, France and Finland were there in a show of support, quietly pushing for concrete US security guarantees, especially important after Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska.
It’s international relations conducted with the same energy as handling your slightly unhinged uncle at Christmas dinner: smile, nod your head, redirect to safer topics like the BMW Golf Championship.
For us in Ireland, watching European dignity attempt to massage American ego is not easy, as was the case in Micheál Martin’s ‘watch between your fingers’ visit to the Oval Office in March. But all has been upended and the sensible diplomacy of old does not wash in this new age of American Idiocy. All we can do, it seems, is act like I did during the Oasis concerts - smile, keep your head down and watch from afar hoping World War III doesn’t start.
Basic human decency
We took the family to see the Jeanie Johnston last week, the replica of the original maritime miracle moored in Dublin’s Docklands. It’s well worth a visit if you are in Dublin. This famine ship achieved the impossible, making sixteen Atlantic crossings without a single death between 1848 and 1855, carrying about 2,500 emigrants. That’s thanks to Captain James Attridge, who refused to overload the ship, and a dedicated doctor on board. None of this was the case on many of the other ‘coffin ships’ as they came to be known, where conditions were horrendous and chances of survival marginal.
The tour was a moving and sometimes claustrophobic experience. Below deck you get a sense of how tight the space with eight to ten people crammed into bunk beds for the six week journey to a new life in the Americas. At least, in this case, the ship was being run by humanitarians who chose basic human decency over gouging, a concept that was radical then and is unfortunately radical again.
It seemed a long, long way from €500 concert tickets.
A win for the good guys
For your nightly dose of schadenfreude, might I recommendOperation Dark Phone: Murder By Text on Channel 4 (streaming here via 4oD).
It’s the documentary revealing how international law enforcement cracked EncroChat, essentially WhatsApp for villains who thought they were being clever. And there are Irish links.
For 74 glorious days, police intercepted thousands of criminals’ messages as they cheerfully documented their own crimes with the digital literacy of your auntie posting her IBAN on Facebook. Murder plots, drug deals, money laundering, grenades lobbed into front gardens – all meticulously organised by gangsters from luxury Spanish penthouses like they were ordering Deliveroo.
Watching criminals incriminate themselves via encrypted messaging they believed impenetrable is both chilling and oddly satisfying. For a small time at least, it seemed the good guys gained the upper hand.
