Ireland

Photo: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images If there were a World Cup for Being Sanctimonious, Ireland would qualify every time. So, mind you, might Scotland. The aftermath of last night’s match in Paris has been predictably entertaining. One refereeing blunder (though it’s quite pssible the referee was unsighted and so did not, in fact, “bottle” the decision) has provided ample opportunity for cant and humbug. Thus, the Irish demand that the match be replayed. Good idea! Let’s have another go at the 1966 World Cup Final while we’re at it! FAI President John Delaney complains: “There’s a team that should be in the World Cup today and that’s us. We should be

George Osborne may be warning of austere times ahead, but the situation is much graver on the other side of the Irish sea. Yesterday’s Irish Times revealed the startling details of a new plan to resuce Hibernia. Even the cute hoors are cheap hoors now. [Hat-tip: BadJournalism via Twitter. My Twitter feed is here.]

Note the jaunty attempt to emulate Gordon Greenidge; note too the lack of control which has caused the bottom hand to leave the bat, suggesting that this attempt has, alas, more or less failed. Photo: Grant Kinghorn. No blogging until next week, I’m afraid. Holiday time. Albeit an unusually energetic trip overseas as I’ll be playing cricket every day this week. I’m making my debut for the White City All Stars – a team skippered by Peter Oborne, late of this parish – on the club’s annual tour of Ireland. Should be fun. Runs and wickets permitting, of course. Anyway, see you on the 28th or so.

Carol Sarler may be correct to argue, as she does in this week’s edition of the magazine, that we have an unhealthy fascination with sex crimes that is both prurient and puritanical. But I’d suggest that, whatever the merits of her wider argument, she doesn’t know very much about Ireland: In Ireland, some 2,000 adults who gave evidence of assault at the hands of Roman Catholic priests and nuns are, probably correctly, spitting tacks. The inquiry into their treatment when in children’s institutions has ruled that, although they did indeed suffer, no charges may be brought, no names shamed and, for what it’s worth, no bank balances swollen by damages

I’m not* one to mock the Irish armed forces and there’s no gainsaying the fact that Irish troops have done their bit in various peacekeeping operations around the world. But (you guessed there’d be a “but”, right?) it’s hard impossible not to be amused by the fact that Irish troops preparing for deployment to Chad have been told they cannot play football soccer on the dusty playing fields of Chad: Defence Minister Willie O’Dea said the decision was made for health and safety reasons. “The reality in Chad is that the ground is extremely hard. Some of the sports are played out on open ground and when people fall, it

There is, as you might expect, some good stuff in Christopher Caldwell’s Weekly Standard piece on the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger. But it also contains some strange thinking, albeit of a kind that is often found when foreigners consider the Irish. Thus: This [prosperity and immigration] is all very exciting for the Irish, but there is nothing particularly Irish about it. Irish identity has often been–explicitly and officially–a matter of protecting citizens from both the temptations of modernity and the vicissitudes of prosperity… De Valera’s Irish Republic was organized around the idea that money doesn’t matter that much. This may have been a noble aspiration, it may

Eammon Forde doesn’t much care for St Patrick’s Day: It says everything about what it means to be Irish these days that the biggest parades take place hundreds of miles from Irish soil where a once-proud diaspora’s celebration of its past has been hijacked by anyone who has seen The Quiet Man and wants to get noisily bladdered. They may as well wear their heart on their sleeves and pay a gaggle of pale-faced colleens with pigs under their arms to spray the streets with whiskey and potatoes.In Alan Partridge’s phrase, “de big oidea” behind St Patrick’s Day today is to amplify every cultural cliché to the point where it