If this boy had been more prudently 
dropped into life on, say, a street 
with trees that throw out their annual yellow 
to make a welcome parade for the sun; 
had as childhood neighbours a Circuit Court Judge 
whose front door had no letter box, 
a Garda Chief Inspector with an opinionated 
and over-confident dog; 
kicked a ball up and down summer evenings, 
dead apart from the occasional well behaved bee, 
with the boy next door (but one) who blossomed 
into a political correspondent 
and now gets to make up truth, 
another way would’ve been found.
But for coming at Gardaí 
with a chemical imbalance, 
what some people are calling 
a machete 
and a totally inappropriate 
post code, 
the only sentence 
was that ethically administered, 
democratically accountable, 
bolt action firing squad.
The eminent and learned 
bottoms we employ to sit 
on the inquiry into this 
need not fret the task ahead of them. 
For their report is already written.
&nbsp;
<pre>Photo Credit: <a class="owner-name truncate" style="color: #808080;" title="Go to Paolo Trabattoni's photostream" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mctraba/" data-track="attributionNameClick">Paolo Trabattoni </a>/ Flickr</pre>

Garda Police

Poem: The Case of George Nkencho

The Commissars yet to be assigned their desks; 
you pick today to text: 
“What have the revolutionaries ever done 
for the likes of me?”
And it reads like the ravings 
of a depressed person at a bus stop 
with a hole in his shoe, 
who has better shoes at home, 
but is saving them; a guy 
who sleeps on a mattress 
with a tear in it, and a stray spring 
stabbing him in the night; 
though he bought a new bed 
months back, he never 
got it delivered, 
and the shop thinks he’s died.
For he loves the feel 
of that spring cutting into his back, 
the way a well adjusted slave 
loves Pharaoh 
being there on his throne 
to complain about.
&nbsp;
<pre>Photo Credit: William Murphy via <a style="color: #808080;" href="https://flic.kr/p/EsqMzV">Flikr</a></pre>

Ireland Elections Poem New_Site

Poem: The First Dissident

“I am the Empire in the last of its decline.” Paul Verlaine
I am Britain in the final orgasm of its fall, 
that watches the confident Scots and Irish 
pack their bright new suitcases 
and stride palely towards the exit, 
like soon-to-be ex-wives 
that would be the death of me, 
if I weren’t already dead.
The chalk cliffs of Dover 
have been sold to a Chinese consortium 
and the front pages applaud the deal 
as a great victory.
Andrew Loyd Webber has been forced 
at pistol point to write additional verses 
for Rule Britannia.
I flip the pages of the atlas and imagine 
invading places here, there 
with the help of aircraft carriers 
I no longer have but can still, 
just about, picture.
On Gran Canaria withered Englishmen celebrate 
their independence and look forward 
to having to dress their own bed sores 
in second hand bandages they’ll get free 
with every glass of Weatherspoon’s 
English sparking wine.
&nbsp;
<pre>Photo Credit: <a style="color: #808080;" href="https://www.geograph.ie/photo/6079181">Eric Jones</a></pre>

Poem: Febrile

You wish you could waddle 
up the Monivea Road like Lord Haw Haw 
wearing a scar the length of your jaw 
you got fighting communists 
but cut yourself shaving once 
and didn’t like it.
In the absence of a girl who’ll let 
you between her legs 
you’d love to invade Russia or Iran 
but can’t afford the air fare 
so instead smashed some glass.
All you want is a part-time job 
in the local concentration camp 
but there isn’t one around here 
yet, so instead you broke a window 
and heroically chucked some books out it.
You once thought of reading a book 
to find out why you’re where you are 
instead spend the hiatus between 
wanks listening to the voices 
in the videos on your phone tell you 
whose fault your life is.
You needed to be someone 
so wrecked a guy’s framed family photographs, 
fled sniggering up the hill, 
still no one.
This poem follows a gathering of solidarity in <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/galway-locals-show-solidarity-with-muslim-community-after-mosque-attack-1.3971688">Galway on Monday night</a>, after a mosque was attacked and vandalised.

Kevin Higgins &#8211; Galway &#8211; Photo Alvaro Araoz

Poem: To the Boys Who Carried Out the Ballybrit Mosque Attack

The teenagers we shot yesterday 
were shot responsibly through the eye 
with plain-speaking dum-dum bullets, 
manufactured in Fife, or taken down 
with SR 25 sniper rifles flown 
heroically in from Orange County. 
Many of these so-called protestors 
specifically arranged to be shot in the back, 
just to make us look bad. 
The gas canisters our people threw 
were entirely rational, and legal, 
like the Boer firestorm the kaffirs 
brought down on themselves at Sharpeville, 
or the best-of-British ambush 
that rubbish walked into at Derry. 
The one rogue canister which lost 
its mind and finished up in a tent 
beside an eight month old baby, 
who, sadly, also expired, is currently under investigation 
and expects to be cleared of all wrong doing, 
unlike the baby who we’ve already found guilty. 
There is no such thing as Palestinians. 
Just some Arabs who used to live here 
and think they still do. 
The keys they wave in the air 
no longer open any doors. 
They are a rumour you foolishly believed, 
now we’ve moved our eternal capital 
to what used to be 
their front room. 
17-05-2018
<pre><a style="color: #808080;" href="https://972mag.com/the-year-in-photos-palestine-and-israel-in-2015/115436/">Image from here</a></pre>

Poem: Let Me Tell You About Them

Introduction 
The Irish housing crisis is so acute it has led to university students spending the first week of term sleeping rough in the university grounds in the hope that something turns up in terms of accommodation. In May 2018 there were 3,826 children in emergency homeless accommodation. In every major Irish town there are a good number of people sleeping on the street which was never previously the case. The causes are simple enough: hardly any houses have been built since the economic crash of 2008 when the Irish construction industry collapsed, with tens of thousands of construction workers being forced to seek work abroad; and though the deny it, the very much right of centre Irish government is ideologically opposed to the building of large numbers of council houses – an essential component to any solution to this crisis. 
What Put The Diamonds In Your Owner’s Wife’s Ears? 
after Bertolt Brecht 
You clean collared columnists 
should first help us fix the basic roof-over-head 
dilemma, before penning your next sermon. 
You shower, who preach careful now 
and always know your own exact bank balance, 
what is this mature democracy towards which you sweat? 
Without a door I can safely lock behind me 
to keep your pity at bay, civilisation 
doesn’t even begin. 
First bring those of us who get by on Supermacs 
each our own mahogany table and a big, silver knife 
with which to cut the turkey and ham into manageable slices 
(with a vegetarian option for those so afflicted) 
and answer us this: 
What put the diamonds in your owner’s wife’s ears? 
Or the Prince Albert ring in her boyfriend’s willy? 
The fact you’re in there polishing phrases 
and we’re out here in the undemocratic rain 
which everyone – from the Primate of the Church of Ireland 
to the Council for the Women of Consequence – agrees 
must never be allowed land on you, 
this is what keeps pinning diamonds 
to your owner’s wife’s sad little lobes, 
and puts the ring that winks up at her 
in her boyfriend’s knob.
<pre><a style="color: #808080;" href="https://ansionnachfionn.com/2018/03/29/a-failure-of-irish-government-and-irish-politics-as-10000-left-homeless/">Image from here</a></pre>

Ireland-homeless-cropped

Poem: What Put The Diamonds In Your Owner’s Wife’s Ears?

Introduction 
Tomorrow, Friday 25 May, Ireland will come out to vote in a historic referendum that will determine the future of abortion laws. 
Voters will decide whether to remove the 1983 Eighth Amendment from the country’s constitution, a clause which explicitly bans abortion and gives a foetus an equal right to life as the mother. 
No Irish woman of child-bearing age has previously had the opportunity to vote on this issue. Someone who, as a then 18-year-old, had her first vote in the 1983 referendum would now be 52 years old. 
Women and girls have resorted to travelling outside the Republic of Ireland to access legal abortion services. At least <a href="https://www.ifpa.ie/Hot-Topics/Abortion/Statistics">3,265 women and girls</a> gave Irish addresses at UK centres in 2016 – an underestimation given that not all women will provide their Irish addresses and some will have travelled to countries like the Netherlands. 
Despite the ban, abortion exists in Ireland, though until now Ireland hasn’t officially had the courage to admit it. A 2016 report shows that <a href="https://www.ifpa.ie/Hot-Topics/Abortion/Statistics">1,642 abortion pill packages</a> were sent to Ireland in a three-year period, between 2010 and 2012, by a single provider. 
A number of women or girls have over the years been forced to take legal action against the Irish state in order to obtain the right to an abortion, or the right to travel to the UK for an abortion. These are commonly referred to in Ireland as the ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘X’ cases. Miss X was a 14-year-old rape victim who, in 1992, was only allowed to travel to the UK for a termination after taking a case to the Irish Supreme Court. 
This poem looks at all the various euphemisms used in Ireland to talk about abortion without actually saying the word. 
&nbsp; 
The Euphemisms 
after Peter Reading 
A great and sure remedy 
for unmarried ladies. A boat 
somewhere so she can sort this out 
and then get back to her life. 
A Ryanair flight to Leeds-Bradford. 
A pill the modern woman 
can take with her coffee. 
An ex-nurse above a fish and chip shop 
who helps girls in trouble. 
A day trip to a clinic 
near Liverpool. Flushing it 
down the lavatory. Something 
the Irish government is in no rush 
to legislate for. What the Bishop of Kerry 
is definitely against. 
Something no one wants. 
The world’s second oldest profession. 
A number in England her doctor 
suggests she phone. 
Something the Irish government 
will deal with in a prompt 
and appropriate manner. 
The constitutional amendment of 1983. 
The letters A, B, C. The letter X. 
If we leave it long enough 
all the letters in between. 
Something you can’t have women 
walking in off the street 
and demanding.
<pre><a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/ireland-abortion-ban_us_58bc6067e4b0d2821b4ed43b">Image from here.</a></pre>

Poem: The Euphemisms

Introduction 
The “mother and baby home” in Tuam, Co. Galway, was one of many Irish institutions run by religious orders where unmarried women carrying “illegitimate” children were sent. 
Both the conditions of the home and the stigma surrounding the children are disturbing – but a similarly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/28/world/europe/tuam-ireland-babies-children.html?smid=tw-share">harrowing discovery</a> has been unearthed by local historian <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/galway-historian-catherine-corless-receives-human-rights-award-1.3270465">Catherine Corless</a>. 
The remains of 796 infants and toddlers are believed to have been unceremoniously amassed for decades in unmarked graves in this single home. An Irish government enquiry last year admitted that many of the bodies at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home were even placed in disused septic. 
When Corless broke the story in 2014, Irish Times journalist Rosita Boland, political spin-doctor Terry Prone and former intellectual Tom McGurk (among other assorted apologists for things as they are) all leapt forth to say that it was most unlikely that such a thing could possibly have happened. But it did. The home was operational between 1925 and 1961. 
It’s believed some of the bodies may now be under houses built locally since the home closed. 
&nbsp; 
Heavy Clogs 
I’m the local schoolmistress 
who worked hard to know 
the zilch I knew about this. 
I’m the Department Inspector 
who remembered 
the questions not to ask. 
I’m the concerned citizen who never 
heard their heavy clogs go, 
by forced marches, up the Dublin Road. 
I’m the editor of the Tuam Herald, 
who talked instead about 
the Pope’s visit. 
I’m the Government Minister whose pink skull 
baldly admired the particular yellow 
of the roses by the newly whitewashed wall, 
and thanked the nuns for their work. 
I’m the County Councillor concerned 
about the cost to the ratepayer 
– per skeleton – of piling that many small ones 
of whom no one had ever heard 
into a disused hole in the ground 
– one big concrete sarcophagus – 
no one knew anything about.
<pre><a style="color: #808080;" href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/28/world/europe/tuam-ireland-babies-children.html">Image from here</a></pre>

Poem: Heavy Clogs

As Theresa May hails a breakthrough in Brexit negotiations, Kevin Higgins gives an Irish view of a post-divorce Britain. 
&nbsp; 
For Darrell Kavanagh in his hour of need 
There will be no more thunderstorms 
sent across the Channel by the French, 
no acid rain floating in from Belgium. 
Pizza Hut will offer a choice of 
Yorkshire Pudding or Yorkshire Pudding. 
You’ll spend the next twenty-seven bank holidays 
dismantling everything you ever bought from IKEA. 
The electric shower your plumber, 
Pavel, put in last week will be taken out 
and you’ll be given the number of a bloke 
who’s pure Billericay. Those used to caviar 
will have jellied eels forced 
down their magnificent throats. 
Every fish and chip shop 
on the Costa del Sol will in time 
be relocated to Ramsgate or Carlisle. 
All paving stones laid by the Irish 
will be torn up to make work 
for blokes who’ve been on the sick 
since nineteen seventy-six. 
Those alleged to be involved in secretly 
making spaghetti bolognaise 
will be arrested and held 
in a detention centre near Dover. Sausage dogs 
will be put in rubber dinghies 
and pointed in the general direction 
of the Fatherland. Neatly sliced 
French sticks topped with Pâté 
will make way for fried bread 
lathered with Marmite. 
There’ll be no more of those new 
names for coffee your gran 
can’t pronounce. The entire royal family 
will be shipped back to Bavaria, with the exception 
of the Duke of Edinburgh who’ll be given 
a one-way ticket to Athens. Curry 
will no longer by compulsory 
after every twelfth pint of Stella, 
which itself will only be available 
by special permission of the Foreign Office. 
We’ll give India back its tea, sit around increasingly 
bellicose campfires in our rusting iron helmets, 
our tankards overflowing with traditional Norse mead.
<pre><a href="https://www.euractiv.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/06/Brexit-Banksy.jpg%20">Image from here.</a></pre>

Poem: Exit

Awaiting the unveiling of a monument for the victims of the 8th Amendment 
&nbsp; 
Introduction 
A ban on abortion was added to the Irish constitution in September 1983 which extended the existing ban to mean that the Irish Parliament (Dáil) could not legislate for abortion, even if it wished to. 
In 1992 the Attorney General got a High Court injunction against a 14-year-old rape victim who had been taken to England for an abortion by her parents seeking to prevent the abortion being carried out. The Supreme Court then ruled that a woman does have the right to an abortion if she can prove that she is suicidal, but this was not legislated until 2013. 
In 2012 an Indian born resident of Galway City, <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/ireland-s-law-on-abortion-violates-human-rights-amnesty-secretary-general-1.2242759">Savita Halappanavar</a>, died of septicemia at University Hospital Galway having been refused an abortion, despite having requested one several times when complications developed during her pregnancy. This led to the Protection of Life During Pregnancy (2013) which allowed abortion in extremely limited circumstances. However, the Act also introduced a new penalty – a prison sentence of up to 14 years – for anyone who has, or assists in, an unlawful abortion. 
The Irish government will soon decide whether or not to hold a referendum to delete the anti-abortion clause <a href="http://www.repealeight.ie/background-to-eighth-amendment/">(the 8th amendment)</a> from the constitution. 
There are many recently unveiled monuments around Ireland to the victims of other past abuses, such as the women detained in the Magdalene Laundries. My poem looks forward to the day when some future Irish government minister unveils a monument to the victims of the grotesque folly that has been the 8th Amendment, which by then many people will not even remember. 
&nbsp; 
Irish Government Minister Unveils Monument 
to Victims of Pro-Life Amendment 
On a date to be confirmed, 
when those who remember 1983 
will sleep safely in their graves, 
or be anxiously telling nurse 
about the auld ones with crucifixes 
they think are coming to get them 
a girl, today 
on holidays from primary school, 
by then grown into 
a Maggie Thatcher suit, will thank 
the Chamber of Commerce 
for use of their microphone 
as a pulled chord unwraps a figure 
chipped from stone 
in memory 
of those forced 
to change trains at Crewe clutching 
solitary suitcases that screamed 
one night only, 
those that bled out in the backs 
of London taxis after journeys 
made possible by post office accounts 
and extra hours at the newsagent’s; 
all because of a stick 
which, for them, turned 
the wrong colour 
the wrong year 
in the wrong country. 
And as the Minister continues, 
across the road a little girl will grab 
her mother’s arm and ask: 
what’s that lady saying? 
Image from <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/report-irelands-abortion-law-treats-women-vessels-340915">here</a>. Artists respond to ‘Repeal the Eighth’ <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/motherhood-is-a-choice-artists-respond-to-repeal-the-eighth-1.2992845">here</a>.