Came in from 5-a-side last night and two local youngsters were passing by as I hobbled towards the front door, socks around my ankles, shinpads still on, carrying a football.
“Were ya football trainin’, Mistah?”, said the little blond one.
“Where d’ya tink he was ya bleedin’ tick?!”, said the other.
“I was playing football”, I said.
“And are you a professional?”, the youngest one asks.
“Do I look like a professional?”, I reply.
“Yeah” he says (I like that kid). There’s a pause and the other lad pipes up.
“Ya dope, if he was a professional he wouldn’t be living on this road”.
How right he was.
Heh – did you have a WAG and a fag ?
Little fuckers will be living in a tent on the street if they’re lucky.
Recent photos of Robert Thompson and John Venables circulating
http://i45.tinypic.com/zx0dgz.jpg
You’ll get your revenge. He’ll be left with a feeling that he’s somehow wronged you and subconsciously all through the remainder of his life he’ll be trying to compensate by being the best estate agent in the region.
Now look what you’ve done.
Twenty’s WAG according to a source
Those photos of Johnson and Venables.. its uncanny how much they’ve changed but still you get the sense you’d recognise them alright…
“Mistah, is yer missus not in Girlz Allow-ed?”
off topic… another one gone:
“Martin Cullen TD, Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism has today (8 March
2010) informed An Taoiseach, Brian Cowen TD, that due to a current medical
condition he is retiring from public life.”
Conan, CHARLIE BIRD is reporting that on his way out the door Cullen broke down in tears and apologised for being a parish-pump political prostitute and fucking disgrace. And then he said thanks for the money, the expenses, the salary, the pension, the driver, the helicopter.
he should have a bought a proper chair to prevent his back getting fucked. Dense cunt.
suggesting an electric chair Itchy ?
Charlie “The Minister has just come to me, Charlie Bird, and told me blah blah blah….” Bird?
Emergency motion: Would An Tanaiste Mary Coughlan please retire from breathing valuable oxygen.
Is mise le meas
Self
…by being the best estate agent in the region.
No less than he deserves, the smart arse little cunt.
Conan – it’s very sudden, isn’t it? He must have come down with something quite seriousl.
It’s been on the cards for a couple of weeks. I wonder if they tried bleeding with leeches when all else failed.
The Arts/Sport/Fun ministry will be getting a bad rep – Seamus Brennan was there before he died.
…and John O’Donoghue before that…
They should all be made have a go
gotta love children
..up the ass
But you wouldn’t feel anything.
just ‘cos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgfZ5DEeDRw
Clearly Pinky and Brain situation… Loved it :)
as david orr said in 2003; ” The Eyreaqi Army couldn’t change a fucking tyre in 45 minutes”
a fucking disaster of epic proportions
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b5dd7afc-27f6-11df-9598-00144feabdc0.html
my apologies to the ft finance dept; my will is good
Iraq’s sectarian elections leave only a sliver of hope
By David Gardner
Published: March 5 2010 02:00 | Last updated: March 5 2010 02:00
As Iraqis go to the polls this Sunday, the hope is that the roar and carnage of the still all too frequent bomb blasts will be drowned out by the din and dirt of politics – gladiatorial politics to be sure, but recognisable enough to justify the reiterated US claim that politics has at last broken out in Iraq.
There is no question that these elections are a milestone in Iraq’s history. There is every question about the rest of the journey. Some Iraq-watchers now see a fork in the road, with one path leading to the sunlit uplands of peace and prosperity, and another crumbling into the abyss of civil war. Yet, the real direction of travel – indeed, whether there is any movement at all – looks a lot less clear.
There is, it must be emphasised, an incalculable value in an Arab country having a more or less free electoral contest that establishes a representative government. That remains true even if – after the debacle of the past seven years – Iraq will hardly be seen across an Arab world mired in despotism and stagnation as the beacon of liberty glimpsed in the hallucinations of the Bush and Blair administrations.
Traumatised by decades of tyranny and wars, then torn by invasion and occupation into an ethnic and sectarian patchwork, Iraq has still to rediscover a shared national narrative.
The national reconciliation for which the US troop surge of 2007-08 was supposed to create the conditions has not taken place. Iraq’s present political leaders, whose lives and politics have been twisted by dictatorship and sectarian strife, do not appear either willing or able to reconcile.
There are still millions of Iraqis, by some estimates as many as one in six, displaced in and outside the country. These are the teachers, doctors, engineers, civil servants and entrepreneurs on which Iraq’s future depends, and they are disproportionately Sunni. Without reconciliation and without security they will not be coming back to help rebuild their country.
Fundamental issues remain unresolved. The Shia-dominated government in Baghdad of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki may have signed contracts to develop Iraq’s oil riches with the world’s top oil companies, but there is still no agreed formula for sharing oil revenue around the country. Iraq’s ambition to become an oil exporter to rival Saudi Arabia will get nowhere without roads and refineries, ports and pipelines, power and water.
There is next to no progress, either, on the division of power between provinces, regions and the federation (including the powder-keg question of who will end up with oil-rich Kirkuk, contested between Kurds and Arabs).
The big winners in an invasion that overturned Saddam Hussein’s rule by a Sunni minority are the Shia majority. But few Shia politicians have shown willingness to put state above sect. Many treat Iraqi institutions as booty, behaving as though they are simply taking their rightful turn to monopolise power and resources.
In the provincial elections a year ago, it looked for a moment as though the tide was turning and real politics had come to Iraq. In the 2005 general election, Iraqis split along sectarian lines; their first parliament was made up two-thirds of Islamists. Last year, Mr Maliki trounced his main rival, the Tehran-allied Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), by cloaking the Islamist features of his Da’wa party in the garb of cross-community nationalism, and emphasising jobs, services and security over religion.
Earlier, he had cracked down on Shia militias and the death squads responsible for the savage Sunni-Shia bloodletting of 2006-07. It began to look as though he was turning what had been a clandestine resistance group into a ruling party.
On the evidence of the current election campaign, that is not to be.
Mr Maliki, splitting his State of Law coalition from the Shia Islamist alliance that came first last time, began by courting allies among the Sunni, who for the most part had boycotted the 2005 elections. He was rebuffed. Many Sunni leaders preferred to find a way back into the political game via alliances with secular Shia forces – which the Da’wa party, for all Mr Maliki’s nationalist rhetoric, is not.
But then leading Sunni candidates – such as Saleh al-Mutlaq, who had teamed up with former (Shia) prime minister Iyad Allawi’s secular Iraqiya coalition – were barred from running, because of alleged ties to Saddam’s now proscribed Ba’ath party.
The Maliki government blames Ba’athists for renewing a deadly bombing campaign from last August, which has punctured the prime minister’s hubristic attempt to claim the credit for improved security. Yet the bans look like an attempt to stoke paranoia and neutralise serious rivals.
That impression has been powerfully reinforced in the past two weeks as Mr Maliki has courted the Sunni vote by reinstating 20,000 officers from Saddam’s disbanded army.
There is, of course, a lot of mud being slung, especially about covert foreign alliances and overtures to regional patrons. Much is being made of Mr Allawi’s trips to Saudi Arabia, and visits by a former Pentagon favourite, the chameleon Ahmed Chalabi, to Iran. But this is more serious, and is deepening sectarian divisions.
Mr Maliki had foreshadowed this sort of behaviour. He did, it is true, purge the militias. But he also used US forces to purge his rivals, such as Moqtada al-Sadr, the insurrectionary leader of the Shia underclass, now in alliance with the ISCI, and for whom an old arrest warrant was recently reissued. Some Shia militias, furthermore, are still around; the government has merely rebadged them.
This does not mean, as Mr Allawi warned in a recent interview with the FT, that Iraq might slide into civil war. That war already took place: the Shia won and the Sunnis lost. What it could mean is an episodically violent scrabble for power, in which enough Sunni insurgents and occasional Shia rebels withhold their consent through bombings intended to tell Iraq’s rulers they will not be allowed to enjoy the spoils of office unmolested.
This Sunday’s election seems unlikely to produce a clear victor. Some sort of coalition, led by a Shia, looks probable, and Mr Maliki is by no means preordained to lead it. In the twilight of the occupation, the US cannot do much. The Obama administration’s minimalist ambitions seem to be to keep withdrawal on track (with all combat troops out by September) and to have an election at least better than the one in Afghanistan.
Realistic hopes for Iraqis can only be minimalist, but are really important. In the absence of a shared national narrative they can aspire to working national institutions, in the hope that new leaders will emerge before the sectarian mould has irretrievably hardened. Ammar al-Hakim inherited leadership of the ISCI last year from his strongman father, but he seems, rhetorically at least, to have it about right. “There are two points of view,” he told Reuters. “The view of the strongman, or the strong institution that creates strong men; we depend on the latter.”
david.gardner@ft.com
on a final note; this bullshit belongs in bertieland
http://news.ie.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=152460540
“Do I look like a professional?”
who pissed on your bag of chips? he was only asking a question, that’s how they started picking on Len in Harry Brown you know
Shinpads at 5-a-side? You absolute fucking queen.
Were you wearing stillettos and fanny pads as well?
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