I’m gonna take your money
Count your loss when I’m gone.
I’m alright, Jack
I’m lookin’ after number one.
If I want something I get it
Don’t matter what I have to do
I’ll step on your face, on your mother’s grave
Never underestimate me I’m nobody’s fool
Don’t wanna be like you.
Don’t wanna live like you.
Don’t wanna talk like you, at all.
Don’t give me love thy neighbour
Don’t give me charity
Don’t give me peace and love or the good lord above
You only get in my way with your stupid ideas
I am an island
Entire of myself
And when I get old, older than today
I’ll never need anybody’s help in any way.
(Looking after No. 1, The Boomtown Rats, 1977)
EXCLUSIVE! Exclusive! Extra, extra! Read all about it! Michael D dropped the ball in Rugby World Cup bid.
In the old days we would say, ‘Stop the Press’ but these days with everything online it probably goes as BREAKING NEWS.
Ok, I agree that might all be a little melodramatic for a Sunday, but please bear with me, I can explain.
In a week that the Irish Times ran two major stories with the following headlines: ‘At least 70 Dublin trees blew down during Storm Ophelia’ and ‘Weatherman Gerald Fleming to retire at the end of the year’. I kid you not. This is not fake news. There is no connection between the two stories and unusually for Ireland the winking weatherman is not being blamed for the loss of the trees in the capital.
Still in the Big Smoke, Bob Geldof handed back his Freedom of the City in an extraordinarily courageous attack on the 60kg Aung San Suu Kyi over her disgraceful and abject failure to take on the might of the Myanmar military regime and its corrupt generals as they ‘ethnically cleanse’ Rohingya Muslims in the country.
Why did we ever campaign to have her released for years of house arrest only to become a puppet of the military junta? Bang out of order Bob, you tell her.
Now in our little island world of high class problems, uprooted trees and soon to be departing weathermen, there was a tragedy to trump all others. We lost our bid to host the Rugby World Cup in 2023. We didn’t just lose it to the preferred bidder South Africa, worse again we lost it to the French.
The arrogant French who dismissed all the small talk, chit-chat, charm offensive and any offers of mighty craic to call out the authors of the technical report which favoured South Africa and ripped it up in the faces of World Rugby and called out South Africa as a murder capital (19,000 murders last year), economic and political basket case which had just lost out on hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2022.
Money talks, bullshit walks and fortune favours the brave. Game over. See you in Biarritz in 2023.
Now what’s all that got to do with Aung San Suu Kyi, Geldof and Mickey D you say? Blame. The blame game. We love to blame someone else when it doesn’t work out, when it goes south, when we lose and get it wrong. Blame someone else. In the best small country in the world for outdoor field games we still find plenty of time for the national blood sport, the favourite national pastime of, The Blame Game.
Geldof has tried to do some good in his day, has certainly been through the mill and we go back a long way the old Rat and I. We have sort of grown up to be punks in pinstripes still railing and arguing the toss with the boss.
But I have seldom seem such a senseless and self-indulgent stunt as handing back the Freedom of the City over the massacre of Muslims in Myanmar as poor President Aung San Suu Kyi is merely a figurehead, trying to keep her head, and has as much say as Shep.
Now Michael D is our own President, a national treasure and sports mad into the bargain. Going to matches since he was knee high to a … well you know what I mean. Never misses a match in Croker or in the Aviva. He was even going to Galway United and Connacht games, when no one else was other than the linesmen.
So to be consistent in the blame game, Geldof and Co who are now beating up on Aung San Suu Kyi might as well blame Michael D for losing us the Rugby World Cup and throw in the housing crisis, the thousands of children who are homeless and the 685,000 on hospital waiting lists while you’re at it.
He is our President after all and it beats blaming the homeless and the media for hamming up the housing crisis.
Or we could turn our guns on Geldof. Wasn’t he part of the failed IRFU campaign video reciting lines of mystical poetry? Or who exactly did Senator Terry Leydon have in mind when he was inspired to slag off the Irish effort to land the Rugby World Cup in the Seanad this week describing them as “a bunch of amateurs who wouldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery.”
The BBC particularly loved that one and I’m sure the Scottish and Welsh rugby unions also drew some gleeful comfort, having cost us dearly with their double cross.
We were sure we had the support of our fellow Celts, Six Nations and PRO14 colleagues in the bag. Leydon, a shameless windbag who thinks nothing of posting out Christmas cards to constituents printed and posted at their expense clearly sees no votes in Donnybrook or among the Roscommon rugby set went on to gloat: “When we were in power we could negotiate for world events.”
This claim continues to puzzle me and I can only conclude that he was talking about the 1932 Eucharistic Congress in the Phoenix Park.
I for one am sorry that we did not win the bid to host the Rugby World Cup in 2023. It would have been great for the country and a great boost for our country, good for business and great for tourism.
It would also have been great sport and mighty craic. However, there is no column or section in the bid format for any of that. I was naïve. So too it seems were the head honchos in the IRFU and the considerable and costly expertise they enlisted to back their bid.
On reflection we couldn’t match either the South Africans or particularly the French in terms of finance. In all honesty, we don’t have the necessary infrastructure in place to ensure visitors would not be ripped off with the cost of hotel rooms in Dublin. Our broadband is brutal and we don’t have sufficient fully completed all-seated modern stadiums.
The M50 is at a standstill most days of the week and we don’t even have a rail link from the airport to the city centre or connecting train stations.
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In France the trains really run on time. In Japan this week they apologised when a train departed 20 seconds earlier than its due time. In Ireland we are just glad if they run at all.
We have been only fooling ourselves and bluffing on this stuff for years. We didn’t use our resources wisely, invest our budget surpluses or largesse properly even in the so called boom years. Ireland continues to really lag behind our rivals and competitors in all these spheres of critical national infrastructure. We have an inflated view of our own self-importance.
If only we could see ourselves as others do. The failure of our Rugby World Cup bid this week will all have been worth it if we learn this lesson and act to rectify it.
Truth is we also lost the vote because we are not as important, influential, popular or as significant as we like to think we are. We didn’t come third. We came last.
If we can’t depend and trust the Scots and Welsh when it comes to their support in rugby politics how will we fare out when it comes to trusting the Germans, French or Italians when it comes to the crunch on Brexit? Will we be left on the side-lines again, counting the cost and licking our wounds?
Who will we blame then? But I am looking forward to when we play both Scotland and Wales in the Six Nations in Dublin this season.
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