Sweary


A couple of days back, I stood breathlessly telling my colleagues about that heinous situation the blogosphere is calling Picturegate, or Cown’gate (The Sun is calling it Poo Gate, for no discernible wit or rhyme or reason).


How awful this whole affair, to make me huff and puff like some sort of chain-smoking bullfrog! I was red in the oxters and nearly fainting, so horrendous the government’s attack on free speech, so alarming the waste of Gardai resources!


Later, it turned out I was breathless because of anaemia, but my argument, unlike my 5?5? frame, still stands. Cown’gate is truly a low point for us all.


“Hmm,” said Colleague 1, when I finished my rant and collapsed like a Bronte into the nearest swivel chair. “My brother would be very like that too.” And she looked at Colleague 2, who chuckled. Then they assaulted the water cooler and left me pawing the air from the floor behind my desk.


When I recovered – the effects of anaemia, unlike my haemoglobin, ebb and flow – I composed an email to my close friends and family regarding Cown’gate, regarding my feelings on the matter, emphasising what I felt were the important issues, asking them if they did not feel as I felt (angry, that is, not gasping for oxygen). I sent it on, and got back to my palpitations, but I was delighted to see a reply come back as promptly as a grovelling national broadcaster angling for a licence fee increase and an extension to their canteen.


The reply said, “Hey girl, do you know any good but reasonably priced hotels in Galway City?”

Am I spiky as a rabid porcupine? Do I give ordinary decent folk the heebie-jeebies? Do people tell their children at night that Sweary’ll come and get them if they don’t go the fuck to sleep? Myself and my excitable nature should not be all alone in the great GAA ground of Irish Protest, hanging over the turnstiles with binoculars, composing welcome messages that whither due to changes in modern fucking languages before I’ve had a chance to use them! WHY DON’T PEOPLE GET EXCITED ABOUT ISSUES ANY MORE?


I don’t get it. Are we that afraid of our blood pressure that we can’t get sweat the big stuff – are we that worried that the top of our heads will fly the fuck off and end up in the North, or something, that if we allow a local cause to cross our minds even once we’ll be campaigning without a bullet-proof vest on the Gaza strip within 24 hours? It seems to me that there’s a greater stigma attached to having an interest in activism than there is attached to slowly driving a Hiace with blacked-out windows and lollipops trailing invitingly behind it. Ok, so the internetz went a bit cuckoo over Cown’gate, as did the careermongering righteous over at Newstalk, but the rest of us? The average man on the street? The average Sun reader? Interested only in taking a sniggery peek at the picture of Brian Cowen holding the bog roll, and squeezing their eyes shut to the real, undeniably sinister goings-on behind the joke.


If I tell my friends about something along the lines of government intimidation of the Irish media, am I wrong to expect some sort of reaction?


Or am I just living in a blogosphere bubble, fortified by Twitter, protected from the wee pricks that threaten to burst it open by undiluted heroes like Bock and Twenty?


If my red blood cells weren’t as scarce as testosterone at a Daniel O’Donnell gig, I’d be really mad about this…

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