Che-nge the record, it's just a statue

Every so often you see a story and think “How the hell is this still a thing?” The furore around Galway’s proposed Che Guevara statue is one such story.

You’d think that the chair of the House Foreign Relations committee would have a loaded plate, what with North Korea in a dangerous state of flux, the war in Afghanistan in its final throes, a cataclysmic situation in Syria ongoing and a band of nuke-happy lunatics purporting to be concerned about Israel getting more baying and mobbish by the day. But Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has still managed to find time to warn of the terribleness of Galway, a city thousands of miles away one eighth the size of a US congressional district, erecting a monument to Che Guevara. It is, she says, “an outrage” that such a thing is being proposed. An outrage! Some would say that a senior congresswoman placing a hold on millions of dollars of development aid funding for Palestine because of their audacious plan to become a country outrageous, but we won’t judge.

She is joined in her outrage by Iron Man wannabe and selector of antique causes celebres Declan “Senor Burns es El Diablo” Ganley, who warned that putting up the statue would be disastrous for tourism, credibility and Galway’s chances of getting a nice summer. And the story trundled on with a comment from the magnificently monikered historian Carlos Eire, who skilfully invoked both the “Bad as Cromwell” card and the “This is pure like denying the Holocaust, so it is” card.
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For the past few weeks people seem to be jumping out of the woodwork any time Che is mentioned in any half decent way, a bit like when someone on Irish Central says something positive about multiculturalism and we get insane rants from...well, you know. What is most galling of all though is not even the arguments themselves, but the double standards at play within them. Lehtinen blasts Guevara as a monster (as many Cuban-Americans understandably do) but the real problem was he wasn’t an American-sponsored monster, of which there have been many. Similarly, Ganley fulminates about the dangerous terrorist who murdered people, but when 2016 comes and the Easter Rising centenary comes around, it’s unlikely he’ll have such strident words for brave rebels Pearse and Plunkett.

Personally, I wouldn’t be in favour of the monument. Not because I have serious objections to Che’s character (I’m actually quite ambivalent about him) but having seen the drawings of the thing, it’s so gawky and out of place I wouldn’t be in favour of it if it had someone unanimously awesome like Steve Allen or Carlton Banks been emblazoned on it. But, monster or not, monstrosity or not, it’s still Galway’s decision to make. Perhaps they should take a leaf out of the American book on this one, and pursue their own interests vigorously, first and foremost.

An Irishman's guide to celebrating St. Patrick's Day in Ireland

St. Patrick's Day Parade in Belfast City

Hail glorious Saint Patrick, dear Saint of our isle! Of course St Patrick’s Day is a momentous one in the world calendar (there aren’t many other national holidays that prompt an audience with the President or turn rivers a different color) and it’s a day to be savored. But before you do, consider the following things to make the most of the national day.

If you don’t get to the city by midday, don’t expect to move freely

It can be hard to get all your ducks in a row on St Patrick’s Day. There’s no school so there are more people to coordinate, and harder to get them out of bed, to say nothing of the inevitable last-minute-scramble-for-shamrocks-down-the-garden-to-attach-to-your-lapel. But if you’re not in the city early enough to nab a decent place for the parades, all you’re likely to see is the back of a 6ft 5 man’s head for an hour and a half, and that’s if you’re lucky. Although, if you’re not located in such a bustling metropolis you might be OK, which brings me on to...

The local parade

Habitually these start about 3pm and end about 3.25pm, although this can be stretched to 4pm if you include the Pied Piper-esque ritual of walking up the street after the floats have passed. Well I say floats, I mean tractors and lorries with people in wigs on the back and kids holding banners while dancing/doing karate/martial dance.

Have a roster of Irish songs ready to belt out at a moment’s notice

If you’re exhausted after the parades and fancy a refreshment in one of Ireland’s myriad public houses, you may a) have to wait a while and b) be called upon to sing a verse or two of The Irish Rover. And possibly some others, because once a crowd gets into the singing groove they won’t stop just because the Irish songs have, as I learned when dozens of revelers outside The Quays in Galway started singing Eternal Flame.

Pace yourself

Once you’ve served your time at the bar (approximately 4 months on St Patrick’s Day), the intoxicating mix of a day off, effusive atmosphere and beer can all get a bit much. That mixed with the fact St Patrick’s Day is one where you can break Lent means things can get a bit messy. Disappear for half the night messy. Wake up the following morning feeling like Adagio for Strings was written just for you messy.

Try and avoid The Daily Mail the day after

Head rattling is bad enough, but hand wringing won’t do your fragile self any good. It’s pretty common for everyone’s favourite makeshift doormat to write a “Think of the children!” diatribe the day after St Patrick’s Day, shoving genteel Ireland’s face in debauchery they apparently hate but must show. A few pages after that, they may also have an affectionate piece on that loveable old troublemaking roister doister Oliver Reed.

March is not a great month for Irish sightseeing

If you’re away from home on Patrick’s Day and resolved to do some sightseeing round the general area, bear in mind the weather may not sit well with your plans. So if you were spending Paddy’s Day in, say, Cork, going to the Cliffs of Moher on the way home may result in being soaked to the skin and blown around the adjoining fields without mercy in near-hurricane weather, before being flung down the steps on the way down at great speed by a gust of Beaufort-busting wind. Not that I’m speaking from experience. Ahem.

A good oul film to end it all

If you decide not to go down the drink yourself into a Daily Mail-outraging stupor on St Patrick’s Day, you can always go home, perhaps with a takeaway, and watch a good oul Bank Holiday film, often with an Oirish twist (Sean Connery as an Irishman in Darby O’Gill anyone?) but sometimes without (Tropic Thunder, as RTE showed last year, crosses all ethnic barriers. Except maybe Vietnamese ones). Sure what else would you be doing?

University qualifications - what do they really mean? Confidence goes a long way

Recently I started a new job in Belfast, namely as a question writer for a TV quiz show. As you might expect it’s a conversation-starting occupation, as proved to be the case when talking to a taxi man a few days ago. When I jokingly asked him if he’d ever take part in a quiz on telly and maybe win a bit of money, he said back without much consideration: “Ah sure I’d be no good on things like that, I don’t have any qualifications or that."

It’s an attitude that is sadly pervasive. Be it through a lack of opportunity, a lack of application at the time, a lack of self-esteem or a combination of both, there are a distressing number of people who link intelligence to knowing capital cities or remembering what an ox bow lake is. Worse yet, they underplay the talents they actually do have and won’t be convinced they’re anything but a social misfit. Never mind the fact that maintaining one’s calm while navigating round a city center at rush hour is a pretty invaluable skill, that taxi driver thought of himself as stupid.
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I’ve seen this all my life in Donegal. People of an older generation were spat out of schools where being given a clout across the head featured heavily on the syllabus, where the focus was getting a job, inevitably in a factory or some such, getting some money into the family home, and that was about it. Bettering yourself was not an option, and if it was it was often actively discouraged through ridicule and a significant dearth of opportunities in the first place. Sometimes it’s so severe that even when opportunities do appear they aren’t taken up: Donegal sometimes feels replete with men of a certain age who turned down offers to play football abroad because they didn’t have the confidence to make it stick. That bad educational experience has in a lot of cases transmitted to their children’s generation, and low self-esteem dogs them for the rest of their lives. 

If the value of education can or should be defined at all, it should be to widen people’s base of knowledge and to pursue the fields people enjoy without obstacle of any kind. More than that, it should widen the base of things we deem worthy of study and pursuit. Up and down the country there are people young and old with talent, talent submerged and undermined and eroded. Helping those people is the smartest thing we could possibly do.