The Rusty Wire Service

Caption suggestions gratefully accepted...   Much of the British media's coverage of the Royal Wedding was a textbook exercise in the sublime elevation of banality to rarified pseudo-profundity. It was just a wedding people! And whether they’re ‘Big Fat Gypsy’ or Royal, they all follow roughly the same protocols of dullness and sentimentality. Of course the real difference between a Gypsy and a Royal Wedding is that Wills and Kate were far less likely to have their reception cancelled the day before. Hell, the Royals even rocked up at the Abbey in a fleet of vans for this hitching. In the weeks running up to this yawnfest, you'd be forgiven for thinking that obsequiousness was a national pastime, given lurid expression every time one of these balding aristocrats has a bunfight they want financed by the taxpayers. Sphincter-tingling... But it’s not even the way Britain  makes a virtue of outrageous class snobbery that rankled; live here for a w...

This Easter, we were treated to a spectacle that used to be commonplace during the Troubles:  Beer-bellied men in balaclavas standing under tricolours in graveyards, reading terse, menacing communiqués to small gatherings of hardline Republicans; it could have been 1973 all over again. To understand why today in the early 21 st century, we are still watching news coverage of masked men threatening to assassinate members of the British Royal Family, we are almost inevitably forced to take a history lesson... Hostage to historical cliché Certainly, the Queen’s proposed visit to Ireland in May is a hostage to history; how could it ever be otherwise? It is a hundred years since the Queen’s Grandfather George V sailed into Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) at the head of a flotilla of gunboats, so for some, this year’s visit has a pleasing, almost geometrically fitting sense of occasion. However, this being Anglo Irish relations, there is always a spectre at the feast. Another coin...

POBLACHT NA H’ÉIREANN ___________________________ THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom. Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organisations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment, and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory. We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish...

'I am the insurrection'   Apparently, on this day about 1967 years ago in Jerusalem, some Jewish guy who looked a lot like Che Guevara emerged from the grave where he’d been interred a couple of days earlier. If he did that today, he’d probably be shot as a zombie rather than being celebrated as the founder of a global belief system. Co-incidentally, Che Guevara died in 1967 ...there's a tenuous link for the numerologists...( At least the ones, like yours truly who couldn't let an arithmetical inaccuracy get in the way of a cheesy set-up ) Pascal-style resurrection through insurrection was the agenda in Dublin 95 years ago today. The Provisional Government of the Republic proclaimed Irish independence from the steps of the GPO in Dublin and the rest, as they say, is history. But nearly a century later, the struggle for ownership of that history remains a fierce battleground. ‘Hit them in the pocket book’ The self-appointed ‘Guardians of the Republic’s fl...

“This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands,-- This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” Today is St George’s day, though you’d never know it living in Sarf-east London. It’s also the birthday of perhaps the greatest English man who ever lived. For English people, we completely understand that the likeliest holder of that mantle is Winston Churchill but for the rest of the world; England’s greatest gift has been the Bard, by a country mile. His work is held in almost universal affection, at least once the traumas of school English lessons have abated. The late Frank McCourt put it rather...

Indifference was my initial gut reaction to news that the Queen would visit Ireland from 17-20 May this year.  That eventually mellowed into ambivalence. Excited? To be sure, to be sure... It’s not that I’m necessarily against the visit, in principle. At least, not exactly. Apart from a diametric opposition to monarchism, hereditary peerage or any other kind of caste system, I don’t really see why any invited foreign head of a state shouldn’t visit the country. Given the trouble Ireland has had over the centuries with its over-ambitious sibling nation, it’s probably a reflection of some kind of post-colonial political maturity if we can show the good grace to treat our former ‘overlords’ with the kind of hospitality for which the country used to be so rightly famous. And in that spirit of maturity and hospitality, it’s also probably worth remembering that if the Great British Public are happy to call themselves the subjects of a Monarch; we, the free-born Citizens ...

TRWS proudly publishes its hundredth posting today. Several thousand words later, the Croppy remains mystified, exasperated, amused, disgusted and optimistic by dangerously bipolar turns. On such occasions, one often feels obliged to take stock; to see what (if anything) has been achieved by all this sturm und drang and what might be gained from it going forward. Well, that’s easy; to quote Seasick Steve: “I started out with nuthin and I still got most of it left.” On a good day I feel like a Jacobite pamphleteer and on the bad ones, I’m flinging pennies at the moon. But either way, it’s been a helluva lot of fun so far, thanks for reading.

  Rebel soldiers loyal to Ivory Coast opposition leader Alassane Ouattara   While the Coalition of the Willing whales away on Gaddafi in Libya for being a naughty dictator sitting on top of an oilfield, excuse me, for oppressing his people; the situation in Côte D’Ivoire looks like reaching a grim endgame in a bunker in the country’s capital Abidjan. Forces loyal to the opposition leader Alassane Ouattara have lain siege to the presidential palace and time is running out for the garrulous Gbagbo. President Laurent Gbagbo won power in 2000, in an election that was by his own admission “calamitous” and which saw both Alassane Ouattara, and the man who came third in last year's first round, Henri Konan Bedie barred. Civil war broke out in September 2oo2 and while government forces held on to the capital, they lost control of the northern part of the country and the rebels forces made their headquarters in the city of Bouaké. Franco-Ivorian relations Gbagbo: ...

It would have been the eighth bookmaker in the high street and the 11th in Deptford. But in a rare outbreak of sanity in a London Borough Planning office, the nice people in Lewisham Town Hall turned Betfred’s application down at the end of March. There had been widespread opposition and even hostility in Deptford to the opening of another bookie office and local people have campaigned vigorously against Betfred's application to have planning use altered from building society only to include betting shops in a vacant high street premises. Because of the way the 2005 Gambling Act is worded,  campaigners were unable to influence the decision to grant the Gambling License with their online petition opposing both the granting of a Gambling License and Planning Permission at 93-95 Deptford High Street. However, according to the blog, Crosswhatfields, the chief of planning in Lewisham refused permission without the need to take the matter to Committee. It is understoo...

The author of a UN report which concluded that the Israeli Defence Force deliberately targeted civilians in Gaza during the conflict of 2008/’09 is now casting doubt on his own report’s findings. In an opinion piece for the Washington Post on April 1, Richard Goldstone expressed grave misgivings about the central finding of the UN Human Rights Council Fact Finding Mission Report on the Gaza Conflict of 2008-9. Namely, that Israel's indiscriminate attacks on civilians were intentional. The benefit of hindsight Goldstone, a former South African Constitutional Court judge and Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, said that “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.” The New Statesman couldn’t see why Goldstone had chosen to go public with his change of heart, after all, it wasn’t as if Goldstone’s initial findings were out of kilter with other international enquiries into the conf...

Friday afternoon, 1.10pm. The monotony of the prison regime is disrupted once again; not for a riot or an assault but for the latest craze that is sweeping through the prison estate nationwide. It’s the Muslim call to prayers.  It’s gotten so commonplace these days that my budgie has taken to tweeting ‘Allahu Akbar’. Before I go much further, I’d like to make it clear that while I was brought up in a strong Catholic tradition, I was also reared to have a great respect for other religions and Islam in particular as it shares so much common ground with Christianity. Many of my friends are Muslims and believe me, they’ve got some pretty strong views on the controversy surrounding this faith. So Inchallah, my comments won’t be misunderstood... Creme Eggs and absolution Last Easter Sunday, I attended morning mass and there were just a dozen of us in attendance in the chapel. Now, let’s have it right; half of them were there on the promise of the crème egg at the end of ...