The Rusty Wire Service

As anyone who knows the Deptford Croppy will happily/ruefully tell you, there are few more fond exponents of cawbogourery, paddywhackery and outrageously tenuous claims of Irishness for unlikely candidates from A to Z -- (Muhammad) Ali to Zorro -- than yours truly. Indeed, as my put-upon flatmates would no doubt exhaustedly testify, this relentless Irishry can take its toll. They might even reckon they could sleepwalk their way through our paramedic training modules on ‘Recognising Radicalisation’ after living with me for two years. Identity is a recurrent leitmotif here at the Rusty Wire Service and frankly, it never gets old. So what better time to revisit the theme than on the weekend of our annual Hibernalia? In fairness, much as I revel in the jubilant silliness of taking irrational pleasure in the (often exaggerated) fables of the land of my forbears, I’d die roaring before I’d allow myself to be called a nationalist. Even growing up during the Tro...

Guardian 2019 For those who like their ‘freude’ liberally leavened with ‘schaden’; having a ringside seat on the slo-mo implosion of English political life that is Brexit has surely got to be the equivalent of riding Space Mountain on mescaline while being enthusiastically pleasured by [insert name of favourite actor/porn star/neighbour about whom you fantasise, here]. Yes indeed, the omnishambolic clusterfuck of the bodypolitic here on Airstrip One continues to confound, exasperate and stupefy in seemingly equal measure. From an objective viewpoint, I’d probably find it genuinely hilarious if it wasn’t happening in a state where I live while also having profound ramifications for the country where most of my family are resident.   Still, I keep finding myself trying to look at the bigger picture and I guess that’s where the ferrous content of this whole sorry saga goes way beyond being irony. If we chose to ignore the grassroots reasons for a ‘Leave’ vote...

So….It’s been a good long while since last there was a post from this very rusty guerrilla news agency. I apologise of course but I’m still hoping my reader(s) understand. Training has been intensity in ten cities and in the middle of that madness, the world kept turning and spinning in a kind of out-of-control gyre that Yeats wouldn’t have made much poetry out of if he was being completely honest…. So, what’s happened since last I put pen to paper? Well, nothing I hadn’t predicted in my darkest days. The coup continues. Brexit was never anything other than an attempt by the selfish right to take control of the sections of public life that hadn’t already been sweated and rendered down to private control. In that scenario, the human stories don’t matter. It doesn’t matter that I'm Irish and about to complete paramedic training and that my partner is French and my daughter is German. It doesn’t matter that I grew up experiencing my first bombing in Ireland at the...