+++ Irish PM Bertie Ahern Announces Resignation +++

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Guido is M.I.A. in Vietnam

Where, incidentally, Guido has discovered that the governing Communist Party is privatising the provision of state-funded education and cutting taxes on business. So Brown's government has more Stalinist policies than the Vietnamese Communist Party...

No Guinness to be found however, ah well... Happy St Patricks!

Can the Irish Again Save Europe?

With the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, it fell to us Irish, to our glory, to save Western Civilisation. It was Irish monks who copied and preserved almost all of Western classical poetry, history, oratory, philosophy and commentary. It was in the Ireland of St. Patrick and the Book of Kells that, safely distant in the West and away from the barbarian despoliation of the European continent, monks and scribes laboriously, lovingly even, preserved the West's written treasury.

As Thomas Cahill records in How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe "when stability returned in Europe, these Irish scholars were instrumental in spreading learning, becoming not only the conservators of civilization, but also the shapers of the medieval mind, putting their unique stamp on Western culture." Ireland became "Europe's publisher" as warrior-monks followed Columcille's example and began to colonise barbarised Europe.

Whereas once before in distant European history the Irish preserved documents to save Europe from barbarians, Ireland could now vote down a document and save Europe from the bureaucrats. Ireland, alone of all the nations of Europe, will hold a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty...

GuyNews : Irish Elections

It is election day in Ireland today. The Green Party are expected to do well, in small part due to this rather good advert. The small Progressive Democrat party, according to some, is going to get wiped out. Guido thinks they will survive.

See it on GuyNews.TV.

Saoirse!

click to enlarge

Guido is off back home to Ireland today, where he'll be doing his bit for the only party of which he is a paid up member - the Progressive Democrats. (How a cynic like Guido came to be a paid up member is complicated and involves alcohol). The Irish general election is on May 24th. The PDs are the more ideological part of the governing coalition which over the last decade has made Ireland the high-growth, low tax, successful enterprise culture that it is today. They are fighting a strong threat from a rainbow coalition of Socialists, Greens and Gerry Adams' gangsters.

The PDs are standing firmly on their anti-IRA, tax-cutting, free markets and free enterprise platform. Didn't Britain once have a successful political party that stood for those values?

Incidentally Tony Blair, fresh from paying tribute to Sarkozy, appeared last night in Fianna Fáil's party political broadcast backing Bertie Ahern. Fianna Fáil is the Irish equivalent of the Conservative party - so that is the second foreign centre-right political leader he has backed against their socialist opponents in as many weeks. The PDs are allied internationally with the LibDems, but as far as Guido can discover, no-one from Cowley Street is going to help the Irish liberal party. We will cope...

Croke Park, National Anthems, England v Ireland

On 21st November 1920, British troops, infuriated by the IRA's assassination that morning of 14 British agents, retaliated by firing wildly into the Croke Park crowd during a Gaelic football match between Tipperary and Dublin. They killed 11 spectators and a player, Michael Hogan, while two other people were trampled to death. Later that night two IRA officers and a sympathiser were shot in the cells of Dublin Castle in shameful circumstances. Two subsequent British military courts of inquiry into the massacre were held. They found that the shooting "was carried out without orders and exceeded the demands of the situation." Major-General Boyd, the officer commanding Dublin District, added that in his opinion, "the firing on the crowd was carried out without orders, was indiscriminate, and unjustifiable". It was the first Bloody Sunday.

Lansdowne Road is being refurbished and so, for the first time, Croke Park, a place of Irish nationalist symbolism, is being used for international rugby. The location of today's rugby match has acute political significance, Sinn Fein are trying to stir up trouble with a protest at the ground. It will therefore be an extremely emotional moment when the overwhelmingly Irish crowd hears the band play God Save the Queen.

Guido's view is that this is rugby, and rugby fans will want to enjoy it without the historical politics. There is however a rumour going round that Peter Hain will lay a commemorative wreath at Croke Park. That would only serve to further politicise the event. It would reflect well on the crowd if the British national anthem was respected. But remember this is the ground where British bullets once reigned down on Irish civilians, there is not a hope in hell that they will like hearing Send her victorious, Happy and glorious, Long to reign over us.

The Irish national anthem is no less militant, in fact it is implicitly anti-British, and tells of despots from "a land beyond the wave". It is explicitly a soldier's song "In Erin's cause, come woe or weal, 'Mid cannon's roar and rifles' peal" the Irish Rugby team will sing, in Gaelic, that they are sworn to be free.

Guido won't be booing the British national anthem this afternoon, but he will be cheering O'Driscoll to victory...

UPDATE : 43 - 13 and the proper respect shown for the national anthems. Ireland can be proud.