If Joyce were alive he might have written this: Ireland before and after the EU

This classic of Irish prose writing emerged in the run up to the second Lisbon referendum.

penned by my good friend Kevin B. It appeared on Machinenation.org while I was away eating confit de canard and sipping inexpensive fine wines in the South of France. This deserves further exposure.

Ireland lovely???????

Wake up you dopes. Ireland before the EEC/EC/EU was a tragic, alcoholic, wife-beating, child-molesting, paedophile priest dominated, unemployed syphillitic hell-hole.
You woke up to nothing to wake up to.
You paid a fortune for shit food.
And when you left dublin - a toasted cheese was high cuisine.
The only thing you could do was get the f**k out.
Sadly the UK was the main option or you went illegal in the US.
Ireland existed as a source of cheap labour for Britain and a source of missionaries for the world.
Beyond that Ireland was a rank, damp TB ridden basement bedsit of a country.
A pyschologically ill bakset case capable of feeding and employing a mere fraction of its citizens.

Then the EC.
The first visible consequence was social - Dutch and Germans came here.
They made cheese, they baked.
And after a decade the slow, fish-hating locals - hey that's why we gave our fish to the Spanish. We didn't like them, they tasted fishy. Fish was penance. Fish was friday. Shell fish yuck. We'll give our fish and you give us more money to fund our cows. Glorious cows.Moo Cows. Milk Cows. Beef Cows. Purveyors of the incinerated steak we ate with cabbage cooked to paste - started to copy the foreigners.
Those weirdos are on to something.
Maybe rivers aren't a place to dump old cars. Sure the flash fellas in Dublin will eat that salmon. You have to smoke it tho.
Jaysus, hurry get the slurry out of the river.
Curiously the locals were joined other people, returnees - no longer "proper Irish", they didn't wear bitterness with pride- coming home from weird places that were not called Cricklewood or the Bronx but Barcelona, Toulouse, Hamberg, Antwerp.
And guess what? The Big Brother EU didn't bar-code the foreheads. No the EU freed us to go where we wanted.
Free from the violence, bribery, backwardness, incestuous mental decay that fuelled the atmosphere here. Free from the fourth "missing field', free from batton charges in Ballsbridge. Free from the dirty protest. (no one seem to notice that the whole country signed up for that one n continued on for decades).
Free from Tom Murphy's Whistle in the Dark. Free from the Great Hunger.
Hunger, now we're back at the table again.
Shut up Da!
Behold is that a vegetarian restaurant I see before me in Dingle. Sushi in Akakista.
Hey where did all these roads come from?
(Thanks again to the Germans - they've helped out with both food and transport).
When the kids came back from Europe they barely recognised the place.
And then, holy mary, that queer Norris brought our homosexuality laws to Europe.
And the genie was out.
Contraception in pubs! Are you mad or what!
Suddenly we had been given all the toys. And we were being treated as big boys.
And what did we do?


For God's sake - the only mature thing about this country is our alliance with Europe.
Outside of that we are a substance abusing, spoilt, immature child that should not be left on its own.

Ireland is a basket case.

Voting Yes is like a form of counselling that we need.

If we don't look out to Europe - the Wahabi wing of the Catholic church - COIR - will have us looking up through whisky red eyes at the Virgin Mary.

"Ah sure Mary will understand. The younger sister was asking for it."