There’s been much controversy in recent weeks over the appointment of a government supporter to the board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, to boost his credentials for his election as a senator for cultural interests. He subsequently resigned the first position and then withdrew his senatorial election bid, but the whole episode turned into a vast circus with the public viewing all the politiical participants as clowns.
Hence the memorable phrase, about the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, doing the work of two people, Laurel and Hardy. All this from a paper which supposedly is a lavish supporter of the present government!
With two by-elections happening here in Ireland this coming Friday, as well as two in England, the political temperature is getting exciting. The makings of a serious popular revolt are getting under way in Ireland, thanks to the charges for water, which have just started. It’s a highly unpopular charge and it has awakened the fighting spirit in many around the country; a big national rally against it is planned for Dublin on Saturday, so it’ll be interesting to see how it turns out. Mind you, reading and watching most of the media in Ireland, it’d be hard to gauge there’s such strength of feeling on the issue around the country. The water charges are very inequitable, because they place a much higher burden on low income families, while high earning families can just shrug them off. No wonder that the other day, a video was posted showing an unnamed 92 year old granny from somewhere in Ireland giving her comments on the water charges. As for the form that everyone has to fill in for Irish Water, her riposte was that she was going to “wipe her arse with it”. Strong stuff for a 92 year old! But such are the passions being aroused by the new water charge that it could well lose the government the next general election in Ireland, which has to take place within the next 18 months.
Also in Ireland, there’s been much comments about the Coynes, the couple evicted from their home in Dublin recently, not because they hadn’t paid their rent, but because their landlord went bankrupt and the Dutch-owned bank that was owed money by the landlord wanted to repossess the house so it could sell it on. Eventually, the Coynes were evicted from their home and they’ve now been ordered to pay all the costs involved. The Irish legal system as well as the Dutch-owned bank have showed themselves to be utterly callous, brutal and totally lacking in any kind of human consideration; it’s not too dissimilar to what happened with the old Soviet gulags. Perhaps they should all take a lesson or two from what’s happening in the British Library in London next year, when original pages from the Magna Carta, the original bill of human rights, will be on display,800 years after they were written.
The by-elections here in Ireland are expected to produce strong results for anti-government candidates and with the two by-elections in England, it’s quite likely that UKIP will win both of them. Meanwhile, the Tories are getting nastier by the day, reverting to all their traditional stereotypes. At the recent Tory party annual conference in Birmingham, what enthused the delegates most was the plan to impose yet more drastic cuts on poor families. The Tories have gone into such retro mood that they’re now walking backwards to Christmas and into the next UK general election. Meanwhile, the quip about the Lib Dem annual conference in Glasgow was that the security guards were there, not to stop people getting in, but to prevent delegates escaping, there was so little public interest in the event.
Meanwhile in France, the 2015 budget has produced little that wasn’t expected; €21 billion in savings are to be made, including cutting welfare spending by €9.5 billion. True, there have been cuts in income tax, but on the other hand, diesel went up by two cent a litre. The public deficit in France now stands at a record €2 billion. Given the dramatic slowdown that’s taking place in the German economy, everyone’s wondering how on earth the eurozone is going to get out of its perpetual cycle of deflation and recession.
There’s also another political split in France, one of many. The latest involves the Chiracs. Bernadette Chirac is a great admirer of Sarkozy and would like to see him back in charge of the centre right UMP party and running in the 2017 president election. On the other hand, her husband, Jacques Chirac, a former president, now 81 and in poor health, has long had a bitter rivalry with Sarkozy and he is vehemently opposed to him making a comeback. He much prefers Alain Juppé as UMP head and presidential candidate and according to a recent poll, seven out of 10 French voters agree with him. Another presidential hopeful, Marine le Pen of the Front National, was also in the news for the wrong reasons. She has just lost her driving licence, for speeding offences, but she had blamed it all on her chauffeur.
Mind you, there’s nothing like a former head of state pouring the proverbial bucket of piss over a current leader, as in the spat between former German chancellor Helmut Kohl and present chancellor Angela Merkel. Kohl is very dismissive of her and remarks that when she first came into politics in the early 1990s, she didn’t even know how to use a knife and fork properly at state dinners. And that’s just for starters, so this particular spat promises to get very dirty and very engrossing!
Someone else who has been in hot water, but who has escaped is Jean Plantureux, a French cartoonist, who does the Plantu cartoons in Le Monde. Many readers regard him as the best cartoonist in France; his work is always cutting and right on the ball. Back in 2010,he published a cartoon on his website that was subsequently used in Le Monde, showing the then Pope, Benmedict XVI, sodomising a child. At the time, there was absolute uproar, but Plantu has now been cleared of charges of inciting hatred. I hate to think what Plantu will get up to when the Pope makes his planned visit to France, as well as to London, in 2015.The Pope is due in Strasbourg before then, on November 25,to meet members of the various EU institutions based there, the latest version of the Holy Roman Empire, but his full blown trip to France will have to wait until next year.
In the meantime, the managing director of John Lewis, one of the biggest UK retailers, has got himself into hot water over his comments on France. After being delayed on his return to London from Paris by train, Andy Street let fly. He said that he’d never seen a country more ill at ease with itself, where nothing works and where no-one cares.” Sclerotic was the word he used. He also said that the Gare du Nord was the squalor pit of Europe. His remarks were very crude and stupid, the sort of thing a 17 year old in a hissy fit would say. Since John Lewis is about to launch a website for its wares in France, it seems an odd way of going about the publicity.
Someone else who said what he thought, this time in Monaco, found himself not only in hot water, but in jail. A 30 year old Tunisian man in the tiny principality was looking for someone official to talk to about a recent legal claim he had made about a work injury, but confronted with bureaucratic obtuseness, he made a series of very rude remarks about Prince Albert. The Tunisian man ended up with a three month jail sentence for being rude about the Monaco royals. It all sounds very medieval and despotic and it’s all in contrast to what happened to someone in France, who in 2008 confronted then president Sarkozy with a banner reading, in translation: “Get lost, you sad idiot”. He faced prosecution, but in 2013, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that he was perfectly entitled to do what he did, without fear of prosecution.
The south of France is also in the news for more positive news. In Monte Carlo, the famed Hotel de Paris closed the other day for extensive renovations. Part of it will reopen for Christmas, but the whole renovation project will take four years to complete. Then in Nice, one of the most beautiful villas owned by the city of Nice is up for sale. It’s the Villa Beluga in Cimeiz, which was bought by the city in 1971.Ever since, it has been home for the director of a local museum, but now it has been put on the market and is expected to fetch upwards of €2 million.
Perhaps Sharon Osborne has the right idea. This extremely wealthy TV star is known for her extreme protests. On one occasion, years ago, she was having a row with Elton John and went to his house in Hollywood and shat all over his driveway and car. On another occasion, she was having a row with the singer and songwriter Lynsey de Paul, who died last week, and left a very particular message. Sharon relieved herself by pissing into a suitcase belonging to Lynsey de Paul. None of this carry-on harmed Sharon Osborne’s TV career in any way - just shows!
Someone with considerable more longevity in show business is Gisele Casadesus, who joined the Comedie Française in Paris way back in 1934. She reached her 100th birthday in June and has since been suitably honoured by the theatre, where she is considered the doyenne of actors. She has also just started giving a series of 10 lectures in Paris on her theatrical contributions. A remarkable lady!
A much more recent media phenomenon in France has made a rapid start-up. Netflix only came to France recently but has had a very good take-up, helped by a free first month. After that, subscribers have to pay between €7.99 and €11.99 a month. France has 25 million TV homes and within five years, Netflix plans to be in a third of them. The service can of course also be seen on mobiles and other portable devices. It’s nearly two years since we abandoned television here at home in Dublin and I can’t say we miss it at all. With Internet radio, it’s possible to get all kinds of interesting programmes from around the world, and the fact they come without pictures, makes them more interesting, in my view, because you have to use your imagination. One of the delights of Internet radio is that we can listen to the Radio 4 news on the BBC - hear exactly what they are missing out, which is quite a lot - and then tune in to Euronews, based in Lyon, to fill in all the gaps.
A recent survey done by the Bookseller magazine in London also turned traditional views of the media on their head. It found that among 16 to 24 year olds, the preference of nearly three-quarters was to read printed books, rather then e books. Which is all very encouraging, since reading a printed book is a much more sensory experience as well as one that is far more stimulating for the imagination and the memory.
A rather more controversial topic is going on view at La Pinacotheque museum in Paris, where a new exhibition is going to reveal all about the Kama Sutra. The co-curator of the exhibition, Dr Alka Pande, has an interesting take on the whole idea, saying that people should come and see the exhibition and go away with the view that the Kama Sutra is not a dirty :little book, but a book of life.
An anniversary came up last weekend, which brought back many happy memories. It’s 26 years since we did a weekend trip from Dublin to Paris on Concorde, a memorable occasion indeed, even if coming back to Dublin on a conventional jet felt like travelling in a horse drawn tram by comparison. Now there are plans by the Airbus consortium to produce a Concorde style plane, but only for corporate use. I wonder will a full scale supersonic passenger airliner ever return?
We were also suitably reminded the other day, by a programme on the BBC, on Strasbourg, about the time, after a suitably vinous lunch, we managed to sprint to the top of Strasbourg cathedral. It’s a magnificent medieval building and the views from the top are quite spectacular. It also reminded us of the medieval Maison Kammerzell, right beside the cathedral, which is now a top quality restaurant. We tried it for ourselves and it certainly lived up to its fine reputation without being too pricey.
There was also the inevitable sad news from France within the past few days. At the end of last week, a group of Swiss entrepreneurs took off by helicopter from Lausanne, bound for a Peugeot factory in eastern France. But just across the border, near the French town of Montbéliard, the helicopter came down, in good weather. It crashed onto a hen coop belonging to a local family, who at the time were having breakfast in their own nearby house. Five people in the aircraft died and two survived.
Then at Carville in Calvados in Normandy the other night, a middle aged man was in his car with his 16 year old daughter, when they came to a bad bend in the road. The man lost control of his car; it flipped over and ended up in a ditch. The two occupants got out uninjured, then the man phoned his wife to come and pick them up. As her car approached the same band, she too lost control, and the vehicle flipped over, in the process, hitting and killing her husband.
All we need now is Ebola in France; the latest predictions say that the dreaded disease will reach both France and the UK by October 24th.And just to add to the spate of bad news, the Foreign Office in London runs a very comprehensive travel advisory service and for people going to France, it says that there is now a high risk of terrorism, with the possibility of indiscriminate attacks.
You could be worse; you could be in the shoes of a jeweller, who met up with two men who apparently wanted to buy a lot of jewellery. They met up in the 8th arrondissement in Paris and did the deal. The men had brought €6 million in a suitcase, or so they said, in order to avoid everyone involved paying tax. The jeweller took some of the notes from the top of the suitcase, went to a nearby bank and had them authenticated. What he didn’t realise that while the top of the suitcase had real money, most of was packed with worthless Monopoly money. The men got away with the jewellery but the poor jeweller was left with a big hole in his wallet.
At least one place in Paris that has given a lot of people a lot of entertainment over the years celebrated in style on Monday night. The Moulin Rouge celebrated its 125th anniversary. It still does two shows a night, each two hours long, and they are nearly always booked out. Every year, the Moulin Rouge gets 600,000 visitors. Still all the celebrations didn’t deter two members of Femen, who climbed onto to the top of the Moulin Rouge, topless, so that everyone could see the slogans they’d painted on themselves, “Not for Sale”, a protest against the sex industry. Femen members have been doing so many of this kind of protest for so long that they’ll probably have to come up with a new twist to keep people interested, to prevent a feeling of deja vu.
While the Moulin Rouge packs them in, Disneyland Paris, better known as Eurodisney, which opened to the east of Paris in 1992, hasn’t been going so well. It’s seen a dramatic fall in visitors, so much so that it’s been making big losses. It’s now getting a cash injection of €426 million from Disney, its American parent, while €600 million in debt is being converted into equity. The Eurodisney people are hoping that its latest attraction, Ratatouille, which cost €200 million to build, will start pulling in the punters again.