It’s not enough that a major scandal surrounding the financing of Sarkozy’s recent campaign to retain the presidency of France has sundered the centre right UMP party. It is now in a state of disarray and so too are the socialists, with the net result that the Front National at the moment seems galloping towards an unstoppable victory in the 2017 presidential elections. Just imagine for a moment the upset the election of Marine Le Pen as president of France would cause. The applecart would be well and truly upset. As an article in the New York Times said so succinctly the other day, the resulting fire in the French house could well spread to the entire European house.
The spirit of scandal is well and truly alive at EDF, the giant energy conglomerate. It seems that Henri Proglio, the boss at EDF, was channelling large sums of money from it into the accounts of his young wife, Rachida Khalil, who has an interesting career as a humourist. In these benighted times, that sound a good job to have. But when she was supposed to be earning minimal amounts from her career, it seems as if vast sums of money, €1.8 million in just a year, was being siphoned off from EDF.
More bad news came last Saturday night. A seven storey block of flats in Aubervilliers, just north of Paris, a poor area, caught fire. Two women, one of whom was pregnant, died when they jumped out to try and avoid the flames. Four people were gravely injured and a further 18 ended up in hospital. Bad and all as the fire was, something else caught my eye about that particular district. I was reading the account of the fire in Le Parisien, which is very good at detailing all the local news in Paris, district by district. When I clicked on Aubervilliers, I couldn’t get over the endless list of crimes listed for that district. Innumerable robberies, attacks, the list went on and on. And if Aubervilliers is that bad, I presume that in a lot of similar districts across France, the litany of crime is similar.
There were shenanigans of a different sort in Paris the other day, when a member of the feminist group, Femen, went into the Musée Grévin, the wax museum in the 9th and poured a pot of paint all over the statue of Putin.
No wonder that last Wednesday and Thursday nights, in the Charente-Maritime department in the west of France, there were some very strange lights in the sky. Luminous and intense bursts of light formed a kind of triangle in the sky, and while there have been plenty of explanations, none is wholly convincing. The proof that it all actually happened is there; Lydia Brun, a municipal councillor in the area, took a video of the lights in the sky.
Maybe it’s just a sign that the president, M.Hollande, is on the ranner again. Sources in Paris say that he’s got together once again with his most recent mistress, Julie Gayet, and that they are back as a couple again. Ah well, just in time for the long summer vacation. During July and August, a large part of France is on vacation, so that nothing of any political interest or importance happens. Talking about vacations, I see that the enchanting railway from Nice to Digne, right up in the Provencal alps, is now working again. Four months ago, the line was closed, because a huge mountainside rock fall pushed a train off the tracks, causing the deaths of two passengers.
Also just in time for the summer holidays, the weather has been improving. In Alsace over the last day or two, the temperature has been hovering around 36 degrees C, which means precautions for a heatwave are in place, while in Paris, it’s been around 27 degrees C. But that level in Paris can feel much hotter and mighty uncomfortable. And at least, the Queen, during her recent visit to France, got a flower market named after her. She was in France as part of the D Day commemorations and on the Saturday morning last weekend, she was on the Ile de la Cité in the 4th to inspect a 200 year old flower market that was being renamed in her honour.
Somone else involved with the original D Day also featured last week. A young man called Jean-Louis Cremieux-Brilhac was the secretary, in London, of the Free French propaganda committee and it was his job to broadcast to the people of France and tell them what to expect after the D Day landings. He still has all his original scripts and he was interviewed by the BBC in Paris, where he now lives. Jean-Louis is now 97,looks remarkably well and has total recalls of the events of 70 years ago.
In France generally at the moment, there’s much disquiet about the government’s plans to reduce the numbers of regions, the so-called fusion des regions, which will see the present 22 regions slimmed down to 14.Such is the popular level of protest building up that I will be surprising if they manage to push through this one.
I was also reading the other day about the last authentic Camembert makers in Normandy, where the smelly but tasty cheese was invented in 1791, called after the village of its invention. Francois and Nadia Durand are the last two cheesemakers in the Camembert town of Pacé, where the cheese has been made for many years. They’ve been working at it for the past 30 years, but it’s a seven days a week operation and they want to retire. The firm turns over €600,000 a year and is profitable but there’s just one snag-they can’t find a buyer for the firm.
But at least a parish priest is trying to move with the times. Frederic Lequin is the priest in the Notre Dame de Bellecombe parish in the sixth arrondissment of Lyon. He’s offering to bless his parishioners’ smartphones, saying that it’s just like the tradition of the church in blessing animals and boats.
There’s also a painting going on view that still has the power to shock so long after it was created. L’Origine du Monde created an absolute uproar when it was first shown in 1866. It shows a young naked model stretched out, with a very luxuriant crop of pubic hair. The man who painted it, Gustave Courbet, was born in Ornans in eastern France in 1819 and he is being honoured by the museum in the town of his birth, from now until September 1st. This sensational work is being shown, along with others by such artists as Degas, Ingres and Rodin. As for the famous painting itself, it’s normally in the national collection held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Here in Ireland, the political discontent is really hotting up. Voters are in a really fractious mood, just like France. Already, it’s been agreed that Sinn Féin will have the Lord Mayor of Dublin’s position for 2016, the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising. An opinion poll published in Dublin last Sunday revealed something never seen before: a quarter of the Irish electorate now wants Ireland to leave the EU. Take a cue from Nigel Farage, who was quoted in another Dublin paper last Sunday as saying that Ireland has one of the worst political classes anywhere in the world. We’re not too different from Spain, where it seems that a majority of the public wants a referendum to see whether the country still wants or needs a monarchy. By the sound of it, if it all depended on popular acclaim, the Spanish monarchy would soon disappear into the archives.
Much still depends on the 71 year old Minister for Finance here, Michael Noonan, who not only has diabetes but has just has a cancerous growth removed from his shoulder. Everyone will wish him well with his health concerns. But some of the awful decisions imposed on Ireland in the past few years by the IMF, the European Central Bank and the EU, have probably caused so much stress to so many people that these decisions are probably indirectly responsible for a whole wave of cancers.
But at least, the Obama administration in Washington has finally decided, after 18 months, to appoint a new US ambassador to Ireland. He’s Kevin O’Malley, a lawyer from St Louis, Missouri, whose father came from Co Mayo. He still has to go through a raft of hearings in Washington before his appointment is ratified, but after such a long gap, it will be good to see a resident ambassador back in place. Let’s hope the US administration deals with ongoing events in the Ukraine a bit more speedily!
To end, I return to a favourite topic, the BBC and many people found themselves agreeing with Norman Tebbit, a former Tory party chairman. He was giving out about a satirical programme on Radio 4 the other evening, which was supposed to be a humorous take on the murder of Lord Mountbatten off the Co Sligo coast in August, 1979. Lord Tebbit said: “It was typical of the profanity, obscenity and sheer bad taste of the corporation”. Many would agree with him about this particular programme, while just as many would like the BBC to simply go back to making decent programmes, that are interesting, informative and enjoyable.