So We Need a Referee as Well as Rules?

Yesterday wasn't a bad day on the sport front. Despite Ronan O'Gara's kicking being about as bad as I've ever seen, Ireland still somehow managed to grind out a 14-13 win against what seems an increasingly and perversely ill-disciplined English team, and it was nice on the football front to see a battered Everton winning and a faltering Liverpool losing too. With Arsenal dropping points again, Everton is seriously starting to look as though they may well overtake them, despite having six senior players, including our most creative player and our most effective striker, injured.

Speaking of football, and bear with me, I've mentioned the Alpha Course and Nicky Gumbel a couple of times in the past here, but haven't talked about either at length. Last May I described Christianity Explored as a mainstream rather than charismatic Evangelical corrective to Alpha, and the previous November I expressed some concerns about a presentation on The Da Vinci Code by the Reverend Gumbel, noting that he had misrepresented some things, made claims that couldn't really be supported, cherry-picked his evidence, and ignored the implications of what he had said.

No, don't ask me for examples. It was a long time ago. I can't remember what I was referring to. I'd need to watch it again, and the time just isn't to be found.

So anyway, I've recently been reading Gumbel's Questions of Life, which is basically Alpha for people who can't do the course, and I've been far from impressed. It's very simplistic, and I can't see how it would work in practice. Not a page passes without me frowning at things that just don't make sense, at statements that don't hold up, at quotations that are utterly out of context... I don't see how this brings people to Christ. I mean, obviously it does, but I just don't see how. I guess it must be linked with other things -- regular Bible reading, perhaps, or attendance at Church out curiosity -- and I suppose that when it's done as a course people have opportunities to ask questions and get answers, rather than simply scrawling in the margins things like 'hmmm', 'not quite', and 'but even Paul was unsure of this - see 1 Cor. 9.27, Gal. 5.4, and 1 Tim. 4.1, also Heb. 3.14, 6.6, 2 Pet. 2.15-21, and Matt. 7.21!'

One bit that particularly bemused me was this passage, on page 75 for what's in worth, in a chapter entitled 'Why and How Should I Read the Bible?'

A few years ago, a football match had been arranged involving twenty-two small boys, including one of my sons, aged eight at the time. A friend of mine called Andy (who had been training the boys all year) was going to referee. Unfortunately, by 2.30 pm he had not turned up. The boys could wait no longer. I was press-ganged into being the substitute referee. There were a number of difficulties with this: I had no whistle; there were no markings for the boundaries of the pitch; I didn't know any of the other boys' names; they did not have colours to distinguish which sides they were on; and I did not know the rules nearly as well as some of the boys.

The game soon descended into complete chaos. Some shouted that the ball was in. Others that it was out. I wasn't at all sure, so I let things run. Then the fouls started. Some cried, 'Foul!' Others said, 'No foul!' I didn't know who was right. So I let them play on. Then people began to get hurt. By the time Andy arrived, there were three boys lying injured on the ground and all the rest were shouting, mainly at me! But the moment Andy arrived, he blew his whistle, arranged the teams, told them where the boundaries were and had them under complete control. Then the boys had the game of their lives.

The point of this story, Reverend Gumbel tells us, is that without rules there'd be anarchy; people, he says, would be free to do whatever they wanted, causing people to get confused and hurt. Rules are needed, he says; people need to know where the boundaries are, so they can be free to enjoy the game. In some ways, he says, the Bible is like that -- it is God's rule book, in which he tells us what is 'in' and what is 'out', what we can do, and what we must not do.

Think about that, and have a read of the story again. The analogy doesn't really work, does it? After all, in the story, the problem isn't a lack of rules, it's the lack of a referee. Sure, Reverend Gumbel did his best, but he realised that he wasn't as familiar with the rules as some of the boys, and the boys themselves didn't agree on how to interpret or apply the rules. What's more, without a whistle he didn't have the authority to insist that the rules be applied consistently, and so he had difficulty preventing things from getting out of hand and people getting hurt.

What Reverend Gumbel appears to be saying here, and it would probably horrify him to realise this, is that we don't just need a rulebook, we need a referee to definitively interpret them. In effect, he's made a fine argument for the Papacy.

Advice That Would Do Me No Harm

One of the most intriguing bits of advice I've come across in a while was in an article by Cory Doctorow for Locus. The piece, entitled 'Writing in the Age of Distraction', featured this curious nugget:

Don't Research
Researching isn't writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. Don't give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day's idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type "TK" where your fact should go, as in "The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite." "TK" appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is "Atkins") so a quick search through your document for "TK" will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention.

I'm wondering whether I should internalise that one as an emergency remedy at the moment. Just write like a fiend, longhand, then type it all up, and then find out what I don't know and fill in the gaps. It might just work...

His six key tips, for what it's worth, for this age when we're constantly 'distracted and sometimes even overwhelmed by the myriad distractions that lie one click away on the Internet' are:

1. Short, regular work schedule
2. Leave yourself a rough edge (And I find this is very counterintuitive!)
3. Don't research
4. Don't be ceremonious
5. Kill your wordprocessor
6. Realtime communications tools are deadly

Number five is probably the most interesting, just from a technical point of view, and leaves me thinking that the way to go probably is handwriting rather than typing, at least to start with, preferably using my fountain pen, that elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

And speaking of more civilized ages and working habits, one of my favourite passages in non-fiction comes from C.S. Lewis's Surprised by Joy, where he describes his days in Surrey under the tutelage of William T. Kirkpatrick on the eve of the Great War. Kirkpatrick, or 'The Old Knock', who had been headmaster of Lurgan College many years before when Lewis's father had been a pupil, was perhaps the most rigorous thinker Lewis ever met. As Lewis reminisced on their days together:

We now settled into a routine which has ever since served in my mind as an archetype, so that what I still mean when I speak of a "normal" day (and lament that normal days are so rare) is a day of the Bookham pattern. For if I could please myself I would always live as I lived there.

I would choose always to breakfast at exactly eight and to be at my desk by nine, there to read or write till one. If a cup of good tea or coffee could be brought me about eleven, so much the better. A step or so out of doors for a pint of beer would not do quite so well; for a man does not want to drink alone and if you meet a friend in the taproom the break is likely to be extended beyond its ten minutes.

At one precisely lunch should be on the table; and by two at the latest I would be on the road. Not, except at rare intervals, with a friend. Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one (such as I found, during the holidays, in Arthur) who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.

The return from the walk, and the arrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than a quarter past four. Tea should be taken in solitude, as I took it as Bookham on those (happily numerous) occasions when Mrs. Kirkpatrick was out; the Knock himself disdained this meal. For eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably. Of course not all books are suitable for mealtime reading. It would be a kind of blasphemy to read poetry at table. What one wants is a gossipy, formless book which can be opened anywhere. The ones I learned so to use at Bookham were Boswell, and a translation of Herodotus, and Lang's History of English Literature. Tristram Shandy, Elia and the Anatomy of Melancholy are all good for the same purpose.

At five a man should be at work again, and at it till seven. Then, at the evening meal and after, comes the time for talk, or, failing that, for lighter reading; and unless you are making a night of it with your cronies (and at Bookham I had none) there is no reason why you should ever be in bed later than eleven.

But when is a man to write his letters? You forget that I am describing the happy life I led with Kirk or the ideal life I would live now if I could. And it is essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman's knock.

The postman never knocks here, I fear, but I dread his not coming. I spend far too much time listening for a bulky letter or a parcel being shoved through the letterbox, and all this waiting is doing me no good.

Is it 'Lent' or 'Loaned'?

Well, I'm glad to see that Rosmuc, An Aill bhuí, which I raved about here the other day, narrowly beat the equally fantastic Cliffs of Moher III in the Brother's competition.

He'd posted a set of five paintings to ask which one people thought should be put up for auction on EBay to raise money for Rape Crisis Network Ireland and St Patrick's Hospital and Marymount Hospice, the two charities supported by this year's Irish Blog Awards. It's his way of saying thanks for his paintings having been included in the event.

If you can’t join in the bidding, he says, you can still help by linking, blogging, tweeting, etc. If you can bid, though, it's surely well worth it. I mean, take a look.

Your wall'd look good around that, wouldn't it?

Having mentioned the Brother, his American Hell cartoon yesterday was a tad less bleak but rather more seasonal than usual, and it reminded me of Ardal O'Hanlon's spiel about Lent from a few years back:

One thing I found bizarre about the Catholic religion is the season of Lent, y’know, forty days, ends on Easter Sunday, and it corresponds to the time that Jesus spent fasting in the desert. You’re encouraged to make a little sacrifice during Lent, to show solidarity with Our Lord, who was cold and hungry and sandy, and all alone. And most major religions would have a period of sacrifice where they’d give up food completely and they’d nearly die of starvation, but not Catholics, ‘cause we know how to look after ourselves.

What do we give up?

Sweets.

Yeah, just ask somebody next year, ‘Ah, hello Brendan, what are you giving up for Lent?’
‘Eh, Crunchies. No more Crunchies for me for a whole month.’

Bloody hypocrite! If he really wanted to make a sacrifice he should give up something he really needs. Like oxygen, for example.

To be fair, we probably ought to be a bit tougher on ourselves than we tend to, but the Church has always recognised that people can go to extremes on this one. Indeed, if we look at the history of early Christianity, it may strike us as ascetic to a degree that may border on fanaticism, but if we compare it with the myriad other cults and heresies that sprang up at the time, what's staggering is that the Church stood against their pessimistic tide by insisting on the inherent goodness of creation, and in doing so it insisted that our sacrifices should have limits: we might deprive ourselves of the good things of this world, but we ought never to hold that the world itself was not good. To quote Chesterton, as is my wont:

The early Church was ascetic, but she proved that she was not pessimistic, simply by condemning the pessimists. The creed declared that man was sinful, but it did not declare that life was evil, and it proved it by damning those who did. The condemnation of the early heretics is itself condemned as something crabbed and narrow; but it was in truth the very proof that the Church meant to be brotherly and broad. It proved that the primitive Catholics were specially eager to explain that they did not think man utterly vile; that they did not think life incurably miserable; that they did not think marriage a sin or procreation a tragedy. They were ascetic because asceticism was the only possible purge of the sins of the world; but in the very thunder of their anathemas they affirmed for ever that their asceticism was not to be anti-human or anti-natural; that they did wish to purge the world and not destroy it.

[...]

That the early Church was itself full of an ecstatic enthusiasm for renunciation and virginity makes this distinction much more striking and not less so. It makes all the more important the place where the dogma drew the line. A man might crawl about on all fours like a beast because he was an ascetic. He might stand night and day on the top of a pillar and be adored for being an ascetic, but he could not say that the world was a mistake or the marriage state a sin without being a heretic.

Which isn't to say that we mightn't do a smidge more than refrain from Crunchies. Am I fasting, and if so from what? None of your beeswax, as they say.

Creative Ashing

Yesterday being Ash Wednesday, or the Day of Ashes to give it its proper name, I made a point of going to mass in the morning. I'd been talking about it with a friend the previous day, who was trying to remember whether it had been me -- it hadn't -- who'd said to her that people like going to mass on Ash Wednesday because they get free stuff.

'Free stuff?' I said, 'Like dirt?'
'Well, yeah.'
'Hmmm. We used to spoof Ash Wednesday in school by using the dust from the tables in the school canteen. It was our science teacher, who was supervising there one day, that started that craze... Do you reckon Ash Wednesday's dirt is better than Palm Sunday's leaves?'
'No,' she said. 'Palm Sunday's far better, because then you can make the leaves into the shape of a cross and keep them.'
'I've done that many times,' I said.
'So have I.'

So yes, I went to mass yesterday morning, like I said, and listened to the readings that tell you basically not to go round moping when you're fasting, as it's not about getting brownie points from your neighbours -- though would fasting really impress your neighbours nowadays anyway? Especially given the far from arduous system of fasting that we tend to go by now.

If anything, it'd surely just cause people to look at you a bit askance.

Anyway, during the mass, when it got to the time for the ashes to be imposed, I couldn't help but stare at all the people ahead of me coming back down the aisle. I'd never seen so much ashes. Not for this priest the discreet grey smudge of the archdiocese of Dublin. Oh no. This fellow clearly went in for the whole shebang, great big black strokes, darkening your whole brow. This was an ashing that was designed to last.

So I went up, and received my ashes, and carried on with what needed doing this morning and eventually came home and looked in the mirror, to see that the priest hadn't so much put the sign of the cross on my brow, but the Batsign! I looked like some odd Bruce Wayne cultist.

And indeed, I looked that way till I washed the ashes off at bedtime.

Rosmuc, by Eolaí

Not that I want to be posting more than once a day, but I ought to add that the Brother is currently seeking advice on which of five of his paintings, recently displayed and apparently 'pawed all night' at the Irish Blog Awards, he ought to auction off for charity.



My choice would be this beauty, Rosmuc, An Aill bhuí, which you need to look at in its original glorious colours.

Gorgeous, eh?

The others are great too, of course, especially the one of the Cliffs of Moher. Go and have a look, and toss in your two cents' worth.

The Truth Hurts

So, having mentioned PHD Comics yesterday, it seems only fitting that I should point you to Jorge Cham's latest gem:

Usually Jorge's spot on, but I'm afraid he's exceptionally -- even painfully -- so with this one. Converting an academic CV into a civilian one isn't for the fainthearted.

For what it's worth, I've got four versions of my CV in play at the minute -- academic, conventional, skills-based, and short -- and the short, 1-page, American-style one actually looks the most impressive. Unfortunately nowadays it appears that 'impressive' may not be enough.

So it goes, though. It's not exactly a great time for career changes, after all. Not surprising, you might think, given that it's not a great time for careers, but given that all the boys with degrees in finance, economics, accounting and whatnot have royally screwed things up, this might'nt be such a bad time to try something a bit more daring

Sometimes playing things safe can be the most dangerous thing you can do. Soldiers under fire tend to bunch together, for example, which is about the most natural and foolish thing to do under the circumstances. It's natural because it plays to our herd instinct -- we're literally programmed to feel more at ease in the company of our fellows, but foolish because forming a clump turns the lot of them into one big target.

Collective defence is far better than individual defence, but it needs to be coordinated. The herd instinct just gets you into more trouble.

Advice for life, that.

The Power of Procrastination

Last term I went to a fine talk by Jorge Cham called 'The Power of Procrastination' in which he pointed us to the glories of such arch procrastinators as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. One he left out, though, was Leonardo da Vinci.

It seems that

'Leonardo rarely completed any of the great projects that he sketched in his notebooks. His groundbreaking research in human anatomy resulted in no publications — at least not in his lifetime. Not only did Leonardo fail to realize his potential as an engineer and a scientist, but he also spent his career hounded by creditors to whom he owed paintings and sculptures for which he had accepted payment but — for some reason — could not deliver, even when his deadline was extended by years. His surviving paintings amount to no more than 20, and five or six, including the "Mona Lisa," were still in his possession when he died. Apparently, he was still tinkering with them.

Nowadays, Leonardo might have been hired by a top research university, but it seems likely that he would have been denied tenure. He had lots of notes but relatively little to put in his portfolio.

Leonardo was the kind of person we have come to call a "genius." But he had trouble focusing for long periods on a single project. After he solved its conceptual problems, Leonardo lost interest until someone forced his hand. Even then, Leonardo often became a perfectionist about details that no one else could see, and the job just didn't get done.'

I had no idea of this, though it rather tallies with the notebooks that were on display at the Chester Beatty Library a year or so ago: page after page of densely detailed notes on hydrostatics with the occasional comment that he needed to be more organised, to manage his time better, to sort his life out.

The article's well worth reading, and makes a serious if counterintuitive case, though its definition of 'genius' is - at best - contentious.

Origins of the Crusades

I got a bit carried away the other day when sending a couple of links to a friend of mine. She's been studying Arabic, and I thought she'd be interested in some books that have recently come out exploring the contribution of the Muslim world to science in the medieval period. I felt, though, that while the books I'd alerted her to certainly looked interesting, they nonetheless went too far.

Islamic thought and learning transformed medieval Christendom beyond recognition, Lyons writes. A key import was natural philosophy, the precursor to modern science, and the idea that came with it: the notion of a university as an intellectual, cultural and social institution. Roger Bacon, the 13th-century English scientist and philosopher, travelled through Muslim Spain dressed as an Arab and was among the first to teach natural philosophy in Paris. Without these imports, Lyons says, the Renaissance would not have been possible and European “progress” as we know it would have been inconceivable. The Arabs gave Europeans their ideological and intellectual identity - indeed, Lyons suggests, “the West” itself is a Muslim invention.

But the West's gratitude to Islam was expressed in its wilful forgetting of the Arab legacy. This process began with the successors of Adelard and Scot and had four core themes: Islam distorts the word of God; it is spread solely by the sword; it perverts human sexuality; and its prophet, Muhammad, was a charlatan, an anti-Christ. It was thus necessary to write the Arab learning out of history and to claim direct descent from Greece. As Petrarch, one of the most prominent 14th-century anti-Arab intellectuals, declared: “I shall scarcely be persuaded that anything good can come from Arabia.”

So summarises the Times reviewer, but the Wall Street Journal one is far more alert to the shortcomings of The House of Wisdom:

Mr. Lyons's narrative is vivid and elegant, though marred at times by tendentiousness. Medieval Muslims, as he says, did find Europeans uncouth as well as brutal. (Though Mr. Lyons doesn't mention it, medieval Muslims were shocked to realize that "the Franks" were ignorant even of such refinements as underarm deodorants.) Mr. Lyons is right to remind us of the spectacular savagery of the Crusaders who waded knee-deep in blood through the Holy Sepulchre and of the embarrassing inability of Europeans to tell time once the sun had set.

But he hammers the point too insistently, as if to elevate Islam by diminishing European civilization to crude farce, and at the very time when it, too, was beginning to launch its own projects of philosophical speculation and scientific inquiry.

Me being me, though, I found it difficult to just send the links and leave it at that. I felt a need to add what struck me as an important caveat, as it strikes me that the books appear to fall into the trap of portraying the medieval Muslims as sophisticated and peace-loving, and the Europeans as mere barbarians, with their barbarism culminating in the savagery of the Crusades. This approach is really just an example of propaganda - much of it anti-Catholic, in fact - which has settled into the popular mind since the Eighteenth Century.

It tends to depend on three things: an ignorance of modern scholarship of medieval Europe which has reached a point where the term 'Dark Ages' is almost taboo, now that we recognise the steady spread of learning and the sequence of renaissances following the fall of Rome; a willful blindness towards the halfway house that was the Byzantine Empire, which certainly doesn't fit the 'crude European' stereotype; and a docile accession to the myth that the Crusades were an act of unprovoked Christian aggression.

Contrary to what pretty much everyone believes, they were nothing of the sort. They were, put simply, a belated response to more than four centuries of Muslim aggression against the Christian lands.

In the century following Mohammed's death the Muslims had overran the Christian lands of Palestine and Syria, Cyprus and Rhodes, all of North Africa and most of Spain, their relentless expansion only being halted by the French under Charles Martel at Poitiers in 732. Even when I'd studied the Crusades as an undergraduate I used to think that things settled down after that. I couldn't have been more wrong.

Avignon soon fell, and Lyons was sacked a few years later. Saracen raids on Southern Europe from 800 on were a match for Viking ones in the North and Magyars in the East - that was a rough century to be European! Crete fell in 826, a 10,000-strong Saracen army took Rome in 846, sacking St Peter's, St Paul's, and the Lateran Basilica, and in 859 Sicily was lost to the Saracens, not to be regained for two hundred years. A permanent base was set up at a fortress between Rome and Naples enabling forty years of raids throughout the area, and a similar raiding centre was established towards the end of the ninth century near Toulon, enabling raids through Province and Liguria, and threatening the Alpine passes. Genoa fell in 935, and Sardinia was briefly taken in 1015, just a few years after the Church of Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem had been destroyed, with the tomb of Our Lord being desecrated.

By 1050, when things were looking far more hopeful for Christendom, with the Magyars and Vikings having been converted, with the Normans campaigning in Sicily, and the Spanish Reconquista well underway, things started getting much more ominous off in the east.

The Seljuk Turks had been converted to Islam and had given Islam an intense new dynamism. Christian Armenia and Georgia fell to them in 1064 and in 1068 the Byzantine Empire was invaded, being decisively defeated at Manzikert in 1071, paving the way for the collapse of Empire in the east and the Turkish settlement of what is now Turkey; within a decade most of Anatolia was in Turkish hands. It was this resurgence of Muslim aggression, raising the spectre of a repeat of the century after Mohammed's death, that basically caused the Crusades. The tipping point may have come with the Seljuk capture of Jerusalem in 1076.

The Pope's first appeal for western knights to help their Byzantine brethren went unheeded, but in 1095, by which point the Muslims were threatening Constantinople itself, having taken Nicea, site of the Church's first ecumenical council, the Byzantine Emperor beseeched the west for help, stressing the dangers the Seljuks posed to Christendom as a whole. This time the Pope's call at Clermont had a far greater effect, and the First Crusade was launched with the key aims of helping the Byzantines, securing the pilgrimage routes to the Holy Land, and retaking Jerusalem itself.

In short, then, the Crusades weren't an example of unprovoked barbaric Christian aggression against Islam - they were, in effect, a counterattack, the first centrally coordinated retaliation after more than four centuries of Muslim aggression against the Christian world and a response to what was perceived as the greatest Islamic threat in more than three hundred years.

There's no denying that they tapped too into a desire to end the constant petty wars that were the small change of medieval European life by sending the troublemakers abroad, and also fed off the aggression and triumphalism that went with the Spanish spirit of Reconquista, or indeed that they they weren't another example of the Norman expansionism that had led to their conquests in southern Italy, Sicily, and England, but in the main this analysis is pretty solid. These elements gave fuel to the fire, but that fire was lit in the first place for reasons that were wholly defensive and utterly defensible.

Of course, it all went wrong, I concluded. The Latins expected help from the Byzantines in recapturing their lands and reclaiming the Holy Land, but Byzantine shenanigans and doubledealing eventually led the Latins to go on effectively alone without help. Cue infighting, petty fiefdoms, bloodbaths in Jerusalem, Crusader kingdoms in the Levant, and several more increasingly ineffective Crusades, none of which - it has to be said - did Christianity much credit.

Yes, I got a bit carried away in that e-mail, I'm afraid. We all have our hobbyhorses, though.

On Reading Behind the Panels

I was chatting to Nigella the other day, and conversation got round to the the brilliant webcomic that is XKCD. We darted online, and I skipped to it, and we began to browse through it, and then, all of a sudden, I discovered that there are bonus punchlines, easter eggs, hidden footnotes that only appear when you do a mouseover on the strip itself.

Take the strip I've posted here, for example. Good, eh? Certainly Nigella is enthralled by it, and is sorely tempted to try it. And why wouldn't she? After all, if you go to the original strip on the site itself, and do a mouseover, you'll see a little box that adds that 'You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.'

My jaw dropped on discovering this, and we rushed through them, laughing at the punchline and then splitting our sides at the bonus ones. How had I not known this?

I e-mailed NMRBoy about when I left. 'XKCD,' I said, 'did you know that when you do mouseovers on the final panels there are odd messages there? I know, that sounds crazy. True, though.'

'They do that in all the best comics,' he replied, 'including mine. but also Dinosaur Comics too. Check it out!'

And I did.

The Intrepid Prawo Jazdy

I have very little patience with people who tell Irish jokes. Or Polish jokes, I suppose. I dunno, I reckon it's just that I grew out of Kerry jokes when I was, oh, ten or so. Maybe eleven. At a push. It may be why the Abderite jokes in To Philogelos rarely do it for me. Try substituting 'stupid person' in for the ethnic identity in the joke. If it's still funny, the joke works. If it doesn't work, but you'd laugh at it with the ethnic element intact, then you're a racist and a cretin. Sorry, but true.

Dara O'Briain has a fine routine in his Live at the Theatre Royal show were he talks about how Irish jokes aren't really done in Britain nowadays, except among a couple of moronic exceptions:

... but then, I'm Irish, and of all the people who've benefited from a good dose of political correctness on this island, it's been the Irish. 'Member the good old days with the jokes about how stupid we were? And then a memo went around some time in the eighties, where you all went 'Oh Jesus, we're not doing jokes about the Irish anymore,' and you went 'Oh, okay, fine,' and you just stopped, and thank you very much. A bit overdue, but thanks very much nonetheless.

'Cause we didn't really enjoy that kind of stuff, and it's good that we don't get that kind of reputation. Just so you know, there are still plenty of stupid people dotted around Ireland, but you're not allowed talk about them.

There was a fire engine called out last year, because there was a cat stuck up a tree in Limerick. The lads drove out, took the cat down, gave it back to the old woman. She said 'lads, will yeh have a glass of whiskey?' This is a completely true story. The lads said 'We will of course have a glass of whiskey. The other crew are on at the moment, it's fine.' So they had the glass of whiskey, they had another glass of whiskey, the whole town came out, had a bit of craic with the fire engine, life was good. Eventually they said 'Listen, we'd better go back now'. They waved goodbye to the village, they waved goodbye to the old woman, they got back into the fire engine, drove off, ran over the fuckin' cat.

Completely true story, and you're not allowed tell it.

And of course, the news this last week has given us a tale to rival it. Yes, it's the story of Prawo Jazdy, which the Irish Times reported as follows:

HE WAS one of Ireland’s most reckless drivers, a serial offender who crossed the country wantonly piling up dozens of speeding fines and parking tickets while somehow managing to elude the law.

So effective was his modus operandi of giving a different address each time he was caught that by June 2007 there were more than 50 separate entries under his name, Prawo Jazdy, in the Garda Pulse system. And still not a single conviction.

In the end, the vital clue to his identity lay not with Interpol or the fingerprint database but in the pages of a Polish-English dictionary. Prawo jazdy means driving licence.

In a letter dated June 17th, 2007, an officer from the Garda traffic division wrote that it had come to his attention that members inspecting Polish driving licences were noting Prawo Jazdy as the licence holder’s name.

“Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence,” he wrote.

“Having noticed this I decided to check on Pulse and see how many members have made this mistake. It is quiet [sic] embarrassing to see that the system has created Prawo Jazdy as a person with over 50 identities.

It's worth reading the whole tale, as it's quite amusing. Sadly, though, some BBC buffoon who didn't get the memo felt a need to glitz up the story a bit:

Details of how police in the Irish Republic finally caught up with the country's most reckless driver have emerged, the Irish Times reports.

He had been wanted from counties Cork to Cavan after racking up scores of speeding tickets and parking fines.

However, each time the serial offender was stopped he managed to evade justice by giving a different address.

But then his cover was blown.

There are some subtle distortions here that change the tone off the story to turn it into an Oirish joke. For the BBC it's a case of the Guards being eejits who were actively conducting a futile manhunt across the land, and being bamboozled by a wily Polish scam, whereas in fact the issue was fiftly unrelated errors and no attempt to join the dots. You can blame laziness for this, or sloppiness, but not institutional idiocy. It's a subtle point, I know, but an important one.

Sorry, this makes me sound a tad touchy, doesn't it? I'm not really, it's just, well, this is a completely true story, and you're not allowed to tell it. Well, you can, but tell it like it is. It's funny enough with racist implications.

And where's this 'Irish Republic' being spoken of anyway? Cork? It's very simple: under the Constitution the name of the country is 'Ireland,' and under the Republic of Ireland Act the description of the state is the 'Republic of Ireland'.

I'm fairly sure the BBC have a style guide that explains this. Calling it the 'Irish Republic 'is like calling the UK 'the British and Irish Monarchy'.