Once again, we are blessed with Scott Turner's always stimulating missive. A graphic designer and writer, Scott runs the Pub Quiz at Rocky Sullivan's in Red Hook.

Greetings Falls Road Ramblers and Bogside Brigands…

It's the Green Season, for better and worse.

This is the better:

And this is the worse:

There's
pride, history, culture, revolution, passion, music, resilience,
literature, dance, heritage, innovation, and resistance.  It should all
be celebrated.  And at Rocky Sullivan's over the next several days, it will be.

But it's a weird St. Patrick's Day this year.  Eire feels like she's crumbling, like the last few years of bright-future vistas have collapsed in a wash of white-noise static.

For starters, here at home, comes Mayor Bloomberg's courting of the Irish-American vote.  His team has been distributing posters and buttons at all the St. Patrick's parades — Woodside, Staten Island, and assuredly the upcoming Park Slope and Manhattan parades.

That kind of exploitive disconnectivity is standard procedure
for Bloomberg.  From atop his enormous bonfire of vile machinations, he
said last week: 

"You know, the yelling and screaming about
the rich – we want rich
from around this country to move here. We love the rich people. People
say, 'Oh, well, you know, if the income were redistributed throughout
the system more fairly.' I don't know what fair means. You can argue
that if you make more money, you deserve more money. A very small
percentage of people do account for a big
part of our income.  The first rule of taxation is…you
can't tax too much those that can move."

In otherwords, if
you're too poor to move, Bloomberg will soak you.  If you're moneybags
material like our mayor, come and go as you like, but while you're
here, velvety-soft hugs will be hand-delivered to your doorman.

And who supports Mayor Mike's Hugs For the Rich mandate?  Why, the Very Rockish Deity himself, Bono.  At a street-renaming ceremony last week, Bono happily pinned an Irish for Mike Bloomberg button on his faux military coat.

If this is the alternative, let's live in a place where the streets have no names.

Bono's no stranger to linking his ego to despots.  He allied himself with Jesse Helms, North Carolina's unapologetic segregationist, back in 2001.  Before that, U2 ignored Kmart's awful track-record of sweat-shops and anti-union efforts to announce a tour in the chain's East Village location.  Bono goes out of his way to blame Irish Republicans for all of the troubles during The Troubles.  This from a Dubliner who hasn't been to Belfast as many times as I have, and who's band's operations are relocating to the Netherlands to avoid paying Irish taxes.  (Slate has the details.)

Back in the Auld Sod…

The fiscal bubble that has burst in the U.S. has exploded in Ireland.  The Celtic Tiger
was one of those first-time-ever national prosperities throughout the
world, and a lot of people bought into it — literally.  They thought
it would last forever.  Ask Japan how long yummy bubbles stay inflated.

In the North of Ireland, tensions are high after two British soldiers and a police officer were killed.  The Real IRA,  a group that broke away from the IRA's
embrace of the Irish peace process, claimed responsibility for the
attack on the soldiers.  A few days prior, the British announced that
the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, a shadowy surveillance unit that caused countless Irish republican deaths during the last forty years, was heading back Ulster to re-start their insidious counter-insurgency program.

Yes, that's really the Special Reconnaissance Regiment's emblem.  Who wouldn't be happy to have them back?

Hands are being rung over the deaths of these state "security"
members.  (As in many places, it was always more about securing the
state than people's daily lives.)  The war is over in Ireland but the
conflict remains.  The British government has created a dangerous
vacuum where everyone's looking over their shoulders — not at army
operations and paramilitary bombs, but at the frustrating lack of a
clear way forward.  Tony Blair and now Gordon Brown know
how oppressive it can be for skittish people who don't want war but
aren't offered peace.  They don't much seem to care how dangerous it
can be.

Is this just a plucked thread on Ireland's delicately-repaired
fabric, or something more grave?  The hype machine is pining for the
latter, but in 2009 the region has moved past war.  Still, as long as
Britain fills this slippery power vacuum with the fumes of a fogged-in
future, there'll be trouble.

The north of Ireland is among Britiain's last colonies.  It's time
they left Ireland for good.  Free of British rule, Ulster can face the
future.  It won't be easy.  Britain is a hobbling crutch for the
pro-British loyalist community and a target for the Irish independence republican community
— and Ireland is plunder-ready place for the British.  Free of the
crutch and the target, the six counties can get on with life — for the
first time looking forward and not over their shoulders.  Free of
colonialism just across the Irish Sea, the British can edge closer to being an ethical country.

Britain fading in the rear-view mirror — it's Ireland's only road forward.