WHAT DID THEY DO TO YOU, MCMURPHY, THE CHILLI ON MY KEBAB?

Irish Independent
March 4, 2007 Sunday

ONE of Fifth’s favourite films is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
a tale of a devil-may-care Irishman called Randall Patrick McMurphy
who gets ground down by the starched forces of orthodoxy, by the
thin-lipped, frigid, intolerance of Nurse Ratchet.

A free spirit made mad by a relentless, crushing drive to conform. Is
there a sadder moment in all cinema than the agony on the face of
McMurphy’s friend Chief as he takes a pillow and stifles the former’s
lobotomised features to let him soar into the afterlife, to let him
cast off the surly, clammy grip of a life not worth living?

Fifth’s eyes are becoming misty as he remembers Chief hurling the
drinking fountain through the window before leppin’ through to jog
away across the lawns and into celluloid immortality.

Fifth’s wife arrived into the room last Sunday night and found him
on his knees with a cushion across the TV, sobbing and wailing,
trying desperately to end another’s agony, trying to set free again
one who had showed us all how to live before succumbing to the mental
amputation.

Conor Lenihan was on The Week in Politics and Fifth made a special
effort to catch him. Fifth always liked Conor; there’s a bit of the
auld devil about him and you could imagine having a right laugh with
the man over a couple of pints. If the brother, Brian, is a bearnaise
sauce on a fillet steak in Thorntons, then Conor is a bit of chilli
on a kebab from the Abrakebabra in Rathmines on the way home on a 15B.

Now Fifth is not implying that referring to anyone or any group –
especially one as numerous and as fierce as the Turks – as some form of
sandwich is ever acceptable. But on the grand scale of racial abuse,
telling Joe Higgins to "stick with the kebabs" wasn’t really that
serious. Certainly not as serious as the kind of racial abuse the
Turks have handed out down the years. Ask the Armenians. You’ll find
them anywhere but where they used to live.

But Conor said it and he had to pay the price. The prim,
self-righteous, utterly boring price. The sanctimonious,
face-reddening, Nurse Ratchet price, as a long line of NGOs, officials
and semi-officials, quangos and quasi-quangos, lined up to tell him
he was revealed as a racist and would have to resignforthwith.

Poor old Conor lived through it, but something happened to him.

Somebody ‘did’ something to that silly-but-sincere streak that made
him believable and urgent.

How does Fifth know?

The Week in Politics featured a disagreement between Conor and John
O’Shea of Goal about Ireland’s State Aid Programme’s African policy.

O’Shea has long and volubly argued that delivering aid on a
state-to-state basis merely gives licence to the crew of kleptocrats,
tyrants and world-class thieves at the top of the heap in these poor
countries to divert much of the money to their numbered accounts
in Zurich.

The alternative O’Shea recommends involves actually doing the hiring
and firing ourselves on a project-by-project basis. What’s the problem,
Conor was asked.

Conor felt there was one main problem. O’Shea’s idea involved lots
of white men running around telling the Africans what to do. This,
we are to understand, is a disqualifying defect. Not a word about the
effectiveness or otherwise of trying to keep the aid vultures away,
just a sad, silly, clapped-out cliche that ensures that people must
suffer or die, just to keep that veneer of venality intact.

If we direct the money ourselves, it implies that the local bigwigs
are corrupt and they might get offended and that’s not acceptable.

They might shout ‘racism’ and then Conor would be looking at a
two-time rap.

What did they do to you, McMurphy?