Gobshites

A great piece in today's Sindo by Gene Kerrigan, who is not only worth the cover price of that silly little rag, but probably the cover price of all Irish print media, north and south, combined (you need to register to read it but that's free, and worth it). A slight departure from his usual evisceration of the corruption and hypocrisy of contemporary Irish society (it tends to keep him busy most weeks, so busy that he might have to outsource some of the work to keep up with it), it treats of a case last week, where a judge and the Gardaí clashed over the supposedly bungled investigation into a pair of Mullingar boy racers, who did a motoring equivalent of happy-slapping on the N4, for Internet consumption. For more background, see here. Kerrigan comes down on the side of the beak, while sympathising with the cops at the same time. He asks rather why this government, and previous ones, have being so tolerant of reckless driving and failed to implement appropriate laws to sort this out. It seems it is only since Latvians and Poles have started becoming involved in fatal car crashes in Ireland that the Irish government (and people) have got too bothered about our atrocious record of road safety. Those familiar news stories about Bank Holiday death tolls were obviously just about bad luck tales then, and as for all those youngsters that have over the years moaned about the expensive insurance premiums for drivers under 25, well, a bit of investigation into actuarial logic might have been revelatory. Geno makes admirable use here, to decribe our friends from the midlands, of the finest word that Hiberno-English has gifted the world tongue: gobshite. Good on ya, Kerrigan, once again.