Same as the old boss; a new, sinister type of colonial administrator

In 1999, Germaine Greer gave a provocative talk in the arts building at UC, Dublin. She alluded to the then recent appearance of a transvestite with “bazooka tits” at the eurovision song contest, already a celebration of camp. She argued that there indeed was the type of “woman” that men might fall for; no time of month or fertility issues, easy to get on with, and always available for the wild thing. In fact, she argued, this new trend was disturbing and dangerous for feminism, and for women in general.

It has not been emphasized enough that neoliberalism, considered as the hegemonic political force that it has become, seeks to control fertility. It is now clear that the plan for Ireland is to replace the Irish with eastern Europeans paradoxically schooled in wild west capitalism; our government does not blink as 300,00 young, energetic Irish emigrate. The corporate tax regime in Ireland will work better without the Irish; it is clear from the Flannery incident that this government, like its predecessor, has no intention of enforcing the law against its friends. Yet the strange obsession with gay marriage perhaps portends something darker still.

The greatest discovery that young men make is that girls actually like them. To negotiate a relationship across the gender gap is to become au fait with a completely different way of experiencing the world, and traditional marriage has been encouraged in every civil society in the world as the main locus for procreation. For gay marriage, on the contrary, we are referred to the example of Nero and his pre-nuptial forced castration and feminization of a male friend.

All this is by way of asking why business man Rory O'Neill addressed Ireland's Abbey theater, a pantomime queen in drag, at a time when men are encouraged in the USA to “marry” each other and outsource procreation to baby farms in east asia. O'Neill was apparently on a short-list for the Euro elections as a labour candidate. The abbey is going through its nadir with the Peacock mainly dark; the incompetence of the Abbey's artistic director Fiach Mac Conghail is now well attested by an official report, and suggests that the plan was indeed to sell off that entire city block as he ran the Abbey into the ground. Before him was the equally incompetent Ali curran.

While the “free” state was IMHO an aberration, the fact is that many worthwhile processes were preserved in its society. One by one, they are being destroyed and subverted. It was inevitable that our overpaid colonial administrators would eventually subvert gender; all that remains is the case of the 8-year-old boy who wants a sex change before puberty. The colonial administrators that govern us on behalf of their international financier masters are well capable of a referendum on this after a suitably -chosen supreme court case

. In the meantime, at the sochi Olympics, gendered rituals of love and estrangement, dominance and “submission” which is itself real power, trust and abandon are aesthesicized on the ice by beautiful young couples. Ireland as ever does not even compete. The USA sends Billie Jean King who of course is invisible.

Of course, a country like the USA that has lost its honour to its own spook services has to try and find something that it does best. It is becoming clear to the rest of the world that the USA is very stuck in a groove and is producing little of any worth in any field; indeed, the NSA's boosting of the likes of Google is destroying native American tech. It took Ireland to bail out the USA in 2010 at the behest of Geithner.

Seán Ó Nualláin 17 Feabhra 2014

PS This is hopefully my last foray into the gender front in the culture wars but a final point needs to be made. Remarkably, it was a young, fertile woman who help the barricades on the pro-life side of the abortion issue last year. When Lucinda Creighton herself got pregnant, veteran moral and political prostitute Tom Parlon remarked that she was now unfit for political office, as she would have  ababy to care for.

It should not surprise anyone that abortion legislation was voted in by misogynists; legislation so bizarre that Kermit Gosnell was simultaneously given 3 life sentences in the USA for the late-term abortions that it sanctions, having been convicted of murder and avoiding the death penalty only by agreeing not to appeal. What is remarkable - and I write as someone against "affirmative action" of almost every sort - is that we urgently need pregnant women and mothers in our political offices as representatives of a critical class of society. Mr Parlon clearly prefers Ms Bazooka tits to a real woman.