ONE OF THE many very real dangers accruing to writing a column that rounds up the events of a week gone by is that you often run the risk of some dramatic news breaking too late to make it in to the final copy.
“Public sector pay deal agreed” is the kind of breaking news I can live with it, what with it not really being juicy enough to make my smart little comments about. Jurgen Klopp leaving Liverpool may be emotionally devastating and fundamentally earth-shattering, but is also thankfully far enough outside the remit of this column not to cause any major rewrites. I don’t want to have to cry in front of you people.
What cannot be ignored is the International Court of Justice’s preliminary order – issued on Friday afternoon – calling on Israel to do everything it can to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza.
The findings of the court put Ireland in an interesting position. Earlier in the week, the Dáil voted to “strongly consider” supporting South Africa in its genocide case against Israel — strange and vague language that left many in Ireland uneasy, coming as it did in response to a defeated Soc Dems motion to support South Africa’s case without equivocation.
The ICJ’s decision to hear the full case (which could, and likely will, take years) and denial of Israel’s application to have it dismissed means Ireland must now seek legal advice on what step comes after “strongly considering” and whether that will involve actually, you know, helping. In the aftermath of yesterday’s ICJ ruling, Tánaiste Micheál Martin reiterated that Ireland would perform a detailed analysis of the decision and that he would take legal advice “urgently” on Ireland’s prospective intervention.
My statement on the final and binding ICJ orders today in the South Africa v. Israel case pic.twitter.com/D5fvZAGogf
— Micheál Martin (@MichealMartinTD) January 26, 2024
Now, on to a much more trifling matter. The kind of matter for which the word trifling was invented, in fact. That’s right. It’s Toy Show: The Musical time.
There’s something painfully 2023 about discussing the Toy Show musical. Remember when it seemed like that was all we had to worry about? We should probably be over this by now, we’re living in the past, the world has moved on. Surely, no other country has sunk this much time, energy and money in investigating a children’s musical for being so rubbish. We do things differently over here.
But it is our very commitment to getting to the bottom of just how rubbish this musical was that is so compelling. This week, for example, we learned that the Grant Thornton investigation found no evidence that RTÉ board ever even signed off on it. How funny is that? A musical so bad that you have to sneak it through without anyone noticing before losing €2.2 million on it. That’s the kind of thing you could pat yourself on the back for for the rest of your life.
And not only did it lose all of that money, but it was further uncovered this week the amount of commercial sponsorship the show received was overstated by €75,000.
It’s gotten to the point now where I wish I had seen it. The carnage it has left in its wake, combined with the fact that it will almost certainly never take to the stage again, means it has become a prime example of lost Irish media. An artefact of ephemera, never to be experienced by anyone ever again. The very, very, very few people who actually went to see it don’t know how lucky they are. What if it was actually good?
Instead of looking 2023 though, let’s cast our minds even further back.
Remember that period between 2018 and 2020 when the big Luke Kelly head on Sheriff Street kept getting vandalised? It was a tough time. The gigantic Luke Kelly head, which looks like its trying to eat you if you stand next to it at the right angle, was repeatedly covered in paint and we all had to pretend like it wasn’t at least kind of funny (in what world is it not funny to have to steam-clean a giant head?)
That episode was brought to a rather sad conclusion this week with the jailing of a man who was found to have thrown blue paint over the statue in one incident in July 2020. Judge Orla Crowe handed a 50-year-old Dublin man a sentence of 18 months, with the latter half of the sentence suspended.
Over the course of the hearing, it was accepted by the court that the individual was a vulnerable man who got drugs as a reward for throwing the paint over the statue. The court further accepted that the man had apologised for the incident.
Ultimately, Crowe argued that the sentence was justified considering the vandalism had “caused a lot of upset to a lot of people” – presumably referring to the widespread fandom of Luke Kelly (who has not one, but two statues in Dublin city).
Luke Kelly is a much-revered and well-beloved songwriter whose lyrical themes and folk renditions often dealt with the dirt, poverty and underbelly of Dublin. It does not seem controversial to wonder what he’d have made of a vulnerable addict jailed for vandalising his statue while under duress.
Without defending vandalism, one suspects an artist like Kelly might have gotten a very sad song out of such a state of affairs, and that he would have taken a terribly dim view of a town that has allowed poverty, addiction and prison-based solutions to become so widespread.
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