Bouncing Your Head In The Rubber Room

By Charley Brady

There are times when you just feel despair as you bounce your head from the walls of the rubber room in this country.

Actually, I take that back. Bouncing my head off the walls is beginning to look good to me at the moment.

There's a couple of things that I had hoped I would never have to write about again; but like a really bad case of the blues they just keep coming back. And then you just can't help but comment.

OK. So we'll get the ridiculous and always in-your-face egoist with the laughable stacked heels and who hails from Oompa-Loompa Land out of the way first.

Yes, you've guessed it: it's Uncle Bono. Come on, you must know him. He starred in

"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." Had quite a small role. Well, when I say small he was there... oh, somewhere I'm sure.

I think he was jumping around with Jim Corr while they discussed how to save the world, Freemasonry, Africa and the origin of time itself. You get the idea.

He's also the guy who avoids paying taxes in Ireland while pan-handling around the Globe asking everyone else to get out the shekels. He's been spending the last six months on his luxury yacht in the South of France.

Now, tired out by that because of the stress of releasing a new album he has moved on for a bit to Italy while preparing to get the begging bowl out again and do the boogy-woogy shake in front of people who work for a living.

For my entire life I have not believed in God, but it's never too late to change. My mind changed last week when I heard that His Majesty Bono is being urged NOT to involve himself in charity-works anymore because he was actually DRIVING people away from shelling out their hard- earned money to just... oh, anyone who happened along the street with a rattling and usually unsealed bucket and then have to send it on to places where it just ends up in the hands of dictators anyway.

Maybe there is a demented but humorous Supreme Being up there after all.

You know, I could forgive all of that. Hell, I would LOVE to swan around the South of France myself for six months with George Clooney (who I think is a good guy by the way) and the rest of Bono's mates.

And if you could invite the divine Meryl Streep (a Goddess) then I would be very happy to sell what's left of my soul. But here's something quite simple that I can't forgive the little self-important weasel for.

Deep breath while I'm writing this, because I still can't believe such pretentious twaddle. Not even from Bono.

Picture the scene: he's talking about his fellow co-star in How To Be A Creep By Having A Stupid Name That No Grown Man Should Call Himself By. Yes, that would be The Edge we're talking about. Here's what Bono said about him:

"He is a genuine genius, developing on the blank and bleached photographic paper, avoiding all the obvious blue scales that blind every other guitar player. The Edge finds some new spectrum of rock. Colours he now owns. Owning a colour, wow. Imagine owning the colour yellow, like Van Gogh."

Wow. I mean like wow, man. As other guitar players go, I guess that we can now, like, wow, rule out Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. Yeah, like that's a pretty groovy and amazing statement... man.

There's a No-Prize for anyone who can tell me what this pretentious twat is on about.

I've asked a few people around my own village of Oranmore already so I don't want answers like "He's up his own [expletive deleted]" or the more usual "That little [expletive deleted]? I'd like to put my boot up [several expletives deleted]." Keep it country, folks.

Having left the rock singer to enjoy the rest his holiday in Italy can I remind you that this week sees the tenth anniversary of the Omagh bombing? No, let's call it what it was: the Omagh massacre.

On August 15th of 1998 there was a bomb left in that town which killed thirty people and devastated the lives of hundreds more.

For the first and only time I found myself crying in public. Of course I wasn't the only one.

Now, looking back over these last years since that hellishly awful day when the news came in, I found myself weeping for the people who had been so savagely murdered as much as I was weeping for my late father, a man who had believed so intensely in Republicanism.

I believe that for my dad and so many like him, a genuine vision and a genuine dream expired with those poor people that day.

As I reach the half-century mark of my own life I look back on the sheer pointlessness of it all.

These so-called freedom fighters and their grubby, dirty little war have been replaced by the demons in Armani suits who now walk the corridors of power with the people that they once swore never to even break bread with. They're some beauties, all right.

The Texan writer Robert Ervin Howard wrote: "Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilisation is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism will always ultimately triumph."

I sometimes think that before he put a bullet through his head in 1936 that he'd had a gaze into a crystal ball and foresaw a future where the suit-and-tie-John savages had somehow taken democracy away from us.

After all of their murderous atrocities they now make the decisions. But hey, that's all right because, despite the drug-running and the punishment beatings and the murders that we pretend not to know about in the name of the peace process, it will all work out in the end. Right?

Yeah, right. It's just been re-incarnated into another form but we'll pretend that we haven't noticed that.

What was it all for? Come on, really. I would love to hear a straight answer from even one of them.

Do they regret it? Can they justify it? Because as a man who grew up with a truly loving father who genuinely believed that Republicanism was the be all and end all I just simply don't see what all those thousands of wasted lives was about in the slightest.

Just to finish this rather sombre piece: I will say that, as becomes increasingly likely, we here in Ireland will be forced to change our mind on the Lisbon Treaty by our cowardly, simpering kiss-ass government then I intend to leave this country that I love so much.

Because, dress it up how you will, it will no longer be a democratic state but a fascist one.

And that's a country that I no longer want to live in.