Hey Joe, Where You Going With That Assertion In Your Hand?

What can be done about the scourge that is Joe Duffy? For me, listening to his show is strictly a form of research, an attempt to gauge the mood of outraged Ireland, to see what is on the mind of the inhabitants of our parallel reality.

Today was a good example. Tommy from Ballyfermot rang to voice his disgust that Deirdre de Burca was running as a Green Party candidate for the European elections in a Dublin constituency. Tommy’s hostility to de Burca stemmed from a vote she cast as a Wicklow County Councillor some years ago to extend an existing law which limited the granting of planning permission in Wicklow to local residents with local need only. The law was extended to limit the sale of houses in small developments in small towns to local people thereby eliminating the need for a plethora of unsightly second rate developments to accommodate Dubliners chasing their lifelong dream of owning two Labradors.

An eminently sensible law which sought to restrict the disfigurement of the country side with crap semi detached houses. Now our friend Tommy had placed a deposit on a site in Wicklow with the intention of applying for permission and building himself a house and, according to himself, the enactment of this law precluded all of this. No mention was made of the fact that existing planning laws would already have prevented him from doing this, as it would have done in every other county in the country, laws which have existed since before Deirdre de Burca was even born. Tommy dressed up this bitterness in a rudderless rant about how “you can’t have it both ways”, that De Burca had “nailed her colours to the mast” and was now looking to Dubliners for her vote, thousands of whom according to Tommy had been deprived of their childhood dreams of moving to terraced houses in Wicklow by her.

Joe, as moderator, made no attempt to suggest that the woman’s motives were in fact honorable and all too rare. Here was someone who was an advocate of good planning and anxious to arrest or at least limit the needless destruction of the Irish countryside. He in fact took up the torch passed by his Ballyer comrade, got de Burca on the line and promptly facilitated Tommy and some other moron who had arrived onto the phone lines by this time to belittle her along with her motives and background. Duffy is smart enough to know the logic behind her vote but at no point provided her with an uninterrupted forum on which to air it preferring instead to see her humiliated and shouted down. Duffy knows that unsophisticated reactionary twits are a much bigger proportion of his listenership than enlightened Green party advocates and so was content to throw her to the wolves, even getting in the odd dig himself.

Apparently what ultimately offended Tommy and his ilk irrevocably was the notion that someone with obvious ties to Wicklow could just simply migrate and seek election in Dublin. This according to him “is just not right”. Duffy did not see fit to point out the irony of this assertion in that what Tommy had originally sought to do was to simply migrate to Wicklow. The good people of Kilcoole dodged a bullet here and should consider staging an annual Deirdre de Burca appreciation day. The only tragedy is that she is ten years too late.