You'll never beat the Oirish

It's a fitting end to 2003 for those in the Irish Republic who'd rather think of the place as nicely socio-culturally integrated with our friends and neighbours in Britain...as if the Republic was really just Shamrockshire. We assemble three pieces of evidence:

1. Most perniciously, take leading Oirish property developer Owen O'Callaghan. Owen likes to give some of his rather substantial loose change to Oirland's soi-disant nationalist politicians in the governing Fianna Fail (the institutional revolutionary party of Ireland). So having paid off the politicians, Owen gets upset when the local councils and regulators try to revisit some of the mysterious planning permissions which his development companies were granted, such as for the hideously Oirish Liffey Valley mall in Lucan, Co. Dublin.

So what does Owen do? He teams up with his good friend and well known Irish nationalist, the Duke of Westminster, to block planning regulators from considering the claims of a rival development company which wants to build a mall quite close to Owen's.

2. The new Ireland continues to operate as playground of the rich and famous, with the wedding of Ozzy Osbourne's son Louis in County Offaly. Note: Louis is the one who rarely if ever appears in the TV show. But to be fair to Louis, his wedding seems a good deal less trashy than some of the other Oirish marital spectacles in recent years, and the dude actually seems to be half-serious about maybe living in Ireland:

[Louis Osbourne] said the prices of houses in the capital at the moment are "absolutely ridiculous".
Louise [the fiance] has family in Meath. We might consider Bettystown," he said.

We can only say that the Royal County is an excellent choice. Sadly, Ozzy and Sharon can't attend given Ozzy's spill from a quad bike a few weeks ago.

3. And finally, the Irish fans of Glasgow Celtic football club are in the tricky position of reacting to the news that the club's excellent manager, Martin O'Neill, has received an Order of the British Empire honour from the Queen. O'Neill is from Northern Ireland, so no citizenship issue arises in his acceptance of the honour, although of course in principle he could have refused it anyway. But he has accepted it, in effect as an honour to the club. We suspect some of the fans have to bite their tongues, but it will be interesting to see how boosterish the coverage is in the Oirish media over the next couple of days.