Daftness should be mandatory in Irish politics

THANK the Lord for Father Ted's BAFTA win. For me, it means we have our licence for lunacy back. And since it was stamped with the imprimatur of hot shots on the mainland, we can break out of the affliction of sorrow, sadness and sodomy that pervades this little island. We might still have to live here for a bit yet, but we can all now have our own legalised Craggy Islands where we can behave like liberated loonies. The best news is that RTE has bought two early series and will screen them, probably in the autumn, a spokeswoman said yesterday.

Father Ted's (Channel 4) award for the best comedy on television came just in time to pluck me and loads more out of the crowded queues waiting to OD on paracetemol, paraquat or Parazone. It suddenly lightened the load of ordure we have been suffocating under since . . . the EC? The North? Television?

If you want reverence, you will not watch Father Ted (Dermot Morgan). If you want the twilight of gloom, guilt and gutlessness to continue, you will probably bless yourself and turn it off. If you are one of the majority of women still treated like a white slave but trying to pretend you are not, you will love the casual cruelty Father Ted and company (Father Dougal - Ardal O'Hanlon and Father Jack - Frank Kelly), wreak on the hapless Mrs Doyle (Pauline McGlynn). It you are someone who calls yourself a serious feminist you will not approve either. Things like the "Lovely Girl's Competition will not amuse. Blessings of Allah on writers, Arthur Mathews and Graham Lenihan, for conceiving it.

Take this conversational show of enthusiasm from Father Ted, the judge and emcee, as the girls parade around: "Doesn't Mary have a lovely bottom?".

(From stage right he is hissed at, this might be taken the wrong way.)

Father Ted: Ah, well, don't all the girls have lovely bottoms".

I know, I know. It's hard to imagine rolling in the aisles at lines so trivial when they are taken in isolation. But, it just kills me; doubles me up in the most noticeable places like alone at a solitary table in Bewleys or facing the exasperated queue when you are coming out of the one working ladies' loo in some busy restaurant.

The programme is in the genre - I swear I will count the number of times this word is used on the next arts/ movie show I hear or see - of John Cleese at his most maniacal or of Rowan Atkinson at his most crack brained nuttiness, of Spike Milligan at his most deranged. And heck, do we need it.

Living in this country - more accurately, being a native here - has become such a serious bore, such a hell.on earth, that nothing the Redemptorists said would happen, if you die din a state of mortal sin could be worse than working out your short lifetime here.

Whether you like it or not, every day in some way you are touched by the deadly avalanche of Ireland Past; the tedium and weariness of Ireland Present . . . you would be insane to expect anything but more of the same or worse for Ireland Future.

Is there anyone left to be outed? Where is the next group of public sinners to come from? Do we really want it? On top of being raped, flogged and defeated by them, do we really now want to balance the punches? Is public pain worse than private pain? Is public exposure worse than hidden flashing? On top of that, we have to face not just murders and robbery, but the sheer bloody hell of so called ordinary life; trailing around supermarkets with bockety trolleys, never finding a parking space, getting a hoot/roar/fingers, from the guy in the 96-D job behind you at the traffic lights.

It will, of course, go on. For some, it is the slashes of leather belts from unmerciful nuns and worse from priests/parents that apparently has yet to be expiated. And much of what is being talked about now is still a way of, life for many. Look at the women's prison in Mountjoy, where more than 70 per cent of prisoners come from Dublin's inner city. In their early 20s, with young babies, many are already riddled with disease. Most are in jail just for trying to escape the wrath of their lives by dreaming with drugs.

But take even relatively simple things. Having done a deliberate fast from anything remotely relating to news for a week or so, I came back to life last Monday and blinked at page one of this paper. If you did not read it with your own eyes, you would think that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael thought last Sunday was April Fools' Day. The Fianna Failers were at Arbour Hill praising the Lord and themselves for the Easter Rising that happened 80 years ago. Their leader, Bertie Ahern said something about John Redmond a man who died 78 years ago. The lead story was a pompous riposte from the Taoiseach. He accused Mr Ahern of "the worst partisan political sentiments".

Honestly. That is what passes for politics in this Republic. Is it any wonder that emigrants are, looking for votes? Is it any wonder there are some - me included - who think the Dail could be half emptied for a start and then half filled with emigrants? I bet they are not making it in Yonkers, Queens, Sydney, Willesden, Hong Kong and the rest by worrying who or what was John Redmond, what he said and when and how and why. Who the hell cares?

Worse, this was the subject of one of the longest questions on Monday night's Questions and Answers. (Now there is a programme that would win, hands down, in any range of programmes guaranteed not to raise a laugh.) Two men and two women panellists assiduously applied themselves to it. The first question was a veiled thing about Eithne Fitzgerald and the letter she wrote asking for money. That story has been so overdone that the mind went into early Alzheimer's. Not a joke. Not a pun.

Roisin Shorthall was so sincerely sincere she confessed they could (should?) all do with a dose of humility. People in public life need . . . humility. Shorthall is an extremely nice woman but I think that was overdoing the sackcloth and ash bit. Okay, it was a GUBU. But in the life of politics it is now centuries old. Is poor Fitzgerald only to be remembered for writing a silly letter? Any fool could tell you she obviously is not used to begging for herself or her party. Or to being in power.

It was the Redmond thing that floored me. Do men in their middle years still worry about shades and hues of greenery? Really? Is it the fault of newspapers and the rest for giving them space for rubbish about things that happened long before they were born? If they - who mix with smart Euros at top summits and guzzle swank food and wine - are still hung up on what their fathers or grandfathers did, why are they killed saying they can not figure out the mindset of the IRA? Even though Arbour Hill was a FF/FG thing, it really had Labour in there as the bad guys in the long grass. How, in the name of Methuselah, do they figure these things out? What are they at? Who needs them and their sound bites?

THE message is that humour is the best foil. The blacker the comedy, the greater the hit.

While women in the North are currently getting themselves ready to challenge the Terrible Trimbles, Haggard Humes, the Airbrush Adamses and the Potty Paisleys in the upcoming elections, I think they should lampoon the lot of them. They are dead right to take them on, but should they just play the old, rheumaticky tunes?

I would get Linehan and Mathews to write the script and let rip on the current martyrs for fields and queens. Out of it all, they just might get a few women elected.