I see the Brits are moving new planes to the island now, Ted! I was reading this week about a Brigadier in Aldergrove, Co. Antrim who told reporters, ‘Ireland has always been a prisoner of geography,’.

At the same time as Piers Ashfield, the senior British military officer in Northern Ireland, was uttering these words, the RAF were wheeling a P-8 Poseidon onto the tarmac from Lossiemouth in Scotland for the first time.

Aldergrove, he says, occupies ‘an absolutely critical position’ in the Greenland-Iceland gap, basically the front row for whatever the Russian Navy is up to in the North Atlantic.

For most of our modern lives, the geopolitical excitement around West Cork was limited to whether the mackerel were biting off the Galley Head.

I know this wasn’t always the case. The coastline is pock-marked with sunken wrecks, jettisoned pirate ships and abandoned U-Boats, after all.

Now we have a Russian shadow fleet ferrying sanctioned oil around the place and dodgy submarine activity in the Celtic Sea. I don’t want to ruin your next sauna on the Red Strand lads but we’re entering an era of hybrid warfare. Down in Castlefreke, just up the road from where we used to neck-roll down sand dunes on the Long Strand when we were kids, Amazon are about to bring a fibre optic cable ashore that’s no thicker than a garden hose, as reported in this paper last week. It’ll be able to stream 12.5 million HD films simultaneously, which is good news, cause we’ll be down in August and we’re bound to have at least half a week of fog on The Mountain.

All joking aside, we’ll probably need more than a few FCA lads with hurleys to keep an eye on that cable, and others like it, as the fella says, ‘going forward’.  So while my back arches at the thought of a new RAF presence on the island, I’d sooner have them keeping an eye on things while we get our sh** together on the defence front.

Of course nothing here is ever clean. We tut at Trump and his goons over Gaza and tariffs and the lovebombing of Putin, while record numbers of US military flights continue to land in Shannon every month. We’re against the war and we’re handing out flat whites to the troops on their way to fight it. Talking out of both sides of our mouths is a hard-earned skill, basically the survival kit of a small nation that spent eight hundred years under somebody else’s boot. But you do start to wonder if we can do a small bit better than the old ‘keep the head down and hope nobody notices us’. The neighbours are noticing and when the presidency of the EU comes to us on July 1st, the spotlight will be on. Hope Micheál has his dancing shoes ready.

Growing up is not easy

My son asked me last week if I would bring him to see Michael, the new biopic. It was an odd feeling for me. I was obsessed with Jacko as a kid.

Picture Ardfield in the late 1980s: ten years old, watching a VHS of Thriller until the tape wore out. We did every move from Beat It in front of the mirror and would have given a kidney to go see him in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. He was the biggest star on the planet.

The folks weren’t bringing us to the concert, sure who’d have that kind of money at the time, but in fairness they drove us into Cork city and ferried us slowly past Jury’s where the man himself was supposedly sleeping. We waved excitedly up at a window. Little did we know that he’d become notorious for his activities around hotel windows later.

What we didn’t know then, and what is now part of the public record is that there was a young boy staying with him at the same hotel.

So I won’t be bringing my kids to see it. Antoine Fuqua’s film, by all accounts a fine bit of song-and-dance, ends with the start of the Bad tour and skirts neatly around all the truly disturbing stuff that came later. The producers had to reshoot the entire third act because of a settlement clause stopping them depicting the first accuser. Another fifty million dollars from the Jackson Estate to make sure the thing came out clean.

That said, part of me wants to go. The same ten-year-old, basically, peering out the back window of a Nissan at a hotel in Cork city, wanting to believe in magic. We were all bewitched by him. That was the whole point, it seems.

Growing up is hard.

Vegas on the Liffey vanity

On a tangentially related note, Dublin City Council is wrestling with a proposal that has the bang of one of MJ’s worst follies.

A private outfit wants to plant a thirty-metre-tall, moving human statue called The Giant at George’s Dock as the centrepiece of our new docklands. Twenty-nine million euro.

CEO Paddy Dunning told The Journal that ‘Dublin city needs something mega’. Dublin has had something mega for the last 20 years, Paddy. It’s called the Spire. Nobody quite knows what it’s for.

Janet Horner of the Greens basically called it a corporate vanity project and she’s not wrong.

The last thing the inner city needs is Vegas-on-the-Liffey.

Let’s start off with some functioning public transport, homes for those who need them and a bit of cop on.