Individually, the Irish people are the best in the world: decent, intelligent, funny, warm, passionate, mad as a farmer’s arsehole. But put a bunch of us together and we turn into pigs and sheep.

Pigs because we’re a bunch of gluttonous fuckers.

Sheep because we’ll do anything we’re told.

We’ll tolerate corrupt governments, banks, police and clergy. We’ll bend over and endure a violent butt fucking so long as there’s a nosebag over our snouts. We’ll pay tax on anything so long as we get to fiddle the returns.

We’re a race of slaves.

We’ll line up like rubes to deal with banks that surcharge the shit out of us to access our own money via a hole in the wall. At least with a loan shark you get that personal touch.

We attend big money music festivals where a fall of rain turns the site into a WWI mud bath and you can barely hear the music through the even muddier PA system.

Pigs and sheep.

Out of Ireland we come, great hatred, little room, with no concept of personal space. Never stand in a queue, attend a concert, sit on an airplane or take a bus journey with an Irishman. He’ll stand on your foot, elbow you in the guts and expose you to the salty waft of his pits without even thinking about it.

The other night in The Point, I watched a young woman ask two drunken fucks if she could pass by them to get to her seat. They guffawed and told her to use the aisle in front.

My kingdom for a humane killer.

Pigs and sheep.

The main pedestrian boulevard in our nation’s capital is caked with human puke. Grafton Street stinks, it’s covered in mustard coloured scabs of dried vomit because we, the Irish race, the race that invented alcoholism, can’t drink for tuppence anymore.

Pigs and sheep.

We put up with council letters threatening pensioners with court action for not paying for a refuse service whose recycling facilities date from the Bronze Age. Then we get lectured about landfills.

Slaves.

I remember a classic Judge Dredd storyline in which the power-crazy Judge Cal flipped his lid and subjected the citizens of Mega City One to so much abuse that they finally rose up against him. A minion came to Cal’s quarters bearing news of the insurrection:

“Judge Cal, Judge Cal, the people are revolting!”

Cal: “Tell me something I don’t know…”

We’re a revolting people, but we’ll never rebel.

Because we’re pigs and sheep.

And slaves.

Merry Christmas.

And a happy New Year.