Paddywhacked!

STREETS OF SHAME: Awash with dirt, vomit and urine . . . Dublin after St. Patrick s day.

The headline in the Evening Herald the next day said it all. Ding Dong Denny O Reilly had laid waste to an entire city. Make no mistake, this was the day our tourist trade died. No more impressionable British broadsheets declaring Dublin "the new Barcelona". As the Herald went on to describe it, the place now looked like "the lavatory at a bad teenage disco".
All that is left for us to do is to consider the devastation wrought upon the city and wonder how the barbarian was let through the gates. For legal reasons, of course, the paper didn t mention him by name, but every whelping dog on the street knows that the principal perpetrator of this drink-fuelled, expletive-filled orgy of wanton destruction, public defecation and dodgy banjo-playing was Ding Dong Denny, lead singer with popular republican balladeers, The Hairy Bowsies.
Hot Press knows this to be true because your correspondent witnessed first-hand the whole sorry episode. The day started quietly enough when I agreed to meet Ding Dong at his home a single-mattress terraced skip at the end of a laneway near Dublin s inner city with a view to interviewing the oul curmudgeon about his imminent debut album, Publocked, while accompanying him on his big day out at the parade.
I was joined by photographer Cathal Dawson, who complained of a rank odour inside the skip, an odour which he later pointed out did not recede when the three of us left the vicinity of the skip and made our way out of the laneway to line the route. Without wishing to cast aspersions on the personal hygiene of Ding Dong, he really should have a fucking wash once in a while.
After a stout breakfast consisting of numerous cans of Guinness, Ding Dong was in good spirits, and the sight of a street-seller selling plastic green Paddy s Day hats and tacky toy-sized tricolours gladdened his heart so much that he got yours truly to buy them for him, before posing for a picture with the star-struck street urchin. We then made our way to Kevin Street, where the parade was due to pass by at any moment.
A few more cans of Arthur G later, and out came the dreaded banjo, Ding Dong s pride and joy, which in his hands is not so much a musical instrument which bespeaks our glorious cultural heritage but a deadly weapon which could get him 5-10 in Mountjoy. He leaves the banjo case open on the ground underneath him but pitifully few coins are tossed into it. Instead, passers-by stare at the woozy musician with a mixture of amusement, disbelief, disapproval and downright disgust. Foreshadowing events to come, Ding Dong croaks out a version of Dirty Old Town ; by the end of the day, the title will prove depressingly prescient.
The parade finally reaches us and, now sozzled as a sausage, Ding Dong appears to get an almighty fright at the sight of a convoy of giant inflatable fish headed his way. Swiping at the air, he throws a few mistimed punches in the general vicinity of the scaly orange menace. The fish don t blink an eye. In fact, they turn the other fin and swim for it.
Not long afterwards, come the gigantic insects, which look like a papier-mbchi sci-fi experiment gone horribly wrong. Ding Dong looks petrified, unsure whether the gargle has made him hallucinate or whether after 800 years of oppression by the fucking Brits, we really have been invaded by a bunch of one-eyed extra-terrestrials.
With his drink-stained, putrid-smelling shirt n slacks, his blood-trickled face, greasy hair and rancid tache, it is Ding Dong who scares the living hell out of the children watching the parade.
While he is tapping their mummies and daddies for a few pence to see him right, the sight and smell of the inebriated Ding Dong makes little girls jump back in horror, before scuttling away to safety, clutching the arms of their parents. As for the adults, many of them just laugh.
Feeling peckish, Ding Dong eyes an ice cream van and orders a 69 but, with mobile brothels not yet trading in Dublin, he comes away disappointed.
With the main thrust of the parade now passed, we wander along to Wexford Street, where Ding Dong becomes irate at the sight of a spanking new BMW sports car parked at the side of the road. Muttering something about "fuckin Celtic Tiger yuppies" and it being a long way from "the oul pony and trap", he begins to pick a fight with the stationary automobile, aiming a series of blows at the side door and punching the windows with his fists. He is out-fought and out-thought by the BMW, however, and Ding Dong collapses onto the ground in a heap, stirring only to gulp down the last of his liquid lunch.
After staggering away from the fight-scene, he is surrounded by hordes of the Great Washed coming back out of the city centre on the journey home. A young mother, on seeing the prostrate down-and-out, takes pity on the sham and urges her daughter to go over and shake Ding Dong s hand. At first, the little girl hesitates, but at further prompting from her mum, she goes over to where the poor sap is laying and in a quite touching gesture, places her little hand in his. Where was the Evening Herald then?
Watching our photographer taking shots of the prostrate Ding Dong, a woman accosts Cathal and tells him that he should he ashamed of himself for taking advantage of another man s private distress for profit. She is even more appalled at the sight of yours truly breaking his bollix laughing.
Taking a turn for the worse, Ding Dong is now feeling and looking like something the cat wouldn t touch with a bargepole. Taking care to avoid the human detritus dribbling down his fetid torso, Cathal and I help the wretched whelp to his feet. We both decide that the only course of action is to deposit Ding Dong in the Ospideal. We dial 999 and call for an ambulance but when we tell them who the patient is, the line goes dead.
Luckily, the Meath Hospital is nearby. Cathal and I ferry Ding Dong to the front gates on Heytesbury Street, where a Garda patrol car stops us, recognising Ding Dong s face from the mug shots in the local station. Ordering us to get that thing off the streets , we bring him into Casualty, where Cathal and I sit and wait till he has his stomach pumped, his cuts and bruises disinfected, and his beloved banjo re-stringed.
After stopping off for a piss that lasts longer than the director s cut of Titanic, Ding Dong is finally back in his home, down Car Park Lane, where we eventually leave him after shooting the breeze about the rising skip prices. Meanwhile, the city groaned, like a wounded animal, bloodied and bowed, unable to comprehend what had hit it. Things will never be the same again.

Near the beginning of our adventure, before the drink took hold, I managed to get a few intelligible words out of Ding Dong. I asked him to describe what St. Patrick s Day means to him. This is what he had to say:
"Like any day, St. Patrick s Day means gettin a few dhrinks but to be honest with you I think St. Patrick s Day is . . . a bit of a pain in the bollix. Of course, now it s just not a day it s a Festival. I think a Festival s more of a weekend than a day, you know worra mean? A day is a day and dat s the end of it. A festival is about three days, I tink.
"Maybe the Pope looked at him and said, look, he s a patron saint, so he now gets three days, unlike the other shams, who only get one day . But all I saw now was that it was full of all these shams from Galway big, stupid fucking heads on them, bating bleedin dhrums; blowin in the didgeridoos or didgeridon ts, as I always call them. What s the fucking story? What has that got to do with Ireland?
"If we had had didgeridoos in Ireland, we d have used them to batter the fuckin English with. Of course, they come from the Aborigines who are not unlike the Irish from what I can see.
"They re similar-looking, with maybe different skin colour. They re they were, having the craic, eating dirt off the fucking floor, and then the fucking bastard English come along and give them fucking grief. And they said, we ll get our own back . So they invented the didgeridoo to get back at the Western world. They re probably laughing their bollix off, over there looking at the fucking parade, from . . . wherever the Aborigines come from.
"But St. Patrick: what s the fucking story? It is embarrassing to tink that out patron saint is a fucking Brit. That fucking Brit comes over here and goes back and tells everybody that the Irish are there fucking ridin animals, fucking in-breeding, riding n pukin . He comes over and tells us, thou shalt not do this , and leave that wolfhound alone , and adoring this virgin, while previously the virgins were all burned as offerings to, eh, a big fucking goat or something. And he stopped all that.
"The cheek of him, this fucker comes over from Wales or wherever, and of course, they don t want him and we say, ooh, very good . St. Patrick was like an early David Gray in that respect.
"And about the snakes I heard that Pope Cornelius was shown the Book Of Kells and he went fucking mad: all these paintings of snakes with their heads up people s arses, wriggling around leathers, tongue-y kissing with fucking . . . Biblical figures and this type of thing.
"As a punishment, he was nearly gonna be excommunicated but because he had converted us to Christianity and all that, the Pope said, alright, get rid of every fucking snake outta dat country, you and your buddy Colmcille. I don t want to see a snake. And then I won t excommunicate you . That s the real story.
"And all this writin with pens that are feathers. A real man would not have learned writin if he had to learn with a fucking feather. A biro is one thing but . . ."
Finally, a few words about your new album, Ding Dong?
"Publocked was made about two years ago and I actually can t remember making it. The sham who was producing it, Pete Holidai a Brit! put manners on us. I suppose I d have to concede he done a great job on it. Fair fucking play to him. I think he d be one of those Brits the odd one who gets away that I would have a bit of admiration for, like that sham who died recently, Oliver Reed. Or Jack Charlton. They d nearly be sorry they weren t Irish.
"The album has all the hits on it, like the one I got in prison about the sham who takes it up the crapper from a New York gangsta rapper so that Ireland will be free. He ends up taking it up the arse every night.
"It s tougher than people think. Everyone thinks it s all the craic, drinking and bating Brits and being killed and all the fun. But no, there is that side of it."
And what of the wave of immigration that s taking place?
"We re a melting pot in Ireland now. I do welcome all the different people in. You re very welcome. Come in, have a look around, and buy a few things. And don t forget the return ticket s cheaper.
"I love all people except the Brits . . . actually, no, I don t like the Europeans either. But it s a melting pot; it s like a pot you d make a stew in. There s so many ingredients you should have in a stew or a coddle. But you can t be putting things like a curry into a stew or game. Just onions and sausages Denny s of course, hahahaha and a bit of lamb, maybe. I don t know: ask a woman what you put in a stew.
"But after a while, it starts to go off. You don t put a Spanish onion in an Irish stew."
Publocked by Ding Dong Denny O Reilly and The Hairy Bowsies is released on March 31st on Solid.