For Pete's sake

What will they do when they look up some day and discover they still have Pete Doherty to kick around? Once they recover from the disappointment?
The more contemptible sections of the media cheerfully anticipate that the Babyshambles singer won’t be around much longer, that he’ll OD or somehow otherwise crash out in a week or a month or at least in the next year. Then they’ll be able to essay a sigh and affect regret in their obits. Some will have the contrived panegyrics written already, in which a nicely-chosen selection of phrases such as ‘tragic inevitability’, ‘fragile genius’ and ‘Kurt Cobain’ will be expertly deployed.
The nadir (so far) was plumbed in the Sunday Independent on April 23rd, in which a journalist who’s had a relationship with another rock singer allowed herself to be pressurised or persuaded into comparing and contrasting Doherty with her drug-troubled ex. Readers were regaled with details of the picture of bloody dishevelment she claimed she’d been confronted with upon once returning home to discover her partner, "having eaten 100 tabs of acid and bitten lumps out of Beach Boy records."
A hundred? Exactly? Had he kept accurate count as he tripped and confided the figure? All that we learn from this yarn is that the woman concerned knows nothing about acid. Consume a hundred tabs and you die. That’s if it were possible to down a ton of tabs, which it isn’t. And, Beach Boy records? Only the Beach Boys? He hadn’t snacked on a few Billy Fury singles in advance of the main course, then? Or polished off a couple of Eagles albums for afters? Or idly munched his way through the ouvre of Freddie and the Dreamers?
I am perfectly prepared to disbelieve this story entirely. Its function in context was not to convey information but garishly to embellish that week’s schlock-horror Pete Doherty piece.
I’d seen Doherty in Derry with Babyshambles the previous week and he looked well enough, in a pasty-faced, panda-eyed, louche-limbed and slightly foppish way. When he didn’t do an encore after a relatively short set, a hubbub of speculation suggested that maybe the urgent need of an angry fix had taken priority over the calls of a packed Nerve Centre for one more tune. But the main and only meaningful question was/is: were they any good?
This was a proper rock gig, perfectly pitched and poised throughout on the teetering edge of hysteria. Doherty came on as part Berlin-dissolute cabaret star, part demagogue, part shaman, part rock and roll menace, part Lost Boy. Not wearing the hat, though. A slurry Hexham accent made it impossible to know what he was saying when he spoke, but everybody cheered anyway in acknowledgment of the fact that he spoke. He hit straight into ‘Kilamanjiro’, triggering a communal convulsion, like somebody’s suddenly pressure-pumped the audience full of adrenaline with a hose. And thus it remained for 50 minutes of twitchy riffs, thudding bass, demonic drums and good-natured, mindless mayhem. On song, Doherty is perfectly lucid, voice full of lyrical, poetical complaint and deftly stated anger. At one point, he holds up a ‘Love Music, Hate Racism,’ t-shirt, and delivers a cryptic manifesto, ‘Fuck the BNP’. At least, that’s what I think he said, which is good enough for me.  
This wasn’t the most polished set ever at the Nerve Centre. There was an argument on-stage between Doherty and Patrick Walden in which neither is smiling, apparently over the tuning of one or other of their guitars. And there may have been a sound check half way through. Or possibly, they stopped for a minute for a scratch. But in the end, what made the gig was the proficiency and panache of a fierce band, Doherty’s sense of concentrated serious intent and intimate enmeshment with his audience and, more than these and most of all, the transcendent brilliance of the songs. “I can’t tell between death and glory/New Labour and Tory/Purgatory and no happy families”, ‘Fuck Forever’ is a beautiful, sad love-song to life and a call to action to transform it utterly. Just wonderful.  
And all in all and despite everything, it was just a wonderful gig, music to shire your brain and save your soul. People who can think of no way to fill space in bad newspapers except with repellent assertions of phoney concern that Doherty is on the high road to ruination should fuck off, or get a life of their own.
“Black and blue but we don’t talk about that/Are you from around here? How do you do?/I’d like to talk about that/Gin in teacups and leaves on the lawn/Violence at bus-stops and a pale thin girl with eyes forlorn/Violence in dole queues and a pale thin girl behind the check-out.” ‘Down in Albion’ is the best song written about haunted England since Shane hauled himself slowly along the old main drag.
That’s an observation the Indo woman might have been well-qualified to make. But would the Indo have taken the article? Would the page have taken the ink?

You’d think that Donegal would be the last county in Ireland where a political party would organise a meeting calling for more power for police. But you’d be wrong.
The Morris Tribunal has described beatings and intimidation, fraudulent evidence, systematic perjury and general contempt for citizens’ rights by gardai in Donegal. "Shocking", "outrageous" came the chorus.
But there are always votes in law’n’order and politicians without scruple to manipulate fear.
Thus, the local headline, "Lifford Is A ‘criminals’ paradise" over a report of a meeting attended by senior gardai, leading clergy and election candidates. Far from calling for curbs on a shamed force, the Lifford meeting wanted more guards, with the gloves off.
Speakers told that "a small minority...known to the gardai" were running amok. Do-gooders were holding the guards back. Increased garda harassment was needed: officers "should be waiting outside the homes of these people and pulling them up wherever they go."
The meeting was sponsored by Sinn Fein. There have been similar meetings recently hosted by SF in other areas, including parts of Dublin.
The strategy recalls a SF campaign in Donegal in 1992, when it was claimed that illegal drugs allegedly available in the Point Inn at Quigley’s Point were fuelling a crime wave. It was suggested that the Point management was deliberately turning a blind eye.
The Provisionals publicly threatened violence against drug-dealers if drastic action wasn’t taken. The life of a man who ran buses to the Point was directly threatened.  
It was against this background that dodgy cops came to believe that they’d get away with mounting a mob-handed assault on the Point and fitting up owner Frank Shortt. Perjury and planted evidence landed Frank in jail for three years
Late last year, he and I spoke at a packed meeting in Raphoe about his and the McBrearty cases and scores of other scandals. A selection of Donegal politicians listened intently. I assumed they’d come to help ensure abuse was brought to an end. Now I suspect some were refreshing their memories of how to whip up hysteria about crime so as to wrong-foot opponents and win votes.