Irish Times

[Diable Rouge]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Aidan Gillen of "The Wire", Hobbit and Game of Thrones in the lead, while Nidge from Love/Hate plays PJ Mara.

[Duncan Gardner]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Thanks, sounds promising

[Toro Toro]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Gillen wasn't in the Hobbit. He was also in Love/Hate, though, and Queer as Folk; and he'll be in the new True Detective.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

who the hell are you confusing gillen with in the hobbit?

[Diable Rouge]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Turner, Gillen - they're all Aidans.

[Borracho]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

This Charlie thing is well-made, well-filmed trash. The levels of exposition in it so far are ridiculous.

[garcia]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

think it's trying to cram too much into the time. too many characters, none of them developed, you don't get much of a sense of what haughey's all about either.

but if you didn't like it, the irish times reckons you might not be old enough to appreciate it http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/rté-television-drama-does-charles-haughey-some-service-1.2054505

[Borracho]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

I liked the idea that Haughey would have had conversations about government policy on, say, Northern Ireland with his local shopkeeper in Donnycarney.

There were so many Love/Hate cast members in it that, by the end, I was half-expecting Terence Big Balls to pop up at one of Haughey's parties in Kinsealy, sipping a sasparilla.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

stephen collins is an arse. The haughey mara dynamic is like a cross between the west wing and Lock stock and two smoking barrels. Haughey spoke very slowly with lots of statesmanlike pauses, and when he wasn't doing that he was swearing every second word.

A major problem is that a lot of the people in it are still alive and would probably sue if they were connected with the naked criminality of that era. That's in part why all the TD's are numbered rather than named.

other problematic moments include geraldine Kennedy's ability to walk through wall, and her alleged attractiveness. and where was tom vaughan lawlor's christian bale/robert de niroesque devotion to verisimilitude and physical acting? This is tom Vaughan lawlor as mara



This is PJ mara


Then there is the moment where mara produces what appears to be a spliff and asks for the putative minister for justice's permission to smoke it. He may as well have taken out his iPhone 7 shown doherty the latest keyboard cat video, before whipping out his cock and wanking like a gibbon to some bukake.

About as much stuff happened in a week back then as happens in a whole political year now. cramming the haughey era into three episodes is criminally stupid.

[garcia]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

About as much stuff happened in a week back then as happens in a whole political year now.

how do you make that out?

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

1. Continual economic crisis like 2008
2. Northern Ireland near violent peak.
3. Fianna Fail a conglomeration of gangsters and racketeers
4. People were a lot weirder and less concerned with public appearances (Gerry Collins, Padraig flynn)

oh and our taoiseach now is Enda fucking kenny, whereas back then it was a cross between lorenzo de medici and cesare fucking borgia

[Borracho]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

The current era is at least as eventful as back then. We've lost our economic sovereignty, one of the two main parties has been destroyed, and the other will get blown to bits at the polls within a year.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

it's the pictures that got small. We have lucinda, they had dessie O'Malley.

[garcia]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

yeah but the idea that more stuff happened then is actually the opposite of the truth. a lot more happens in the same amount of time now compared to then, that's just a function of communications technology. back then the taoiseach apparently had time to dress up as an english country gentleman to shoot ducks and ride horses.

[Duncan Gardner]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

NI's violent peak was in 1972.

While I remember, do any of you have a copy of Ann Cadwallader's recent book that I might borrow? Will pay p&p of course. Thx in advance.

[garcia]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

i would agree that people were weirder. there used to be a sort of everyday grotesquerie that the media has flattened out and homogenised. people these days are more aware of standard models of behaviour. i think even modes of weirdness have converged along standardised lines.

[Duncan Gardner]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Grotesquerie sounds like a Van Gaalapropism

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

The use of footage from the old ardfheiseanna lifted my heart and made it sing. All those hideous inbred Gombeenmen with those outstanding combovers and Wigs that were cut out of hotel Carpet. Those were the days.

yeah but the idea that more stuff happened then is actually the opposite of the truth. a lot more happens in the same amount of time now compared to then, that's just a function of communications technology. back then the taoiseach apparently had time to dress up as an english country gentleman to shoot ducks and ride horses.

there's a lot more trivial twitter nonsense, a lot more press releases, a lot more fluff. But a lot of our real political events of today are simply shit that was going on back then coming to light.

You're probably familiar with a double murderer being found in the attorney general's house, but there was all sorts of shit going on that people have completely forgotten about. There's the Dowra affair just to pluck an example out of the air. Shit like this was going on all the time.

most important decisions now are made in brussels, and we have a taoiseach whose grand vision is to be the civil servant who makes the speeches, while we do what the multinationals tell us to do. Enda is just a cypher. He can't even properly organize a fucking election to the seanad.

There isn't a politician today that wouldn't have been eaten alive back then.

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Yes, a lot was happening in Ireland in the 1980s, as the RTE News from 1985 demonstrates.

It's fucking Craggy Island stuff.

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Eddie Hobbs in 2006. Oh dear.

I think he's intentionally overplaying the accent, to be honest.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

look at the date. The news in Ireland in august now is full of youtube clips of cats.

and what the hell do you want? There are boyscouts talking to spacemen, A mass religious hallucination brought on by a year of unremitting rain, and me remembering that I had a big thing for anne doyle.

[garcia]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

there's a lot more trivial twitter nonsense, a lot more press releases, a lot more fluff.

"i don't understand the twitter business". you're missing the point, it's not just twitter, it's a whole world of instant communication that means everything that happens happens much faster, as all parties to any given event can make their moves much faster than they previously would have been able to, then something else happens before something else would have had a chance to happen in the letter-writing days, then something else and something else.

there isn't a war in northern ireland that's true, but politicians are nevertheless a lot busier.

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Fintan O'Toole on form once again.

[Toro Toro]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

I genuinely spat out my Coco-Pops at the opening line.

[Borracho]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

That's good stuff from Finty. I genuinely don't think this new party has a chance of getting anywhere. Creighton isn't particularly popular, except with newspaper editors, and Hobbs is a figure of fun after all the nonsense he spouted during the boom.