I don't know why, but recently I have been thinking about. For those of you who weren't around at the time, most of you, I suspect, Hall's Pictorial Weekly was a series of humorous TV programs broadcast on RTÉ in the 1970's.
Devised and produced by Frank Hall, the program concentrated on lampooning politicians. This it did by depicting a meeting of county councillors in charge of a place called Ballinagash. Leading the actors in this satire was Frank Kelly, a pastmaster at mimicking gombeens. The whole thing was hilarious, especially so, if you did not happen to be a politician.
The point about this is to remind ourselves that there was a time when we used to enjoy laughing at politics and those involved. Scrap Saturday, with Dermot Morgan, is another outstanding example of Irish political farce.
But sadly, the laughing has stopped. It is not funny anymore. Can you see anything funny about our Dear Leader, the Taoiseach, the Dictator from Cork, standing up in Dáil Éireann and declaring that he has no time for a backwards-looking view of sovereignty? In saying this, Micheál Gang Un is, in fact, dismissing as nothing the blood and life sacrifices that have been made by our gallant forefathers and mothers.
Or where can you find humor in his lackico, the Tea Boy, telling us all that carbon tax is out of his controll, when it was he and his merry men and women, agreed to the selfsame carbon tax with th EU in the first place?
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