Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny - The First Culchie

Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Enda Kenny has been handed a bog that was once the Emerald Isle.

The former primary school teacher has led the center-right Fine Gael party to a historic victory, on course for 75 plus seats and replacing the once dominant Fianna Fail party as the largest group in Ireland's parliament.

Yet at the start of the election campaign, many within his own ranks feared the father of three was a liability who would jeopardize key seats everytime TV cameras shone on him.

After decades of Fianna Fail ( Irish equivalent of the American DNC) governance, Enda Kenny of County Mayo and Fine Gael ( Irish GOP) has been swept into leadership of the toothless and de-clawed Celtic Tiger.

Voters' perception of any new leader almost always improves once they become prime minister and Kenny has so far struck the right notes.

His victory speech on Saturday night was measured rather than triumphalist and in his first major media interview after his win he struck a serious tone, warning people that there would be tough times ahead.

Kenny, whose only government experience in over 35 years in parliament was as minister for tourism and trade between 1994 and 1997, is also fortunate to be starting off from a relatively weak base.

Ireland has been all but mortgaged to European Union. Ireland is as bankrupt as Progressives seem to want America to be. Enda Kenny, a County Mayo Mountain Man, is married to a woman from the equally mountainous County Kerry, father of three,a former school teacher and a team player.

Here in America, many second and third generation Irish Americans, come from Irish Civil War (Irish: Cogadh Cathartha na hÉireann; 28 June 1922 – 24 May 1923) stock - Up Dev! Irish Republicans from Kerry, Cork, Galway, Mayo and Clare. My grandfather, who came to America in 1912, was a Big Jim Larkin, James Connolly Labor Man, who had earned his labor chops on the Liverpool docks, after leaving Castleisland, Co. Kerry, before coming to Chicago's stockyards. He was growing a huge family in Chicago and fighting to organize the Engineers Union, during The Troubles ( 1916-'21) and during the Civil War in Ireland. Lawrence Hickey was a De Valara Republican, as were most Chicago Irish and opposed to the Treaty for the Irish Free State led by Michael Collins -founder of Fine Gael.

During and after the Irish Civil War many, many Irish Republicans escaped death or imprisonment at the hands of Free Staters. The south side of Chicago became loaded with tough Clare, Kerry, Galway, and Mayo men with those dangerous 'dead eyes.' They had killed Brits, Free Staters and Informers. They became Chicago tradesmen, police and firemen, streetcar drivers, People Gas diggers, and proud Americans, after fourteen years of course. They were hotly Fianna Fail sympathizers and imparted that brand of Irish Republicanism that was reflected in the Aran Sweater, Clancy Brother prejudices of their children who voted Democrat.

Fianna Fail's leadership of Ireland has been a disaster. Now, a Mayo man named for a 6th Century Warrior Prince from Galway, who became one of Ireland's greatest monastic saints and mentor to Brendan the Navigator and the peregrine apostles of Ireland who preserved the Christian Faith in Europe during the Dark Ages ( Sts. Finnian,Columba,Ciarran, Jarlath of Tuam), will become the first Culchie* (red-neck) Prime Minister.

The Republican Culchies always followed the big City Dublin, Cork or the more genteel eastern Irish county leaders. Eamon De Valara was a Yank born in New York **whose dad was a Cuban. MSNBC would call Enda Kenny, one of the Tea-bagging, Bible and gun clutchers.

Therefore, Enda Kenny is the First Culchie. Perhaps, the wild bog man will pull the Irish economy out of the bog.




*

The term is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "One who lives in, or comes from, a rural area; a (simple) countryman (or woman), a provincial, a rustic", a word derived from the remote town of Coillte Mach, County Mayo.[2] Another possible derivation is from the Irish coillte meaning "the wood/forest",[citation needed] to describe people who lived in the woods. A further, simpler, explanation is that the word derives from the word agriCULTURE, highlighting the industrial/agricultural divide between rural and urban populations.[citation needed]
Another potential derivation is an old Gaelic term "cúl na tí",[citation needed] meaning the back of the house. It was, and still is to a certain extent, common practice in rural areas to enter a neighbour's house through the back door, rather than the front (which is for more formal visits). Thus the term cúl na tí or culchie was applied to these people. Also, many city dwellers from Dublin tenements had to work as servants. The servants were not permitted to enter the house from the front but had to use the back door or servants entrance. It became common practice in Dublin to use the term in a derogatory manner. Over time as the numbers of servants dwindled away the term was still kept in everyday use to this very day.

**

No. Name Entered Office Left Office Party
1. Cathal Brugha 21 January 1919 1 April 1919 Sinn Féin
2. Éamon de Valera
(1st time) 1 April 1919 9 January 1922 Sinn Féin
3. Arthur Griffith[2] 10 January 1922 12 August 1922 Sinn Féin (Pro-Treaty faction)
4. Michael Collins[2] 16 January 1922 22 August 1922 Sinn Féin (Pro-Treaty faction)
5. W. T. Cosgrave 22 August 1922 9 March 1932 Cumann na nGaedheal[3]
Éamon de Valera
(2nd time) 9 March 1932 18 February 1948 Fianna Fáil
6. John A. Costello
(1st time) 18 February 1948 13 June 1951 Fine Gael
Éamon de Valera
(3rd time) 13 June 1951 2 June 1954 Fianna Fáil
John A. Costello
(2nd time) 2 June 1954 20 March 1957 Fine Gael
Éamon de Valera
(4th time) 20 March 1957 23 June 1959 Fianna Fáil
7. Seán Lemass 23 June 1959 10 November 1966 Fianna Fáil
8. Jack Lynch
(1st time) 10 November 1966 14 March 1973 Fianna Fáil
9. Liam Cosgrave 14 March 1973 5 July 1977 Fine Gael
Jack Lynch
(2nd time) 5 July 1977 11 December 1979 Fianna Fáil
10. Charles Haughey
(1st time) 11 December 1979 30 June 1981 Fianna Fáil
11. Garret FitzGerald
(1st time) 30 June 1981 9 March 1982 Fine Gael
Charles Haughey
(2nd time) 9 March 1982 14 December 1982 Fianna Fáil
Garret FitzGerald
(2nd time) 14 December 1982 10 March 1987 Fine Gael
Charles Haughey
(3rd time) 10 March 1987 11 February 1992 Fianna Fáil
12. Albert Reynolds 11 February 1992 15 December 1994 Fianna Fáil
13. John Bruton 15 December 1994 26 June 1997 Fine Gael
14. Bertie Ahern 26 June 1997 6 May 2008 Fianna Fáil
15. Brian Cowen 7 May 2008 Incumbent Fianna Fáil
[edit]

A Name is No Crime - Unless You Come from Kerry

"I heard a County Kerry farmer interviewed on Irish Radio, ... and they asked him, "Do you believe in the Pookah yourself?"
And he said, "That I do not! and I doubt much that he believes in me either!"

~ Robert Anton Wilson


"A jug of wine, a leg of lamb and thou! Beside me, whistling in the darkness."

http://countykerrylogic.blogspot.com/





The FBI - Most Wanted List*:
Edward Eugene Harper
Usama Bin Laden
Jason Derek Brown
James J. Bulger
Emigdio Preciado Jr
Robert William Fisher
Victor Manuel Gerena
Glen Stewart Godwin
Jorge Alberto Lopez-Orozco
Alexis Flores

The FBI is offering rewards for information leading to the apprehension of Top Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. Check each fugitive page for the specific amount.
Notice: The official FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list is maintained on the FBI World Wide Web Site. This information may be copied and distributed, however, any unauthorized alteration of any portion of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives posters is a violation of federal law (18 U.S.C., Section 709). Persons who make or reproduce these alterations are subject to prosecution and, if convicted, shall be fined or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.

A couple of economists reported in Social Science Quarterly this week that there's a link between having an unpopular name and ending up in trouble as a teen boy.

To figure this out, Shippensburg University economics professors David Kalist and Daniel Lee (both of whom, it must be noted, have very popular names) gathered up four years' worth of boy names (15,000 in all) from one state's birth records and compared them with the first names of about half of that state's juvenile delinquent males born in those years. They found that the more unpopular the name, the more likely it was to be associated with kids who ended up with substantiated charges in the juvenile justice system.

Kalist and Lee take pains to point out that simply having an unusual name is not going to lead to a boyhood of crime. "It is not that the name is causing the crime," Kalist said.

Instead, he said, it looks like troubled families—the kind that tend to raise troubled kids who end up in the juvenile justice system—also tend to give those kids unusual names.

So go ahead and name your boy Rocky (No. 914 on the Social Security Administration's list of 1,000 popular names for 2007), Bentley (No. 990) or Blaze (No. 876). Your family's solid, right?

Naming a son can be a terrible problem for some parents. My own parents ( Pat and Ginny) found this out when they named my brother Kevin. You see, in Irish families especially those with roots in the Culchie(an old Gaelic term "cúl a' tí", meaning the back of the house.) ** West of Ireland ( Donegal, Sligo,Mayo, Galway, Clare, and the bogmen of the Kingdom of Kerry) where families tend to give boys the same name for generations; thus Michael Patrick, Michael Joseph, Michael John, and have Mickey Pat, Mickey Joe, & etc. or a family brand set of names like the Hickey Clan. The Hickeys of County Kerry can be distinguished by these male cognomens - Lawrence, Sylvester, Barthlomew, Patrick, John, and Michael with very few exceptions.

Last year I took My Love to a Hickey Wedding - an event of lavish welcomes and warm embraces by the women, who dance every dance, and the men to tend stand with hands and forearms locked at the groin and nod ascent or damnation to their male counterparts and dance when bidden to do so by their better halves. The young woman who holds my affections comes from Ohio and is unfamiliar with the Chicago Irish tribal subtleties. At one point in the evening, the band leader called into the microphone, 'Will Pat Hickey go to the photographer's set-up for a picture with the bride' and me and twenty of my cousins showed up.

The Hickeys tend to have waves of children and all the males bear the same names handed down for generations with multiples of given names spiced by the baptism names and the concomitant nicknames attached to weaknesses, foibles, quirks, sins or physical traits. Patrick the son of a Patrick might become the diminutive Padgin *** or 'Little Pat'( pronounced as Pat Sheen in Chicago dialect) and he may have seven to ten cousins bearing the exact same handle. Hence Red Pat, Paddy Piss-in-His -Britches, Paddy Mike, Larry's Pat, Paddy the Goat, Pig-eyed Little Sneak Paddy, Pat The Girl's Rump and Run, or Father Patrick,O.S.A. Who is Still in Orders e.g.

When my brother Kevin (Caoimhín in Irish and means 'fair begotten'), a very blond man, was born my mother and father named him Kevin after St. Kevin of Glendalough, which is no where near County Kerry. Lovely.

My Grandfather ( Lawrence) a genuine Kerry Bogman, roared in response 'Christ Jesus Almighty! And where did the two of them come up with a bollocks of a name like that, so?'-as if my parents had named the wee man Caligula or Adolph. Kevin is a rock-solid Union Man and gifted carpenter who has only generous bones to match his expansive heart.

Remember, it is for the deeds one does in this life that a name bears honor, shame ignominy or whatever the hell else follows in the wake of your deeds - Unless of course the Family are Kerrymen. ' I see no Sylvie, or Bateen or Mossy up above on the names in the FBI Listing, so.' Like the story . . .

* Please note that there are No repeats of the first name in the Ten Most Wanted List

**The term in Ireland is often a derogatory one used by those living in the capital (Dublin) for anyone who lives "outside of the pale" or "down the country"

In Hiberno-English, culchie is a term sometimes used to describe a person from rural Ireland. It usually has the pejorative sense of "country bumpkin", but is also reclaimed by some proud of their rural origin, and may be used by either side in banter between town and country people. Dublin GAA fans call supporters of any other of the county teams from Ireland as culchies, fans from counties in the north are called nordies. Dublin's fans are themselves called Jackeens in retort. In large cities such as Cork, Limerick and Galway, the term may be sometimes allocated to anybody who comes from outside an urban area. The same is true for Belfast and the rest of Northern Ireland, where the term is also popular.[1] Generally the term is more humorous than abusive in rural areas, as opposed to the more offensive term "muck-savage".

*** - Your humble correspondant was tagged Patrick Francis Hickey - My father is Patrick Eugene Hickey; thus, Padgin and subsequently as 'Dipshit,' 'Useless Amadaun (,Amadaun; Irish for 'fool'. It also refers to the court jester of the Sidhe - the people of the hills of Irish legend. The Amadaun is beautiful and graceful, but can kill with merely a thought.) and more than universally - Hickey,