This may as well be an Orange march down O'Connell Street. Hordes of Americanised Protestants (mostly migrants) preaching their American style of worship to their Americanised god.
It is un-Irish and it ought to be dismissed as such, alongside any "nationalist" cheering it on.
The Laughing Cow has replaced its mascot’s smile with a straight face on some packaging
The new packs read “We need to talk,” but the company says she’ll explain “when she’s ready”
If I saw the girl on the right, then I'd know for sure the ramen wasn't very good. There's a saying in America: "Never trust a skinny chef." If she can stay thin even when surrounded by all that ramen, then it's not delicious enough.
Dessie O'Hare, the Border Fox, was born in Keady, County Armagh in October 1956. His Da and six uncles had been interned in the 1940s, and his granny had done time in Holloway Gaol for harbouring republicans. He joined the Provisional IRA as a teenager but fell out with the leadership in the late 1970s and drifted into the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA).
By 1987 O'Hare had left the INLA too, forming his own splinter outfit, the Irish Revolutionary Brigade (IRB). That October he led a gang who burst into a gaff on Brennanstown Road in Cabinteely, intent on kidnapping Professor Austin Darragh, a wealthy pharmacologist. Darragh had moved out three years earlier. His son in law, a Dublin dentist named John O'Grady, was living there instead, and he became the new target.
O'Grady was snatched and held first in a Dublin basement, then moved to Cork and locked inside a shipping container. Gardaí stumbled on the hideout at one stage, but O'Hare's gang shot their way out and fled, later torching their getaway car in Dundalk. O'Grady was brought back to Dublin and held in a house in Cabra. I can only imagine the horror and devastation of the ordeal and thinking you were about to be rescued.
The gang demanded a ransom of £1.5 million. When it wasn't paid, O'Hare took a hammer and chisel to O'Grady's hands and severed the little finger from each one, posting them to Carlow Cathedral. He phoned the Gardaí afterwards with the chilling line that it had cost O'Grady two of his fingers.
The manhunt that followed gripped the country for nearly four weeks. It ended in a shootout at Urlingford, County Kilkenny, on 27 November 1987, when courageous Gardaí intercepted the gang at a checkpoint. One of O'Hare's accomplices was shot dead as O'Hare tried to ram the roadblock in a stolen BMW. Thankfully O'Grady was found alive and freed and continued to practise dentistry in Dublin.
O'Hare stood trial at the Special Criminal Court and was convicted of false imprisonment, wounding with intent and firearms offences, receiving a forty year sentence. From the dock he called on republicans to turn their guns on the judiciary, the prison service and the Gardaí, and declared his hope that his deeds would echo until war was waged on Britain and its southern allies. So, thats a stance.
The INLA's political wing publicly disowned him within weeks, insisting he no longer spoke for them. The Border Fox remained in Portlaoise Prison, shunned even by former comrades who felt he had dragged the republican cause into disrepute. O'Hare was eventually released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement in 2006.
Then, in 2019, he received another seven year sentence for leading an assault on a man and helping falsely imprison another man, both at a Saggart apartment block in 2015. O'Hare told gardaí he'd been hired by businessman Jim Mansfield Jr to clear a family from a house.