Aodhán Ó Riordáin’s Latest Own Goal

Labour Party fat cat Aodhán Ó Riordáin is back to his old Harry Maguire ways. Whereas Maguire is roundly mocked for being the biggest threat to Manchester United’s defence, Ó Riordáin is fixated on totally divorcing Ivana Bacik’s Labour Party not only from the Catholic Church but from any ounce of credibility with the Irish working class as well.

Ó Riordáin’s latest own goal was to block Fairview footbridge with a few hundred Labour and ANTIFA fellow travellers from Ireland’s NGO industry. Fairview footbridge, for those unfamiliar with it, is a bridge that allows students from St Joseph’s Christian Brothers’ school to cross over to Fairview Park without blocking the roads beneath, which is a major commuter road which the Green Party are busily widening at Fairview Park’s expense so local Green Councillor Janet Horner can peddle about it to her heart’s content.

Though Horner, like Ó Riordáin, fully supports hundreds of young men with no documentation being put into the heart of nearby East Wall, Horner has no mandate whatsoever; she has never received one single solitary vote from East Wall or anywhere else as she has never once stood for election. Being from the ruling political caste Horner seems to argue, if she could be bothered arguing, that she is more entitled to speak than are others who likewise lack a mandate.

Ó Riordáin would argue that he has a mandate and, yes, he has one of a sort, for leading a campaign to stop refugees being housed in proposed new buildings beside swanky St Paul’s School that caters to his swankier Clontarf base. Ó Riordáin argued that, presumably unlike East Wall, Clontarf is not suitable for building as Brent geese occasionally stop by there and Clontarf’s children like feeding them and looking at them.

Not that Ó Riordáin’s activities are confined only to his swanky Clontarf parish. Ó Riordáin was formerly the head of Seville Place’s St. Laurence O’Toole’s Girls’ Primary School which, like the nearby St Laurence O’Toole CBS School, was traditionally a feeder school for O’Toole’s GAA Club, with which Ó Riordáin is also tangentially involved. Given the traditionally close connections of such schools with the Catholic Church and the preponderance of female teachers in such schools, one has to wonder how the rabidly anti-Catholic Ó Riordáin, who was bullied as a child for being much bigger and stronger than his peers, landed that cushy gig (which he has now traded in for a cushier one as a Labour TD). Mum’s the word, comrade.

But not on this Fairview footbridge mallarky. First off, such protests are now generally the preserves of groups like Gemma O’Doherty’s or the National Party which, from what I’ve seen, do not clog the footbridges but merely use them to spread their message to passing motorists largely, I presume, because other avenues are denied them.

That is not what Riordáin’s rent a crew have done. They have blockaded Fairview footbridge, safely away from East Wall’s Micky Mudds and Paddy Stinks, to give yet another big f*** you to the residents of East Wall and, more to the point, to pretend they have strength in numbers. They do not, at least in areas like East Wall, where they had to draft in their patsies from the Institute of Public Administration to pretend they were working class East Wall residents.

The Labour Party, under  Ivana Bacik, is neither of the working class nor for the working class. Ireland’s working class traditionally voted in mass for Fianna Fáil before switching, in more recent years, to a variety of opportunistic politicians like the late Tony Gregory and parties like the Workers Party, Janet Horner’s Greens, Sinn Féin and even People Before Profit. Even if the Labour Party still want to con the working class people of East Wall and areas like it to vote for them, having loose cannons like Aodhán Ó Riordáin trying to intimidate the people of East Wall is not the way to go. There are, in summary, reasons why his detractors nickname him amadán and why his former schoolmates are still sniggering away at this colossus who once dominated their schoolyard like he now tries to dominate, at a distance, East Wall.