Have ya ever seen the Government move as fast on anything as they did on the head shops. All it took were a few phone calls to Joe Duffy and you didn’t even have to be from Clontarrrrrrrrrrrfff Joe and hey presto, they’re introducing legislation that came into force, not tomorrow, but yesterday. That’s the type of Government ya need. Introducing laws so fast that they’re in force by the time you get to hear about them. All around the country on Tuesday morning, poor Hans and Jurgen and Johann with the funny hair who ran the head shops had to draw up “Closed Til Further Notice” notices so much on the hop they had been caught by our ultra quick fast reacting Government. Mary Harney, a woman who wouldn’t be in the FloJo league when it comes to turn of speed, had the laws in by the time that Hans and Johann and Jurgen had gone to bed, and by the time the dawn broke over the headshops and they looked through the hazy scene that was their lovenest, they were no more. And if Hans and Jurgen and Johann thought they were going to just shut up shop for a few days to give them time to change the name of the legal high to Ohjaysisthisisgreatdylhide, fast Mary had out-thought them on that too. She had the clear head, ya see. She wasn’t smokin’ any of that auld foreign shite. When she’s overseas, she doesn’t go into the brown cafes. No, she goes to the hairdressers and probably the nice muffin shop next door. She wrote into the law that any drugs that have their names changed and that the guards think are a bit funny can be deemed illegal as well, so now go away and put that in your pipe and smoke it, she told them, smug as anything. She might be leaving Granny for 72 hours on a shopping trolley in Casualty our Mary, but she put it to those foreigners with their head shops
Now the only legal highs in the country are the ill-eagle highs that the Kerry farmers are poisoning under the guise of minding sheep. Little Bo-Peep me eye. But in case we give all the credit for this to the concerned mammies, Joe Duffy and Mata Harney, let’s not forget our friends, the dissidents, who helped matters along with a well-orchestrated campaign of bombing and burning the head shops. Yes, when people power meets petrol power, you can get a lot done quickly. Maybe a combination of both is what we need to get things done in this country. Maybe in a type of new politics, we can, like Nick and David ‘cross the water, have our own seismic shift, the Size Mick, shift, in which we cure the ills of the country with the voice of Joe Duffy, the cunning of the ministers and a few gallons of the hot stuff.
It was great to see the Government get so exercised about the dangers of the legal highs and the psychological side-effects of the same products. But how does this lie with the Government’s inaction on the problem of teen binge drinking which will be this country’s Achilles Heel in the decades to come.
Go into any town centre any night of the week now and see the nation’s youth staggering around blind drunk, puking and peeing on the streets, and then getting into cars and then driving home and crashing and killing each other. Hundreds dead each year and thousands more fecked up in the head ‘cos of the drinking. Ask the suicidologists and they’ll tell you that drink is a major player in the level of suicide, about a thousand times bigger than the problems with the head shops and yet, zilch when it comes to taking on the drinks industry. Time to get on to Joe again, I think. Yes, and a box of matches please.
