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'Assembly' is hologram on the hill national |
rights, freedoms and repression |
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 Wednesday May 24, 2006 18:13 by Brian Feeney - Irish News 24 May 2006
 Leaving the unionists talking to each other in this hologram on the hill is the best way to expose that their only aim is to avoid sharing power. In case you haven't noticed, the assembly meeting up at Stormont isn't the Northern Ireland Assembly established by the Good Friday Agreement. It's 'the assembly' as the school-marmy speaker keeps telling her class. It's only after a few meetings that you fully realise what a humiliating sham the whole performance is. Our proconsul appoints the speaker. He decides when the assembly meets. He decides what it can debate - not only the range of topics but he actually determines the order of business. He draws up the order paper. He decides if and when Scotland's first minister is coming over to address the assembly and indeed who else will speak to them and when and how. The assembly of course can make no laws or take any decisions. |
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Comments (2 of 2)
Jump To Comment: 1 2When I saw the headline "hologram on the hill", I knew I'd heard it before. So I googled it and sure enough, Eamonn McCann had coined the phrase in the Belfast Telegraph two weeks ago. It's a good description of the smoke and mirrors that is the Assembly - but Feeney could do the right thing and admit the phrase takes a wordsmith...and he isn't one!
Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. Brian Feeney is one of the more astute commentators on the North – he puts words together pretty well.
In the absence of seeing McCann’s effort (always the surest basis for making the type of comparison I am about to attempt) I’m sure Feeney made better use of the phrase than McCann, who tends to go for cheap-shot humour that is politically timeless.
And, on the point of origination of the phrase in question, I wish to correct ‘Saoirse’.
The originator of the phrase ‘hologram on the hill’ was none other than Johnny Ringo, author of ’When the Devil Dances’, dealing with the ‘Posleen invasion’ of planet Earth (as if we didn’t have enough problems with the Brits already).
The invasion timeline can be viewed at
http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200204/0743435400___0.htm
Gripping stuff.
Here is the original use of the phrase. McCann is presumably an avid consumer of the works of Mr Ringo (profile below) and possibly regurgitated it unconsciously:
“Jake flipped down the bipod on the Barrett, flipped up the ladder sight and pushed an old Jack Daniel's bottle out of the way. The range to the saddle, actually to the upper edge of it where the trail was clear of obstructions, was just at eight hundred meters. Judging distance like that, downhill in the mountains, was usually tough. But Jake's AID just laid a hologram on the hill and marked various points with range markers.”
Here is a profile of this noted observer of the human condition:
John Ringo
John Ringo had visited 23 countries and attended 14 schools by the time he graduated high school. This left him with a wonderful appreciation of the oneness of humanity and a permanent aversion to foreign food. He chose to study marine biology and really liked it. Unfortunately the pay was for beans. So now he manages a quality control database and the pay is much better. He hopes to someday upgrade to SQL Server. At that point life will be complete.
Bedtime reading for Eamon McCann?