Riverdance’s McColgan Comes Up with Internet Portal Idea
By Bock Feb 27th, 2010 | | Category: Bock's People
Did you hear John McColgan on the radio this morning?
Who?
John McColgan, the guy behind Riverdance, along with his partner Moya Doherty.
They made a fortune out of something that put nine hundred Irish dancers on a stage all at the same time, in miniskirts, with a big old pikey like Flatley out in front, all shaved chest and shiny teeth. The Capped Crusader.
All prancing around like The Quiet Man on acid, with a million drums driving them on, and shamelessly proclaiming to the world — or to be more specific, to China, Japan and the United States — that this is Irish culture. Proud. Confident. Uncompromising.
Of course, anyone who lives in Ireland knows that Irish dancing was invented in 1890 by some maniac puritan priest, around the same time they were inventing the rest of the nonsense that would one day fill the world with fake Irish pubs utterly unlike anything we have at home, since we destroyed the originals and replaced them with soulless drinking-dens made of PVC.
That’s Riverdance for you. Re-packaging a spurious, invented Irish culture and selling it back to us as our own.
We’re good at this sort of thing, you know.
We Irish are capable of believing any old nonsense about ourselves.
For example, we can believe that sentimental pap like When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, somehow evolved in Ireland, and not in the schmaltz-mill of New York. This is because we’re as happy as a dog to accept a pat on the head from anyone prepared to take notice of us.
There’s no end to this shit.
The Stone Outside Dan Murphy’s Door.
Shake Hands With Your Uncle Dan.
For Christ’s sake.
All this sentimental crap was churned out in America, and sold as Irish folk music to sad and lonely second-generation Irish Americans, but the thing that really pisses me off is the gullibility of our people, who re-adopted it as their own, abandoning the genuine culture they possessed in favour of ersatz nonsense.
We’re good at this, in Ireland.
Anything glitzy is good, including Riverdance, which is simply a reworking of yet another fake cultural phenomenon.
It’s a sign of our national inferiority complex. If the Japanese and the Chinese and the Americans and the Germans think Riverdance is great, well then, let’s make Riverdance our national cultural symbol.
Even though it isn’t.
Of course, I don’t begrudge John McColgan his enormous financial success in selling Riverdance around the world. Good luck to him and to the show that spawned a thousand fake Irish pubs.
But something can follow in the wake of great success, and we’re all vulnerable to it. It’s the Pope thing. The belief that we’re infallible.
And so, John McColgan has come to believe in his own infallibility, and he’s come up with a groundbreaking new idea, that’s going to shatter all our previous beliefs. John, you see, has discovered the Internet, which he thinks is incredibly complicated, and he’s putting together a group to explore his idea to promote Ireland through an internet portal.
He says his idea is being seriously examined by the government. Yes, indeed: the same people who don’t actually know what the internet is, and who sold off our communications infrastructure to an asset stripper. Now there’s a vote of confidence if ever I saw one.
McColgan is quoted as saying that his idea involves a technically sophisticated, stylish, interactive, cutting-edge portal to connect everything Irish on the internet.
He’s talking about a website. A website! Imagine that. Who knew anyone could ever possibly make a fucking website? A website, by Jesus.
Now there’s an original idea, from a guy who admits he knows fuck-all about the internet.
I know. Let’s set up a website, but first, why don’t we hire a load of experts, and ask the government, instead of doing what everyone else with a successful website does, and just go ahead set it up for small money?
No. We can’t do that. Let’s ask the minister for foreign affairs what he thinks, as if he’d know what the hell he’s talking about. And let’s get a bunch of civil servants together to form a committee — the wonderful people who brought you e-voting. But whatever you do, don’t ask the people who are out there actually doing it for real.
This is Ireland, after all, and McColgan is from show-business, and guess what those two things have in common?
Yup. Neither of them live on this planet.
This will cost millions to investigate, just as the ludicrous Centuri21 project did ten years ago, a project that consumed about €5 million of European Commission money with nothing to show for it.
McColgan’s portal project will produce nothing, or else will produce something vastly inferior to what could be turned out by a talented 17-year-old if they paid him a couple of grand, a box of Slayer t-shirts and a lifetime supply of pizzas.
To put it another way, John McColgan should stick to the Irish dancing and leave the internet to sort out its own shit.
He should submit his idea to Martin McAleese, and win himself €100,000, he would probably think it was a great idea too.
Hopefully “Pirate Queen” will be the next thing John remembers when he starts thinking of this again.
River Dance whilst being an incredible show was a place in time, not hugely entertaining but a “MOVEMENT”
DeInternet should be left to people who know what to do with it.
If you listen very closely to his interview with Marian Finuccane earlier today, you’ll hear John already plan his get out of jail free card for this project.
The magic word he’ll only have discovered when someone familiar with this Internet thing will have gotten involved.
“Monetisation”. And bang, “portal Ireland” is dead and buried.
He said there was no point building this portal if it’s not financially self sustaining.
That’s that, then.
I guess they’ll have to buy back Ireland.com from the Times first. Or maybe they could use an existing page at that little known site called Wikipedia? Hmm, perhaps that’s where McColgan overheard the word ‘portal.’
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This is more like the BOCK writing style that makes this blog so interesting. Excellent post; stimulating.
As for McColgan, I could care less what he gets up to as right now there are more pressing things about that really have me occupied.
I expect I’ll get through the lot however while our ‘asset-stripping-loving-Government-fucking-Ministers and fuck-’em-over-every-which-way-possible-civil servants can go fuck themselves for all I care.
Their days are numbered.
I remember the grandfather telling me about websites and how a young chap from his home place invented them. The same lad that invented the X factor, comin home from the dancin at the crossroads with Cathleen ni Houlihan up on the bar of his bicycle. Anyway the poor lad was read off the altar at mass the following Sunday and sent to an industrial school. Turned up in the silicone valley years later apparently, young Liam O Geata.
Plagiarism Bock thats whats its all about. Funnily enough I made the same point about Martin McAleese and his ripped off scheme yesterday on the Mary Coughlan thread. However as long as the public, government and bureaucrats are too slow to recognise it, people will continue to plagiarise. See further on this on my new website http://www.rockthebobber.con
Typical whinging. Whats wrong with Doherty and McAleese attempting to do something positive ?,even if the ideas aren`t original. Its pathetic to see obviously creative minds like Mel and Bock concentrating on such negativity. Why don`t you guys get positive, come up with solutions instead of problems. Enter McAleese`s competition and win yourselves 100 k
Stick to the creativity, lads. Don’t ask hard questions. Believe any old horseshit they throw at you.
That’s what made Ireland such a great country today, believing any old horseshit.
Anally retentive , is that it Silver? My whole point was that and as I see it Bocks is that these people are incapable of real innovation and creativity. Yet at the same time they are given unlimited exposure and in the case of YCYC finance to wheel out the same old shit. RTE naturally tugging the forelock to the so called great and good.
It would benefit you greatly to read the posts before covering the likes of us with your bucket of dull conformist tripe.
Bock – It’s a sign of our national inferiority complex.
To which I will just say, that subtly belies our national superiority complex. Did yo know that the only people, according to Freud himself, that are immune to psychoanalysis, are the Irish!
The prostitution of our culture is nothing new, and either is the wasting of our public funds, unfortunately. In some ways, it makes us what we are. What ever that is..
I’ve heard that thing about Freud before but I’ve never been able to find the original.
Me either, though I’m starting to have the suspicion that it came from his famous book on psychoanalgy “Dr. Darby O’Gill’s experiments on the Little Subconsciousesis’s”
I’m not sure that Freud ever did say that about the Irish?
Lots of people have been talking about this notion since it was “quoted” in The Departed.
Is that where it came from? Great movie.
I think so, ya.
I agree, great movie. Nicholson was just mad! I wouldn’t like Freud’s job having him on the couch!
My point is that I’ve heard it but never seen a single shred of evidence to confirm it. So has Bock, but I bet we’d all love to believe it. Not so “inferiority complex” after all.
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Hi Craic, I think our posts clashed.
Yes, we think all of that psycho-babble is for cissys and “Yanks”. :-)
[...] At the moment, apart from these regional meetings referred to Dr. Gurdgiev, the most developed idea so far seems to be the Global Irish Internet portal being worked on by John McColgan. There’s a post over on Bock The Robber that covers that idea – Riverdance’s McColgan Comes Up with Internet Portal Idea. [...]
Washed-up has been ‘impresario’ discovers the internet. What a pile of crap. Why do we listen to these people? Even the word ‘portal’ was quietly retired in 2001 when it was clear that it was meaningless. So now we’re going to have HappyIreland.com or some such bullshit – what the fuck difference will that make? John McColgan should retire to his parlour and count his money and shut the fuck up. You fooled us once – you’re not a fucking genius.