“The idea of the title ['Starburster'] is about embracing the necessary delusion in terms of how to function [in everyday life]. I imagine it as a world within a snow globe, that you can slip into like a warm bath, but within that world is all the madness and the hysteria. It's about embracing that.”
“This album is about my fascination with falling in love at the end of the world: the album is about protecting that tiny flame. The bigger armageddon looms, the more precious it becomes.”
“We’ve always had this sense of idealism and romance. Each album gets further away from observing that through the lens of Ireland, as directly as ‘Dogrel‘. The second album is about that detachment, and the third is about Irishness dislocated in the diaspora. Now we look to where and what else there is to be romantic about.”
Since I’ve been making posts about American/ British entitlement towards Ireland, I thought I’d talk about this video here.
I am a student at this college. It’s a big tourist attraction for many reasons, but the main one being that the book of Kells is kept here. I am also from Kells itself, but Dublin having the book and not Kells is a whole other issue.
So this protest that’s been happening over the the past few weeks is in response to the college once again raising rents for student accommodation to astronomical rates. That being when rent in Dublin (and Ireland as a whole) is already unliveable. You’d find cheaper rent off student accommodation, but it’s hardly easy to find places like this. As well as this, the majority of the student accommodation isn’t even on campus to begin with. Most are about a 45 minute luas journey away. So what the fuck are you paying for?
This protest is necessary. It’s been a long time coming. Time and time again they prioritise tourists over us. Buildings are old and falling apart, equipment isn’t functional, accessibility is god awful. I know this because I am disabled and use a rollator, but I can’t even use it on campus most days because there’s simply no ramps/ elevators in some buildings.
In one of my lectures last week we were in one of the old buildings. We had a lot of content to cover, but of course the projector wasn’t working. The professor spent fourty minutes trying to get the computer/ projector to work, but to no avail. So we have a whole lecture to catch up on! All of this while I was looking out the window at this atrocity:
A new building for tourists! Yay!
They’ve been building new school buildings for years, but of course instead of finishing them, they’ll spend their time and money on the tourists. I’m not even having an exam in one of my modules because they told the professor that there simply isn’t enough room to host our class for the exam. And it would be “too expensive” to book a venue… it’s only a class of about thirty. He had written a whole exam and we were under the impression we’d have one, but now it’s just continuous assessment I guess!
So you have to understand why we’re not exactly jumping for joy for the tourists. There are hundreds on campus everyday, just generally being annoying and entitled. And yes DISCLAIMER; not all tourists, not all Americans/ British people, blah, blah. But from my experience, you do encounter some obnoxious people everyday.
So that’s why they blocked entrance to the book of Kells. That’s why it’s disgusting for the tourists to be arguing with them and demanding entrance. For once we just want our college to prioritise us! So yeah we will revoke your entitlement, because we are the ones who study here, we are the ones who have to LIVE here.
The far right have started serious riots in Dublin in response to a stabbing by an immigrant.
I don’t even need to go into how him being an immigrant is fucking irrelevant, and making this about your fascist opinions is taking away the attention from the actual victims. You guys are smarter than to fall for that.
Gangs of white Irish men are destroying the city; setting cars, buses, and shops on fire. They’re posting videos of them laughing as they smash out the windows of buses and shops and loot the place.
This is the right wing’s politics. “Immigrants are destroying Dublin”… says the people actively smashing the place to bits.
Please stay inside if you live in the centre. Especially for immigrants/ people of colour/ trans people / queer people/ any group that white supremacists target.