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Niall McArdle

A short story before bedtime Vena Amoris

The story came second in this year’s RTÉ Short Story Awards in memory of Francis McManus.

THE ANNUAL RTÉ Short Story Award recently chose its 2019 winners.

The overall winner was Honey Days, written by Stephen O’Reilly. This year, as with last year, TheJournal.ie is delighted to publish the three winning stories, along with the audio of the story as read by an Irish actor.

In second place was Vena Amoris, by Niall McArdle, which we feature this evening.

Vena Amoris

A widowed man, surrounded by the clutter and detritus of his life, loses a precious companion.

I leave him on a dreary, blowy Tuesday afternoon, a little while after lunch, when he is solid asleep in the armchair. Three ticks of the second hand on the clock on the mantelpiece. I am with him and then I am not.

That night he has three dreams. In the first he is a child of six, flying a kite with his brother in a storm. In the second a woman he doesn’t recognise insists she’s his wife. The dream wakes him up unnerved and needing to pee. He drifts back to sleep, and in the third dream he realises something isn’t right. He groans awake.

He turns on the lamp and looks at his hands. His ring finger has a slightly pale mark. He rubs at it and shivers. He remains in bed for several more minutes, then gets up and pads the carpet carefully. He bends down, looks under the bed, on the nightstand. He goes into the bathroom. Many of the tiles are cracked and the grout is blackened and mouldy in spots. The black and white pattern was her choice. He always thinks it’s too hectic in spite of its geometry. He’d prefer bigger tiles. Standing in the bathroom feels like being lost in an infinite set of chessboards.

He returns to the bedroom and sits on the bed. His trousers are hanging as usual on the back of a chair by the window. He checks the pockets. There’s some change, a crumpled hankie and the stub of a train ticket to Skerries.

His wife’s voice is a slumbering grunt.

“Come back to bed.”

The lights in the kitchen are too dim to see the floor properly. He gets a torch from the pantry and spends fifteen minutes pacing the room. There is nothing except dirt in the corners and on top of the skirting board. He is surprised at how filthy it is. Honestly, what’s going on? The bathroom tiles, now this. He’ll clean it tomorrow, and give the floor a good mop.

He looks on the kitchen counter. He looks by the sink and by the cooker and in the presses. He checks all the drawers, even the bottom one which hasn’t been opened in so long he has to wrench and jiggle it. It’s stuffed with appliance manuals, batteries, a pair of dull scissors and bits of twine.

She’s up now.

“Why do you keep all that junk? We haven’t had an electric carving knife in years, remember? We finally threw it out when it stopped working and you couldn’t fix it.”

“I still think we should’ve got a new one covered by the guarantee.”

Her laugh sounds like a motor struggling to turn over.

“We had the blessed thing fifteen years. The guarantee was long gone.”

She’s sitting at the kitchen table in her yellow nightie, her mouth curved in either a grimace or a smile. Her hair is a bird’s nest, thatched and crumpled. There are liver spots on her arms and her toenails are yellowed and curled.

“Do you want a cuppa?” he asks.

“It’s the middle of the night. I want to go back to sleep. We’ll find it in the morning.”

He spends most of the next morning searching. He looks again in the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen. He checks the basket of dirty clothes, then the dryer. He tries not to use it too much, it eats the electricity, but she was sick of hanging up the washing outside.

He tackles the living room. He pulls up cushions. His mouth fills with the grey taste of dust. He reaches down the back of the couch. Coins. Buttons. Mouldy sweets. Postage stamps, of all things.

He moves the furniture around the room and stares at the carpet. The colour, a sort of speckled eggshell, was her choice. There’s a large reddish stain. He can’t remember if it’s wine or curry. The carpet’s frayed in spots and he can see the path he’s worn in his daily trudge to and from the kitchen.

Dancing in the ballroom on New Year’s Eve a thousand years ago. Her long red hair was swept up. She wore a green silk dress and matching shoes, a costume brooch that could maybe pass for sapphire in the right light. She was looking up at him. He could smell her perfume, the sharp sweetness of it. His suit was too tight; he’d piled on a few pounds since he last wore it, that was at his brother’s wedding. He was careful not to step on her toes.

“You’re a grand dancer.”

“You’re not so bad, yourself.” She laughed – a guffaw disguised as a titter. He fell first for her laughter, for its coarse promise hiding behind grace.

On Thursday he looks in Sophie’s room. Their daughter’s bed is neatly made. There are pillows propped up and Sophie’s collection of stuffed toys on the windowsill. There are posters of pop stars and film actors. He sits on the bed and looks at the nightstand. There are books in a neat pile and a reading lamp and Sophie’s keys. He likes to think he can still smell her perfume.

By Friday he has searched for me in almost every corner of the house, and has taken to looking again in places he’s already been, hoping as people often do that lost things will suddenly reappear. He can’t find me because when I slipped from him I rolled under the drinks cabinet and came to rest leaning behind a caster.

He goes out to the garden. The lawn is choked with weeds. He looks at the slick of green on the surface of the pond. He should drain it and fill it in. The bird feeder has toppled over. Dandelion spores scatter and dance in his wake as he tramples to the shed.

The rank fart smell of engine oil. There is a rusty saw hanging off a nail. A coiled and buckled hose in the corner. Wobbly shears and a scythe that couldn’t cut paper. Three lawnmowers. A petrol model that spews blue smoke and struggles when he pushes it up the slope at the back of the garden. An electric one that hasn’t worked in years. And a proper old-fashioned push mower, the blades dull but it still does the job, doesn’t it? The guts of an old wireless spill out on the counter. A faded, tatty parasol is propped up in the corner next to deckchairs that haven’t been unfolded in years.

He rubs at his ring finger. He thinks he might find me here? Is he mad? He’s trying to remember when he last noticed me. He thinks maybe it was Skerries. I’ve been with him for so long that even after letting me go, I can sense when his mood ticks over from joy to fury.

He feels her watching him as he pokes through the toolbox and opens drawers filled with bolts and lightbulbs.

“Do you remember you promised to build me a gazebo?”

“It’s always bloody raining in this country.”

“Would’ve been nice.”

“I’d have had to varnish it every other year.”

It was lashing down the day that they chose me and my partner. They stood under the awning for a minute before coming in, both of them making a single puddle. He shook out his umbrella and fanned his gabardine. She took off her scarf and gloves. The old jeweller’s glasses were smudged but he had a plump, kind face. Holding her hand, his own was thick and stumpy like a butcher’s.

“Why is it always this finger, do you know?” she asked.

“The Vena Amoris.”

“The which?”

“Vein of Love.” He tapped her ring finger. “Runs from there right to your heart.”

Her ring was narrow and bright. I am rather plain, broad and quite thick, and my shine has always been dull. He likes that, and he likes the clunky weight of me.
She placed me on him on a rainy Saturday afternoon in October. He used to look at me quite often, then less and less, than got out of the habit completely. He catches glimpses of me now only by mistake. He never took me off, not even that time he went on a business trip and had it away with a prostitute.

He absently rubbed me the few times they argued. He absently rubbed me when the Guards came to break the news to them about Sophie. He absently rubbed me looking at their daughter on the slab, and years later when he sat in the same hospital, listening to a gruff and distracted consultant tell them that the tumour was malignant and there was nothing could be done. He rubbed me when he sat by her bedside, when he watched her get thinner, when he helped her make it to the toilet, when he watched her heaving for breath, when he watched her struggling to tell him something just before she died, when they covered her with a sheet, when people lined up to shake his hand and say ‘I’m sorry for your loss’, when she was trolleyed into the crematorium. He absently rubbed me when they handed him her urn.

Later he went to Skerries at low tide and walked to the water’s edge. He took off his shoes and socks, rolled up the bottom of his trousers, stepped into the sea and tipped her in an ashen fall into the water. He stood there watching her greyness spread upon the rolling surface, the sound of gull’s cries overhead and the rumble of the waves.

He let me slip almost two years later.

Ten days after losing me, he’s in the armchair, snotty with tears.

“Bloody woman, I’ve grieved enough for you. Why can’t this end?”

She’s on the couch, her eyes barrelling into him.

“Why didn’t you cry when Sophie died?”

“What?”

“Not a single bloody tear.”

“I’m crying now. Look at me.”

“Nothing dries as fast as tears, my mother always said.”

“I go to Skerries once a month, you know, hoping the water will take you away forever. But you’re still here.”

It doesn’t seem right to leave him there in that chair, blubbing like a child who’s lost his toy. I am right here still, glinting behind the front right caster of the cabinet. Seven months, ten days and three and half hours from this moment, he will finally find me. You’re happy to hear this, I trust, but you mightn’t be thrilled when I tell you what happens.

He falls, you see. Not just falls. Collapses like a demolished building. Lying on the carpet, dust swirling around him, trying to suck in air, he thinks, Typical, I’m dying in the living room. Then he spots me winking at him. He drags himself across the floor and reaches out to touch me.

Later, when they find us, he is sprawled like a sprinter, one leg bent upward, one stretched longward, a look of gruesome bliss on his face, and something golden in his grasp.


RTÉ Radio 1 / SoundCloud

Vena Amoris, which took second prize in this year’s RTÉ Radio 1 Short Story Competition in honour of Francis MacManus, was broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 at 11.20pm on Tuesday 17 September 2019, read by Eamon Morrissey and produced by Sarah Binchy. The three judges of this year’s awards were writer Liz Nugent, RTÉ’s arts and media correspondent Sinéad Crowley, and Declan Meade, publisher of The Stinging Fly.

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    Mute Maurice Danaher
    Favourite Maurice Danaher
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 5:28 PM

    Current national debt is circa €190B. Is Noonan giving up on getting the ECB to finance the Bank debt and get it deducted from the €190B. This was one of FG’s election promises. The real national debt figure is probably close to €500B if we were to accrue all PRSI pension liabilities. Yesterday’s article in the Sunday Times is frightening on this.

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    Mute Winston Teardrops
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 5:33 PM

    Why would they include future liabilities? At that rate you could bring future expected revenue into the equation!

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    Mute Emily Elephant
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 5:40 PM

    Because as from 2017, we have to account for unfunded liabilities to give a true picture of national debt. Just as companies have had to do for years. There’s no real difference between a bond you have to repay and a pension you’re committed to paying, except in accounting terms.

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    Mute Maurice Danaher
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 6:01 PM

    Well said. Couldn’t have put it better myself.

    19
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    Mute Kate Ellen Egan
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 6:04 PM

    Where will the money to fund these early repayments come from ? I know it’s a stupid question but does anyone know the answer ?

    11
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    Mute Robin Tobin
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 6:11 PM

    Maurice the minister is doing lip service for the next election. Europe is in receivership and has told Noonan no to what you have noted. It would be nice but our politician didn’t talk hard they were the good boys in the class. So Europe expects them to keep paying.

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    Mute Alien8
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 6:15 PM

    They will be coming from 15 year loans/bond issues so the banks will be lending this money to repay them back early.

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    Mute VoiceOfVanguard
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 6:23 PM

    Wait ’til Ireland doesn’t get the retroactive bank recapitalization.

    And when – not if – new international corporate tax rules take effect from 2016 (OECD), at least €50 billion, or half the annual value of services exports will be vapourized.

    Plus, some multi-nationals have also said they will leave when that happens i.e. when they have to start paying a lot more corporation tax back home on top of high wages in Ireland.

    Hold on to your tin hats.

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    Mute Richard Rodgers
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 6:28 PM

    Emily
    Perhaps now the penny might drop when we consider the point John Bruton was making when discussing such liabilities recently.!
    He was massively abused on this site when his opinion about defaulting by the State on pensions etc when the alternative was bankruptcy .
    How quickly we shoot the messenger in Ireland rather than trying to deal with realities.

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    Mute SeanieRyan
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 8:14 PM

    Still think that a debt deal will have to be done.

    The EU live in a fantasy world where real economic reality is denied and put on long finger.

    They blew their chance to resolve the Euro crisis.

    11
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    Mute Ben Gunn
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 8:32 PM

    That would apply to unfunded civil service pensions but not to PRSI pensions. That liability is subject to year by year legislation and, in theory, could be reduced or abolished by a new Finance Act. It won’t happen of course, but the possibilty means that it is not a reckonable long term debt.

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    Mute Stephen Brady
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 8:47 PM

    What do you mean give up, they didn’t even ask for feck sake

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    Mute Kerry Blake
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 9:48 PM

    ohhh I feel another seismic shift coming on….

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    Mute Huggy Bear
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    Sep 8th 2014, 9:12 AM

    Property tax
    Water charges
    USC
    ….any if these terms familiar to you????

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    Mute IrishGravyTrain
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 5:21 PM

    No financial penalty for paying off loans early. Ha ha. We should be getting a discount for paying early.

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    Mute Winston Teardrops
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 5:30 PM

    Don’t get into finance. I can tell by this one comment that it’s not for you.

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    Mute Tony Skillington
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 5:51 PM

    We should never have had them in the first place…ffs

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    Mute Peter King
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 5:23 PM

    Getting a bit annoyed with this sycophantic attitude the government has with Europe.

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    Mute John Deegan
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 5:38 PM

    What, you feel no surge of patriotic pride when our minister begs the faceless financiers to kindly allow us to give us a big ball of cash?

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    Mute John Deegan
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 5:39 PM

    * you a big ball of cash *

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    Mute Mike O Neill
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 6:00 PM
    7
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    Mute Richard Rodgers
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 6:39 PM

    Peter.
    What a brain and what a genius. Please tell us how yo can save the State a cool three hundred and seventy five million Euro a year as proposed by Minister Noonan so that we don’t have to politely ask our creditors for agreement to vary the terms of our Bailout.
    You must be a whizz with figures and I envy the confidence with which you stride across these pages.
    I showed your comments to a colleague and I could see straight away that he misunderstands you. In tact what he said about you couldn’t be printed here but all great men Peter suffer from such slingshots!

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    Mute Paul Mc
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 8:09 PM

    @Rodgers as per usual your wisdom knows no bounds you and your comments are wasted on the journal.
    Its time you took up your true vocation and that in my humble oppinion is that of chief Fine Gael ass wipe.

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    Mute Richard Rodgers
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 8:22 PM

    Paul
    Thanks! Your opinion in your own words is indeed humble and it is quite clear that you never aspired beyond that though instinct probably told you that there was enough material in you to heft a Sinn Fein shovel but you would need to be told what to do after that.
    The world needs simple folk Paul and at least you have recognised that!

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    Mute Stephen Grehan
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 8:37 PM

    Well said Paul Mc. When Rodgers is in the company of Edna its like a scene from the film The Human Centipede.

    13
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    Mute Thomas Newell
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 9:09 PM

    hows life as the chief arse kisser and male cheer leader to enda and his brigade richard cos clearly you are one of them patriots big nose hogan was on about

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    Mute Kerry Blake
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 9:54 PM

    So Richard hows that seismic shift of Enda the statesman performing these days?

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    Mute Richard Rodgers
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    Sep 3rd 2014, 12:01 AM

    Kerry
    Whaaaaaaaaat?

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    Mute E=MC2
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 5:58 PM

    When the cost of Noonan’s very generous minster’s pension to which he does not contribute a cent is added to the debt it could be the last straw that breaks the taxpayer’s back.

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    Mute Phillip Hogan
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 5:23 PM

    Wow, we are so lucky.

    25
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    Mute Alien8
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 5:53 PM

    Looking at the returns, it is all rosy for Noonan – revenue’s new mantra is to suck every last penny of savings and profit out of small business and their employees and to present it as a gift to some unelected ex-politicians and expect a pat on his obnoxious head.

    “Look what I brought you – someone else’s debt, maybe I’ve ruined a few small businesses and taxed earnings and savings from Irish people to the hilt, but as long as we’re all happy let’s make this look like good news to the ‘media’ – you’ll print it like that, you property funded news website”…

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    Mute Ger Ryan
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 7:29 PM

    At the end of the 1st 1/4 2008 this country was heading towards a deficit of 22bn euros. In d last 5 yrs we have undertaken a huge social experimenr in how to balance d books without strikes/riots etc and we have nearly made it. There is huge credit due to fg and lab and enormous credit due to d dept of finance and public expenditure.

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    Mute Stephen Brady
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 8:52 PM

    Why should lab and fg get any credit. Ff told them what to do before they got booted out.

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    Mute Colin Mccormack
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    Sep 3rd 2014, 3:53 AM

    How is it any credit to them, it’s a credit to the irish people not the politicians. The politicians didn’t stop riots they hid away in Leinster house and quietly stripped us of our pride and dignity and left most of us demoralised and close to bankruptcy. Suicides are through the roof, let’s see these magnificent politicians of yours deal with that elephant in the roof. Crime.? It’s bandit country in ireland again, those shower deserve no credit for anything.

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    Mute Ger Ryan
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    Sep 3rd 2014, 7:22 AM

    The simple fact if the matter is that this country of 4.5million people withdrew over 16bn from circulation over the past 5 years. Politicans put their names forward as spokespeople for that. You didnt. You come on forums and talk abt how bad it is. Pokiticans arent stupid or even greedy anymore. They all know the suicide numbers, the high taxes, the unemployment but they still put their names forward. You didnt. it is easier spew vitriol from d sidelines

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    Mute Alan O'connor
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 6:06 PM

    More bad news for the Shinners. Tax take up. Ahead of forecast.

    Where are the Shinners anyway?

    I suppose it’s hard for them to spin positives into negatives. Especially when there’s an election coming up. Just doesn’t appeal to voters.

    But it’s all they have.

    21
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    Mute Thomas Newell
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 9:13 PM

    so anyone that has a different opinion to them muppets in power are shinners………explains the mental state of the cheerleaders for the likes of the FG/LB/FF crowd on hear…..deluded one trick ponies who believe anything that comes out of the lot in the dail

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    Mute John Hartigan
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 6:08 PM

    Election spew has started

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    Mute Nosmo King
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 6:11 PM

    ” Noonan ” and ” charm ” in the same sentence !! . It is just so wrong, Jack Horgan-Jones. Just so, so wrong.

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    Mute VinHeffer89
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 6:05 PM

    Will Mr Noonan be dancing suggestively for Mario Draghi et al as well?

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    Mute Susan Adair Farrelly
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 8:54 PM

    Charm?? God help Europe…

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    Mute Jarlath Murphy
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 5:41 PM

    Jam?………………………………..
    ‘…………………………?…………….
    ……..?………………………………….

    NEVER!

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    Mute DM
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    Sep 2nd 2014, 6:16 PM

    Why was my two comments deleted?

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    Mute Brehon Law
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    Sep 3rd 2014, 8:16 AM

    Just in time for the general election!

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