Star Wars age 9 Comic Book

Age 10/11, 1979/1980? The Star Wars disco is interrupted by an Irish party political broadcast! Whoo-hoo! Can this get any better?

As Olivia Newton John might have sang, “Let’s get p’litical, p’litical—I wanna get p’litical, plitical, lemme see your body move…”

A Party political dreamcast

While it doesn’t say, “We Interrupt this dream to bring you a party political broadcast on behalf of the Fianna Fail party”, that’s what seems to be happening! Did it happen in the dream itself? I’ve no idea. But here it is.

I suppose this is the very thing that politicians—such as Donald Trump—would love to be able to do: to broadcast campaign videos straight into our dreams!

The politician depicted is the late Charles J. Haughey, the corrupt leader of the Irish Fianna Fail party, and Taoiseach (Prime Minister of Ireland). I drew several cartoons of Charlie—as people still unfortunaley refer to him. Unfortunate, in that like Maggie Thatcher, Charlie sounds affectionate and cuddly. The man was self-serving, treacherous and greedy for power and wealth.

It might be that I’d seen his infamous broadcast, in January 1980, in which he told the Irish people that we had “been living beyond our means” (speak for yourself) and that we must tighten our belts. Ireland was in yet another of its many economic recessions.

This was being said to the hard-working people of Ireland by a man who styled himself as a Tuscan Duke, wore £1000 Charvet shirts—paid for out of expenses by the hard-pressed taxpayer, owned his own island, and yaught, and had his minister for finance—the later notorious Fianna Fail Taoiseach Bertie Aherne—sign blank cheques for him so he could live in the manner of royalty. He was also allegedly involved in corrupted property re-zoning deals. His friend and government minister, Brian Lenihan flew to the United States for an emergency liver transplant (he was a long-time alcoholic) and Haughey pocketed some of the money that was raised to pay for it. He died in disgrace. But as you can see from the YouTube comments, he’s still adored and called an Irish hero.

For some reason, this page—or even the comic—looks as if it was temporarily abandoned and then added to later, for a laugh, with the very unfunny Haughey thing.

Please leave a comment below if you enjoyed this, or if you’d to like to reminisce about the 70s, or Star wars dreams