Where Edward Snowden Went Wrong

In the Dáil recently my friend Clare Daly called on the Irish government to give political asylum to American National Security Agency whistleblower, Edward Snowden.

I absolutely agree. Indeed, we have a vacant appartment upstairs for which the usual rent is €150 per week; I'd be happy be rent it to young Edward for the bargain price of, say, €130. I understand that his girlfriend. Lindsay (possibly now his ex-girlfriend?) is a pole dancer. Now, while I wouldn't approve of that sort of carry on myself, how people earn their living is not my business. As long as the rent gets paid. Lindsay (pictured below) seems like a nice young lady and would be welcome to join him here. If they are cat people, which I'd guess they probably are, then we may ask them to help us out by feeding our cat Ziggy when are away doing poetry readings.

There is a double bed and a spare room with a single bed. The only thing we'd ask is that they don't make too much noise nor bring around any of that shower from Galway Alliance Against War. This is a quiet neighbourhood and we have certain standards, although not too many. Edward Snowden can give me a call any time on 087-6431748, if he wants to have a chat about the appartment. I look forward to all of my future phone calls now being monitored by the National Security Agency; it's important work they do and vital to protect us from the threat posed by the international terrorist movement my late mother used to describe as yer man in Afghanistan with the beard.

Intelligence agencies have a traditional solution when it comes to dealing with agents who depart the fold: they smother them in hotel bedrooms or spike them in the leg with risin tipped brollies. In 1938, when American KGB agent (and founding member of the U.S. Communist Party) Juliet Poyntz decided that Stalin was, after all, a murdering psychopath rather than the saviour of the international working class, she disappeared and Stalinist collaborating 'progressives' such as Lillian Helman and Pete Seeger worked hard to forget her name. From sea to shining sea, readers of The Nation could, if you listened very carefully, be heard whispering: what's a dead ex-comrade or two when what's at stake is the glorious October Revolution. I have a poem dedicated to Juliet Poyntz published here
^{http://neoneocon.com/2012/06/18/juliet-poynz-changer/}

As I say, I entirely sypathise with the predicament in which Edward Snowden finds himself. It is not a surprise that intelligence agencies would be involved in gathering information on innocent millions of people in the sinister way we now, thanks to Edward Snowden, know for sure the National Security Agency are. Some silly people who believe in things like Jimmy Carter, the United Nations and the speeches of Michael D. Higgins have been shocked by what has been revealed. These poor souls should be given all the help our best psychiatrists can offer.

Back on planet Earth, the one criticism I would have of young Snowden is that he entirely mishandled his application for political asylum in Ireland. He asked us directly for asylum. He should have been advised that you never ask an Irish person a direct question. It would have been far better for him to take the Cascarino approach, which was referred to by Clare Daly in the Dáil:
“I seem to remember that it was deemed sufficiently important to get an Irish passport for Tony Cascarino on the grounds of a fictitious grandmother so he could be part of Jackie’s Army.”

According to the Gospel that is Wikipedia, it was actually Cascarino's grandfather who was, if not exactly fictitious, certainly not at all Irish:

"Cascarino was born in England but represented the Republic of Ireland, qualifying through his Irish grandfather. However, he later revealed that his mother told him in 1996 that she was adopted and therefore no blood relative to the grandfather. Cascarino said in his autobiography: "I didn't qualify for Ireland. I was a fraud. A fake Irishman". The adoption of his mother gained her the right to Irish citizenship and he was eligble." 

What Edward Snowden needs to do is get signed as a centre forward for Millwall. Then his problems will be, if not over, then certainly very different. He just needs to learn to think outside what Johnny Giles (pictured below) would call the box.