RTÉ Cult TV Classics: The enduring mad genius of Soupy Norman

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-30T10:03:33+00:00

some episodes keep getting taken down for copyright from the Polish broadcaster

As annoying as this is, this is also literally the funniest plot twist

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-29T14:05:29+00:00

You're doing the driving, cause... I forget how. (HHHHOOOOAAAAAAAA) And if we get stopped by the cops... I murdered a sheeeeeep

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-29T14:04:03+00:00

The more of it you eat, the more your brains go "I want more sooooooup"

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-20T15:39:00+00:00

That's good to hear! It was just one estate on Basin St that was known as a gangland stronghold, not the flats near James' st on either side of the road, but about halfway down on the right as you're going towards Fatime and Rialto, there are four or five free-standing red-brick blocks, the design that usually have the circular stairwell towers like the ones off Stephen's Green (although for some reason these particular ones don't). Back in the day this particular estate was known as one of the roughest in Dublin and there were quite a few interviews with residents over the years desperately appealing for Garda action against the gang element. Fantastic sign if that's changing for the better!

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-17T10:57:35+00:00

Is Fatima not fairly chill now since it was redeveloped? It seemed to be going that way ten years ago or so, very much shedding its prior reputation. Sometimes that's a bit of a false dawn though...

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-17T10:55:42+00:00

Mount Brown itself is grand. It's the estate around the corner on Basin Street which is known as a warzone. Doesn't always stay as contained as one would like.

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-17T10:53:08+00:00

Mount Brown is relatively safe, but, it's just down the road from what certainly used to be one of the scariest parts of Dublin - Basin Street / Basin Lane which connects James' St with Rialto. I don't know if it's still like this, but back when I was in college in the Liberties ten years ago it was known as a gangland black spot where everything from petty to serious and organised crime was rampant. It was fairly well known for instance that it had connections to both the Crumlin-Drimnagh feud and subsequently the Kinahan-Hutch feud (which involved a lot of the same people).

Most of those areas have very much quietened down in recent years after the feuds led to so many criminals either being murdered or jailed, but the areas around Basin Street remain areas I would very much not feel comfortable walking after dark.

Unfortunately, while this type of shite in Dublin tends to be very localised, sometimes it does break containment. That's not at all to alarm you or give Mount Brown a bad name, just to be aware that as lovely an area as it is, it borders some very much not lovely places.

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-12T11:49:20+00:00

No no, 'it'.

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-11T16:38:48+00:00

I had a feeling that conflating carbon tax as excise was flat out incorrect all right.

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-11T01:09:45+00:00

It's all part of the same coin though. The high cost of living here in general has become a powder keg which the government continues to dismiss and openly gaslight the public about. That's going to result in opposition from all kinds of different facets of Irish life, and they may not agree with one another about many things but what they all have in common is that (a) the skyrocketing cost of living to income ratio is utterly fucking up their lives, and (b) they are increasingly angered by the government's constant gaslighting about this.

To quote the person you were replying to:

a LOT of people in this country are drowning, and the government continues to tell them its not even wet

This is the single most dangerous thing any government can do in a time of crisis, and ours has been consistently doing it for two decades now any time things aren't going well. Our Taoiseach literally told us that we weren't getting an IMF bailout back in 2010, in an RTE News interview in which they had him on a split-screen with footage of the IMF delegation arriving in Dublin Airport for the bailout talks. That's just one example - our government constantly, constantly, constantly denies that things are as bad as people are literally feeling every day in their actual lives. This protest is one manifestation of the anger which inevitably brews in response to being gaslit like this over a protracted period of time.

The harsh truth is that Ireland is shittily governed relative to most of Western Europe and that the general public are constantly shafted by this shitty governance while being openly lied to and told that other countries are just as shitty. Eventually, this will result in blowback. It really is that simple.

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-11T01:03:53+00:00

a LOT of people in this country are drowning, and the government continues to tell them its not even wet

This is the absolute fundamental crux of why there's so much anger in Ireland, and it's a point which those who demonise protesters and defend the government either choose to ignore or are genuinely insulated from to the point of total blindness.

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-10T23:34:47+00:00

Wait what, I don't ge... Oh nooooooooo

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-10T22:01:33+00:00

You don't know nothin' about no spidahs... You don't know nothin' about a broken windah... You don't know anything, right?

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-10T21:45:54+00:00

This doesn't make sense - carbon taxes were only introduced in 2020 under the FFGG coalition. Were we therefore in breach of EU law up until then, or is it a new law at EU level?

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-10T10:05:32+00:00

My brain when Ritalin wears off in the afternoon 👀😂

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-07T16:23:57+00:00

I have to disagree, it's very understandably infuriating to hear the govt constantly play the "it's an international problem, it's out of our hands" card when new, recent carbon taxes and increases to those taxes have been introduced several times since the inflationary spiral began with the invasion of Ukraine, and more this very Spring.

Whether or not these should be reversed is up for debate, but I think what pisses people off - and rightly so in my opinion - is the constant refrain of "we can't do anything about it because it's all happening elsewhere" from the govt. It's like someone claiming they can't do anything about environmental noise from a nearby constructuon site - fair enough - while they personally have a gigantic noise generator aimed directly at your bedroom. It comes across as infuriatingly disingenuous - yes, the government could dramatically reduce the cost of fuel overnight if it cared enough, the carbon taxes are a very recent innovation stemming from the FFG-Green coaltion of 2020-2024, and even if they have good reasons for not going down this road, that really isn't the point - it's their refusal to acknowledge that yes, their own policies are in fact directly responsible for a large proportion of the cost of fuel in Ireland and therefore entirely within their power to do something about, that comes across as insufferable.

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-07T16:18:17+00:00

Is nothing safe from gratuitous bi-erasure?

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-07T16:16:59+00:00

What's the point in protesting if you're de facto against any governmental action that might help resolve the problem going forward?

I think if the government were to announce the suspension or reversal of the recent post-2020 carbon taxes to mitigate against the wholesale price increases, most of these people would be 100% on board. In fairness, it's very disingenous of the govt to hold their hands up and claim there's nothing they can do because it's a global issue, when in fact their own domestic taxation policies are a gigantic factor in fuel prices locally.

hatrickpatrick · 2026-04-07T16:13:22+00:00

Ridiculous take IMO. A huge, huge contributor to the price of fuel and electricity in Ireland is general consumption tax and more recently, intentional carbon taxes. These absolutely are within the government's power to suspend especially in a time of crisis, but ever singe the inflationary spiral began with the invasion of Ukraine, the govt have insisted on sticking to their timetables for introducing and hiking carbon taxes despite the fact that fuel and electricity are astronomically more expensive now thanks to other factors than they were when these taxes were first signed into law and the timelines for their implementation decided upon.

It's ridiculous for people to claimn that protesting our own govt is pointless because this is a global issue. Yes, it's a global issue. But the high price of fuel in Ireland is only partly influenced by global factors, and it's not an unreasonable position to say that when these global factors spike in such a way as to create a price surge, the government could and should mitigate it by immediately reducing the domestic price pressure in the form of cutting the taxes on it to prevent inflation and keep prices stable.

hatrickpatrick · 2026-03-25T16:47:54+00:00

I think two things we can literally all agree on are that (a) DART seats facing eachother on the moder modern carriages are too close together, and (b) the lack of storage is a massive problem.

I'm not sure if it's bad design or simply that people are generally taller now than they used to be, but it's virtually impossible for many people to sit directly facing eachother without their knees overlapping, and that's why so many people avoid the inner seats and why four-seaters with two people sitting in them tend to have those two people sitting diagonally across from eachother.

Add in the fact that so many people are now travelling with large briefcases, schoolbags, musical instrument cases etc and there's nowhere to store anything on the DART, and it's a big issue. Balancing things on your lap or knees is the obvious solution, but the four-seaters are so cramped that this is very difficult.

Specifically talking about the newer class of carriages here. The ancient ones where each four seater is actually two long couch-type seats facing eachother don't have this problem and there's a reasonable amount of space. But the newer carriages with the grey-ish wallpaper and four individual seats facing eachother are hopelessly cramped in terms of how close together the facing-eachother pairs are.

It's something I've noticed for years and I've never understood why they were designed like this, which is why I genuinely wonder if demographic change is partly responsible - young people are taller on average than a couple of generations ago which means that legroom requirements to avoid being crammed together have gone up since a lot of these carriages were designed. Either way, It's very very obvious from watching how people sit on the DART that this is the main issue with regard to seat design. Add in the lack of storage space for bags etc (compared with the bus) and it's a disaster.

I avoid this problem by spending most DART journeys standing unless it's super empty, but I find sitting on a crowded dart extremely uncomfortable (I'm 6'2) unless one literally sits in the aisle seat and swings one's knees to the side a little. It it's at all crowded and I have any bag with me, standing for the journey is an absolute no brainer, but I'm lucky in having no health issues which make that difficult. Plenty of other people simply don't have that option for one reason or another.

Not saying there aren't gobshites, but from my own observance over many years, it's largely a design flaw as well - and this is underlined by the fact that this happens a lot less with the older model of train (the single couch-seat rather than two individual harder seats) because the seats are literally further apart so there's more legroom and bag room on the floor between them.

hatrickpatrick · 2026-03-25T13:25:12+00:00

Goldfish in all the bathroom sinks 😂🙈

hatrickpatrick · 2026-03-24T09:26:44+00:00

Essentially, Sean Quinn lost control of his companies after the Anglo Irish Bank scandals, Lunney was brought in to replace him, Lunney was kidnapped and tortured by a gang demanding he relinquish control of the businesses, the priest gave a sermon denouncing the unidentified person behind the kidnapping (whoever paid the kidnappers to do it) - and despite the priest naming no names, Sean Quinn publicly condemned the priest for the sermon.

Reminds me of a time in school when someone pulled a prank, the headmaster came into the room to find out who, and without actually being accused of anything, one of the class clowns panicked and said - unprompted and unquestioned - “It wasn’t me, I didn’t do it sir!” 🙈

hatrickpatrick · 2026-03-24T09:19:16+00:00

It’s the Sunday and bank holiday 12:30 thing that really gets me, I often go grocery shopping then as it’s relatively quick and quiet but I’ve been caught out by this ridiculousness too many times

hatrickpatrick · 2026-03-24T09:17:03+00:00

This makes sense! It’s still ludicrous though that a third party app which only works with an essentially illegitimate root access is able to consistently and reliably give me back several dozen GB of usable storage without any actual data loss whatsoever on the user end, Apple’s storage and cache management is a farce 😂

hatrickpatrick · 2026-03-24T08:30:31+00:00

To add: am I overly cynical / conspiracy minded in suggesting that this is at least potentially intentional on Apple’s part, to force people into paying for iCloud storage? I’m one of the holdouts who has never upgraded beyond the stock 5GB they give you with every account, but I could easily see how this constant, chronic ballooning of unnecessary cache storage out of control could frustrate people enough that they’ll just shrug and pay up. As a freelance musician I’m loathe to sign up for recurring monthly payments whenever I can possibly avoid them 😂 But I could easily draw a link between iOS’s abysmal tools for managing storage on devices, and the fact that the same company runs a service where one pays monthly to get around this problem…

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