ian o’doherty

Clicking Along The Ledge

#10 Student Hack Bites Back (April 15th)
Funny story this. Student hack writes extremely flattering, but also totally made up, profile of me for student magazine. I publish said profile here, replete with sarcastic comments from myself and various associates. There is much rejoicing. Months later, student hack drops us a line protesting cruel treatment. I offer him right of reply. The rest is… acrimony. Read the rest of this entry »

World’s Most Devastating Comeback Leaves Me Torn Between Weeping, Ending It All…

Holy fuck! Lesson = Learned. How am I supposed to match the Don Rickles-esque comic genius of Ian O’Doherty? He must have a crack team of twelve year old boys writing these zingers for him!

Last time I ever mention this idiot. I promise.

Last week I expressed surprise that Ian O’Doherty had not been taken to task over some really callous homophobic invective in a recent newspaper article. Now I’m a little wiser. Having a rational argument with O’Doherty, I realise, is like having a fist fight with a toddler. There is no glory in it.

Yesterday in the Indo, he fired back at me. Well to be fair, he first chipped in a really stellar (even by his own lofty standards) think-piece about bras, which concluded with the burning question: “After all, who wants to live in a world where chicks with massive hooters aren’t celebrated?” Then the gloves came off.

Though professing not to know me, nor to have any quarrel with what I had written about him, he referenced (apparently without irony) my supposed “bitterness” and “talentless outrage.” Really, in terms of the guy having a comically low self-awareness, he could only have topped that by singling out my drooping jowls and pass Leaving Cert standard English. Read the rest of this entry »

Holy crap, is this the most casually homophobic article you’ve ever read or what?

When I read this piece by Ian O’Doherty yesterday morning, I shrugged my shoulders and just kinda assumed someone else would kick up a fuss about it. But that didn’t happen. Now I’m no fan of outrage, but last year Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir was widely pilloried for a column she wrote following the death of Stephen Gately. And truthfully, that article contained little more than a few massive logical non-sequiturs and some spiteful innuendo.

On Tuesday – coincidentally, the morning after RTE’s acclaimed Growing Up Gay documentary was screened – a columnist in our biggest selling daily newspaper branded gays “sexual deviants”, and clearly equated homosexuality with paedophilia and bestiality. Read the article after the jump. It’s about a thousand times more ignorant and offensive than anything Jan Moir wrote. Yet no one seems to have batted an eyelid: Read the rest of this entry »

THE VENGABOYS: A CRITICAL REAPPRAISAL

Attention wedding DJs, office party organisers and hack journalists… A Nineties revival, as wearily predictable as day following night, or Mayo crashing out in Croke Park, is soon to be unleashed. I got a phone call today from a radio station (not one I regularly appear on, I should point out) asking if I’d come in and reminisce about what a wild and crazy decade the Nineties were. Read the rest of this entry »