Those of you who followed my Election 2005 Blog may have noticed that I'm not the DUP's biggest fan and disagreed with their new Belfast City councillor Christopher Stalford on a semi-regular basis.

Just to show that there's no hard feelings, it's not personal and that I don't hold a personal grudge I want to commend him on his response to Big Al McDonnell's outburst over the flags erected on the Lisburn Road.

"When Alasdair McDonnell was elected as our MP he claimed that he would be a representative of everyone in south Belfast. His latest public statement belies his earlier remarks. It is clear that when Dr McDonnell was talking about 'everyone', he did not mean those of us who have a pro-Union, pro-British outlook.

When Alasdair described the Union flag and Ulster flags as 'loyalist flags', he was creating a false impression by trying to conjure up images associated with paramilitaries - this is disingenuous in the extreme."

Christopher Stalford, Belfast City Councillor: Laganbank ward

Stalford also said that the flags should be allowed to stay up for the remainder of the marching season and then removed. Something I also agree with.

Well said Chris.

George W Bush has publicly stated that the USA will drop its agriculture subsidies if the EU takes similar steps with the Common Agricultural Policy. The statement was made in an interview with Trevor McDonald to be aired today on ITV's Tonight program.

I welcome this new move and call on Tony, Jacques and friends to live up to the challenge. Strangely, even the Party of European Socialists have called on the EU to scrap the CAP!

Back to Bush though; let's have a look at exactly why the man who just 3 years ago signed into law an agriculture bill which almost doubled US agriculture subsidies now wants to be in a position to drop them. Could it be, perhaps, because his government has run up the biggest fiscal defecit in American history and are looking for ways to save money?

Amazingly, defenders of the CAP here in Northern Ireland (and they range from Sinn Fein to the UUP and DUP!) have said that for some Ulster farmers, the subsidies provide most of their income - THAT'S THE FUCKING PROBLEM!!

Subsidies shouldn't be a source of "income." They should be at most a temporary measure to allow farms to modernise or buy in technology to become profitable. Farmers should not be paid nearly £177,000 of public money like UFU president Campbell Tweed was this year - is it any wonder the UFU aren't for reform!? It's time these guys lived in the real world with the rest of us.

A 50 year-old woman collapsed in her home last night in the republican Glenalina area of west Belfast. Ambulance crews alerted the PSNI, whose officers then found her in her kitchen, unconscious. They began to resuscitate her with a defibrillator and CTR and she was later treated by paramedics before recovering.

As the police officers left and headed back to New Barnsley station, their vehicle was attacked by stones and missiles hurled by approximately 40 youths all aged between 10 and 15! The missiles narrowly missed ambulances as they were leaving the scene. The police vehicle has since been taken out of service.

I just fail to understand the mentality of someone who could bring their kids up to be so hate-filled and brainless yet not be concerned. The fact that this wasn't just a handful of scummy bastards also disturbs me - police reported up to 40 kids taking part. It's good to know Sinn Fein will have a solid recruiting base in the area in future.

With grotesque scenes like that I wish the police were less reluctant to break out the plastic bullets - a couple of those wee fuckers could have done with spending the night in hospital, if not the cells.

It's taken over a month but I finally have internet access at home again. Some of you may remember I moved house on 27th May and it has taken me until now (well yesterday to be pedantic about it) to get decent internet access at home. Read on for details of the trials, tribulations and complications I came across trying to do something as straightforward as get broadband installed.

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Just days after the Northern Ireland health minister Shaun Woodward announced a smoking ban (whether partial or blanket isn't known yet), the government has decided that young smokers will be more receptive to warnings that smoking will impact their sex lives than they are to general health warnings, at least if their latest ad campaign is anything to go by.

The government reckon that male smokers in their 30s and 40s are 50% more likely to suffer erectile dysfunction than their non-smoking counterparts, while up to 120,000 British men now suffer from impotency as a result of smoking. They're therefore launching an ad campaign with the slogan "Does smoking make you hard? Not if it means you can't get it up."

Women don't get off much easier either, as another ad points out that smoking leads to premature skin aging and causes "cat's bum mouth." I'm not sure what a cat's bum tastes like exactly, but I think I can safely say that kissing someone who's recently finished a cigarette tastes like what I can only imagine is akin to licking an ashtray.

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Easyjet launches 5 new routes from Belfast today, flying to Rome, Berlin, Geneva, Palma (Mallorca) and Inverness. This means that 19 destinations in total will now be served, by easyJet, from Belfast International Airport (unfortunately not including Malta, where Northern Ireland will play their summer friendly on Weds 17th August).

This can only be good news for the economy and could hopefully establish Belfast as a regional European hub. Certainly there are a lot of domestic routes and this weekend's move sees a fantastic increase in the number of European destinations served. You can now get from Belfast to Holland, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, Spain, France, Majorca and Italy direct with a low-cost airline; not to mention Zoom's direct summer-only flights to Canada! That's some travelling.

As well as the new routes, their existing summer route to Faro in the Algarve (Portugal) is now planned to be served year-round.

It's really good to see easyJet continuing their commitment to Northern Ireland and specifically to Aldergrove. I'm sure there were government subsidies involved in setting up some of these routes but I'd hope they either have or will become self-sufficient and repay easyJet's faith in Belfast.

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60 bikers took part in a ride along the Ards peninsula last night to raise funds for the family of Lisa Dorrian, murdered on 28th February (many blame the LVF). The bikers stopped at the site where the girl was abducted from a caravan park in Ballyhalbert.

Lisa's family marked her 26th birthday recently (12th June) by releasing white balloons at Bangor's seafront and last week Lisa's family launched a campaign to keep the murder in the public eye, with north Down shops giving out blue ribbons to those who support efforts to recover her body. This is atop the £10,000 reward already offered for information leading to the return of Lisa's body.

4 people have been questioned by the PSNI over Lisa Dorrian's murder, but none have been charged.

Funnily enough, I'd been thinking either last night or this morning about this. If the men and women in power in Scotland deride sectarianism so much - why put up with the mass influx of bigots that occurrs every time Rangers and Celtic play? If the clubs are so anti-sectarian, why do they allow their fans to continue to act the way they often do?

Could it possibly be to do with the fact that the clubs know that the only reason many of their 'fans' attend the game is to express their blind sectarian hatred for the 'other' lot? Presumably the amount of money being spent by the teams' fans is enough to ensure that a blind eye is (more or less) turned to the problem).

Almost as if they knew what I was thinking, the BBC reports today on a study published by the University of Strathclyde which concludes that the Old Firm creates 3,000 jobs and generates in excess of £100m for the Scottish economy.

As Puff Daddy said: "It's All About the Benjamins"

Apparently a couple of 'nice' MPs have decided that anyone who uses the word chav is a snob. Being faithful to my Norn Irn heritage, I refuse to use the word Chav, but am no stranger to laughing at Spides!

A major plank of the rationale behind this is that the term is classist. Personally I have to disagree as there are plenty spides/chavs out there who are as well off as me - so either I'm working class too, or they're lower-middle class. Either way, my disdain for them can hardly be termed classist.

The MPs have been sickeningly self-reighteous in their comments I have to say. Lembit Opik says "people who think this is a genuine label are really only labelling themselves as snobs," while Ealing MP Stephen Pound goes so far as to describe himself as an 'aspirant chav'. Who knew Ali G Indahouse was based on a real life MP, eh?

So what's going on? Is it classist to find disturbing spide logic like "If we don't get to walk down the Garvaghy Road then next thing there'll be a united Ireland"? (that's an actual quote from a spide I used to know, who had nothing to do with Portadown LOL - my emphasis)

I think Lembit and friends are obviously speaking from a typically (for a politician) out of touch position. They clearly don't understand the true and full meaning of the word chav. They seem to take the dictionary definition, which is "a young working class person who dresses in casual sports clothing," when we all know the definition of a spide is something much more complicated than that. Perhaps its simply that these people have not spent enough time interacting with chavs, or those who use the term.

Note the description in the previous link above contains no mention of the word 'working' or the word 'class'. In fact I think to describe chavs as 'working class' is quite inaccurate as most chavs/spides seem to have something of an aversion to work!

Is this just an attempt to win a few votes? If so the exercise will most likely be fruitless since spides, as a general rule, don't exactly vote in huge numbers (except in Northern Ireland and here its more of a sectarian roll call than a considered choice). Hearing politicians or Michael Collins, author of The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class, refer to the use of term chav as snobbish is reminiscent of Ali G's famous "Is it cuz I is black?" line.

You'd nearly expect it from Lembit Opec. Being a Lib Dem, he may well just spend all day thinking up things he can deem offensive. Maybe Stephen Pound just has a lot of chav constituents to keep happy and his outburst was supposed to be a cheap votewinner? (This would also explain the similar sentiment espoused by Liverpool MP Louise Ellman)

Being a spide isn't about the class you belong to. It's about your lack of it.

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As explained in my weekend roundup, some members of Orlaith McAllister's family don't seem to have been overly chuffed at her entrance to the Big Brother house. Having been pointed in the direction of the Big Brother thread on Our Wee Country, I've come to the conclusion they'll now have moved from disappointed to 'pure scundered'.

Apparently on Monday night our Orlaith got all wet and soapy alongside fellow housemates Kinga and that strange looking bloke who went in with them. Someone on the OWC forum kindly posted links to naked Orlaith's front view and her rear view (don't look at these if you're in work for the love of God; or if your wife is reading this with you for that matter). There's also an equally "you'll get sacked for this" video clip doing the rounds too.Not bad stuff, although a touch more than the world needed to see?

Thanks to David N from Ulster Nation for pointing out the reason so many people had been looking up her name on google these past few days (and ending up here! They must have been so disappointed!) So yes, I know this is a touch tabloid, but don't let it be said that I don't believe in giving the people what they want!

Anyway, at least its good to see Orlaith (or at least her friend) has good taste in football teams

Update: 26th July 2005
This is for all you sad fuckers who have been searching on google for "nude pics of orlaith mcallister" and ending up here - get a fucking life you no-hope losers! She might well be a bit of a slag but I very much doubt she'd ever be desperate enough to shag a sad lonely pussy who spends his days looking for nude pictures of D-list celebrities on the internet. Why don't you just fucking die?