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Post by Ballyfireside on Nov 1, 2015 9:49:27 GMT
Well, well, well ... will this be made available to the public?
Report on south Kerry region to be launched tonight
A report which makes a number of recommendations about the needs of the south Kerry region will be launched in Listry tonight.
The report, ‘Rural Vibrancy in Northwest Europe – The Case of South Kerry’ incorporated the views of more than 100 community and voluntary organisations in south Kerry as well as some 1,000 individuals in the region. The 143-page publication is a joint venture between Department of Geography at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick and the South Kerry Development Partnership.
The report is being launched by Irish Times journalist, Michael O’Regan at Listry Community Centre at 7.30pm.
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Post by givehimaball on Nov 1, 2015 13:14:08 GMT
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Post by Ballyfireside on Nov 1, 2015 19:23:33 GMT
There are a number of angles to this, firstly Ireland winning projects and secondly where best in the state to locate. Of course it ain't that simple, the greater Dublin area is often left competing with other capital cities, Kerry Group also looked at wasn't it London and Amsterdam before choosing Naas for their R&D centre. Connectivity is a big thing and Dublin has the most frequent flights to the most destinations so proximity to such an airport is key. From a GAA perspective this is only going to get worse and I heard somewhere that 50% of the population will be around Dublin area in a few short years.
That Cavan was the only county to have no visit underlines how important Quinn was there and the mess that became of it all will be painful for generations to come. Last I heard it was becoming part of a commuter so that is some help. We are lucky with tourism and it is the factors that prevents us from winning inward investment is what is of greatest concern from a GAA perspective.
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Post by kerrybhoy06 on Nov 1, 2015 20:39:19 GMT
When is the last time we voted in a business savy politician? Dick Spring probably. Kerry keep returning a combination of gombeens and undesirables who have no say/knowledge of/in national or international affairs.
I cant think of any current Kerry politician who would encourage me to do business in the area couple that with the inability to get proper road links to limerick or cork developed and thats why there is an issue. People vote in lads because they get a ring road in tralee or a nice road from kenmare to kilgarvan but thats all internal baloney to be honest. It'll save the locals ten mins a day but wont entice anyone else in- essentially what I'm saying is that we are reaping what we have sowed with insular and idiotic political choices. We are a backwater because we choose backwater politicians with backwater reputations and backwater mindsets
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Post by Mickmack on Nov 1, 2015 20:46:15 GMT
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Post by givehimaball on Nov 1, 2015 23:11:50 GMT
When is the last time we voted in a business savy politician? Dick Spring probably. Kerry keep returning a combination of gombeens and undesirables who have no say/knowledge of/in national or international affairs. I cant think of any current Kerry politician who would encourage me to do business in the area couple that with the inability to get proper road links to limerick or cork developed and thats why there is an issue. People vote in lads because they get a ring road in tralee or a nice road from kenmare to kilgarvan but thats all internal baloney to be honest. It'll save the locals ten mins a day but wont entice anyone else in- essentially what I'm saying is that we are reaping what we have sowed with insular and idiotic political choices. We are a backwater because we choose backwater politicians with backwater reputations and backwater mindsetsYup if you had a foreign business delegation and were trying to attract investment to Kerry I'd imagine that you'd be doing your utmost to avoid meeting the vast vast majority of our political representatives. Politicians whose greatest skill is getting stuff from the Department of Social Welfare have zero interest in creating jobs. A TD whose key ability is sorting out people with medical cards would have nothing to do if their constituents all had good paying jobs with medical cover.
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Post by sullyschoice on Nov 2, 2015 0:04:31 GMT
They could maybe get into the import business using fishing trawlers instead
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Post by Ballyfireside on Nov 2, 2015 10:41:12 GMT
We are potentially a top location and we would be wasted on basic manufacturing and where we can't compete anyway. The problem is attracting the top candidates to do the right courses in University and if we could achieve that then the spin off would also create jobs in services, SMEs, for non-graduates, get people back into work force, etc.
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Post by Mickmack on Nov 2, 2015 20:37:21 GMT
We are potentially a top location and we would be wasted on basic manufacturing and where we can't compete anyway. The problem is attracting the top candidates to do the right courses in University and if we could achieve that then the spin off would also create jobs in services, SMEs, for non-graduates, get people back into work force, etc. I rang Aviva recently and a charming man based in Bangalore or somewhere like that answered and very effective and efficient he was too. I suppose this comes back to Annauscauls point... high speed broadband will open up the western seaboard to call centres and such like.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Nov 3, 2015 9:29:46 GMT
We are potentially a top location and we would be wasted on basic manufacturing and where we can't compete anyway. The problem is attracting the top candidates to do the right courses in University and if we could achieve that then the spin off would also create jobs in services, SMEs, for non-graduates, get people back into work force, etc. I rang Aviva recently and a charming man based in Bangalore or somewhere like that answered and very effective and efficient he was too. I suppose this comes back to Annauscauls point... high speed broadband will open up the western seaboard to call centres and such like. Paying people 50% below the minimum wage would also cause call centres to set up on the west coast.
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Joxer
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Post by Joxer on Nov 3, 2015 10:43:44 GMT
Spot on Ciarraiabu! Are call centres really what the west needs? South Kerry needs? Broadband is a fundamental utility at this point and crucial to developing sustainable jobs in the west. Unfortunately, we don't see too many politicians wringing their hands over that one....and yes, that's our fault. Given the ability of our leaders to seek headlines over actual action, I'm not expecting high speed broadband where I'm living in this lifetime! Change is needed but hard to see where it's going to come from.
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Post by Ballyfireside on Nov 3, 2015 10:52:08 GMT
My contention was that we avoid that sweat shop stuff as our people are over qualified at all levels, what we need are top quality global firms who's employees would be big spenders, generating massive spin off for local SME services where we already have excess capacity in terms of premises and staff, i.e. retail, restaurants, garages, trades, garages, domestic services, etc. The big firms are mobile and can locate anywhere in the world but the SMEs are local and serve the local market which is boosted by the former, simple really, the hard part is getting the conditions right to attract and keep the big firms, the ultimate wealth generator.
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Joxer
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Post by Joxer on Nov 3, 2015 11:00:53 GMT
But what about doing a few things for ourselves rather than waiting for multinationals to arrive? The intelligence and ability to develop and grow business is here. Funding is an issue of course but it is for everyone. We aren't even in the starting blocks without high speed broadband and continued migration to Dublin will continue. If we could only get as angry about this as some seem to be able to do regarding paying for water! But maybe the motivation is different....
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Post by Ballyfireside on Nov 3, 2015 23:09:32 GMT
Water is a joke, a trivial amount by comparison with other things but it is isolated so convenient to protect, people are being fooled.
There is a host of things to get right for start-ups, but the idea is the key. We are a bright race and if the conditions were right we would have a vibrant enough rural Ireland.
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Joxer
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Post by Joxer on Nov 3, 2015 23:20:07 GMT
Completely agree. We are a creative people and have shown this many many times. Problem is, we also like to be led and have things given to us..and complain loudly when we don't get. A great pity we don't put our creative instincts to our own productive betterment more often. There is an amazing consistency in the governments we elect and the quangos they control...some of whom are even meant to be of assistance to the people!...and that consistency can be summed up I believe in the following..talk a good show, name check meaningful actions then sit back and do nothing (or pretty much nothing..some individuals involved are better than others). Apologies for the cynicism but until we have more people actively looking at developing a big picture for the west, we are going nowhere (end of rant)....
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Post by givehimaball on Nov 4, 2015 20:40:17 GMT
I'd imagine a huge issue is brain drain in terms of university/third level graduates - saw a stat a while back that in Roscommon something like only 13% of university graduates get their first job in Roscommon. That's almost 9 out of 10 university graduates emigrating out of the county. I'd imagine the situation in Kerry would be fairly similar given the main industries of agriculture and tourism aren't ones that tend to employ a whole lot of graduates.
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Post by givehimaball on Nov 4, 2015 20:48:06 GMT
Well, well, well ... will this be made available to the public? Report on south Kerry region to be launched tonightA report which makes a number of recommendations about the needs of the south Kerry region will be launched in Listry tonight. The report, ‘Rural Vibrancy in Northwest Europe – The Case of South Kerry’ incorporated the views of more than 100 community and voluntary organisations in south Kerry as well as some 1,000 individuals in the region. The 143-page publication is a joint venture between Department of Geography at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick and the South Kerry Development Partnership. The report is being launched by Irish Times journalist, Michael O’Regan at Listry Community Centre at 7.30pm. Links to the report here - haven't read it yet www.southkerry.ie/rural-vibrancy-in-north-west-europe-the-case-of-south-kerry/
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Post by Mickmack on Nov 7, 2015 16:22:36 GMT
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Post by Mickmack on Jan 16, 2016 13:07:10 GMT
I was watching a programme the other night on a SME in Cornwall (I think) that was making goats cheese from the goats milk. It seemed to be thriving. They have come up with something called "the knowledge box" as a devise to drop the tax on multinationals profits to 6%. There should be schemes that discriminates in favour of indigenous businesses along the west coast of Ireland. This letter in Todays Irish Times sets out the only way i see for solving the problem of jobs in rural ireland
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Post by Ballyfireside on Jan 16, 2016 17:26:05 GMT
This is already in place with higher grant rates by the IDA, EU, etc, and you have the BMW region, Objective One, etc. It is not enough though and you saw that Kerry Group moved R&D to Naas to be near Dublin Airport for global access. It is a global phenomenon and while the problem cannot be eliminated, some things can be done to reduce the effects. One thing I have often aired is our suspect property titling system; the consensus is that Dublin firms are less likely to let you down and for the same work they are no more expensive. From my own experiences I can vouch for this and in one case a Dublin solicitor who as it happens I never even spoke with, actually saved my bacon. Intellectual Property titling is the first and fundamental step of small technology firms setting up in picturesque rural Ireland but not if the legal infrastructure is not there and which is important, just like broadband network infrastructure. Funnily enough the roads we have are good enough as services, and specifically The Internet of things, is delivered down the phone line, so the integrity of contracts and advisers there is is essential.
What is lost on many is that people want to live in rural Ireland and near the coast is an added advantage. The big noisers wanted to close Coolard School in Ballydonoghue many years ago as they said it was 'in the middle of nowhere.' What saved the day was a local wise owl who warned that the day may come when children couldn't travel to the far away school as they would be over dependent on oil. It did and since then children now come from Listowel to this school 'in the middle of nowhere'. With drugs now being sold outside urban schools he was a very wise owl and this same school has among it's past pupils, the first and only ever dual holder of a Celtic Cross and an Aussie Grand Final.
In a nut shell, rural is quality, urban is being swept into the jaws of the unrefined gales of globalisation; now where would you want to live and rear children? Where would you want to be?, inhaling Ballybunion sea air or carbon whatever from city traffic?
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Post by Mickmack on Jan 16, 2016 18:35:52 GMT
the letter goes much further than what the IDA, etc do.
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Post by Ballyfireside on Jan 16, 2016 21:17:18 GMT
With respect Mick, that letter touches on a few spin off benefits that would result if the root causes were addressed and in fact some of the points in that letter would cost more to implement than any perceived benefit, and in other cases there is no such problem, e.g. we have empty houses in rural Ireland. I had an experience where an IT company left Ireland because the regionally based solicitors insisted that an associate of theirs be awarded shares that were already allotted to the venture capitalist who had done the due diligence. This is just an example of the issues that the general public may not be aware of.
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Post by Ballyfireside on Jan 17, 2016 11:54:57 GMT
I have been accused of going to great lengths, and sometimes outside of the GAA, to get to the root cause of issues that determine the welfare of the GAA, and which is closely aligned to the national well being. Well I am going further here as the opportunity does indeed present itself. This article in today's Indo nails rural regeneration, and a lot of what will be spoken in the weeks ahead will be based around it as it. I don't know the author not do I care for Denis The Minus Menace, and anyone who reads it will delight as it calls it straight. I reread it myself and will probably do so again!
While it is not for the faint hearted on the subject, in summary, it looks at things from the opposite side to where we are, so one can trace how we can benefit, and the things we would have to do to benefit. It is the only solution, there is no other way as everything starts with funding, money, respecting and exploiting globalisation.
If multinationals pull out, we need a Plan B to sustain recovery by Eddie O'Connor Ireland has been fortunate of late. Job creation is up, unemployment is down and incomes are rising. But we should be aware. Things can easily go wrong. Manna from heaven is fine, for as long as it lasts. It might disappear. Here is why. Much of our recovery has been based on the arrival here of a new wave of US multinationals. Some are even carrying out the tax-avoidance 'inversion' into smaller companies with their headquarters here for tax purposes. Much of the income tax derived is akin to unearned income. We need to be super-cautious about such windfalls.
The big recession of the 1980s was brought to a close with the arrival of 56 US multinationals. They came to Ireland at a time when France, in particular, was enforcing technical barriers to goods manufactured outside the EU. Fortress Europe was a phrase often heard. US multinationals had to find a way of accessing 500 million Europeans. Ireland was chosen because, firstly, it was a member of the EU. It was a country with a stable political system, with no great changes of policy from one Government to the next, unlike our nearest neighbour. There was a relatively benign corporate taxation regime in place, taking a lot less than almost all other jurisdictions. There was an English-speaking, well-educated, young population, with a growing number graduating every year.
This group of multinationals had a multiplier effect on the economy, insofar as it gave rise to a large supply chain. The ensuing employment was very significant in terms of the new housing and infrastructure that had to be built to accommodate them. The EU also helped with funding our infrastructure spend. By the mid-noughties, Ireland was scarcely recognisable compared to the situation before 1987. The population was growing, in contrast to the falling one of the 1980s. There had been a complete transformation in the general wealth of the country. We were up there along with Luxembourg in terms of wealth per head. Unfortunately, much of the wealth was driven by debt. The banking sector was the area where the biggest changes could be seen.
During the 1980s, everyone became familiar with the new approach to bank loans, which were in vogue at the time. Perhaps such measures existed in the noughties, but no one ever referred to them. Debt was flung at people by banks. The traditional conservatism had completely gone. From the outside, it looked like the bank credit committees had been discredited by their peers and their staff given early retirement. Money was handed out for deposits on mythical housing in Bulgaria; second mortgages were given out like sweets. There was a collective losing of the run of ourselves.
How could this have happened? Where were the regulators? Why did politicians not act prudently? We have always been weak at risk assessment and regulation, particularly where the insurance industry is concerned. There was the PMPA, ICI, Quinn Insurance, and, latterly, RSA. All selling below cost and we are paying for their losses still
Perhaps more importantly, why should we be asking these questions now? This last question is the one that matters.
Why? Because we are again the recipient of vast unearned wealth.
A second wave of US multinationals has decided to locate here. They are copying the success of their predecessors. The decidedly dodgy 'inversion' is also a factor. US multinationals can legally avoid tax in the US if owned by companies domiciled in Ireland. While the eurozone grew at around 1pc in 2015, Ireland grew at 7pc. In fact, there was also almost a perfect heaven situation.
A weak euro allowed these multinationals to sell more product, so the revenue recognised here for tax purposes was higher because of this euro weakness.
At the risk of being likened to a wet rag, it is very important to ask how sustainable is this modern munificent miracle? It is particularly important to do so in an election year. It is quite likely that the populists, masquerading as they do as socialists, will be tempted to give away what was hard won during the great recession.
There were some big wins during the recession. We broadened our taxation base, by having a property tax. We at last seriously began to deal with our water loss and shortage situation by setting up Irish Water.
Would it not be brilliant if we could identify every public service area and charge for it in a transparent way, as was planned with Irish Water? I unequivocally argue that the fundamental issues facing this economy should be addressed, debated and provided for. We are extremely happy that we have been given this manna from heaven in the shape of US multinational relocation.
It is, or rather could be, short-term, while the fundamental megatrends of life in the early part of the 21st century are by their nature long-term. Ireland is fashionable now. Like all fashions, the current wave could go the way of bell-bottomed trousers.
My top 10 fundamental issues are: • Global warming. We cannot meet our 2020 EU electricity commitments without profound interconnection with the rest of the EU. We most assuredly will be fined post-2020 for not meeting our targets.
• Providing for an ageing population in need of support, having raided the NTMA-run pension provision pot.
• The energy crisis arising from the imperative to decarbonise the energy system. • The housing crisis arising from the inexorable movement into Dublin and dealing with fossil-intensive ribbon development.
• The threat of the UK leaving Europe, thereby committing economic hari-kari, and the need to prevent the same happening here.
• The need to recognise and accommodate the inexorable rise of China as the world power.
• The impact of our animal herds on greenhouse gases.
• The need to deal rationally with the failed 'war on drugs' and prevent the criminalisation of a whole class of users and suppliers. • The need for a rational industrial policy, one that is based on the principle of nurturing entrepreneurship.
• Recognising that major global growth will occur in the southern hemisphere and major growth in trade routes will be between Latin America, sub-saharan Africa and India, SE Asia and China. How can we be part of this new paradigm?
Where will our economic growth go if that last megatrend tempts the multinationals to relocate in order to be nearer the major trade routes?
Every country there speaks good English. All that has to happen is that one of them adopts a taxation policy like Ireland and we could be left to our own devices. The manna from heaven could disappear and we would be back to square one.
We need a Plan B.
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kerryexile
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Post by kerryexile on Jan 26, 2016 16:03:24 GMT
On the theme of social equality, below is an interesting article about a Kerryman in New YorkMike Quill: The Irishman Martin Luther King described as ‘a man the ages will remember’
This time 50 years ago, people throughout the US were talking about an Irishman who was being blamed for a transport strike that was crippling New York City. The New York Supreme Court ordered the suspension of the strike, but Mike Quill, president of the Transport Workers Union (TWU), tore up the court ruling order in front of television cameras. “The judge can drop dead in his black robes,” Quill said. The strike was continuing and he would go to jail, but as he being taken to jail, he suffered a heart attack and ended up in hospital instead. Quill was born in Gortloughera near Kilgarvan, Co Kerry, on September 18, 1905, the second youngest of eight children. As a 14-year-old, he became a message carrier and scout for the No 2 Kerry Brigade of the IRA during the War of Independence. His family home and his uncle’s house in Kilgarvan were renowned for revolutionary sympathies. Quill participated in the Civil War as an IRA volunteer. Free State troops seized Kenmare on August 11, 1922, but Republicans retook the town two days later. The 17-year-old Quill was one of those who took part in that engagement, one of the few real military victories enjoyed by the Republicans. After the civil war, Quill felt he had little chance of a job at home and his only real option was emigration. He arrived in the New York City on March 16, 1926. Still only 20 years old, his first job there was in construction on the New York subway, but he did not feel suited for construction work. After a variety of jobs, he went to work as a ticket agent for the Interboro Rapid Transit Company (IRT), which was the biggest subway operation in the US. Working conditions there were horrendous. Quill was often required to be in attendance for four hours without pay until work might finally become available, and then he was condemned to a slave-driving schedule of 84 hours a week — 12 hours a night, seven nights a week for 33c an hour. There was no sick leave, holidays, or pension rights. While moving from station to station, he got to know many of the IRT employees, especially those Irish migrants who had fled to the US in the wake of the troubles at home. He jokingly referred to them as the Irish Republican Transit. Although he had only had a national school education, he studied at night and read up on James Connolly, whom he greatly admired for patriotism and his drive in unionising workers. Quill and Thomas H O’Shea, a native of Queenstown (now Cobh), were the two main founders of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) on April 12, 1934. At the time it had close ties with the Communist Party. O’Shea was selected as the union’s first president, but he was soon replaced by Quill, who worked fulltime as TWU president for almost 30 years. With the help of trusted colleagues to identify union activists, Quill built up the union in a patient manner, conducting some brief protests, or strikes over working conditions while avoiding major confrontations. The union, which began with 400 members, quickly won over all 14,000 IRT employees. The first strike that Quill called was on January 23, 1937, in support of two men who were fired by Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation for union activity. The sit-down strike won the enthusiastic support of other company employees and helped to boost the TWU’s membership to 45,000. On July 4, 1937, the TWU signed its first contract with the IRT. Union membership stipulated that all members should be treated equally and justly, regardless of race, or creed. Hitherto a black person could only work as a porter on underground trains, but this rapidly changed under Quill’s leadership. Unlike other unions, which treated black people as second-class citizens, Quill was a quarter of a century ahead of his time in insisting on treating them properly. The TWU appointed Clarence King, an Afro-American porter, to its executive board. “If we, black and white, Catholic and non-Catholic, Jew and gentile, are good enough to slave and sweat together, then we are good enough to unite and fight together,” Quill proclaimed in 1938. He opposed the Irish-American demagogue Fr Charles E Coughlin, who was famous for his radio broadcasts throughout the US. In the process, Quill provoked the ire of Fr Edward Lodge Curran and his Christian Front movement. The two priests were rabidly anti- Semitic, but Quill took them on openly. In June 1939, he organised a rally against anti-Semitism in the South Bronx, which was predominantly Irish-American. Christian Front literature denounced Quill as “Red Mike,” an agent of “Judeo-communists.” In 1940, Quill was called before a Congressional hearing of the notorious House Committee of un-American Activities about communist involvement in the TWU. He confronted the chairman Martin Dies, who promptly decided to go into private session. “You are afraid to hear the truth about our union,” Quill snapped. “You can’t take it, but the American labour movement will live.” That committee was building the notorious reputation that it developed during the 1950s when Senator Joe McCarthy poisoned American politics with his red smear tactics. Racist opponents tried to smear the civil rights movement as a communist front. It was a measure of Quill’s standing that he managed to avoid the worst of the smears. Quill successfully ended a wildcat strike of white members in Philadelphia who were trying to block the promotion of eight black porters. In 1961, when 25 TWU airline workers in Tennessee protested against the union’s support for the Civil Rights desegregation campaign, Quill’s response was to invite the Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King to address a TWU convention. He introduced King to the gathering as “the man who is entrusted with the banner of American liberty that was taken from Lincoln when he was shot 95 years ago.” “Dr King’s life at this moment is in just as great danger as was Lincoln’s,” Quill added. “And he has to walk with care if he is to continue to lead this crusade.” Quill was a crusader himself. “Most of my life I’ve been called a lunatic because I believe that I am my brother’s keeper,” he explained in summing up his philosophy of life. “I organise poor and exploited workers, I fight for the civil rights of minorities, and I believe in peace. It appears to have become old-fashioned to make social commitments — to want a world free of war, poverty and disease. This is my religion.” The conditions of his union members had changed beyond all recognition during Quill’s tenure as TWU president. Yet throughout his career, until his final month, he only initiated one strike. Some thought he was afraid to lead a major strike, but they were wrong. On January 1, 1966, the mayor of New York called TWU’s bluff, but Quill was not bluffing in threatening to paralyse the New York subway. “The Transport Workers Union is on strike,” Quill announced on television during the early hours of the New Year. “The issues will now be decided on the streets of New York.” After 12 days, the subway bosses capitulated and offered the TWU acceptable terms. Quill had won, but he had little time to enjoy his success. He died just days later on January 28, 1966. “He spent his life ripping the chains of bondage off his fellow man,” Martin Luther King declared in a tribute following Quill’s death. “This is a man the ages will remember.”
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Post by Ballyfireside on Feb 6, 2016 0:37:37 GMT
The Templenoe team come from an area which is 45km in diameter, presumably at the widest point, although having said that all bar three live/work/study outside the area with the majority being in Dublin, Cork and Limerick. Now that tells us what the GAA is up against with the imbalance that is in society, the point I raised initially.
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Post by Mickmack on Mar 19, 2016 16:24:22 GMT
Michael Viney’s Ireland: 50 years a blow-in
The English journalist and naturalist – this paper’s longest-serving columnist – has always been a keen-eyed yet sympathetic chronicler of Irish life. So what does he make of our nation in this centenary year?
On a black, wet night in March 1966, as Ethna, my wife, was driving us back from the west, on a wide main road, we were struck head on by a galloping black heifer. The cow’s passage over the roof left me with a gash under one eye and Ethna badly shocked but unhurt. At Loughrea hospital news arrived of the explosion that had felled half of Nelson’s Pillar, in Dublin. It was one way of marking the 50th anniversary of the Rising and one more reason for remembering the day.
We were returning from Letterfrack, in Connemara; its industrial school was one of those that I visited for an Irish Times series on the fate of young offenders, published soon after. At the time it stirred a single letter to the editor. The deeper scandals of children in institutions had to wait for searing television documentaries that were to change the whole mind cast of Ireland.
From apprenticeship to my local Brighton weekly, at the age of 16, I look back, at 83, on a lifetime in journalism. My love affair with The Irish Times began in 1962, when the spark of postwar renewal – Seán Lemass, TK Whitaker, Garret FitzGerald – prompted me to join Ireland’s future.
In 1977 Ethna, our daughter and I moved from Dublin to Co Mayo, from where, in yet another life, I have kept my eye on affairs from a digital eyrie above the sea, where broadband beamed from the islands brings me six newspaper front pages before breakfast.
In the early years of social inquiry for this newspaper – into mental illness, single motherhood, care of the elderly, unhappy marriages and more – I sought to set a mirror to the new and understandable obsession with Ireland’s economic revival. It was, journalistically, a virgin field. As Diarmaid Ferriter wrote in his recent modern history, I became “almost a one-man department of sociology”, exploring “Ireland’s dark corners”.
But that was all a long time ago, before the Republic’s profound social change, expressed as much in people’s feelings as in new systems or law. Behind current public anger in reaction to the recent economic crash and to austerity, and the cranky verbiage of Facebook and Twitter, there has been a change of heart. Even the pattern of last month’s general election, in its support for local, independent candidates, reinforces the strength of a new fellow feeling.
Over the 50 years the advances in education and acquaintance with the wider world have helped to erase the old social exclusions and stigmas. It might even be that television soaps now meet the need for drama that used to motivate such keen and sometimes cruel rural gossip.
Life has grown much more professional in the new competition for well-paying, less-secure jobs. Most journalists today are graduates, among them gifted analysts of a far more complex society. Many women among them are instinctively feminist. Before contraception was finally freed from male control, including that of the Catholic Church, in the family-planning Act of 1979, well-known media faces were among crusading women waving condoms from the Belfast train.
The need to respect and understand the human condition has encouraged Irish people to come out in defiance of old taboos and silences. Those suffering depression should never have felt inhibited from saying so, and families coping with a suicide should never have felt the need to mask the truth. Both have to be talked about for help to intervene.
Single mothers can now push the baby down the street. The unhappily married can divorce and gay couples wed in public. Sooner or later abortion reform will respect the mother’s health, not just her life. It is as if a hidden Ireland is tired of long dissembling and has declared a solidarity with the human pursuit of happiness.
Alternative pioneers Blow-ins are much more welcome, too, unless too many and strangely black. My very first series, “Ireland for Sale?”, in 1962, explored local suspicion of coastal land purchases by Europeans seeking cleaner winds at the peak of worries about the threat of nuclear war. Today, from the first “alternative” pioneers reclaiming derelict farms in the hills of west Co Cork, incomers are commonplace in Ireland’s countryside, their energy often turned to artisan foods, crafts and community enterprise. Their green ideals and the success of organic produce have helped the State towards its new, “green” niche in marketing. I have never felt, nor been made to feel, that much of an English outsider. Even the nuns, priests and brothers I quizzed in the 1960s received me kindly and co-operatively, gave me tea in the parlour and put up with a Brit, a nonbeliever, seeking their views on professional theories for the progress of childcare.
If I feel an outsider now it is still towards the England I left, now so xenophobic and multiculturally confused. An exploration of Northern Ireland in the mid-1960s found not dissimilar tensions and discrimination. I returned to report on John Hume’s activism in Derry as something like good news.
It helped my own integration, of course, to marry a resourceful west-coast woman with her own ideals of social change. Ethna McManus, young chairwoman of the farmers’ co-op in Killala, was doing a late economics degree at University College Dublin. We spent weekends driving from the capital to meetings with the small farmers and fishermen she was urging towards local co-operative action.
Ethna also flew a flag for rural women, then often labouring in harsh domestic and marital conditions. A cartoon in our loo, drawn by Warner for the Farmer’s Journal in 1968, commemorates a lecture she gave to a seminar of priests and bishops. It attracted a front-page headline in the Dublin evening papers, “Country wives starved of love says Ethna Viney,” and brought Bishop Harty of Killaloe to set up the first rural marriage-guidance council. In the 1990s, for RTÉ, Ethna and I made a film with the women of our local town, Louisburgh. It was called Risen Women, with Grace O’Malley, the pirate queen, at the helm.
The far greater comfort of today’s typical small-farm Ireland – carpeted bungalows with fitted kitchens – is the fruit of decades of EU farm policies and structural funds, topped up by off-farm construction work in the transient Tiger years. The farm husbands, too, have left a way of life behind.
In the late 1960s, exploring small-town economics, we arrived at Kiltimagh – where the word “culchies” came from – on a fair day in March, a necessary couple of hours before dawn. We found the dark streets of the Co Mayo town thronged with cattle, the light of torches making bright clouds of their breath. Rising in the early hours, the farmers had marched them for miles through a snowy countryside, converging along six roads into the town.
With the Republic’s entry to the EEC, in 1973, new cattle marts took over, stilling the slapping of hands on a bargain in the street. Good local abattoirs were sacrificed to larger centres of impeccable hygiene. A new solitariness entered farming life, with the end of kinship and neighbourhood gatherings for hay and silage meitheals and the seasonal cutting of turf, both now generally abandoned to outside contractors.
There’s little visiting between bungalows glowing with television screens, which makes Mass and the Sunday supermarket shop a welcome opportunity to see friends. When the young come home from Dublin their gaze remains lowered to their virtual social world. That’s, of course, when the young are still in Ireland and not chatting on Skype from Sydney or San Francisco.
Robbed, at present, of so many young, many small towns are left in sad limbo, as supermarkets and co-operative stores have centralised retail shopping. Louisburgh has the better life that tourism and small industry can bring. It was once my joke that Nomadic Structures Ireland manufactured yurts for Mongolia, but it has successfully exported folding exhibition equipment since the 1980s.
In the early years of the Industrial Development Authority there was some unease about attracting multinationals to Ireland. It was feared that many would up stakes and leave once initial grants had been spent. This was to underrate the attraction of Irish corporation-tax rates and the long and grateful service of dependent communities, not to mention the pleasing tenor of Irish life. Globalisation and corporate restructuring have inevitably brought collapses and betrayals.
In the anniversary year of 1966 Donogh O’Malley, as minister for education, disconcerted Seán Lemass and the Fianna Fáil cabinet by announcing free secondary education. This set in train the advance towards college so generally counted on today. The new embrace of science, not least in the realm of the marine, has filled great gaps in Ireland’s intellectual ambition, and the seismic arrival of computers seems to have touched, in many young entrepreneurs, an especially Irish imagination and creativity.
Settled on our acre in Thallabawn in commitment to a “simpler” life, news of a personal computer in the early 1980s had me wondering what on earth it was for. Later, struggling with the early Amstrad and its telephonic modem, the digital delivery of my “Another Life” column to Dublin was, indeed, often preferable to cycling to the post office in wind and rain.
Changes in the landscape on our side of the hill have been mercifully gradual and mostly inoffensive. Drilling on the hill for gold did not, in the end, deliver a mine, and wind turbines, similarly, never arrived. The new second homes of the Tiger years crept along the road to the edge of my view and then stopped. The Wild Atlantic Way has a tendril past our gate, but at least it keeps most of the potholes filled, most of the time.
Common pleasure The natural world, now, fills much of my mind. The past 50 years have seen both the revelation of nature, and its “ecosystem services” to humankind, and the accelerating destruction and extinction by human activity. In Ireland targets for increased national agricultural production threaten new problems of water pollution and higher output of greenhouse gases. As farming intensifies the countryside continues to lose the habitats that vital pollinating insects need. However, a natural world that was once thought of interest to ascendancy hobbyists has become the common pleasure. When the Free State was founded nature study was scrapped from the primary-school syllabus to make more room for Irish. Now the young tend school gardens for the thrill of making things grow and watching butterflies, at least until the first video game draws them into the virtual world.
The State, meanwhile, has been dragged into conservation. The EU’s protection of habitats and species was originally framed by a consensus of scientists, Irish experts among them. It was then enshrined in EU directives, enforceable through fines from the European Court of Justice. The process has produced a rich fund of native ecological research and a flow of home-grown initiatives.
Although nature directives can seem authoritarian, especially to farming interests caught up in their implementation, they let politicians get on with conservation while pleading coercion from Brussels. I trust that the next regime will follow this dishonourable tradition, so long as it works to nature’s benefit.
Conceived on this side of the hill, my view of 50 years may seem of no great relevance. Avoiding social media as unnecessary complications of life, we are spared the darker minds that haunt disputed territory. But it does seem that in today’s Ireland most people now deal with each other more fairly and with greater intelligence and empathy. In today’s divided world this can’t be bad.
Michael Viney’s Reflections on Another Life, a selection of his columns from the past four decades, is available from irishtimes.com/ irishtimesbooks
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Post by Mickmack on Mar 19, 2016 19:57:27 GMT
I didnt know where to put that article. I thought twas a great read
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Post by kerrygold on Mar 21, 2016 9:12:14 GMT
Talk about Michael Healy Rae and minister for rurual affairs in the same sentence circulating in the media. That would be interesting at least.......................
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Post by givehimaball on Mar 21, 2016 13:07:59 GMT
Talk about Michael Healy Rae and minister for rurual affairs in the same sentence circulating in the media. That would be interesting at least....................... Yeah - sure South Kerry have had a Healy-Rae on the council for almost 50 years and there's been one in the Dail for almost 20 years and South Kerry has never been in a better state.
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Post by kerrygold on Mar 21, 2016 14:25:57 GMT
Talk about Michael Healy Rae and minister for rurual affairs in the same sentence circulating in the media. That would be interesting at least....................... Yeah - sure South Kerry have had a Healy-Rae on the council for almost 50 years and there's been one in the Dail for almost 20 years and South Kerry has never been in a better state. A designated Minister for South Kerry and Rural Development would be an interesting space all the same. Pat Spillane will be able to drop any informed ball based on his research on rural matters into the Kilgarvan square from the Templenoe parish fairly easily enough with a drop kick shooting into the breeze. The Loo Bridge Kilgarvan axis might have been upgraded after all to by-pass Killarney!
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