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Post by glengael on May 10, 2011 11:54:56 GMT
Can the Queen win over Croke Park?There are few more hallowed corners of Ireland than Croke Park, home of Gaelic sport and the ground where British forces slaughtered 14 people in 1920. Yet next week the Queen will visit the stadium. Leading Irish writer Fintan O'Toole charts this remarkable turnaround
Jane Boyle went to the match with the boyfriend she was due to marry five days later. She died when the crowd stampeded in terror and she fell underfoot. John Scott, who was just 14, was so badly mutilated it was at first thought that he had been bayoneted to death. Thomas Ryan was kneeling down, whispering a prayer into the ears of another dying man when he was himself shot. Two little boys, one aged 10, the other 11, were among the dead.
The 14 people who were killed at Croke Park stadium in Dublin on 21 November 1920 were far from the only victims of the Troubles of 1916 to 1923 that led to the foundation of the Irish state. Indeed, 31 people in all were killed on that single day alone. Yet those killed when troops and police opened fire on the crowd at the headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) are remembered more clearly than many of the others. They died in the most traumatic of a concentrated series of violent incidents. There was another Bloody Sunday during the more recent Troubles in Northern Ireland, but this was the day for which the term was coined.
In the early morning, 14 secret agents, the core of the British Intelligence operation against the Irish Republican Army, were killed in their suburban Dublin homes by a squad organised by the IRA leader Michael Collins. In the evening, three prisoners, two of them senior IRA men, were killed by the British "while trying to escape".
But it is what happened in the afternoon that makes this month's visit by the Queen to Croke Park, the headquarters of the GAA in Dublin, so resonant. Tipperary and Dublin were playing a game of Gaelic football in front of a crowd of 5,000 people. Croke Park was surrounded by a mixed force of armed members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, regular troops and members of the Auxiliaries, an irregular force largely recruited in England and attached to the Irish police to help fight the IRA. Armoured cars blocked the exits from the grounds. The intention was that all the spectators leaving Croke Park would be searched for arms.
Military and police participants later claimed they were fired on by someone in the crowd. Whether or not this was true (and there was no independent inquiry), what happened next is broadly clear. Over the course of a few minutes, the police and Auxiliaries fired 228 shots, and an army machine gun at one of the exits fired 50 rounds. Fourteen civilians were killed, two of them trampled to death in the panic. Sixty more were injured. The secret military inquiry, which became public only in the past decade, concluded that the firing was "carried out without orders, and was indiscriminate and unjustifiable". The almost universal view among Irish nationalists was that the killings were a deliberate reprisal against unarmed civilians for the assassinations of the intelligence officers earlier in the day.
One of the victims of Bloody Sunday was the Tipperary player Michael Hogan. The Queen will meet GAA members under the Hogan Stand of the monumental new Croke Park stadium, rebuilt in the 1990s for a capacity of 82,000. That amateur sports played in just one country can fill such a stadium is extraordinary. Much more extraordinary, though, is that the stadium can now play host to a British monarch.
Even a decade ago, the idea would have been unthinkable. Now, the only official comment on it from the GAA is a discreet notice on the Croke Park website, concerning arrangements for the museum at the stadium, where the Queen will spend 45 minutes: "The GAA Museum will be closed from Saturday 14 to Wednesday 18 May inclusive." The studied pretence that nothing much is happening is itself testament to the reality that the unthinkable is coming to pass.
A century ago, if you asked a typical Irish nationalist what was distinctively Irish, they'd have listed the big forces that defined their culture: the Catholic church, nationalist politics, attachment to the land, the Irish language and the GAA. Today, almost all of those markers of identity are gone or weakened. The church may never recover from the child-abuse scandals that have destroyed its authority in the past decade. The Fianna Fáil party that captured mainstream nationalism and dominated Irish politics for half a century was decimated in February's election. Ireland has long since ceased to be a rural, agricultural society. The Irish language clings on but the aim of making it the everyday tongue is further from fulfilment than ever.
The one part of the package that still functions is the GAA, which is not merely surviving but thriving. If you want to give a foreign visitor a quick sense of something unique to Ireland, you bring them to Croke Park for a game of Gaelic football or, better still, hurling.
In spite of the glamour of professional sports such as soccer and rugby, the GAA's showpiece inter-county championships, played out over the five summer months, account for 60% of all attendances at sporting fixtures in Ireland. The vast majority of those fans also follow British football teams, such as Manchester United, Liverpool or Celtic, and many are passionate about, for example, the Munster rugby team. But the GAA touches a very different nerve. In a world where global sporting spectacles are packaged for passive consumption, the GAA appeals to something local, intimate and democratic. It doesn't just belong to Irish people, it gives them a sense of belonging.
The laureate of the GAA, Tom Humphries, captured this perfectly when he wrote: "The GAA player who performs in front of 70,000 at the weekend will be teaching your kids on Monday, or he'll be selling you meat or fixing your drains or representing you in court. The soccer player who performs in front of 70,000 people at the weekend will be moaning about too many games and trying to sell you his personalised brand of leisure wear."
The GAA evokes feelings that go so deep you can be completely unaware of them until something happens to reveal their power. The most recent revelation came in early April, when dissident republicans murdered a young policeman, Ronan Kerr, in County Tyrone. Kerr was a Catholic and a member of his local GAA club, the Beragh Red Knights. In killing him, the dissidents violated a community's sense of itself, the pride it takes in the young men and women who play on its local GAA teams.
The hero of the classic GAA novel, Charles Kickham's Knocknagow, published in 1873, is a farm labourer who goes on to the hurling field with the cry: "For the credit of the little village!" GAA players still take the field for the credit of all the little villages – not just the literal ones like Ronan Kerr's Beragh, but the psychological villages to which we cling in a globalised culture – the idea of a place, of a community, of something that is not yet owned by a TV company or a corporation.
Ronan Kerr's funeral produced an image that is in its own way even more powerful than any that will be captured at the Queen's visit to Croke Park: the pictures of his GAA team mates and the Tyrone county manager, Mickey Harte, passing his coffin from their shoulders on to those of his police colleagues. It was a picture of the dissidents' worst nightmares. The GAA was defining the police in Northern Ireland as "us" and Ronan Kerr's killers as "them". There is no other institution in Ireland, north or south, that has the authority to do this.
Kerr's funeral and the Queen's visit both point to the GAA's ability to grasp something that can be very difficult for organisations rooted in notions of tradition. Ideas of place, of community, of identity are hugely important, but they are not static. What has been remarkable about the GAA in recent years has been its capacity not just to respond to change but to create it.
The Queen's visit to Croke Park may have been planned only in recent months, but it is the culmination of a process that has been under way for more than a decade within the GAA. Very calmly and quietly, a series of the GAA's elected presidents, such as Joe McDonagh, Sean Kelly and Nickey Brennan, have set about modernising the organisation. That meant, in political terms, aligning it more closely to the mainstream of Irish nationalism, which had been disgusted by the IRA's violence and which hankered for ideas of Irish identity that were positive and open rather than embittered and embattled.
Change was driven from the Republic, but the leadership was careful not to alienate the more conservative membership in Northern Ireland. The GAA's democratic structures were a big help – the conservatives had their say and were never allowed to claim they had been railroaded. Bit by bit, the GAA took down the barriers that protected the old exclusive attitudes. It lifted the ban on its members playing other sports. It opened up Croke Park to the "foreign games" of rugby and soccer whose infiltration of 19th-century Ireland it was founded to oppose. It allowed God Save the Queen to be played on its hallowed turf in 2007 when the England rugby team came to play Ireland. (It helped that the money the GAA made from renting out Croke Park was channelled back to its own local clubs.)
Most importantly, in 2001, the GAA deleted its Rule 21, which barred members of the Northern Ireland police or armed forces from joining. It is worth recalling that, at the time, the delegates to the GAA congress from five of the six Northern Ireland counties voted to keep the rule in place. Within a decade, those same people were embracing Ronan Kerr as one of their own. The GAA managed a shift in attitudes so gentle that it took a terrible murder for everyone to realise that a quiet revolution had taken place.
The shift was hard for two reasons. One is that the GAA was embattled for a long time, especially in Northern Ireland. The grounds of the famous Crossmaglen club in south Armagh, regular winners of the All-Ireland club football championship, were occupied by the British Army from 1974 until 1999. There were arson attacks on GAA clubhouses by loyalist paramilitaries. GAA members were easily identified as Catholics and therefore made clear targets for sectarian killers. In 1997, for example, Sean Brown, chairman of the Wolfe Tone club in Bellaghy, County Derry, was kidnapped as he locked up the clubhouse after a match and murdered shortly afterwards.
But the GAA has also been psychologically embattled. Its games have a very long history, but also a long history of disparagement.
In 2009, when the Cork county goalkeeper Donal Og Cusack came out as gay, the novelist Colm Tóibín hailed him as "the first gay hurler since Cúchulainn", a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Iron Age mythological warrior-hero whose feats with stick and ball make him the precursor of today's hurlers. The odd thing about this mythology is that it doesn't seem at all ridiculous. If you watch a top-class game of hurling, the speed, strength, dexterity and personal courage on display do remind you of warriors in the hurly-burly of war before armour and technology.
But hurling has not always been appreciated. Arthur Young, the English economist, who witnessed a game in the 1770s, called it "the cricket of savages". A 1936 MGM documentary movie called Hurling was advertised with the slogan "Shillelaghs in Swing Time as 30 wild Irishmen demonstrate their game of athletic assault and battery". In John Ford's 1957 movie The Rising of the Moon, an English tourist, seeing injured players carried by on stretchers, asks nervously: "Charles, is it another of their rebellions?"
The question was not entirely stupid, for the GAA undoubtedly was part of a cultural rebellion that could not be cleanly separated from a military one. In its own mythology, the GAA saw itself, in the words of IRA leader Harry Boland in 1919, as having "drawn the line between the garrison and the Gael" – separated the native Irish from English influence. The GAA was effectively taken over by the revolutionary Irish Republican Brotherhood (forerunner of the IRA) in the late 1880s. More moderate nationalists subsequently regained control, but the IRB influence remained very strong. It was not entirely illogical for the police and army to attack Croke Park on Bloody Sunday – senior figures in the GAA at the time included IRA leaders like Boland, Austin Stack, Eoin O'Duffy and Michael Collins himself.
It's not surprising, therefore, that it's taken a long time to completely disentangle the GAA from violent republicanism. But there is another reason why the shift has been slow: it is quietly audacious. For the task that the GAA will complete when the Queen visits Croke Park is a momentous one – that of creating a distinctive and proud Irish identity that is not anti-British. The GAA came out of a time when the easiest answer to the question "what does it mean to be Irish?" was "not British". It takes real courage to replace that easy negative with something more positive and fluid.
But there is something pleasingly neat in the way it is happening. The irony is that the GAA is a quintessentially Victorian institution. It is a classic creation of the late 19th-century English drive to codify sports with written rules and centralised organisations. The men who established the GAA in 1884 saw themselves as traditionalists and cultural nationalists, preserving the ancient games of the Gael from the new vigour of rugby, soccer and cricket. But their reaction took the form of emulation – they did for Gaelic football and hurling what the English were doing for other sports.
There is a further irony that the Queen might appreciate, however. Not only is the GAA a classic Victorian organisation, it has been much more faithful to its origins in late-19th-century sporting culture than the English sports that influenced it. If you want to get some sense of the ethos of English sport before the rise of professionalism, without the snobbery that went with it, the best place to look is probably the GAA. The Queen will find many of the notions that characterised the old Corinthian spirit – character, community, playing for the sake of it – alive and well and living in Croke Park.
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Post by glengael on Jun 18, 2011 12:11:35 GMT
Saturday June 18 2011 ENTIRE families are going to homeless centres for their dinner every evening. Before the recession, the Capuchin Day Centre for the homeless in Dublin would rarely have seen children coming through its doors -- but now up to 10 families a day are coming coming in to get fed. Many of the families are struggling to pay large mortgages taken out during the boom. They are worried about losing their homes and literally do not have enough money to put bread on the table, says Brother Kevin Crowley, who runs the shelter. He says that there are four times the amount of people arriving today compared with a few years ago. Some of those now seeking help are professionals such as engineers and architects who would have been earning a very good wage during the boom years. "It's not just homeless people who come to us, its anyone who is in need. We are getting lots of families with children coming in," he says. "Many of them have lost their jobs, and are on the verge of losing their homes. All that has increased in the past few years." Brother Crowley points out that before the recession hit, the centre would usually have about 100 people for dinner, but now more than 450 come to eat there each day. Despair The number of people collecting food parcels every Wednesday has increased from 400 to more than 1,000 in the same period. "There are professional people -- some architects and engineers -- coming in who can't pay their mortgages and are in despair. "It's really frightening for people," Brother Crowley adds. The Capuchin brother yesterday launched a charity cycle from Dublin to Mayo in aid of the well-known centre. A group of 24 gardai and prison officers who completed the trip are due to arrive on their bikes in Belmullet, Co Mayo, this afternoon. They broke the marathon 310km cycle with an overnight stop in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim. The Capuchin Day Centre's running costs are €1.3m, of which €450,000 comes from the Government, with the remainder coming from fundraising events such as the cycle and charitable donations from the public. For more details on the cycle challenge and how to donate to the centre see www.homeless.ie. - Fergal Gallagher
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Post by kerrygold on Jul 24, 2011 16:11:15 GMT
By Shane Ross
Sunday July 24 2011
Who is afraid of a sovereign default?
"Not I," said the Greek. On Thursday, the dreaded D word was an ingredient in the potion to raise Greece from the grave.
"Not I," said the German, whose chancellor Angela Merkel decreed that some of the private holders of Greek debt would be victims of default.
"Not I," said the Frenchman whose President Nicolas Sarkozy cooked up the default deal with Angela Merkel.
"Not I," said the Yank, whose US government is threatening to default on its payments if a deal is not reached on its debt ceiling by August 2.
On Thursday afternoon, the Yahoo Finance webpage was carrying the headline 'US Braces for Default'. Seemingly paradoxically, right alongside the gloomy headline, the Dow Jones Index was in rapid recovery, up 158 points. Nor had news from Europe that a second Greek bailout included default spooked investors. It prompted a buying frenzy.
Thursday's emergency European summit was flagged as D-Day for the euro. Over in the eurozone, as the news of the default deal leaked out, the currency had a bumper day, rising by 1.65¢ against the dollar. European stock markets gained ground, the FTSE bounced by 0.8 per cent, the German Dax by one per cent and in the US, the Dow closed 152 points higher. Even the ISEQ finished the day of default ahead by 0.62 per cent. The markets warmed to the so-called disaster.
All eyes were on the ratings agencies. It was obvious that they would pronounce that the Brussels deal included default, however fancifully the "burden sharing" was dressed up as "voluntary".
The "voluntary" plea is obvious nonsense; no private sector investor will exchange a current bond for one with less favourable terms, unless his arm is twisted. Lots of arms have been twisted.
No one except the ECB seemed to be too troubled that an organised default would soon be triggered. The ratings agencies could go take a hike. A relief rally set in. Buyers bought Italian and Spanish bonds. Yields on Irish and Portuguese bonds dipped.
A Rubicon had been crossed. Denial in the case of Greece was over. For months the markets have been signalling that Greece would be forced into debt write-offs. Political heavyweights and the mighty Jean-Claude Trichet had stood, faces to the sun, rubbishing the markets' verdict. On Thursday, we witnessed the climbdown. It was couched in soft "restructuring" rhetoric, but the catastrophe facing Greece and Europe had forced the mighty to gobble their words.
A face saver was concocted for ECB president Trichet who had threatened to refuse Greek bonds as collateral in the event of a default. Member governments hurriedly agreed to guarantee Greek paper as collateral for Jean-Claude. Problem solved.
The markets loved it. They were once again on the button. Europe had wasted summit after summit with sticking- plaster solutions. The ostriches had bowed to the inevitable. The markets had won.
Back in Ireland, the ostriches are still in prime position.
On Thursday morning the secretary of the Department of Finance, Kevin Cardiff, told the Dail's Public Accounts Committee that default was not high on his agenda. He was focusing on the here and now, the negotiations in Europe. Ostrich Kevin bristled whenever the default word was uttered. He ducked all questions about whether the mandarins had prepared Plan B for the default option.
Ostrich Enda was out in Brussels enjoying a rare day of good news. Greece's default package bestowed similar benefits on the other European basket cases -- Ireland and Portugal. Ostrich Enda shared the sun shining on Greece. Ireland would see its interest rate cut by around two per cent.
We would enjoy the privilege of buying bonds in the secondary market with the new powers given to the rescue fund. Ireland was one of those whose loans could be extended from seven-and-a-half to 15 years.
So Ireland will now pay less interest on longer loans. Relief had arrived at last. The Taoiseach was on a roll. Only that morning the Irish Times/ Ipsos opinion poll had recorded the Taoiseach's popularity at unprecedented heights. Now he was about to scoop the pool and claim a triumph at the top tables of Europe. Enda the parliamentarian was suddenly Enda the statesman.
Enda Kenny deserves a break after so long in the doldrums. He is proving far more effective as a Taoiseach than most observers predicted. He is not out of his depth. He is a genius at presenting a cheery front in times of adversity. His optimism is infectious and has camouflaged some of the austerity facing the nation, but his presentation of the deal as a success for Irish diplomacy is over the top. Ireland has cashed in on the coat-tails of Greece. The Greeks had borne us gifts. If Greece, the worst offender, is forgiven, lesser sinners must receive proportionate comfort. Portugal and Ireland only had to sit back and benefit from the concessions included in the Greek rescue plan.
Enda's immediate problem will be to dampen expectations. Too loud a cry of triumph will lead to demands for a relaxation in his austerity programme. Vested interests will be striving for an end to the cuts. How can he claim that it has been a good day for Ireland and still leave special needs pupils neglected? If he has really saved €800m a year with the interest rate cut, what is he going to do with the extra cash?
He was quick to pooh-pooh the idea of looming largesse after trade union leader Jack O'Connor was first to jump in with demands for the loot.
The euphoria will die down this week when Ireland's citizens realise that the boot will not be taken off their throat by the next Budget; that the IMF gang will be resuming its quarterly visits to ensure that we are still paying back the European bankers who helped our home grown rogues to bring the economy to its knees; that crippling repayments still need to be paid; and that Michael Noonan will be taking €3.6bn out of our pockets next year. Here comes the reality check.
The debt remains enormous. An €800m saving is a pittance in comparison with the overall burden. Bond prices are temporarily a bit better, but are still signalling that we will not be allowed back in the markets to borrow next year.
European leaders were at pains to insist that the deal was unique to Greece. They were terrified that it would be seen as a model for Portugal and Ireland.
Let us help them to realise their worst fears. We should take the deal as a template. After the dust has settled we should look for similar generosity.
Default should no longer be the taboo that politicians have painted it. In the case of Greece, the markets have recognised it as a realistic part of the solution. The roof did not fall in when it was inserted as an essential ingredient. Shares rocketed in response.
The US is openly toying with default. Europe has accepted it as a tool in rescuing the currency.
The ostriches in Ireland should contemplate joining the club.
- Shane Ross
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Post by An Ciarraíoch Taistealaíoch on Aug 16, 2011 9:26:18 GMT
Column: We need to keep Irish alive, but the government isn’t helping AS A NATIVE Irish speaker, no debate irks me more than the Irish language debate that gets trotted out every few years as zealots from both sides try and recruit to their respective aims. Some people don’t like the Irish language; others love it to a twitching fervour. I don’t begrudge either side their views; I just find them annoying. Both sides wish the eradication of a language on these shores. I am very much in favour of supports for the Irish language. They needn’t be grandiose, but should be enough to make language preservation a continued activity in the name of the public intellectual good. It is good to at least try and preserve and remember those who are often swept up into the uninterested eye of history, and the retaining of Irish goes a long way in that regard. We live in an island that is interestingly divided. What I notice, more and more as I observe such things is the great divide that both Irish and English have created. For myself, the Irish language is something I utilise on a daily basis, I communicate, converse and joke in it; I live in an area steeped in the language and I am comfortable with it, it is the native language of my parents, my family and all I know. We do not make a conscious decision to not use English, on the contrary we are the epitome of a bilingual people, but the Irish language to us is a link to our heritage that many outside our communities will not understand. It goes back, I suppose to the days of colonialism, in that much of the serviceable land in the country was planted or invaded (pick your moniker for it) and the majority of Ireland subjugated under British rule. That’s old hat, of course. What we seldom realise though is how devastating the erosion of culture. The practices of the people, stories and customs – all carried through language – began to fade as people felt the need to adopt English in order to survive. It was not a conscious decision, like what happens in the Gaeltachtaí now, but rather a forced choice. Years upon years passed. Some traditions died, others fused into English and most were forgotten. A new Irish society was formed in these areas, the society which forms the majority of the island now. ‘Happily bilingual’ Contrast that with the Gaeltachtaí, which were not classically planted or colonised or subjugated in a manner seen in the rest of the country. We were left mainly to our own devices, so long as we did not cause a hassle; we were isolated enough not to warrant a comprehensive British presence. We kept our language, our customs and so forth and have carried them through to this day. That does not mean though, that we spurn English; we don’t. We are for the most part happily bilingual, transact our lives in a bilingual manner and live happily this way. The notion that those who live in the Gaeltachtaí are anti-English is a load of hogwash; we only want the chance to be able to be ourselves and to have that facilitated. However, problems have arisen from Government policy on the Irish language. For one, the campaign to have a bilingual copy of every state document is costly, and needless. Most translated documents are converted to a clunky overdeveloped Gaeilge that is impenetrable for the majority of Irish speakers. One remembers the last Lisbon campaign where the booklet detailing the treaty provisions in Irish held the odd distinction of being more difficult to understand than the stilted English used in the original. We care little for the ‘Official Irish’ because it is not a natural form of the language we have lived with for hundreds of years. We normally use the English standards of forms and so on because they are easier to understand. Each Gaeltacht stands fiercely by its canúint, or dialect, and while Gaeilge caighdéanach is adequate it never translate well in terms of being practicable on a day to day basis. The Irish language versions of most official documents are often much too cryptic for native speakers, so I imagine it must be doubly difficult for non-native speakers. Furthermore, we have great debate on the manner in which Gaeilge is to evolve. What has normally happened is that English words have been adopted to take the place of words where no natural Irish translation exists. What you get then is a patois of sorts which aids in the fluid manner in which Irish is spoken. This is a cause of panic for some purists, who would rather clunky translations provided by a Dublin office to fill the void. To each their own, but language seems to assimilate rather than ignore. Is English not a well-refined mix of Latin, French and everything in between? ‘Gobbledegaeilge’ Furthermore, we do not need this. Language preservation doesn’t need tens of thousands of passport forms transmuted into Gobbledegaeilge. What the language needs is a redefined methodology of teaching; putting conversation at the heart of education. The study of Gaelic literature is a fine practice for whoever wishes to pursue it but the current practice of heaving difficult tomes onto schoolchildren is idiocy of the highest order. You need to be able to speak and comprehend what you are reading first. Padraic O Conaire and his miserable Scothscéalta can wait. What needs to change is our focus on preservation. The study of old poems provides evidence of the language once existing on a greater level, but it is the speaking of it that renders it alive and not dead. I don’t believe there is any great animosity towards Irish on this island. On the contrary, most consider it fondly, with pride being exhibited by those who have even the cúpla focal. This is heartening for all I think for it shows that a tie still remains in the Irish psyche. Long may it last. But I digress. The debate that often looms in our society is whether or not we should continue to uphold the use of Irish. For a simple answer: Yes. Yes, we should do this, but we should do it in an intelligent manner. Education needs to change and a deeper understanding for the neglected culture of the West would be welcome. We are often, wrongly, seen as backwards. We are not; we are a proud, intelligent witty people who have safeguarded a dying culture for you. We wish to share it with you. It should never be used as a language of the elite, for it was never that. It is merely the last strong link to who we were. Nothing more. We are in dire economic times and the Irish language funding will take a hit. That is all right, it has been bloated and misspent. Community and language development is what counts for us; not government forms in Gaeilge. www.thejournal.ie/readme/column-we-need-to-keep-irish-alive-but-the-government-isn%E2%80%99t-helping/
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Post by MrRasherstoyou on Aug 16, 2011 16:07:43 GMT
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Post by kerrygold on Oct 15, 2011 9:35:00 GMT
Always finding answers The Kieran Shannon Interview Saturday, October 15, 2011 PREVIOUSLY, Kevin McMenamin’s head would have been wrecked before a big game, his nerves nearly shot, his energy practically drained. The night of his championship debut against Wexford last year had been particularly torturous. What if he made a mistake? How loud would the crowd groan? What if Dublin fell behind? What if they lost? As it turned out they didn’t, but they almost did with McMenamin taken off long before the end, a shadow of the player he had been for most of the league. In almost any other setup he wouldn’t have known where to turn to, but with this one he did. Caroline Currid had been there with them from their very first session of 2010, out on the basketball court in DCU at 6.30 on a frosty January morning, and from then on it was like she was one of them. If you had a grievance with or query for management, you could go to her and she’d discreetly suss it out. If you were feeling a bit flat, you could confide in her, if she hadn’t subtly approached you already. Towards the end of that league McMenamin had hit a wall, only to meet Currid the week before they played Tyrone away and find the few pointers she gave him, and again at half time, hugely useful and reassuring. Now he had run up against another dead end so again they met for their monthly coffee. Together they talked it through, worked it out. "She just had a very simple and honest way of dealing with you," says McMenamin. "She’d hear you out and then between us we’d come up with the best way to approach it." It was okay for McMenamin to run through a game in his head, but only for about 10 minutes, and only when he was nice and relaxed, like on his bed at home, picturing how he wanted to play and to react, rather than how he didn’t want to play or react. "Any longer than those 10 minutes, Kevin, do you find it helps you to be thinking about the game?" she asked him. "No, it doesn’t," he responded. "Is there anything that you do or like that gets your mind off the game?" And that’s how super sub Kevin McMenamin came up with his own ingenious little pre-match routine. It was slightly different from that of his 1982 equivalent, Seamus Darby, who eased his nerves the night before he made history and felled a kingdom by phoning up his brother-in-law and enquiring if he had a bottle of brandy handy, which the two of them drained along with a sprinkling of 7-Up. It wasn’t totally unlike it though. Again it was offbeat, again it worked. The evening before this year’s All-Ireland final, a couple of McMenamin’s club-mates called over to his house in Templeogue, a guitar and banjo in hand. McMenamin greeted them with a mandolin in his hand before taking them to the back room, where they jammed for a couple of hours. Instead of thinking and worrying about Marc Ó Sé and Eoin Brosnan and Tom O’Sullivan, he was too absorbed playing and singing tunes from the likes of The Pogues, Damien Dempsey and Bell X1. He hadn’t a care in the world, and thanks to that little help from his friends, a day later he’d feel king of that world too. About an hour after McMenamin had scored the goal that shook a stadium and a whole country, Pat Gilroy reflected on his team’s journey from startled earwigs to All-Ireland champions. "We’ve done an awful lot of work on our mindset," he said. "We’ve got huge benefit out of doing things a certain way. Some people who know a lot about the mind have been really helpful." Gilroy didn’t specify that "certain way" or who those certain people were but he was primarily referring to Caroline Currid and the Sligo woman’s pioneering way of working with GAA teams. Before Currid, advisors to inter-county teams on the mental game were usually rolled in on a sporadic basis to talk to the group in general; sit downs with individual players were infrequent, almost fire-fighting, affairs. From her time working as a performance coach in the corporate world, Currid identified there had to be another way: the immersion approach. She’d go to all their games, most training sessions and meet every player one-to-one every month or so. "I felt to get the most out of a team of players it wasn’t good enough to just do group sessions. You couldn’t really get to the root of some stuff that was going on with players. The only way you could do that was to sit down with them and give them time on an individual basis. "I had to know these guys at a completely different level rather than being seen as some head shrink coming in to deal with their problems. I’d wear their gear, chat to them at training, become one of their unit, one of their family." Probably the reason it hadn’t been tried before was because people had assumed county boards would baulk at the time and cost involved but Currid sensed progressive ones would realise they nearly couldn’t afford not to have such a programme. The record and trophies have backed up her vision and her hunch. The first team she tried it out with was Tyrone in 2008. In 2009 she joined up with the Tipperary hurlers and was still with them when they won the 2010 All-Ireland. These past two years she’s been working with the Dubs, the current All-Ireland football champions. That’s three All-Irelands in four years. The odd year out was 2009 and that year Tipperary gave probably the greatest runners-up performance any September has ever known, performance being the operative word. That’s the business she sees herself in — performance. She’s just finished her masters in sports psychology in Jordanstown and has studied psychology through open university but she finds athletes tend to shirk at the term ‘sport psychologist’ so she tends to shy away from it too. She has qualifications in business coaching and as an NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) master practitioner but she doesn’t go around calling herself any of those things either. Instead on her website she describes herself a performance coach. All those other disciplines have helped her and her clients — including one Paul O’Connell — but ultimately facilitating performance and the athlete is what it’s all about. "It’s about steering them towards what they want to achieve. It’s very much their agenda rather than me going into the room and saying, ‘Right, well, I’m going to make this happen’. "You listen to them and then between the two of us we try to come up with an intervention. It could be a problem at home and the solution is to move out of the home place. The key is to actively listen to them, let them express themselves. Seek first to understand, then to be understood." Seek first to understand, then to be understood. The first time she heard that pearl of Stephen Covey’s was from an old mentor about seven years ago. When she looks back on who she was back then, it makes her laugh and it makes her cringe but above all it made her learn. She was with MBNA banking in Carrick-on-Shannon and had made her way up from being a debt collector to section manager. At 23, she thought she’d arrived in the world. The shy little girl they’d known starting out was now an all-knowing, all-conquering boss. Boy, would she tell them what to do; boy, would she put them in their place! "I went about it completely the wrong way. I thought people were beneath me. I was demanding that people work overtime rather than asking them. I was treating them as employees rather than human beings. These people had been in the bank for years yet here was Bucko, telling them it was my way or the highway! "I was lucky I had a great boss. Matt McGrath called me in one day and said, ‘Caroline, you’re as good as anyone but you’re not superior than anyone either’. He taught me a huge amount about how to manage people. Maybe the reason they couldn’t work overtime that evening was because they had to collect their child from some class but they’d have no problem working overtime the next night, once you’d taken time to listen to what their circumstances were." Around this time she was also playing for the Sligo ladies footballers, helping them reach three consecutive All-Ireland junior finals. Again, there was huge learning in that. In the lead up to this year’s All-Ireland final Dublin kept talk of the post-match banquet to a minimum; the only people you could bring were your partner and your parents, end of story, while the first time you’d see your suit would be in your hotel room after the game. That would have been informed by Currid’s experience of the 2004 All-Ireland junior ladies final. The Sligo girls had seemed more focused on banquet tickets and dresses than the game itself. "We got caught up in the whole occasion and felt heavy on the day. It was only in the second half we started to play but by then we were eight points down." For 2005 she was made captain, but in the Connacht final her cruciate went. That’s when her fascination with the mental game really began. To help her in her recovery, she ate up a library of sport psychology and personal development books, everything from Bob Rotella to Robin Sharma’s The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. A year later she was back on the Sligo panel that would finally make their All-Ireland breakthrough and studying and working in performance business coaching. By the end of 2007 she was prepared to go into sports performance coaching full-time; while banking had been her apprenticeship, sport was her passion. She spent that autumn cold-calling and meeting some of the biggest names in Irish sport to gain an insight into what mental approaches and techniques worked for them. Packie Bonner would have been one of them; Catherina McKiernan and Eamonn Coghlan too. What changed everything though was when she met Mickey Harte and mentioned her vision of performance coaching some GAA team for 2008. Harte told her to look no further. Tyrone would be that team. She learned so much from that experience but they learned so much from hers too. They won that All-Ireland with marquee names like Mulligan and O’Neill as fringe players and unsung heroes like Martin Penrose, Collie McCullagh and Tommy McGuigan having career years. McGuigan himself puts a lot of that down to their one-to-one sessions with Currid. "Up until that year," McGuigan would say, "I’d have put too much pressure on myself taking frees, thinking, ‘This has to go over!’ Caroline taught me to relax and take a few deep breaths and think more, ‘This is going over’." Currid could empathise with McGuigan because when she became Sligo captain she’d put too much pressure on herself too. Instead of wanting to play well, she felt she had to do well and it was stifling her rather than trusting herself and letting it just happen. Although such sessions with Currid can be soft, even soothing, some of her sessions, particularly the group ones, can be blunt, even brutal. She has done some terrific work on the club circuit, most notably helping Carrigtwohill win their first Cork senior hurling title in 93 years, and one of the most recurring issues and one of her greatest skills is bringing the group’s norm commitment level up towards that of the team’s most ambitious players. "There are guys on the club scene who primarily just want to have the craic and that can be very frustrating for the guys who want to win. And one of the ways of handling it is to have accountability sessions where if someone feels someone else isn’t pulling up their socks, they say it straight out. "You open it up, where the team is driving the team, not the manager, because they’re the guys who cross that white line together. A sports team doesn’t have to necessarily all like one another, though it helps, but they must all respect each other and in order to get that respect they must hold each other accountable and be honest with each other. Because it all comes out, one way or the other. "If fellas are drinking, if fellas are late for training and all that stays under the carpet, then it will all come to the surface in the big game when the team is under pressure and they start being narky at each other because they don’t trust each other. In those accountability sessions I’ve seen players tear strips off each other, but by the end of it they almost always feel like a massive weight has been lifted off them, because before that everyone was talking behind each other’s backs and nobody was confronting the real issues." She stops short of saying she had to conduct such a session with Dublin, only to say that after her preliminary round of one-to-ones they found they were too individualistic and need to become a tighter, more coherent unit. Her real work though wasn’t so much talking to the group as getting the most out of all of those individuals. Not all the players availed of the Caroline option — "It would be naïve of me to think all 34 players would buy into it," she says — but most of them did. The great thing she had over management was that while she was a link with them, she wasn’t one of them. She couldn’t drop them, she wouldn’t judge them. Kevin Nolan, man of the match in the All-Ireland final, particularly benefitted from the ear and the words she offered. At the end of the 2010 league, his career with Dublin was on the brink. He’d played less than 70 minutes throughout that entire spring campaign and in May Gilroy relegated him to a development squad, telling him he could still make the starting 15 for the championship or just as easily be out of their plans altogether; it was up to him, depending on how he went with this development squad. Nolan was startled but upped his game and sought out Currid. "Caroline put it in such a way to me that Pat had been mentally testing me to see how I’d react and that I’d passed the test. After that I would have spoken to her a lot. What we found was that I would have been thinking too much about how my direct opponent would play. I was listening to too many people and worrying too much about my opponent’s strengths. "I now find myself playing with a greater freedom, that I focus more on my own game without over analysing it, which is where Caroline came in, helping me come up with some little buzzwords to keep myself loose." He’s also struck a better lifestyle balance. In the past he’d have found if he wasn’t studying, he should be taken up by football and if he wasn’t doing something related to football that he should be studying. "Caroline explained to me that it was good to hang out more with my friends and girlfriend because it reduced my stress levels and increased my energy levels. "The Friday before this year’s Leinster semi-final against Kildare, I went to Tommy Tiernan with my girlfriend and had a great laugh. A couple of years ago I’d never have done that. I’d have thought if I wasn’t cooped up at home I wasn’t preparing properly for the match." He’s still laughing. Because Dublin have Sam, in no small part because they had the benefit of the Currid effect. Read more: www.irishexaminer.com/sport/gaa/always-finding-answers-170719.html#ixzz1aqD8oCmu
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Post by kerrygold on Nov 18, 2011 18:31:10 GMT
Why the Irish experiment doesn't add up Jake Niall October 23, 2011 .Ads by Google TG4 Rugbywww.tg4.ie Níos mó rugbaí ná riamh! More Rugby Than Ever Before. Irish import Tadhg Kennelly. Photo: Sebastian Costanzo Three decades on and the doubt remains, but there's hope they're out there - somewhere. JIM Stynes, the late Sean Wight and Tadhg Kennelly are not merely the most successful Irish imports to the AFL. To this point, they are the only clear-cut Irish successes in a game that, to date, has been unforgiving to Gaelic converts. They're like the minority of actors who make it in Hollywood while the rest wait tables. Last week was a fateful one for Irish players in the AFL. Setanta O'hAilpin was cut by an apologetic Carlton. Two days later, Essendon quietly delisted Michael Quinn, the Irishman whose potent athleticism won him a best and fairest at the Bendigo Bombers, but wasn't sufficient to make the grade in the AFL, where he played eight games. Advertisement: Story continues below Tommy Walsh was in demand. The key-position prospect left St Kilda for Sydney on the proviso that he would be given his chance. Walsh rivals North's Majak Daw as the most hyped zero-game player in the AFL. Tommy turned down the Saints and, not to be outdone, Majak did the same to the Queen. O'hAilpin's versatility and size should ensure that he finds another club. While his position in the Carlton seniors was never really secure, he stands among the most decorated of the Irish to play AFL. O'hAilpin, an alumnus of hurling, played 80 games for the Blues. From the Irish ranks, only Melbourne's pioneering pair of Stynes and Wight, and Sydney's Kennelly, have bettered his games tally. Stynes, Kennelly and Wight (who was technically Scottish) are the only Gaelic graduates to have played more than 100 games of VFL/AFL from an ad hoc migration program that has been running for more than a quarter of a century. The extraordinary life stories, tragedy and romance of that trio have masked the difficulty the Irish have had in converting from round to oval ball. The basic numbers show that the Irish invasion hasn't been nearly as successful as widely believed - indeed, the strike rate of footballers from the el cheapo Victorian amateurs over the same 27-28 years is no worse. AFL clubs have done far, far better in mining indigenous talent, which today represents about 11 per cent of players. The AFL's conservative official figures lists 34 players as recruits from Ireland, including Wight, since the well-named Paul Early played his one and only game for Melbourne, a full year before Wight, in 1984. Out of that group, very few have established themselves as regular senior players. A staggering 19 out of 34 didn't - or haven't yet - played a single game of top-level football. Several others played only one, two or three games. Melbourne had five forgotten Irish who played an aggregate of three games. It should be noted that, of those 19 past and present Irish without a game, a few are considered certain to play - Walsh, for instance, will be given senior games by the Swans, while Collingwood is optimistic about the prospects of Paul Cribbin and explosive recruit Caolan Mooney (not counted among the 19), whom we hear would win any AFL decathlon. Richmond's Jamie O'Reilly managed four games in his two seasons at Tigerland. There's also a small group of players who might well improve the overall Irish performance, headed by Pearce Hanley of the Brisbane Lions, who has played 34 games and has the tools to break the 100-game barrier. Taller teammate Niall McKeever played 10 games this year, Carlton's Zac Tuohy (11 games) also has shown signs of genuine ability, while Marty Clarke who had an impressive first two seasons before dropping off in 2009, will add to his 46 games. Clarke's decision to return to Ireland to play Gaelic during 2010-11 underscored one of the Irish problems - the time constraints (imposed by either player or club). O'hAilpin started his odyssey in 2004. At 28, he is probably approaching his peak at an age when most players are entering decline. Given that many Irish don't arrive until they're 20 or older, the window for a) learning the game, and b) becoming very good at it, is quite narrow, and I suspect this will encourage the drafting of taller Gaelic players who can be afforded more time. The Irish experiment Ron Barassi launched at Melbourne was predicated on the similarity between the codes and the supposed ease with which an Irishman could adapt to Australia's game. But Australian football has proven a challenging sport to take up. It's possible that the congestion caused by the press makes it tougher for the Irish, who have mainly played best behind the ball with space in front of them. As the future of the international rules series becomes a legitimate concern, the AFL desperately needs an Irish star or two to emerge. Collingwood and Carlton have the money to make it worthwhile; others consider it expensive and don't bother. West Coast can afford it, but doesn't like the percentages. Would the Pacific Islanders provide a better investment, or does American basketball offer a richer field, given the scarcity of 200-centimetre athletes here? Is New Zealand a possibility? Or is it better simply to focus on other sports in Australia? An Irishman, a Pacific Islander, a Kiwi, an Australian rugby player and an American basketballer all try to play AFL. It sounds like the beginnings of a joke. One can only hope that it isn't. Read more: www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/why-the-irish-experiment-doesnt-add-up-20111022-1mdp7.html#ixzz1e5Cq12ze
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Post by kerrygold on Nov 24, 2011 9:40:58 GMT
Wednesday November 23 2011 WHILE I was dropping the children to school yesterday, the morning radio show on Newstalk highlighted an Ernst & Young report which claimed in its latest forecast on the economy that full employment would not be seen again in this country until 2030 -- that's 19 years away. What a thing to say with any sense of confidence! In 2030, my children will be 30 and 28. Only a firm that has been totally insulated from reality -- which could be the case for E&Y, as it audited Anglo, after all -- could think that any society would tolerate a generation of mass unemployment without demanding a significant policy shift. Whether this shift manifests itself in a new currency, a new tax regime or an economy-wide debt resolution -- or something even more dramatic -- something will give and it must. But before we examine how that might happen, consider how long 19 years is. It is over one-third of your working life. Think about the world 19 years ago, in 1993. The newly unified Germany -- a country which now lectures Europe on fiscal rectitude -- was running a massive budget deficit. More significantly, the German budget deficit was financed by the poor countries of Europe through the medium of sky-high European interest rates as the voracious German demand for funds sucked money into the new Germany. The 1993 currency crisis was the direct result of Germany's unilateral decision to unify. Now we can't blame them for doing so, but it is worth reminding ourselves that we have all made sacrifices. In Ireland in 1993, the IRA was still killing people, there were very few immigrants here and Irish banks were reasonably well-run outfits. Albert Reynolds came back from Brussels with a famous commitment of IR£8bn in regional funding and we thought we were made. (In fact, over the 35 years from 1973 to 2008, we received €18bn from the EU in regional aid; Anglo lost nearly twice that in 12 months! Back in 1993, our daily lives were so different from today. There was no internet, few mobile phones, no iPhones or i- anythings for that matter and only a tiny number of laptops. There was no YouTube, Facebook or Google. Geo-politically, China was still largely a closed economy, as was India. Brazil was a pariah nation in default, rather than the second-fastest-growing country in the world that it is today. And things are changing more rapidly still. For example, in the past year, 246 million new internet users were registered in China. This means that more people began to use the internet in China last year alone than there are actual internet users in the whole of the US. China added more users in one year than there are users in the US. Imagine what this means. In the second quarter of this year, when the West was mired in debt problems and the consumer wasn't spending, 3G mobile subscriptions in China increased by 172pc, reflecting the huge demand for smart-phones. Last month, only 11 quarters after the product was introduced, 160 million Android smart phones had been delivered from factories. This compares with just 40 million Apple iPhones delivered in the 11 quarters after that product was first introduced to the world market. This trend reveals the extraordinary demand for new forms of technology and shows how, in just a few short years, a market leader can be overtaken. Such is our new world and, irrespective of the laws of old economics, new economics is going to affect the careers of my children in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago. In fact, it is likely that my children will be working in jobs that haven't yet been invented. These observations reveal the problem with long-range forecasting. It is impossible to project with any real accuracy because there are simply too many things going on. But we know one thing for sure, to use the words of the great US economist Herbert Stein: "If something can't go on forever, it will stop." This should be applied to the current crises in Europe and Ireland. Politics will react to events and what was inconceivable only a few months ago becomes mainstream very quickly. We know that all periods of high unemployment lead to significant political change. Recent US research reveals that the state of the economy in the year of the election is the single biggest determinant of who wins the presidential election. This is why Obama -- no matter how good he is on the hustings -- needs the US economy to be creating jobs next year. At the moment, the indicators are that the US will slip back into recession next year. In Europe, Ireland and the US, the problems are similar -- we are experiencing the hangover of far too much borrowing. This is called "deleveraging" in economics. A period of rapid growth and house-price inflation following too much credit availability is followed by too little credit and too much house-price deflation. This leads to low or non-existent inflation and economic stagnation. How long this lasts depends on how long you can put up with it. If you try to pay all debts and screw the economy in the process -- the Ceausescu option -- you will get poverty, massive unemployment and, ultimately, revolution. This is exactly why this won't happen. It isn't politically feasible. TAKE any historic episode you like, after a massive credit binge, policy changes dramatically. In 1935, the US defaulted on all its debts by coming off the gold standard. In 1992, Finland shafted its foreign bondholders by devaluing the Marka suddenly. The UK did the same. This is what happens. A similar realpolitik will determine what happens next in Ireland. Real economics revolves around human capital and demographics. The true economic value of a country is its people. Actually, when seen from an economics perspective, debt is actually accountancy not economics at all. Debt can be fixed by accountancy and corporate finance tricks, while real economic growth takes more time. This is why we should expect large-scale debt deals in Europe. European banks are bust and because they are bust, they can't finance European budget deficits, so realpolitik demands that the old creditors will get burned. Then the banks will sell assets and we start again. This will happen after the next big credit crisis in Europe, which is coming in the next year. Ultimately, the deleveraging timeframe in Europe will be shortened, balance sheets will be cleaned up as both creditors and debtors take a hit and then we will start again. This will take about 19 months, rather than 19 years, and we will enter a new global economic cycle where the global structural changes in technology and demographics and geo-politics dominate. When someone can't pay, they won't pay. Get over it and move on. That is what will happen and the future will offer as many chances to Irish children as any others. As I watch a bunch of nine-year-olds, bags slung over their shoulders, shirts hanging out, shoes scuffed, I am consoled by the knowledge that their future is not sealed for the next 19 years. Life -- and economics -- doesn't work like that because when something can't go on forever, it stops. www.davidmcwilliams.ieIrish Independent
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Post by glengael on Nov 26, 2011 11:35:38 GMT
Our famous cead mile failte now little more than a snarl By Gordon Deegan
Saturday November 26 2011
THE traditional Irish 'cead mile failte' has been replaced by a snarl and we have a long way to go to get back to our internationally renowned welcome.
That was the stark message delivered yesterday by National Roads Authority chairman Peter Malone who fired off several broadsides at the state of Irish tourism at a conference in Co Clare.
Mr Malone told delegates the Irish had lost the cead mile failte and that prices were too high.
He also called for Failte Ireland and Tourism Ireland to be merged into one agency.
In his outspoken address at the 23rd annual Clare Tourism conference in Ennistymon, Mr Malone -- who oversaw the expansion of the Jury's Hotel group from three to 36 hotels -- said: "We have lost the friendliness that we became famous for."
He added: "Staff don't say 'please', don't say 'thank you'. The little touches that I learned all over the years in Jury's, they're gone.
"You get into a lift in any hotel, staff won't even say 'good morning' or 'good evening' to you.
"Go into a shop, go into a post office, go in anywhere, we snarl at people."
Mr Malone warned: "Unless we stop the rot soon and improve training and standards in our country, the friendliness will not return. We have a long way to go."
He also hit out at the prices that tourists are forced to pay.
"Food in restaurants and bars are at unreal prices. Even a cup of tea or coffee is often €2.25 or more."
Mr Malone told delegates: "Take your children out now at your peril as they are charged just as much."
Confusion
In calling for the merging of agencies Failte Ireland and Tourism Ireland, Mr Malone said: "There is great confusion all over the country in the tourism sector as to who is doing what job and the industry has become frustrated.
"When we had the one agency, Bord Failte, it was much better."
Mr Malone said the new Tourism Minister Leo Varadkar was "really keen in cutting back on quangos and this is an ideal thing to do now to put everyone back into one tourism body".
- Gordon Deegan
Irish Independent
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Post by sullyschoice on Nov 28, 2011 16:46:47 GMT
Many years ago I learnt that some things in life are worth using your fists to protect and if pride is a sin then I am a sinner, writes MATT WILLIAMS
THE PUNCH that Jack Mullins threw was an absolute beauty. It made that unmistakable sound of a fist thrown in righteous anger, smacking into the flesh and bone of a human head. The young face that was punched contorted, jolted and crumbled. That punch was thrown amongst a heady mix of youth, testosterone and male pride. The result was an all-in brawl on the rugby field.
The brawl was a long time ago. I was captain of my under-15 team at St Patrick’s College in Sydney. We were a very good age-group team. We had only lost one game in three years. That day we were playing Scots College, a rugby nursery that has constantly produced Wallabies over more than a century.
Yes we wanted to win but that did not cause the brawl. Pride was our sin. The Scots boys were constantly calling us “Rockchoppers”. That is a particularly derogatory Sydney term for Catholics. It is related to the first convicts being mainly Irish Catholics who were forced to quarry stone at what became known as “The Rocks”. No one in our team had ever heard the term before that day.
In the break in play prior to the fight I remember calling the team into a huddle. My father later told me he thought I called in the team and instructed them to start a fight. I actually asked “What’s a Rockchopper?” There were a lot of blank faces. Our big secondrower Jack Mullins summed it up pretty well. “I don’t know what it means but I don’t think it’s anything good. Let’s bash them.”
As captain I don’t remember agreeing to this, but I also don’t remember disagreeing. They were teasing us and bullying us with taunts. It was on our home ground. We were going to have none of that. We were too proud for that. We had all bled too much for our team. We all trusted each other like brothers. We had great pride in our jersey. We had pride in ourselves and our results. We had the sin of pride.
Jack Mullins had unknowingly followed the Sun Tzu art of war philosophy to a tee. He made battle on the ground of his choosing. The next lineout.
He struck with great surprise. A wonderfully delivered right to the jaw. He had support and troops ready to continue the fight after the initial attack. All 15 of us dug in.
There was blood on both sides.
I am not encouraging young players to fight. It is wrong. Both the Scots boys and my team were young and silly. I am just telling you what happened. Thankfully no one was badly hurt that day. However – and I know this is politically incorrect – and I would be lying if I did not say this: it was also great fun. To this day both teams remember the fight.
The referee blew the pea out of his whistle and teachers ran onto the ground as we punched each other as hard and as often as we could. We got some good ones in and we took some very good ones back.
After the melee I remember looking up and seeing two men I still idolise, my headmaster and my coach standing next to my parents and thinking, “That is not good.” My parents were stony silent for the first few moments of the car ride home. The silence did not last long . . . “you embarrassed your parents, disrespected your opponent, brought shame on your school, let down your coach . . .”
Finally they asked why did we start the fight? “They called us Rockchoppers. What is a Rockchopper?” There was a silence. My father explained the term to me. Something changed in my father’s eyes. I saw a glimmer of pride behind the admonishments.
In the headmaster’s office with our coach, the team stood on the carpet as I explained the Rockchopper taunt. The two Christian Brothers looked at each other. For an instant it was there in my coach’s eyes. Pride.
My headmaster wanted to know who started the fight? He was not a man to be lied to and I was in a dilemma. I was not going to give Jack up and could not lie to the Boss. The short silence was broken by an old friend named Ross Creighton. Ross emailed me this week. The email triggered this article. Ross’s answer taught me a lot about being part of a team.
Ross simply said, “We did.”
Yeah, we did it. Not Jack but us. We fought. We did it. We all got into the fight. We were happy with that. We did not like our pride being kicked so we stopped the taunting by starting a fight. And what was worse for my poor old boss we were not in the slightest way sorry.
The boys who stood in that office are still a team to this day. We are older and greyer. We can’t fight any more and we rarely gather as a group but there is a lifelong bond between us.
The Boss said and did all the right things but we could tell his heart was not in the punishment. We knew deep down, as politically incorrect as it was, he was proud of our spirit if not proud of our actions.
I learnt then some things in life are worth fighting for.
Some things in life are worth using your fists to protect. Fighting for your family. Fighting for love. Fighting for your kids. Standing up to and fighting sectarianism. Fighting and protecting justice and simply fighting for your mates. If they are not worth fighting for what value has life?
Rugby has taught me to be proud. I have pride in my clubs and the men I have played with. I have pride in the men I have coached. I have pride in my professionalism as a coach. I have pride in my race.
I look for proud men when I recruit players. I look for proud men when I recruit staff. I encourage young players to wear their jersey with pride and as I say to “get a bit of pride about yourself”. Sometimes your pride is worth fighting for. When I was a boy I followed Jack into the fight because of pride. If pride is a sin, than I am a sinner. I am not arrogant, I am not bigoted, I am not gluttonous, I am not slothful but I am proud.
By the way, Ross reminded me in the email, we won the fight and we won the match. I am still proud of that fight and the win.
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Post by kerrygold on Dec 9, 2011 10:06:52 GMT
Friday December 09 2011
James Lawton: Yes - Corkman’s assessment cuts to bone of Old Trafford woes
Of course Alex Ferguson turned on Roy Keane in the first rush of his anger over Manchester United's humiliating ejection from the Champions League. Of course he sneered at his former field general's critical credentials. Wasn't he, after all, a failed manager?
That was the predictable public expression of deep private angst, but it also displayed the degree of Ferguson's agitation over the meaning of that stunning, destabilising defeat by Basel. It showed a man who knew the truth of Keane's blunt claim that United had simply deserved their fate.
And who was better qualified to say it? Ferguson might question Keane's managerial record, as almost everyone else does, but if his relationship with the player ended sourly -- and ironically around the time United were last dismissed from the Champions League at the group stage -- no one knows better than the Old Trafford boss quite what Keane, the player, the supreme enforcer of a manager's will, had always represented.
Building
It is something beyond the successful organising and building of a winning team from the manager's office. It is an understanding of when a team is functioning properly, when it has put itself in position to win, and when, and why, this is not the case.
Keane aimed his blows at what he believed was unacceptable levels of complacency in the team heading for Switzerland. No doubt his assertion that United "got what they deserved" had a much wider application.
Surely it touched the fact that many of Ferguson's recent announcements have suggested that he was entering a period of denial. Before the game, he mocked suggestions that United had to survive a crisis.
"What kind of crisis was this?" he asked with an edge of scorn in his voice before listing all the reasons the question was nonsense.
He had players who lived with pressure every week of their professional lives. It was their second nature. They understood what was required of them in Switzerland and it simply wasn't an issue. Then the roof fell in.
Why? Because there was no one like Roy Keane in the dressing-room, not one ready to wage a one-man war against the idea that anything less than a total effort would carry the team through.
Before and during Wednesday's game, Keane saw warning signs that he had recognised at least 100 times while playing for United. But then he had the power to shape events, to roar and to cajole and, most of all, lead by superb example.
For many, including the great Bobby Charlton, the supreme expression of this capacity of Keane's came in Turin 12 years ago when he almost single-handedly led his team back from a two-goal deficit in the Champions League against Juventus.
In the course of a quite extraordinary individual effort, Keane picked up the yellow card that ruled him out of the final against Bayern Munich. The personal disaster did not, however, glance against the surface of an astonishing commitment.
What would Ferguson have given for such a contribution as his troops wilted against ill-considered Basel? Rather more, you have to believe, than his £35m-plus overture for Internazionale's hugely influential Dutchman Wesley Sneijder in the summer.
Those who believed that Ferguson sooner or later would be haunted by his failure to persuade the United ownership to part with the money that would have delivered Sneijder's signature could not have expected such swift vindication. Maybe it was this, as much as the manager's foul mood of bitter disappointment, that provoked the savage dismissal of Keane's observations.
Interestingly, Keane's former team-mate Gary Neville did not on this occasion risk the ire of Ferguson. Since his retirement from playing, Neville has earned good notices and in some cases rave reviews for his work as a TV analyst. This week, though, Neville settled for a workaday defence of his old mentor.
Ferguson, said Neville, would assess the position carefully and would not rush into panic buys. He would have his list of preferences and if the top one or two were not available, he would not lunge down the list. He would not panic.
But then some sources close to the Old Trafford hierarchy might react with the question, why not? Certainly there is a growing sense that United, having been banished from Europe, might be in danger of facing the kind of quick and demoralising regression which had been unthinkable ever since Ferguson made his first breakthrough in the early '90s. The third round of the FA Cup at the home of fellow Champions League casualties Manchester City became huge at the moment of the final whistle in Switzerland.
In the league there might even be a threat to United's presumption of automatic qualification for the Champions League, a fear compounded by the stirrings of Chelsea and Arsenal and the momentum of Tottenham. United do have a cushion at present but it has hardly looked secure for some time.
Nightmare
In the wake of the Basel defeat, Patrice Evra talked about living in a dream. Others might be more inclined to speak of nightmare. Rio Ferdinand confessed to being a man separated from one of the certainties of his professional life and could only shake his head at the new regime of Thursday night Europa League action.
For some at Old Trafford, last week's Carling Cup defeat by Crystal Palace was just as devastating as the fall in Basel. Champions League defeat cost £20m but the failure of United's much heralded battalion of prospective stars went to the very heart of the club's hopes for the future.
Certainly, it was no doubt a contributing factor to Ferguson's bleak mood. Having been forced into a midfield combination of the venerable Ryan Giggs and the extremely promising but still callow Phil Jones, his case to the owners will have to be insistent.
The United manager needs a significant reinforcement in the middle of the team, someone of the quality of Sneijder. He needs the Dutchman for his tough understanding of how it is you shape a team on the field, how you set the kind of competitive standards that went missing so disastrously this week.
No one ever did this for Ferguson quite as consistently as Keane, which is probably why Ferguson greeted his voice as rather more than a provocation. You have to believe it was a reproach that went straight to the bone.
Paul Hayward: No - Heaping blame on young players shows why he failed as manager
A clue as to why Roy Keane has failed in management could be heard in his pontificating from the touchline in Basel on Wednesday night. The self-appointed barrack-room conscience of Manchester United has a habit of selecting the wrong target.
United's problem, Keane diagnosed in the mortifying Champions League defeat, was the youngsters. He told ITV viewers: "I'd be getting hold of some of those lads and saying, 'You'd better buck your ideas up'." Except that this will never happen because the clenched-face warrior flamed-out in Alex Ferguson's profession after a promising start.
"Roy had an opportunity to prove himself as a manager and it's a hard job," Ferguson responded, applying disdain as cold as the winter night to his description of Keane as "a TV critic" now.
There were echoes in old Roy's prognosis of the MUTV outburst that hastened his departure in November 2005. Then, too, he played the role of alternative manager, dismayed by the inadequacies of younger men lucky enough to share his air space.
The big problem with this swipe at the team who crashed out at the group stage in Switzerland, it seems to me, is that it merely offered the accuser a chance to fantasise about lost power. Ten years ago, Keane could have barged through that dressing-room, indulging his tendency to belittle and to blame.
Ferguson would make no claim to have been in Keane's class as a footballer, but as a psychologist, team-builder, supporter of youth and clan loyalist, the "TV critic" would not be within emailing distance of his old mentor.
Keane knows more about football than most of us, but surely he can see that United's weaknesses have stemmed from the more senior pros and not Phil Jones, Chris Smalling, Danny Welbeck or David de Gea, who are in no need of a lecture from the former Ipswich Town manager.
On the retreat from Basel, depressed United fans talked most critically of players they considered to have regressed, or who were "not good enough in the first place". On a 7.0am flight back to London that was hardly an airborne comedy club, I heard no mention of Ferguson's bright young things.
Fizzled
The hardcore will say Patrice Evra has ceased to defend his channel, that Ji-Sung Park is ineffective or that Ashley Young's good start at United has fizzled out. They wonder why Antonio Valencia has been subdued this term and kick around the mystery that is Dimitar Berbatov.
The youngster most often mentioned, Tom Cleverley, is talked about in yearning tones. They miss his enterprise and thrust. But for Keane to infer that 'big-time-charlieism' has infected the stars of the future suggests an inability to work out what might be wrong with a team. Always, with him, it comes back to an obsession with true grit.
Which brings us nicely to Ferguson and how he will respond to this setback. Not, you can be sure, by giving up on the next generation. In United's preoccupation with gilded youth, some detect a smokescreen for the debt-laden Glazers to hide behind. They suspect the owners of pursuing an upmarket Moneyball approach where age and resale value is everything.
To say United have stopped spending is not accurate. Jones, Young and De Gea cost more than £50m in the summer.
Where the screw is tighter is on wages. Wayne Rooney's new deal, struck a year ago, shook the club's whole pay structure but has not led to huge salary offers to the kind of midfield artist United lack. On that score, they lost out to Manchester City on Samir Nasri and appeared to be put off by Wesley Sneijder's astronomical pay in Italy.
Ferguson's strategic mastery is the buffer between the Glazers and the mob. With no guarantee of continued success when the Ferguson age has passed, the American speculators will dread the day he quits. The good news for them is that his retirement date will not be based on a private urge to depart in a burst of glory.
This point is missed again and again. If choreography was his bag, Ferguson would have walked away after the Champions League victory in Moscow or United's record 19th league title win. He is not some ageing monarch fretting about his legacy or a showman wondering how to leave the punters wanting more.
His paternalistic sense of United as a family with him at the head is so fierce that he would be more likely to stay on to oversee a bumpy phase than worry about whether he has a major trophy in his hand for the valedictory photographs.
This is the kind of bond that is built up over 25 years and one that Keane will never know. You have a problem, you react. It is not about self-aggrandisement. (© Daily Telegraph, London)
Irish Independent
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Post by kerrygold on Dec 10, 2011 11:07:05 GMT
By Robert Fisk
Saturday December 10 2011
Writing from the very region that produces more cliches per square foot than any other "story" -- the Middle East -- I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis. But I will not hold my fire.
It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.
Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" -- in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East -- and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab Spring" book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and -- up to a point -- Libya. But this is nonsense.
The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world.
The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries.
The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations.
Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.
And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business -- a perfectly justified cause -- and against "governments".
What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties -- which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and derivative traders and rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.
The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed -- and still believe -- they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have, through the gutlessness and collusion of governments, become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners.
Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.
I didn't need Charles Ferguson's BBC2 documentary 'Inside Job' this week -- though it helped -- to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government.
The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated subprime loans and derivatives in America are now -- via their poisonous influence on the markets -- clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US.
I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940? Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and -- oh, dear, even al-Jazeera -- treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power?
Why no investigations into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American "peacemaking" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the good guys are "moderates", the bad guys "terrorists".
The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become "anarchists", the social "terrorists" of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak.
We in the West -- our governments -- have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can't touch them.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny solemnly informed the Irish people this week that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found themselves.
They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who was to blame. Isn't it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers did tell us? And our reporters, too? (© Independent News Service)
- Robert Fisk
Irish Independent
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Post by kerrygold on Dec 18, 2011 10:57:33 GMT
By Gene Kerrigan
Sunday December 18 2011
It was a hellish year. Very little to remember fondly. Not a year we need to dwell upon. Yet, with the new year promising to be even more grim, are there lessons we might usefully remember from 2011? And what might those lessons be?
We learned, for instance, that things will be fine if we stay the course. As 2011 began, President McAleese told us she was keeping an eye out for those "green shoots of new beginnings". Later in the year, a young and rested 60, Mary headed off into the sunset, with a pension three times the salary of the average software developer.
The departing Cowen regime whooped that we were "on the road to economic recovery". Ministers of that government then retired in droves, while still relatively young, to spend more time with their vast pensions.
We learned, in short, that those who are loudest in their optimism about the current course of austerity are usually those with well-feathered nests.
We learned conclusively that the Cowen/Lenihan austerity strategy, now being implemented by Kenny/Noonan, doesn't work. This ordains that we have to destroy the country in order to save the banks, so that the banks can save the country. So, under ECB instructions, we've been feeding the bankers tens of billions; and seeking vainly to balance the books by cutting services and asset-stripping the citizens. The insane strategy of deflating an already damaged economy smothered any chance of growth. The economy contracted. Unemployment rose relentlessly.
The argument between austerity (focused on reducing deficits) and stimulus (focused on protecting jobs) has been settled. Over the past four years, austerity has turned a crisis into a catastrophe.
One of the most important lessons we learned in 2011 was this: it doesn't matter that the austerity strategy doesn't work. The Economic War Against Ourselves has the approval of the EU, the ECB, the IMF, Fine Gael, Labour, Fianna Fail and The Irish Times. This makes the strategy unimpeachably respectable and perpetually untouchable, despite its blatant failure.
You may notice that Fine Gael, Labour, Fianna Fail and The Irish Times are precisely those who cheered on the property bubble. You may notice that the EU, the ECB and the IMF benignly observed the insane gambles by German, French, UK and Irish bankers that fuelled that bubble. Among the people who matter, being repeatedly, disastrously wrong has no bad consequences.
People who oppose austerity policies are "politically motivated". The incompetent, overpaid elites who blunder onward are, on the other hand, "realists". With no political thought but peace and goodwill to all.
We learned, from the lips of ministers, that Kenny and Noonan "renegotiated" downward the profiteering interest rate we were charged for EU/IMF loans. This is simply untrue. But they continue to say it, every time they need a morale boost. Which is often.
We learned that Tim Geithner, Barack Obama's top economics guy, vetoed any suggestion that the Irish Government might demand that bank bondholders pay some of their own gambling debts.
Some weeks later, face to face with Obama, Enda Kenny chickened out of raising that matter. Face to face with Geithner, Michael Noonan also chickened out. We learned, in short, that Irish politicians are tough when they're taking money away from blind people.
We learned that politicians can be courageous and move swiftly when something matters to them. When the rules said that Richard Bruton's adviser, Ciaran Conlon, couldn't be paid more than €92,000, Bruton's boss Enda Kenny used his authority to set aside the rules and give his old mate a €35,000 rise. And then Kevin Cardiff, top lad in Finance, was rejected for a job by an EU committee. Kevin is remembered for his role in the bank guarantee, and was in charge of Finance during the €3.6bn accounting error. Politicians swarmed to his aid. Kevin was lifted into his EU job. He will get €260,000 for a job he has described as a "doddle".
We learned that democracy is dispensable. At election time, we're told to be grateful for the sacrifices that gave us the ballot. People living under dictators put their lives on the line to achieve the right to vote -- and we rightly honour them.
We learned after last February's General Election that a mandate for change is without value, when the elite collude. Promises of change are without meaning. The right to vote becomes a child's game, a trivialising simulation of democracy.
When democratically elected politicians in Italy and Greece balked at taking instructions from the ECB they were replaced by people who never received a single vote. Their successors (bankers) were chosen by unelected but extremely powerful functionaries within the ECB (bankers).
We learned that a strike of capital is not worthy of comment by politicians, academics and the austerity pundits. If bin-men withheld their labour because of an insufficient return there would be screams of "holding the country to ransom at a time of national crisis". When capital conducts an investment strike, in demand for higher returns, the otherwise garrulous have nothing to say. They instead obsess ("Crokeparkdeal!Crokeparkdeal!Crokeparkdeal!") about a minor impediment to the asset stripping.
We learned that some people can state something and then state the opposite, and retain credibility with the media. For instance, a year ago Michael Noonan fiercely condemned the FF/Green regime for throwing away tens of billions by generously paying the gambling debts of Irish, German and French bankers.
When he became minister, less than three months later, he seamlessly continued the FF/Green strategy he had denounced. This was not hypocrisy. When Noonan condemned the squandering of billions he was playing the role of a tough, angry opposition politician.
Today, Noonan has another role. He plays a shrewd, worldly-wise Minister for Finance. It's all pose, by a superb actor, but he convinces many now as he convinced many a year ago.
We learned over the past couple of weeks that it is imperative that we put the EU's "fiscal responsibility" measures into our Constitution. Noonan says we must pass such a referendum whatever the wording, or we'll be voting ourselves out of the euro. We will be no longer "at the heart of Europe" (you'll remember how voting Yes to Lisbon 2 ensured our presence within the cockles of Frau Merkel's heart?).
Some people fear that Germany wants to take control of our budgets, perhaps our economy. I don't think that's true. Something far bigger is happening.
For 30 years, a brash form of casino capitalism reigned. The old conservative capitalism (welfare state, effective regulation) had lost the argument (and anything to the left of that was old hat). Casino capitalism (markets rule, deregulate, privatise) consequently ran up trillions in debt and ruined whole countries.
Even after the failures of the past four years, with the euro collapsing, the fiscal hawks remain immovable (deficits matter, not jobs -- banks matter, not people). They want to make any further argument unconstitutional. It's a more sophisticated form of the Tea Party movement in the US, that's smothering economic recovery with "debt ceiling" laws.
Amid the ruins they have made, they hold up constitutional handcuffs and they say, "trust us".
And a happy Christmas to you, too.
- Gene Kerrigan
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Post by kerrygold on Jan 8, 2012 12:41:53 GMT
Sunday January 08 2012
Colm O'Rourke: Weakest pupils to lose out from Quinn's changes Cutting the number of career guidance staff is a cynical 'saving' that will only backfire on us all, says Colm O'Rourke
With all that has been going on in terms of budget cutbacks, the most nasty and insidious one in terms of education is making career guidance teachers part of the normal teacher allocation in schools.
Most people have no understanding of what is involved here, so in general this change passed unnoticed. What it will mean in reality is that schools will have fewer teachers and bigger classes as almost every school will have to cut their teaching numbers from September.
At the time, the Department of Education said this was the only alternative to increasing the pupil-teacher ratio. But the net effect is the same -- almost all schools will experience an increase in the pupil-teacher ratio.
On top of the cuts made in previous years this represents another reduction of two teachers for my school, as due to the cutbacks relating to guidance teachers' hours we won't be able to replace teachers who are retiring. The same applies pro rata around the country.
By this measure being dressed up as putting career guidance teachers back into classrooms, as if they were not working already, the Government has used spin in a most cynical fashion to give the impression to the public that this was merely a better way of using teachers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The career guidance teachers are a necessity, especially given that they provide a counselling service to young vulnerable people.
This change should have provoked a storm of protest, but the public in general, and parents in particular, have been so battered by bad news that they feel there is nothing that can be done except bear it. Well, that is not the case at all. Education is in a shambles and a lot of it has been caused by bad decisions at central level and, of course, the Croke Park agreement.
When the agreement was being debated, I wrote in this paper that it was the deal of the century for teachers, and instead of debating it, they should have grabbed it with both hands. But that did not go down too well with many teachers who thought it was a bridge too far, and I received an earful from plenty in the profession.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost but the fear many of us in school management positions had at the time that this agreement -- negotiated between unions and the Department of Education with no school management involvement -- would end up causing long-term damage is now a reality.
The department had an opportunity to set education on the right track for the future but it made a mess of it. The unions more or less wrote the agreement, and now there is not a hint of protest from them when teachers are going to lose their jobs. The real problems for those of us trying to cobble together a timetable will come next summer when there are fewer teachers for the same or greater numbers of students.
The net result of these cutbacks will be a real difficulty in actually being able to provide the weekly 28 hours tuition, as required. If that problem is overcome the actual results will be bigger classes all round, and where schools were able to provide Foundation classes at Leaving Cert level in subjects like Maths and Irish, they are very likely to be the first casualty. Who suffers most? The weakest, of course.
Most commentators don't understand the logistics of how cuts hit schools or what they actually mean in framing a timetable. But let nobody be in any doubt that these latest cutbacks will hit hardest those who need most help.
Of course, Minister Ruairi Quinn will say that he had to make savings. But there are plenty of other ways that the €10.14m for this year could be saved, or €32m in a full year. It costs €1.17bn a year to pay teachers in the secondary sector and this leaves out the pay in the VEC schools whose figures were not available. It would take a very small reduction per head (maybe as low as 2 per cent or net 1 per cent) to keep the 500 teachers in the system that the Government wants to get rid of.
Naturally the minister and his friends don't want to start a war with their comrades in the unions, but if they want to show leadership and tell the truth this is what must happen.
This is how the necessary money can be found to protect teacher numbers. If the minister does not want to make a very small reduction in pay he could scrap the Supervision and Substitution scheme which costs €36m. At a stroke and without changing pay, the money becomes available. He could also have all in-service training outside of school time and so save a fortune on paying substitutes.
On top of that he could do the same with oral exams, pay the teachers to do them during the Easter holidays and save on the subs who must go into classes while teachers are away in other schools doing these vital tests.
And in a new Croke Park deal he could make the extra hour that was put in for meetings after school available for timetabling purposes, which would solve a lot of problems at a stroke. The bottom line is that he could save a multiple of the €32m needed if he really wanted to.
The greatest crime of all is to offer incentives to teachers to leave the profession. It makes much more sense to keep these people in than give them attractive pensions to get out. I don't begrudge these teachers their pensions at all, and we will lose two great educators this year -- who have given long and very distinguished service -- but this incentive to retire is merely a bookkeeping exercise where the Government can claim it is reducing numbers in the public sector.
It makes no social, economic or educational sense to lose so much talent and then not replace it by making a cynical cut in the career guidance allocation. It is absolute lunacy and the cost of these pensions will be a drag on the economy for decades.
At the same time the minister wants to make changes to the Junior Cert. This is certainly worth supporting, but the nuts and bolts must be put in place before making big decisions which can't be implemented in the short run. This has been put off for a while but nobody seems to have worked out what to do with a specialist teacher in something like music or art if that subject is not part of the reduced number of subjects for the new Junior Cert.
And this minister, who talks about reform and wants better standards in literacy and numeracy, should think before he acts on teacher-number reductions. They are a bit contradictory. Every school and every teacher will play their part in this new drive but the weakest are going to lose out from these changes which are not needed to be made, as my figures demonstrate.
Anyway, the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test on literacy and numeracy in the past probably overestimated Ireland and now slightly underestimates our performance. I would be very surprised if this year's test does not show a big improvement in comparison with other countries.
What is happening now is that the work of career guidance teachers is being completely undervalued in order to massage figures to show a reduction in public-sector numbers. The minister has also embarked on a crusade to get the church out of primary schools, an easy target at the moment, but there is no great demand for that. Set up new schools in whatever fashion you want and let people decide if they want to leave the existing ones. It won't happen in any big numbers.
If Minister Quinn wants to show proper courage and wants real reform he is aiming in the wrong direction. By hiding behind cutbacks to career guidance teachers he is dem-onstrating no vision when he won't make cuts in the areas I have outlined in order to protect the quality of teaching.
Take on your own unions and we will see what you are made of. Career guidance was a soft target. As Marc Antony said about Brutus: "This was the most unkindest cut of all." So include me out of the minister's fan club if he continues to talk about reform but actually does the opposite.
Public sector reform has been a bit of a joke, paying people off is not reform and nobody in any job has anything to fear from greater efficiencies.
As far as education goes the minister has a choice, a real choice. He can retain jobs long term by making minor adjustments to the Croke Park deal or he can tell all the excellent young people, who I see every day doing their teacher training, that they have no future in this profession. If he persists with the budget proposals as if there is no other way, he might as well buy airline tickets for all the brilliant young people who want to be teachers.
Colm O'Rourke is principal of St Patrick's secondary school, Navan, Co Meath, and a well-known GAA commentator
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Post by kerrygold on Feb 20, 2012 8:57:19 GMT
Monday February 20 2012
China needs food -- we're perfectly placed to sell it
SO why did the future head of a nation of 1.3 billion people bother to visit a small dairy farm in Clare yesterday? Vice President Xi Jinping is interested in food-production systems here because ensuring a secure supply of trustworthy food is one of the key challenges facing burgeoning economies such as China, India and Brazil.
It's for exactly this reason that our agri-food sector is one of the most optimistic places to be right now. Ten years ago, many thought the farm sector here was a sunset sector with profits falling in the face of cheap food imports.
That's all changed with the rise and rise of the so-called 'Bric' economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China). As millions of people in these economies see their incomes rise, they want more of what the west already has. In most cases, this starts with a switch to richer diets based more on meat and dairy products than traditional grains and vegetables.
That's why beef prices have increased by 30pc over the last two years, while our dairy sector is predicted to grow by 50pc over the next eight years.
But how is this going to lift the rest of the economy out of the hell-hole it has found itself in? Isn't agriculture supposed to be a shrinking part of modern developed economies?
The best place to start convincing yourself of the impact that a booming agriculture sector can have on an economy is the local mart.
Chances are you'll struggle to find a spot in the car-park, jammed as it will be with a healthy mix of tractors, jeeps and cars. And while the cattle trailers that are invariably attached might look a little worse for wear, the number of 2011 number plates present is striking.
But it's not just the motor dealers that are doing well on the back of the commodity boom that has lifted all the boats in the agriculture sector.
Take Sixmilebridge Mart in Co Clare. It re-opened for business after a massive push by the local community to buy it off the previous owners.
Now, a premises that had weeds growing through it 12 months ago is providing part-time employment for up to 30 locals on mart days.
Every local business benefits -- from the local pub that gets a few extra customers in for a quiet pint, down to the locals who sell home-baked treats and vegetables on the stalls dotted around the edge of the crowded car-park.
But the booming trade in meat, milk and grain is only part of the reason behind the current optimism. Changes in the policy pipeline are also likely to play in Ireland's favour.
The dairy sector is a case in point. Our 17,000 cow men have been licking their lips in anticipation of the effective deregulation of the dairy sector in 2015. This is when the EU milk-quota regime that capped our output here for the last 30 years is finally dismantled.
The figures show that one of our natural God-given competitive advantages is, somewhat paradoxically, the rain. It allows farmers to grow grass almost all year round. As a result, we can grow more of this cheap, green feed on a year-round basis here than pretty much anywhere else in the world bar New Zealand.
So when the quota shackles come off in three years' time, the Irish dairy industry is better positioned to benefit than the rest of Europe.
The movers and shakers in the sector are already well aware of this. The biggest dairy co-op in the country, Cork-based Dairygold, has already seen its supplies increase by 15pc over the last two years. It is hatching plans which could eventually see it pour €130m into developing extra processing capacity at its three processing sites at Mallow, Mitchelstown and Mogeely.
If everything goes according to plan there will be an extra 2.5bn litres of milk being produced annually in the Republic by 2020. At current prices that equates to an extra €825m in milk cheques flowing into dairy farms in every community and every county.
The beef and sheep sectors are gearing up for expansion, too. The big imponderable is, of course the future prospects for commodity, prices. The last two years have seen huge price increases in almost every farm output.
The price of milk is up over 50pc, beef and lamb prices are up 30pc, while grain and wool prices have doubled in many cases.
The current high is partly driven by the erosion of the production base in farming. The steady decline in the basic profitability in the sector during the first decade of the 21st Century, while everything else boomed, lured farmers' sons away from the land.
Huge falls in sheep and beef numbers were seen not only in Ireland, but in the UK, the US and across the western world. Some of it moved to cheaper economies, such as South America, but now the tide has turned.
The developing economies need all that they can produce, and more. The classic forces of supply and demand have kicked in with a vengeance and Irish farmers are benefiting greatly from it. Even farm land is increasing in value here again, seemingly oblivious to the ongoing carnage in the rest of the property sector.
But how long will it last? If China or India gets a cold, it could send prices tumbling very quickly.
The key for Irish food producers is to concentrate on the products they can produce cheaper or better than anybody else. Dairying is an obvious example. But plans to develop a huge 350-acre, deep-sea fish farm off the west coast that could double our national salmon output in a single stroke is another example of the potential we have yet to unlock here.
Granted, bigger production units might not be everybody's cup of tea, but they certainly have the capacity to generate profits.
The world's population is growing by over 200,000 a day, while at the same time prime agricultural regions of the world, such as Europe, are losing productive land at a rate of 680 acres on a daily basis.
Somebody somewhere is going to have to squeeze more food out of what land we still have.
Why not us?
Irish Independent
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Post by glengael on Feb 22, 2012 9:55:11 GMT
Quinn ‘unable to detail’ 4,000km of expensed travel By Shaun Connolly, Political Correspondent
Monday, February 20, 2012
Education Minister Ruairi Quinn is unable to detail more than 4,000km of travel he has claimed expenses for.
Though he claimed for travel of 5,100km in July, trips recorded in his official diary only account for 884km, documents released under freedom of information legislation show.
Mr Quinn’s department said an itemised record of his car trips for July has not been kept.
"The electronic diary maintained by the minister’s office does not reflect all official use of the minister’s car," said a spokesman.
"An itemised list of car journeys is not available.
"The new travel arrangements introduced by ministers have resulted in annualised savings of 70% in respect of Minister Quinn’s travel."
Ministers are banned from claiming mileage for journeys that were taken for personal or party political reasons, but do not have to submit details of all journeys in order to receive claims.
Mr Quinn claimed the €1,451 for mileage in July.
Mr Quinn was in America for six days in July, and a further seven days are listed as private or blank in his official diary.
Only one of his official engagements in July was outside Dublin — a visit to the MacGill summer school in Co Donegal.
Ministers sign a form at the end of each month to state how many kilometres they have travelled on official duties.
For the four months between May and August last year, Mr Quinn made 16,800km of mileage claims, worth €6,751.65.
Mr Quinn’s department has been at the centre of a bitter row over cutbacks, with special needs assistants and schools in socially deprived areas amongst those targeted for spending reductions.
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Post by sullyschoice on Mar 19, 2012 22:11:40 GMT
ANNE LUCEY
A GAA museum proposed for Kerry is set to be developed in Killarney after planning permission was granted for the sporting and cultural facility at Fitzgerald’s Stadium.
Some €3 million will be needed to build the Kerry Cultural and Sporting Experience facility, which is expected to be up and running by 2014.
Local councillor and former Kerry footballer Michael Gleeson, who is part of the museum committee, said Kerry literature and music would form part of the displays.
Fáilte Ireland funding will be crucial to the project, president of the local chamber of commerce Mike Buckley said
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Post by kerrygold on Apr 1, 2012 13:57:15 GMT
Brendan O'Connor: There's Big Phil -- in the middle of things, again Phil Hogan threatens to be the Achilles heel in what should be the perfect government right now, writes Brendan O'Connor
ASK any kid who has studied Economics 101 about Adam Smith's principles of taxation, and they will tell you that one of the four guiding principles is that a tax should be easy and convenient for people to pay.
We can only assume that Minister Phil Hogan has not studied Adam Smith. Why else would he have taken a tax that people are reluctant to pay anyway, and made it very difficult to pay too? So in the last few weeks we saw an extraordinary situation where many people were trying despite the prevailing mood to pay an unpopular tax, but finding they couldn't. Even some members of the Government didn't seem clear on how to pay the Household tax.
I don't need to lead you through the catalogue of disasters that have brought Fine Gael, Big Phil, and the Household tax to this sorry pass. It has involved ineptitude, incompetence, arrogance, bullying, a lack of credibility (based on previous climbdowns on septic tanks and turf cutters), a lack of communication, complete confusion on the part of Phil and his colleagues, misinformation, and, at the root of it all, arrogance. Not to be a smartass, but this baby had all the hallmarks of the last administration.
But the household tax fiasco, and a complete fiasco it is, is only one of the reasons why Phil Hogan, this weekend, threatens to be the Achilles heel in what should, in some respects, be the perfect Government right now. Fine Gael's ard fheis this weekend should have been a victory lap. Boyish Enda is home after charming both East and West. Obama loves him and the Chinese love him so much they want to buy the country. Enda's been out rebuilding important friendships, and both the superpower of the 20th Century and of the 21st Century appear to be eating out of his hand. We got some class of a convoluted deal on the hated promissory notes, meaning that the March payment will not go ahead. And in general, in some ways, there is almost an air of possibility again in Ireland. Enda could be forgiven for thinking that everything is going his way.
But there are a few flies in the ointment, and too many of them are leading back to Enda's pal, the man to whom, some say, Enda owes everything. It was Big Phil's combination of threats and inducements, they say, that retained the leadership of Fine Gael for Enda when everyone thought he was gone. Without Phil, Enda could have been the greatest Taoiseach we never had.
But instead of a victory lap, this weekend's ard fheis saw protests outside, a general air of disillusionment with the Government. And if you look at the root of the problems, the answer, all too often, is cherchez le Phil.
The Mahon tribunal blew up on Fine Gael in a way it didn't expect. That foolish and badly planned appearance by Enda, on the balcony with Denis O'Brien, allowed Fianna Fail to put the spotlight back on Fine Gael last week and ask it some hard questions about its own friends.
The ripples from that appearance would even see members of the Government questioning Enda Kenny's fraternising with O'Brien. Lucinda Creighton questioned again O'Brien's appearance at last year's economic forum and Joan Burton fired an extraordinary warning shot across Fine Gael's bow in the Dail about public appearances with O'Brien, who was criticised by the Moriarty tribunal a year ago for the manner in which he obtained a mobile phone licence under the auspices of a Fine Gael government.
And all of this has people looking back and remembering that Phil Hogan is a great pal of Michael Lowry's. And then you remember that the Moriarty report detailed political donations made by Denis O'Brien in the run-up to the process of the awarding of that licence to Esat.
It was at a constituency fundraiser in Phil's Carlow/Kilkenny constituency in March 1995 that Denis O'Brien began the process of trying to combat what Sarah Carey had informed him was an image problem he had with Fine Gael. O'Brien donated €1,000 to that lunch and attended it, as did Michael Lowry. Lowry attended as a guest of Phil's, though that was not the first time Lowry and O'Brien had met.
A few months later, in June 1995, O'Brien donated €5,000 to Fine Gael's funds for the Wicklow by-election. Phil Hogan was director of elections for Fine Gael at that by-election. Sarah Carey says that she was not involved in this donation and that Hogan and O'Brien discussed it among themselves. Hogan's recollection is different. He says that as he remembers Sarah Carey asked him whether O'Brien or Esat could help the party out and Hogan mentioned the Wicklow by-election fundraiser. Carey said she didn't recall that conversation. Denis O'Brien said he couldn't remember but he wouldn't disagree with Carey. O'Brien and Lowry both attended that function. This is the first time Hogan thinks he met O'Brien. There was sensitivity around that donation in case people would misrepresent it as a bidder for the mobile phone licence trying to curry favour with the government.
Another big donation that O'Brien gave around this time was €4,000 given to a Fine Gael golf classic. Phil Hogan was chairman of the organising committee of that. Again, for reasons of sensitivities and the possibility of others misunderstanding, Esat asked Fine Gael not to advertise its sponsorship at that event.
Now, it is important to note that Phil Hogan says he never discussed the mobile phone licence with Denis O'Brien and he even says that letters he apparently sent to O'Brien about the donation to the golf classic were not even written by him, rather just signed by him. And there is of course no suggestion that Phil did anything untoward. But with the whole relationship between Fine Gael and O'Brien coming under the microscope again, it would probably be better for Phil if his name didn't pop up there too. Phil's name in connection with another problem.
Phil's name has also come up in another awkward capacity in connection with the phrase "suppression of planning inquiries". Again, no one is saying he did anything untoward, but it just doesn't sound good does it?
'It was Big Phil's combination of threats and inducements, they say, that retained the leadership of FG for Enda...'
There has been a suggestion that Phil halted several planning inquiries that were due to go ahead in, among other places, his own constituency. Hogan said that it was the previous incumbent of the Environment portfolio, John Gormley, who failed to progress these inquiries. But Eamon Ryan came out fighting on this and said Hogan and other ministers were deliberately misleading the public last week.
According to Ryan Meade, former special adviser to John Gormley, in Thursday's Irish Times, an extensive dossier about these inquires, the result of an internal report, was on Phil Hogan's desk when he took office in March. Hogan apparently said that some of the complaints about planning were spurious and cancelled the inquiries in June. In response to Hogan's assertion that John Gormley had not progressed the inquiries, the Greens say there had been a tendering process completed and letters of appointment were ready to go out to chosen consultants to conduct the inquiries, but these letters had been held back by the Department of the Environment when Phil Hogan took over. By Thursday night Fine Gael was all over the problem and promising the results of its own internal inquiry. But mud sticks. And there was Big Phil's name again, in the middle of something to do with planning, in his own constituency. No one is suggesting he did anything wrong but it was more bad publicity for Fine Gael in what should have been its hour of glory, and Phil was in there.
The perception that Phil has acted like a bully over the Household Charge (and the anecdotal perception that it is pensioners who were most terrified by the charge, and the paying thereof) wasn't helped by the story of Phil and Anne O'Connell at the Oireachtas golf outing in Connemara last August. You will recall that when Ms O'Connell remarked to Phil that she hoped he wouldn't screw property owners in the upcoming legislation, he responded, referring to her partner Mairtin Mac Cormaic, "I have no problem screwing you. Hasn't Mairtin been screwing you for years?"
Ms O'Connell, you will recall, was an administrator to John Bruton and is a woman of a certain age. While Phil would later apologise to her for what Ms O'Connell found to be a degrading, insulting and abusive remark, he apologised by saying that he meant it as a joke and it was said in the context of him knowing the couple for 24 years. However, Ms O'Connell told the Clare Champion last week that she didn't know Phil well enough for that kind of banter and that the context of him saying it was not in jovial company, that it was a dismissal in public. Mairtin Mac Cormaic, for his part, feels that the comment implied, in front of other people, that Anne O'Connell had loose morals.
Now while we know that different people can have different memories of the tone of a conversation, you have to think that if Phil was a senior member of government in the UK, made such a remark, and was slow to apologise, he'd probably be gone by now. There would also be questions asked as to why the Taoiseach acknowledged one of Anne O'Connell's letters of complaint to him but didn't reply to either of them. Again, another awkward moment, and Big Phil is there in the middle of it.
As Fine Gael looks back this weekend on its year of magical thinking, it may be starting to see that things can very easily turn sour and that, as Albert said, it's the little things that trip you up. Or the big things. And with tensions becoming more evident between Fine Gael and Labour, and tensions building between the Government and the people, and Phil Hogan's name cropping up too much in those tensions, Fine Gaelers must be wondering just how far Kenny's loyalty to his friend will stretch when the going gets tough.
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Post by kerrygold on Apr 5, 2012 22:15:31 GMT
Thursday April 05 2012
Paul Hayward: Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy head a red-hot field at Augusta as redemption hangs in the air
DANIEL Lewis is the steward who lifted the rope for Rory McIlroy to bend under when his tee shot at the 10th cracked off a tree and landed between cabins two and three 12 months ago. Lewis, who was on duty again on Wednesday, knows there are serpents in paradise.
‘‘I saw Nick Faldo do the same,” he said, beside a fairway that was still strewn with leaves and branches from Tuesday night’s wild storm.
But Faldo had been able to strike a three-iron towards the pin to escape the forest. Last year McIlroy had to play out sideways on his Sunday ride to oblivion.
Further up the 10th, another marshal, Christopher J Davies, said “15 people” had already asked about McIlroy’s ricochet into the cabins, 50 yards from the tee.
The spot is a place of ghoulish fascination, like James Dean’s mangled car. On a course that venerates perfection, the crowds are no less drawn than any other paying mob to failure.
For a story to really work, there has to be redemption, as every hack scriptwriter knows.
So when the American golf trade wonders whether this is the most hotly anticipated major championship since the 1960 US Open at Cherry Hills it must be because the two main protagonists have emerged from their own private tempests to establish this deliciously poised rivalry.
McIlroy, 22, came through one disastrous final Masters round that he started four shots clear and ended in a tie for 15th. Tiger Woods leaves behind a 2½-year hiatus.
The sporting mind struggles to recall any world-class athlete reclaiming power after such a long spell in the desert.
Muhammad Ali’s refusal to accept the Vietnam draft and subsequent absence from the ring is one echo, but the circumstances are hardly identical.
Woods’s swing, personal life, team and game all fell apart like a shamed Wall Street bank. McIlroy’s torment was soon solved by an epic US Open win.
All week, though, he has been pressed on last year’s collapse. He has been marched back to the scene of his errors and his psychological turmoil as if the Masters exists in a separate time-capsule distinct from the rest of golf (which it largely does).
But Woods-McIlroy is not the only game in town. The new Northern Irish darling of American galleries (they love his charm, his humility) is the meat in a rankings sandwich.
The bread is Luke Donald, the No?1, and Lee Westwood, who had his own Woods-style dive. A former European No?1, Westwood plunged to 258 in the world before scrambling back to his present high perch.
Of those three Europeans, McIlroy is the only major winner, and only four world No?1s have won the 26 Masters since rankings were introduced in 1986. But forget numbers.
The point is that Woods is resurgent, McIlroy the new poster boy and Westwood, Donald and Justin Rose are chasing a first major victory under challenge also from Hunter Mahan, the American ranked four whose time has come.
In 1960 at Cherry Hills, Arnold Palmer in his prime went into battle with a young Jack Nicklaus and Ben Hogan, who was at the end of his career.
Force today’s cast into those costumes and Woods would dress as Palmer, McIlroy as Nicklaus and Phil Mickelson as Hogan.
Sports Illustrated speaks of this trio as ‘the new Big Three’. Alan Shipnuck from that publication writes: “The big question was, ‘Is there life after Tiger?’ The answer looks like yes, because if Rory wins this Masters he goes to absolute superstar level.
"He’ll be ahead of Tiger’s pace and Jack’s pace [for winning majors]. We’ll stop the Tiger countdown and start a Rory countdown.”
The convergence of all these threads justifies the extravagant claims being made for this year’s tournament, in which Augusta National is forced to confront a few inconvenient realities.
Ceding ground to technological change, Billy Payne, the chairman, said yesterday that “even beauty and sense of place can be recreated on a digital device”, such as a tablet computer.
The borderline obsessive compulsive disorder with which this course is arranged precludes anything as useful as Twitter or even a small earpiece radio. It excludes women, too, from being members.
During unusually fierce exchanges with the media over Augusta’s all-male complexion Payne was asked by a reporter: “What should I tell my daughters?” His cold reply: “I don’t know your daughters.”
While excluding half the world’s population from ever wearing a green jacket, Payne also fretted out loud about “declining participation” across the sport – a real worry for the industry, in this time of collapsing projects.
But the real purpose of the Masters is to keep things as they are, from the radiance of the flora and fauna to the sanctity of the golf, which continues to resist commercialisation.
A crackerjack of a field is the best asset golf could have. The ‘patron’ who administered hydrogen peroxide to his dog to make him vomit back up the Masters tickets he had swallowed is emblematic of the fervour this tournament generates.
The passes were recovered, with no damage to the canine, and the relieved customer joined the dawn chorus who are welcomed to Augusta with smiles and greetings but must obey the rules at all times.
Satisfyingly, on the course, hot steaks abound. Any major golf championship can line up CVs and reputations but the beauty of this one is that almost all the major candidates are in red-hot form.
Donald tees off on the back of his Transitions Championship win, McIlroy has finished outside the top 10 only once since last year’s PGA and Mahan won the Shell Houston Open on Sunday. Donald, remember, headed both the PGA and European money lists last year.
This Magnolia Lane of talent sets out in a Ryder Cup year, too, at a time when Ernie Els, one of Woods’s old victims, could neither qualify nor secure an invitation for this tournament.
If the 14-time major winning Woods crushed one generation he is going to have to do it all again to players who grew up outside his long shadow.
Where McIlroy played pinball in the trees and cabins at the 10th a year ago, they might need to put a plaque to deal with all the voyeuristic interest. Linger there with the marshals and you start to understand the music of chance.
Had the ball taken the Faldo route, McIlroy might have recovered his senses and his round. Instead it took a random, vicious deflection, and exposed the young author of the shot to humiliation, which always lurks in these Georgia pines.
As Woods said on Tuesday, nobody glides to Masters victory, despite the sylvan setting. It has to be a fight.
McIlroy laughs about it now – goes along with the joke – because he knows it is the kind of history that cannot harm him as he sets off at 6.42pm London time with Angel Cabrera and Bubba Watson.
Woods may not be able to say the same about his own multiple troubles, which flashed across his life like the luminous storm of Tuesday night, casting light into the darkest areas.
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Post by Annascaultilidie on Apr 19, 2012 12:48:40 GMT
Hot-to-trot Flashy saves pony breed by siring 140 foals THE Kerry bog pony population has been given a boost by a 'Flashy Fox' who has sired more than 140 foals, bringing the breed back from the brink of extinction. Just two decades ago, only 20 of the bog ponies existed -- and Flashy Fox was the only stallion. And the future of the rare Irish breed looked so bleak that the Department of Agriculture had to intervene and offer incentives to conserve and regenerate the animal. The pony was later classified as a 'rare breed' under the supplementary measures of the Rural Environment Protection Scheme. Since then, Flashy Fox has sired more than 140 foals and both he and his father Dempsey Bog have played the biggest part securing a healthy future for one of the country's oldest equine breeds. Dempsey Bog is now in the US, where it's hoped he'll continue to help populate that side of the Atlantic with the pony. Flashy Fox's mother Purple Heather is now 30 and continues to be a standard bearer of the breed. Breeders of the Kerry bog pony from all over the country will gather in Glenbeigh, Co Kerry, on Saturday where their ponies will be DNA tested to establish their purity. It's the latest event planned by the Kerry Bog Pony Co-operative Society, whose work has ensured the breed is listed as third most popular Irish breed after the Connemara pony and the Irish draught horse. "When we started, there was only a handful of stock but now we have over 160 members of the society all over Ireland and we're also trying to spread the breed in America and Europe and a new branch of the society is opening in England," said society president John Mulvihill. Prices A sure-footed and strong animal, the pony was traditionally used for bringing turf from the bog. However, as farming became more mechanised they began to die out. The height of the bog pony revival was between 2005 and 2006 when their popularity increased as did prices, and a purebred mare could be expected to fetch €3,000. Prices have since fallen to between €1,200 to €1,500. Physically, the pony is quite stocky and has a strong body and neck. The breed is hardy and has a long, dense coat, especially during the winter. Stallions grow to approximately 11.2 hands, while a fully grown mare will not exceed 10 to 11 hands. A strong whole colour is deemed the most desirable and chestnut, grey, brown and black are the most common. Piebalds and skewbalds are not allowed. The Kerry Bog Pony Society is now in the running for a community award that will be presented by RTE's Miriam O'Callaghan at the Dromhall Hotel, Killarney, on Sunday. - Majella O'Sullivan www.independent.ie/national-news/hottotrot-flashy-saves-pony-breed-by-siring-140-foals-3083727.html
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