A young man in Brandon, Co Kerry died unexpectedly last Friday. He was 28.
A friend of his said about him: “He was a kind person. The whole world would pass by and you’d take notice of it if you were talking to Luke Mullally.
May Luke rest in peace.
his funeral Mass is today in Brandon, in West Kerry.
This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.
On this day, July 25, 2000 the supersonic passenger aircraft, Concorde crashed on take-off in Paris.
All 109 passengers and crew, and four people on the ground were killed. The plane ran over debris dropped on the runway from an earlier aircraft on take-off.
Concorde was retired in 2003 after 27 years of commercial operations.
The Russians also designed a supersonic passenger plane, the Tupelov Tu - 144. It flew for less than a year and crashed in May 1978.
The Concorde was a British French project. Design planning began in the 1950s.
The Irish Times yesterday carried a two-page report on the story of Dundalk woman Lisa Smith, who on Friday was sentenced to 15 months in jail for membership to Islamic State.
There are two large pictures of Lisa, dressed in traditional Muslim attire. Her head is covered and she stands out as someone who dresses differently from her contemporaries.
In the August edition of the St Martin Magazine there is a photograph of a young woman, who is sitting either in what appears to be either a swing or hammock. She is smiling. Her name is not given.
Her head, like Lisa’s is covered and she too stands out as someone who dresses differently from her companions.
For both women their attire is linked to their belief in God.
From Crux
German Catholic leaders ‘astonished’ at Vatican warning about ‘Synodal Path’: https://cruxnow.com/church-in-europe/2022/07/german-catholic-leaders-astonished-at-vatican-warning-about-synodal-path/
In 2003 Google spent $80,000 on lobbying.
In 2021 Google spent $9.6 million on US lobbyists.
The quote below is from Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People. It’s a great read. It’s complicated at the beginning, especially with all the different characters and those unpronounceable Russian names. But if you stay with it you will discover it is a fascinating account about how Vladimir Putin is where the is today.
One has to ask the question is it true? And if so how come western intelligence did not know what was happening.
“Putin had become obsessed with the media’s power, knowing all too well how, with the help of Berezovsky’s TV channel, he’d been transformed from a nobody into the country’s most popular leader.
“He was aware that without control of the country’s federal TV channels, that could change at any time.”
Vladimir Putin knew exactly what he had to do and he did it. [Page 203]
Tom Crean from West Kerry, who was a famous sailor and explorer was born on this day, July 20, 1877, though Wikipedia gives his birth as February 16, 1877. He died in 1938.
He took part in three major expeditions to Antarctica
Crean's third and final Antarctic venture was as second officer on Ernest Shackleton’sImperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition.
After the ship got stuck in the pack ice and sank, Crean and the ship's company spent 492 days drifting on the ice before undertaking a journey in the ship's lifeboats to Elephant Island. He was a member of the crew which made a small-boat journey of 800 nautical miles (1,500 km) from Elephant Island to South Georgia Island to seek aid for the stranded party.
After retiring from the navy on health grounds in 1920, Crean ran his pub the South Pole Inn in Annascaul in West Kerry with his wife and daughters. He died in 1938.
This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column
Good news from the Vatican.
In recent weeks a priest of the Dublin Archdiocese was overheard saying that it is now his belief that the Catholic Church is heading of schism.
https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/francis-reimposes-restrictions-latin-mass-reversing-decision-pope-benedictNiamh Brennan, who is the Michael McCormac Professor of Management at University College Dublin, has an article on the Uber story in The Irish Times today.
She reveals how an Irishman exposed his former employer’s dirty tricks.
The article stresses the importance of whistleblowing, and the valuable job that whistleblowers do.
We are fortunate in Ireland to have the Protective Disclosures Act of 2014.
All organisations, whether secular, military, voluntary or religious are subject to all the laws of the land, including the law on whistleblowing.
Brennan concludes her article: "The leaks also highlight driver exploitation, with little concern for driver safety. The leaks reveal how the company side-stepped paying its fair share of taxes, instead redirecting tax officials to collect taxes from its drivers.
"All its lobbying was ultimately unsuccessful. Uber did not win Uber-friendly regulation in Ireland. Our civil servants and politicians are to be commended for standing firm against Uber’s efforts.”
It is interesting how the whistleblowing revealed how the company avoided paying its correct tax. It is also interesting how the revelations uncover the unorthodox relationship between Uber and its drivers.
The Thinking Anew column in The Irish Times today.
Michael Commane
Last week a rare Scotch whisky sold for £16 million to a private collector in Asia.
The single malt, which dates to November 1975, was produced at the 207-year-old Ardbeg distillery in the Scottish island of Islay.
Known as Cask No 3, the £16 million barrel sold for more then double the price that Ardbeg’s owner Glenmorangie Company, a subsidiary of LVMH luxury group, paid for the distillery and its entire stock in 1997
Some 88 bottles, priced at approximately £36,000 each, will be drawn from the cask each year for the next five years.
From the Financial Times Weekend Saturday, July 9/Sunday. July 10.
Mark Twain has something to say on the topic: “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whisky is barely enough.”
"The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them in parliament". Lenin
This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers' column.
Michael Commane
I’d been telling everyone that I had managed to avoid Covid, at least so far. And would add that I usually pick up every sort of dirt but have dodged Covid. Only in mid-June I gave out my spiel with a smile, saying: ‘touch wood, no Covid,’ and at that, I’d jokingly touch my head.
A piece by Fintan O’Toole in the Weekend Review section of The Irish Times Weekend. It makes for great reading.
What happens to the boy in the bubble when the bubble bursts? He falls from a great height.
The vehicle in which Boris Johnson floated to power was Brexit. It took him to an astonishing place, one where, in any sane world, he did not belong.
But bubbles are wildly erratic in their movements, and they don’t last. The same was always going to be true of Johnson’s premiership.
There is, in much of the British media and within the Conservative Party, a story about this week’s surreal events: they are all to do with character. They have nothing to do with policy.
This is self-delusion. For Johnson’s character is itself inextricable from the biggest policy decision Britain has made in the last 50 years: leaving the European Union.
His great strength, indeed, was his uncanny ability to embody an entire, and epic, political project. Others cared about Brexit and fought for years to make it happen. But Johnson, who did not care about it, gave it an ample physical form, a voice, an attitude.
The old Eurosceptic cranks wrote a script – Johnson performed it. Without his brilliant ability to enact Brexit as a persona, it would simply not have happened.
Just as 18th-century cartoonists invented England as a character – the big, meaty, stubborn John Bull – Johnson reinvented it as Boris: big, meaty, stubborn, anarchic, rule-breaking, freedom-loving, fun.
That’s what 52 per cent of UK voters voted for in June 2016. Not a political and economic programme — there wasn’t one. But a spirit of “freedom”, a word made flesh in the unlikely, ungainly but instantly recognisable shape of an Old Etonian populist.
In this act there was a confusion of two meanings of “character”. “Boris” was a great character, in the sense of a fictional personage. Johnson was, and is, a terrible character. Sooner or later, the second reality was always going to overtake the first.
It is hard to overstate the degree to which Johnson was the single greatest asset for the Leave side in the 2016 referendum. Andrew Cooper, chief pollster for the Remain campaign, later admitted that “in the focus groups and in our polling, Boris invariably came top on the question of which politician has made the most persuasive impact”.
Detailed exit polls found that how people felt about Johnson correlated strongly with how they voted. It is not a stretch to suggest that if Johnson — as he might just as well have done — plumped for Remain, the UK would still be in the EU.
Why was Johnson so extraordinarily influential at such a momentous moment?
Firstly, because, in his extraordinary fusion of the Upper Class Twit with the Man of the People, he brought together two currents of Englishness. One was that weird concoction, Tory anarchism, the privileged fecklessness of a decadent post-imperial ruling class. The other was the two-fingered salute to “the establishment” favoured by a post-industrial working class.
The Bullingdon Club brat and the spit-in-your face punk are not all that far apart. “Boris” brought them together, creating a cross-class alliance that carried Brexit and smashed the Labour Party’s red wall of old proletarian loyalty.
Secondly, he embodied a promise that was at the heart of the Brexit moment: no consequences. If part of the appeal of Brexit was that you can f**k everything up, the crucial other half was that you can f**k everything up and yet pay no price.
If Johnson were a stick of rock, No Consequences would be written all through it. In his personal life, in his journalistic career and in his political adventures, he has always been the one who walks away unscathed and leaves other people to clean up his mess.
There could be no one more fitted to personify the promise that Brexit would be like this, that Brits could (as Johnson repeatedly promised) leave the EU but still enjoy all of its advantages. Bear in mind that Johnson actually thought – or claimed to think – that the UK could still have a seat on the European Commission after Brexit.
But, in the end, there are consequences. As they accumulated, Johnson’s real character could not sustain the potency of his fictional one.
The first and most obvious consequence was that a man so patently unable to govern himself could not possibly govern a country.
Everybody knew this. Johnson had held two serious political offices.
As mayor of London his job was quickly delegated to competent subordinates, while he became a frontman and a showman, indulging himself with idiotic and grandiose schemes (Boris Island, the Garden Bridge) on which, to use a term from his own adolescent Etonian vocabulary, he spaffed tens of millions of pounds.
As foreign secretary he was almost universally hailed as the worst holder of that great office. His highlights reel includes giving Iran the excuse to lengthen its detention of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and sucking up to a prominent ex-KGB agent.
It says much for the self-proclaimed patriotism of so many Tories that they knew damn well that Johnson was simply incapable of functioning in high office with either honour or ability — and yet gave him the keys to 10 Downing Street anyway.
There is a nice line in an Elbow song: “I want to be in a town where they know what I’m like and don’t mind.” Brexit turned the Conservative Party into the town where they knew exactly what Johnson was like and didn’t mind – so long as his bumptious energy could keep their bubble aloft for another year or two.
And so long as he was fun. Johnson’s great skill was that of dissolving the difference between a serious thing and a joke. The tongue with which he lied was always also, somehow, always in his cheek.
But the problem with every comic act is that it requires the collusion of the audience. If the crowd decides that it is no longer amused, the act dies, excruciatingly, on stage.
This shift would probably have happened anyway, simply because government is a serious business. But the pace of the shift was greatly advanced by the Covid-19 pandemic.
In a time of plague, Johnson’s act wasn’t funny anymore. Not that he didn’t try: he allegedly told his subordinates in one fit of fury: “no more f**king lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”
But no one was laughing anymore. And the anarchic rule-breaking that had appealed to so many people in England became suddenly less attractive when it meant that Johnson and his subordinates were flouting all the rules that ordinary people had to follow, often at great personal and emotional cost. “Freedom” turned out to mean what it has always meant for the upper-class: the right to do as they please while telling the peasants to obey. The peasants finally realised that they were not in on the joke – they were the joke.
Without the protective force field of “only joking”, Johnson could not possibly ward off the consequences of his own cynicism, corruption and incompetence. His habitual mendacity, having lost that quality of comic evasiveness that had made it palatable to so many of his compatriots, now looked like what it was: crude and constant lies.
Perhaps none of this would have mattered much, though, had it not been for that deeper revenge of consequence: the bursting of the Brexit bubble.
Johnson managed to squeeze two distinct (and essentially contradictory) energies out of the Brexit story. But neither of them could be sustained.
The initial energy was boundless optimism – the Golden Age, the sunlit uplands, the new dawn of “world-beating” Britain in which the gloomsters and doomsters would be put to flight and all would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
English political culture was alarmingly susceptible to this kind of mindless boosterism – but blather is still blather. The sharp pin of reality was always waiting for the bubble.
Brexit is making most British people poorer. The sunlit uplands, as the SDLP MP Claire Hanna put it recently, are becoming ever more obviously the gaslit uplands – a fake world that no one can inhabit. Johnson, though, got a second shot at shaping this story. He turned it – again with a rather brilliant opportunism – into a much more downbeat appeal: let’s get this bloody thing over with.
He won an election, and a huge parliamentary majority, on a breathtakingly brazen slogan: Get Brexit Done. It implicitly conceded that most people just wanted not to be bothered anymore by his grand project.
But he couldn’t even deliver on this promise to pretend the whole thing never happened. He couldn’t do it because he had nothing else to offer.
Stoking and exploiting English animosity to Europe has been Johnson’s career-defining shtick. It’s the horse he rode in on. But once Brexit actually happened, it also died under him.
The “Boris” act was essentially a one-hit wonder. That hit was massive, mega, multi-platinum. But his follow-up numbers – Levelling Up, War on Woke – were flops.
He had to become his own tawdry tribute band, using the Northern Ireland protocol to play an increasingly out-of-tune rehash of the same old song.
The DUP and the Brexit ultras in the ERG may have applauded, but the vast majority of English voters were merely bored and baffled.
What, then, happens to Brexit without Johnson? To call it Hamlet without the prince would be to dignify it too much. There is too much farce intertwined with this tragedy.
It is, perhaps, just a circus without its clown, its high-wire act, its illusionist and its contortionist. Johnson has been all of those things – and the performance has been dizzying to watch, by turns gloriously ludicrous and incredibly death-defying.
Where the tragedy does lie for his compatriots is that this is a circus that will not fold its tents and leave town. It has taken up residence in the main square and cannot be shifted.
Who can replace Johnson as its star act? No one.
Part of the reason why the succession race is so open is that Johnson can have no successor. He embodied a project that has no future, that is merely stuck in a moment it can’t get out of.
Johnson’s only value to his country has been as a stress test. He showed that its existing order was so fragile that an absurd opportunist, armed only with excruciating jokes, debating society bombast and a bottomless well of shamelessness, could shape it to his own appetites.
If the UK is to have a future, it must start by asking not how Johnson finally fell, but how it was possible for him to rise so high.
On this day, July 10, 1991 Boris Yeltsin became the first elected president of Russia.
Overheard during the news marathon on the Boris Johnson saga.
This sentence from Conservative Brexiteer MP, Peter Bone and a Boris Johnson fan, who sounds extremely posh and a tad arrogant. Surely a fact is always true: "You are saying a fact that is not true."
And this from Sky reporter John Crea, again talking about the resigning UK prime minister: "A clear lack of dishonesty.”
Would that not make Boris Johnson an honest and truthful man?
And the man himself, standing outside 10 Downing Street said that he had the best job in the world.
To think that the sun never sat on the British Empire. How ruling organisations, secular and religious, subjugate and fool so many.
Barry Nyhan was born close
For many Dominican novices in the 1960s, '70s and '80s the Nyhan household was a port of call, where they were always received with open arms by Mrs Nyhan.
Barry, who grew up close to the Dominican Priory in Pope’s Quay, where he served as an altar boy alongside James O’Gorman, joined the Dominican Order with James in September 1962 and both were ordained priests on July 6, 1969. Barry died on the 53rd anniversary of his priestly ordination, Wednesday, July 6, 2022. James died in 2002.
Barry studied philosophy and theology at the Dominican Studium in Tallaght.
After priestly ordination he did postgraduate studies in theology at the University of St Thomas in Rome while living at the Dominican Priory in San Clemente on the Via Labicana.
On returning to Ireland he obtained his Higher Diploma in Education and taught christian doctrine in a vocational school in Dublin's north inner city. During this time he was a member of the Dominican community in St Saviour’s on Dublin’s Upper Dorset Street.
Barry resigned from his priesthood in 1975/1976 and married Jane Robinson in 1978. They had two children, Stephen and Marc.
Barry obtained a Masters in Education, First Class Honours, from Trinity College, Dublin and was awarded a PhD from the University of Bremen in 2004.
He spent most of his working career with the European Commission in Maastricht, Brussels and Thessaloniki, where he worked on the development of further education. He coordinated programmes to assist the advancement of adult/further education within the European Union.
Before taking up employment with the European Commission Barry worked with AnCo, the National Manpower Service and the Youth Employment Agency, later named Fás and now called Solas.
On retiring from the European Commission in 2007 Jane and Barry returned to Ireland, living in their home in Churchtown.
Barry kept in close contact with the Irish Dominicans and had life-long friends within the Order.
For many years both he, Michael McCarthy and Jerry O’Keeffe, also former Dominicans, made it their business to call to visit Fr Fergal O’Connor in Dominick Street, before attending rugby matches at Lansdowne Road.
Barry was a man of great faith, who was an avid reader of theology. His theology/philosophy studies strongly influenced him all during his working career.
The proud Cork man was interested in many sports. He played golf with a respectable handicap and was an excellent Gaelic, rugby and soccer player. It is said by many of his friends that he was close to being of FAI football league standard. And of course he was an avid supporter of Cork hurlers and footballers but had been greatly disappointed in how they had performed in recent years.
He enjoyed hill walking, and before they became popular on Irish roads, he cycled a fold-up bicycle, indeed he was the proud owner of the Rolls Royce of fold-ups - a Brompton.
Barry was a first cousin of the late Fr Micheál O’Regan, a Dominican priest who died in 1997 at the age of 59.
He was a tall, athletic person, who loved the great outdoors. So, when struck down with a form of Parkinson’s/Lewy body dementia approximately two years ago it came to him as a great shock. But he carried his illness with dignity and patience.
Barry Nyhan was the quintessential gentleman. He was the kindest of men, a gracious person, who always saw the positive in the other person.
His retiring from priesthood was a terrible loss to the Irish Dominican Province but a wonderful moment for his wife Jane and for their two children, who would later be born to them.
It so happens that Stephen, who lives in Dublin, is married to a woman from South Korea, and Marc, who currently lives in Japan, is married to a Japanese woman.
Barry’s funeral Mass takes place on Saturday at 11.00 in the Church of SS Columbanus and Gall, Milltown followed by committal in the Garden Chapel at Mount Jerome Crematorium. The funeral Mass will be live-streamed at mcnmedia.tv/camera/milltown-parish
I shall greatly miss his friendship; his kindness and wisdom.
May Barry rest in Peace.
Last evening Boris Johnson sacked Michael Gove. A statement from 10 Street referred to the sacked government minister as a snake.
Anyone watching proceedings in the House of Commons yesterday might wonder how did this parliament see over an empire where the sun never set. It mismanaged and caused great injustice and harm.
To think that Boris Johnson is responsible for what has happened in Northern Ireland and that no one in his cabinet shouted stop.
The saga of the Johnson premiership trundles on. Yesterday his chancellor of the exchequer and health secretary resigned. Earlier in the day a retired senior civil servant said that the prime minister had not told the truth in the current controversy surrounding Chris Pincher.
Johnson gave an interview yesterday to BBC where he admitted he made a mistake in appointing Chris Pincher to a government job. He even tried to sound contrite.
It’s interesting with all of his tricks, lies and deceit it looks as if it’s the alleged sexual behaviour of Chris Pincher and Johnson’s attempt at cover up that will be his downfall.
Johnson talks of 'absolute truth’. He seems to think it’ different from truth.
Might bishops learn?
It would seem Johnson has surpassed the world of - GUBU.
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RTÉ’s The Late Late Show began on this day, July 6, 1962, in black and white. It is the world’s longest-running tv chat show.
This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.
On BBC’s Newsnight last evening British government minister Jacob Rees-Mogg quipped to presenter Kirsty Wark: “I hope he’ll[Boris Johnson] be a Walpole and do another 21 years.
Robert Walpole was British prime minister from 1721 - 1742.
Is it arrogance, humour, stupidity that's the glue that keeps the current British government in place?
British politician Chris Pincher, Conservative MP for Tamworth and deputy government chief whip is back in the news again.
While drinking himself sick at the exclusive Carlton Club last week it is alleged he groped two men.
Annual fee at the Carlton Club is approximately £2,000, another world for the majority of the people living in the Tamworth constituency.
Mr Pincher’s surname is unfortunate for a Tory MP who has a history of groping men.
It was reported on BBC Radio 4 this morning that Boris Johnson said of the MP: “Pincher by name, Pincher by nature”.
One might add: Birds of a feather flock together.
The link below is an interview with RMT general secretary Mick Lynch last Saturday on RTE I’s Brendan O’Connor Show.
He makes an interesting point at the end of the piece. While the railway companies and the government are claiming that the unions will not introduce new technology, something Lynch refutes, that same government will not allow trade unions carry out votes electronically. They must use the Royal Mail. Mr Lynch says that it is difficult to carry out postal votes and far more members would vote if they had the possibility of voting electronically.
https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22113309/
The five quotes below are words spoken by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. So stand up please the real President Putin.
1. History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior.
2. Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.
3. Russia is a part of European culture. Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.
4. Nobody and nothing will stop Russia on the road to strengthening democracy and ensuring human rights and freedoms.
5. Our aims are absolutely clear: They are a high living standard in the country and a secure, free and comfortable life.
Yesterday I was speaking to an elderly patient in a hospital oratory. I commented on how often I had seen him in the oratory and asked him to remember me in his prayers.
He replied: “I have nothing else to do”.
Will he ever know the impact those seven words had on me? I doubt it. Maybe I’m wrong. One way or another it doesn’t really matter.
Sensationally profound words at that moment and in that place.
Should I tell him? Probably not.
In the link below Iain Dale interviews RMT general secretary Mick Lynch on LBC. It is sensational radio.
And it’s sensational because Mr Lynch is simply speaking the truth in an articulate and convincing manner. No spin, no spoof and above all no lies.
On the other side of the Atlantic former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson revealed at the January 6 hearings yesterday how former US president Donald Trump grabbed his security detail by the neck because he would not drive him to the Capitol. She also told how the former president broke delph and smeared a wall in his office with ketchup.
Cassidy Hutchinson on what Trump said about crowds and weapons on Jan 6: "I don't F'ing care that they have weapons. They're not here to hurt me. Take the F'ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the F'ing mags away."
Lynch represents railway workers, speaks for working people, who earn small sums of money.
Trump represents the capitalist class and people who earn large sums of money.
Has there been a bishop or senior clergyman who has spoken in support of what Mick Lynch is saying?
