This is from last Friday’s Guardian.
It’s commenting on an email from the new British health secretary, Thérèse Coffey to her staff about the Oxford comma. The piece is a great read and good fun, with serious undertones of course. With a name like Coffey, the minister may have links to Ireland. And not a word about when to use the fada.
You may have noticed new street
In recent weeks pictures have been appearing on these new ‘bruscars’.
The art work below appears on the new bins in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Council.
It is the work of Lou Lou O’Brien, the 11-year-old daughter of Michelle Nevin, who is a radiographer in St Luke’s Hospital in Rathgar.
Lou Lou is a pupil at Our Lady’s Grove school in Clonskeagh.
A great idea of DLRC and brilliant work by young Lou Lou.
LBC’s presenter James O’Brien on his programme yesterday said that after the last number of days of mourning the death of Queen Elizabeth and then her funeral on Monday he currently feels warmly towards the concept of monarchy, British monarchy than in any other point in his life.
He thinks this may be happening him because of how Donald Trump has changed his mind about democracy.
This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish weekly regional newspapers’ column.
Michael Commane
I had three appointments in Tralee earlier in the month. I drove from Dublin to West Kerry after work on Thursday. It’s a long drive and my first time to forsake the train for the gluaisteán in a long time. But on this occasion for logistical reasons I took the car.
I arrived in Castlegregory close to 8pm. Within 30 minutes I was swimming in the Atlantic. Of course I prefer to call it the Atlantic. To be more exact it is Tralee Bay, maybe even Brandon Bay. Telling people you swim in the Atlantic gives it an extra touch, it sounds more adventurous and exciting. I’ve just checked it on a map, yes it is the Atlantic Ocean, the North Atlantic at that.
An interesting piece from the Guardian how the Russians are the changing the school curriculum in areas of Ukraine they have occupied.
Brutal occupiers always seem to do that. Isn’t that what the British did in Ireland.
The article tells a wonderful story of a young Ukrainian teacher, who simply against the odds says no to the Russian aggressor.
Yesterday evening on BBC Radio 4’s Political Thinking Nick Robinson interviewed former MI6 operative Christopher Steel, who worked at the Russian desk from 1987 until 2009.
It was a fascinating interview, a powerful piece of radio.
Steele spoke openly and clearly how Russia invests large sums of money in attempting to influence Westerners. He said they spend as much money doing that as they are doing on the battlefield in Ukraine. They use London as a major laundering city for corrupt money and have been doing so for 20 years.
He asked: “Should we punch Putin in the face or slap him in the stomach?” He believes we do the former and we are slow about doing that.
Steele said that Britain was far too slow to react to the death of Alexander Litvinenko as it was to Russia’s meddling in Ukraine.
He is concerned that the West does not know how to react to authoritarian nationalism. He is confident that the West is far more technologically advanced than both China and Russia but we are living in a new era where the West is no longer dominant.
A fascinating interview with a fascinating man.
Most Western TV news bulletins yesterday carried the story of what the Russian Army has done in Izium.
Earlier in the week the Ukrainian Army reclaimed territory that had been occupied by the Russian Army since the beginning of the war in February.
A young soldier, aren’t all soldiers young - was interviewed as bodies were being exhumed, some with their hands tied, others with ropes around their neck.
The soldier said all feeling had left him as he discovered the results of the Russian brutality. All that was left for him to do was to fight on and stop the Russian invader.
Of course truth is the first casualty in all war but it is now clear that Russia is carrying out a shocking barbarity.
This war started under the pretence of ridding Ukraine of Nazism. Today the Russians and their collaborators are doing exactly what the Germans and their collaborators did in Ukraine in World War II.
Whatever the price, whatever the sacrifice that has to be made, this Russian aggression has to be stopped.
Are there hints appearing that the Russian Army is indisciplined and lacking in leadership?
The link below is from the Guardian.
Interesting video on Putin’s obsession with Ukraine.
Dublin City Council has paid out €49.9 million on claims from falls on roadways and footpaths since since 2017,
Dublin Bus has recorded a seismic reduction in insurance claims since its fleet has been fitted with cameras. The cameras cover the entire interior of the bus and also activity immediately external to the vehicle.
There has been much talk and jubilation in the Western World at the success of the Ukrainian Army in recapturing eastern parts of their country and routing significant numbers of the Russian Army with the Russians abandoning tanks and ammunition.
Over the last months the Germans have moved from sending helmets to howitzers to Ukraine and the debate is now on of the possibility of Germany sending their world famous Leopard tank to Ukraine.
Who would have dreamt that German tanks would come face-to-face with Russian tanks on Ukrainian soil. It sounds close to unthinkable but it now seems most likely that again German and Russian tanks will fight for the soil of Ukraine.
This time the tables are turned with Germany supporting democracy and the rule of law, whereas the Russian tanks represent oppression and dictatorship.
It’s also worth noting that at Stalingrad the much superior German Army was expected to defeat the weaker, less sophisticated, poorer equipped Red Army. It didn’t happen and it was on the Volga that the Russians routed the oppressor. The Germans expected to take Stalingrad in two weeks. Six months later they surrendered.
It might well turn out that the River Dneiper will be to the people of Ukraine what the River Volga means to the Russians.
This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column
What is difficult to understand is how can so many people be at one moment grieving the death of Queen Elizabeth II and within less than 30 seconds in high spirits, cheering and smiling at King Charles III.
The queen is dead long live the king.
Queen Elizabeth has rightly received high praise for the work of a lifetime and in the case of Ireland she will be forever respected for her official visit to the State.
“Truss is a very worthy successor of Boris Johnson.
Johnson never believed the Brexit story either - he just realised that he could hitch a ride on a rocket ship fuelled by English nationalism and fantasies of liberation.
And this, then, makes it a hat trick.
Since the Brexit referendum of 2016, Britain has had three leaders; the remainer Theresa May, the cynical opportunist Johnson and now the zealous convert Truss.
None of them really, truly believed that Britain was being oppressed and held back by the EU. But each of them, in order to attain power, has had to enact that pretence.
- Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times yesterday.
The Thinking Anew column in The Irish Times today.
Michael Commane
After my parents got married, they moved to a small house which meant they had to part with their Alsatian dog. They gave it to a friend. Weeks later, sometime after midnight my father heard a noise outside the hall door. The dog had found her way back home having walked approximately eight kilometres through a built-up urban area.
At the Funeral Mass of 13-year-old Jack de Bromhead on Wednesday his famous father in his eulogy said:
“Whosoever you love, make sure you tell them. Because if something like this happens to you, something so tragic as it is, happens to you, its’ a great comfort.
“I’d love you to take that away with you, we’d really appreciate it.”
Wonderful words.
Electric Ireland electronic bills are becoming more and more difficult to follow.
If you are an Electric Ireland customer have you difficulty understanding your bill with specific reference to comparing your kilowatt usage over a 24-month period.
Smart meters are being installed across the country at present. How easy is it for a customer to check if the meter is correctly calibrated?
Many customers who called Electric Ireland yesterday were left waiting 40 minutes to speak to a customer service representative.
We are constantly being told technology speeds things up, makes life easier.
It was far easier and quicker to receive information from the ESB 50 years ago. That is a fact.
This article appeared in The Irish Times of Thursday, September 1.
An interesting read.
A letter posted to John McGahern in October 1987 was more than an average fan letter. “Dear John,” it opened, “I have been meaning to write you this letter and tell you the following story for some time.” The letter’s author, Pat Feeley, a fellow teacher, had attended an Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) meeting in Abbeyfeale, Co Limerick, in 1965. Feeley recounted his memories of the meeting, which was held in the weeks that followed the banning of McGahern’s second novel, The Dark, and the subsequent loss of his job as a teacher in Dublin.
When “any other business” was called for at the crowded meeting, Feeley stood up and asked: “What does the INTO propose to do in the John McGahern case?” Total silence followed. The chair of the meeting responded by asking: “The John McGahern case? What case is that? I never heard of it.” Feeley, naively, told the story of the fate that had recently befallen McGahern, before the chair “spread out his hands with the palms upwards and, with his eyes on the ceiling, said, ‘It’s all news to me.’ ”
A new tranche of correspondence and other materials has recently been added to the McGahern Archive at the James Hardiman Library of NUI Galway.
Comprising more than 1,000 letters sent to the author from Irish and international literary figures, translators of his work, publishers, editors, as well as from family members and general readers of his work, this newly available archive represents an invaluable contribution to the study of McGahern’s writing as well as to the understanding of his many networks and circles of conversation.
Letters to McGahern gathered in this archive include those from Seamus Heaney, John Updike, Jennifer Johnston, Brian and Anne Friel, Eavan Boland, Richard Murphy, Melvyn Bragg, Mary Lavin, Hilary Mantel, Thomas Kilroy, Tom Murphy and Tom Paulin among hundreds of other correspondents.
The people who populate the voices recorded in the letters to an author, as well as of those relationships developed and often broken along the way, are hugely significant. Now, for the first time, hundreds of letters sent to McGahern, from his formative years as a young writer in the late 1950s, through to time of his death in 2006, are fully catalogued and accessible. This correspondence also adds to and contextualises the recently published The Letters of John McGahern edited by Prof Frank Shovlin.
New York renown
One of the earliest letters in the archive is from the famed editor of the New Yorker, William Maxwell to assistant editor (and later fiction writer) Elizabeth Cullinan. “The John McGahern story [Strandhill, the Sea] went through.” Maxwell adds that “if you see any more of this calibre floating around Dublin, start them on their way to me”. Letters from Cullinan to McGahern are also interesting in revealing how much she was influenced by his stories. She states that she has “... just read Nightlines and I think it’s a perfect book”. Cullinan adds she met Mary Lavin in New York recently, who had also recently read McGahern’s Nightlines, and was convinced a character in the book was named after her.
A file of more than 40 letters from poet Richard Murphy to the McGaherns begins in 1965 with Murphy writing following the death of his own father. Murphy writes that he visited McGahern’s father and his sister Dympna at their home in Grevisk, Co Roscommon. Murphy clarifies that The Dark was not mentioned “out of courtesy” to McGahern’s father and stepmother. He adds the prescient observation that “the banning of the book did more harm to the country than to the book itself”.
The letters also dovetail with social and political news of the day. In March 1972, Murphy recalled a recent visit to Belfast, where he also met the Heaneys, saying [the city] “reminded me of London in the air raids, to look at the streets, most of them like mouths with bad teeth”.
McGahern sent Murphy a copy of his The Leavetaking, prompting Murphy to reply in January 1975, in praise of McGahern’s voice, imagery “and the triumph of words over pain ... the many passages that I read and re-read, rejoicing in the style that can cut stone, are pure lyric poetry without mesh of metre or rhyme’s peal of bells.” Murphy’s allusion to stone here is revealing. The presence, form and indeed excavation of stone was a common theme in his work, including his 1985 publication, The Price of Stone & Earlier Poems.
The letters sent to an author are less often anthologised, if at all. Yet, they offer a remarkable cross-section through the literary and personal networks, friendships and relationships that intersect with the literary and creative worlds. How do other writers approach and critique McGahern’s writing?
What of their own self do they bring to the reading of his works? So much in these letters ties to the world, both physical and imaginative, out of which McGahern wrote and crafted his stories and novels.
Ian McEwan, for instance, wrote to McGahern in 2006 stating that he “would dearly love to come and see the land that lies around your imagination”.
Similarly, the French writer Michel Déon (who lived primarily in Ireland since 1968) wrote to McGahern in 1996, discussing the selection of short stories in the French edition of McGahern’s Les Créatures de la Terres et Autres Nouvelles, translated by Alain Delahaye. (The file of letters from Delahaye, the long-time French translator of McGahern’s work, is the largest in the archive from any one person.) Déon lamented that stories My Love, My Umbrella and Bank Holiday were not included before adding The Country Funeral meant most to him from living in rural Ireland where “these gatherings [funerals] are so genuine, so opened [sic] that they are mostly an occasion to break the stillness of country life”.
Paddy Swift (a close friend of McGahern along with his brother Jimmy) was a co-editor, along with David Wright, of X magazine, based in London. The periodical was the first to publish an extract of McGahern’s first novel, The End or the Beginning of Love. Writing on X-headed paper, Swift advises McGahern of the interest surrounding his early work from various publishers. Titles and plans for the book are discussed (The Grindstone was one less-alluring title suggested by Swift.) The novel was not published in the end, withdrawn by McGahern, and its manuscript resides in the archive at NUI Galway.
Elisabeth Schnack was a translator of many important works from Ireland, Britain and the United States from the 1950s through to her death in 1992. As well as works by McGahern, Schnack translated books by Mary Lavin, Seán Ó Faoláin, George Moore and many other Irish writers, into German. During her work translating The Barracks, Schnack wrote to McGahern regularly in 1971, asking questions and clarifying the meaning of single words and phrases from McGahern’s book, including “to save the turf — to carry it away?”, “they jigacted”, and “They might get a hell of a land — nothing? Or bad land?” Schnack visualised and researched the spaces of the lives and places of McGahern’s characters to such detail that she ended the letter by saying: “Now I’ll go to my police station and ask for expressions, and then I’ll find a footballer. The Catholic expressions I got explained by a Catholic friend.”
Barracks map
The exchange also reveals that Schnack requested, and received, a hand-drawn map of the floor plan of the barracks in Cootehall from McGahern. “I cannot start typing before I understand fully!” she exclaimed. McGahern did draw such a map, a visual record recalling the spaces and rooms of the barracks in which he lived and his father ruled.
As many of McGahern’s novels and stories are discussed throughout the vast files of letters, so too is his play The Power of Darkness. A version of Leo Tolstoy’s play of the same name, it was directed by Garry Hynes and first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in October 1991. Critics accused the play of being melodramatic and sentimental of “old Abbey” rural dramas. The plot centres on a dying wealthy horse dealer, Paul King, and the jealousies and scheming at play by those who surround the dying embers of this rural Irish patriarch. McGahern later acknowledged the language in the play “had been too colourful and idiomatic that it skimmed over what was at the heart of the play”. McGahern talked of “the old fear of famine”, “the confusion and guilt and plain ignorance that surrounded sex”, “the sad lusting after respectability” and singled out the Kerry Babies case as an example of the prevailing social attitude and the suffocating weight of public ceremony and religious doctrine.
Tom Murphy wrote to McGahern in the wake of the play’s panning by critics in 1991, incredulous at the reception, slamming the “famine mentalities” of those who dismissed it. The poet Robert Greacen further added, in a letter to McGahern: “I think every society is unwilling to face its problems/prejudices/intolerances. Ibsen found that out in his native Norway.” One wonders how a new production of the play might fare today in a very different Ireland from the one that first saw it.
Various publishers’ files include letters, contracts and royalty statements. A letter from Barrie and Rockliff publishers in London enclosed a cheque for £40, being the fee for the extract from The End or the Beginning of Love, published in X magazine, one of the first such payments for writing McGahern received. Royalty statements from Faber and Faber for 1966 reveal The Dark outsold The Barracks by almost two to one that year.
Dr Barry Houlihan is an archivist at NUI Galway
This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.
Yesterday Pope Francis beatified
John Paul I was pope from August 26 to September 28, 1978. The pope of a month. He was 66 when he became pope. Before being elected, Albino Luciani was Patriarch of Venice.
He was known as the smiling pope and in his short time in the job he made some significant changes.
He used 'I’ instead of the royal we. He initially refused to use the sedia gestatoria until others convinced him of its need to allow himself to be seen by crowds. He was the last pope to use it. He was the first pope to refuse to be crowned. Instead of a coronation, he inaugurated his papacy with a "papal inauguration" where he received the papal pallium as the symbol of his position as Bishop of Rome.
Luciani had mixed feelings regarding the traditional stance on contraception. In 1968, as Bishop of Vittorio Veneto, he submitted a report to his predecessor as the Patriarch of Venice, Giovanni Urbani, that argued that the contraceptive pill should be permitted. It was agreed on by fellow Veneto bishops and was later submitted to Pope Paul VI.
When Humanae vitae was released, Luciani defended that document. Nevertheless, he seemed to contradict that defence in a letter he wrote to his diocese four days after the encyclical's release.
In May 1978, Luciani was invited to speak at a conference in Milan to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the encyclical. He refused to speak at the event or even attend it.
Might Albino Luciani have been the Catholic Church’s version of Mikhail Gorbachev? The Russians waited far longer to return to their old ways than did the Catholic Church.
Sadly and unfortunately he was not pope long enough to show his style and to carry out much needed reform in the church.
While in Venice he wrote a monthly column for Messaggero di S. Antonio.
Below is an introduction to his letter to Charles Dickens and like any good journalist he admits to having difficulties in coming up with an idea.
Dear Dickens,
I am a bishop who has been give the odd task of writing a letter to some eminent person every month for the Messaggero di S. Antonio. I was pushed for time, around Christmas, and didn’t know whom to choose. And then I saw an advertisement in a newspaper to your famous books and thought to myself, ‘I’ll write to him. I read his books as a boy, and really loved them; they were filled with love of rtht poor and a sense of the need for social reform, they were warm and imaginative and human’. So here I am, bothering you.
First of all I remember your love for the poor. You felt it and expressed it splendidly, because, as a child, you lived among the poor.
Illustrissimi - The Letters of Pope John Paul I is a collection of Luciani’s letters to famous people of the past. It was first published in 1978.
Archbishop Basil Hume writes a preface to the English translation published in 1978.
This from the Guardian is worth reading.
An excerpt from the link: When asked how Gorbachev should have responded to the war, Sergei Truba, a pensioner at the ceremony, said: “He had already done the main thing required in his life.” When asked what he meant, he replied: “Perestroika.” As to the war, he added, “his voice wouldn’t have made any difference. He could not have changed this.”
“I actually used to dislike Gorbachev,” said Truba, who said that he had condemned Gorbachev and Yeltsin as the main culprits in the hastening of the collapse of the Soviet Union. “But once Putin arrived, everything changed for me … I realised what a great man we had before.”
Below is a link to an interview of three BBC journalists with RMT boss Mick Lynch.
Lynch makes perfect sense and the three journalists ask real and meaningful questions.
At the end of the interview the viewer can say they have learned something.
President Vladimir Putin will not be attending the funeral of former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR and later President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev.
Mr Gorbachev will not receive an official state funeral, something he will share with Nikita Khrushchev.
Mr Gorbachev, who was a man of great humanity, attempted to open the Soviet Union.
Nikita Khrushchev played an important role at the Battle of Stalingrad, where he was a political commissar. It meant he was the go between person between Stalin and his generals. It was something he was proud of throughout his life.
Later as General Secretary he too tried to move Russia from its old Stalinist ways to a more friendly place.
Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov said Putin would not be attending the funeral due to his work schedule. Yesterday the president flew to Kaliningrad.
Putin did lay a bouquet of red roses at Gorbachev's open coffin, bowing several times while making the sign of the cross.
What about the Holy See's Secretary of State Pietro Parolin attending the funeral.
Putin surely lets himself down by not attending and in many respects insults the Russian people.
The world has paid tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev, who died yesterday.
When Gorbachev arrived in Berlin to celebrate the 4oth anniversary of the State he cheekily told East German leader Erich Honecker life punishes those who come too late. That sentence ‘Wer zu spät kommt den bestraft das leben’ was on the lips of every German for many years after Gorbachev said those words in Berlin.
I was living in Weimar in the German Democratic Republic when there was the coup against Gorbachev.
While the GDR had its borders with the West it was still the GDR and not yet united with the Federal Republic of Germany. Soviet troops were still in the country and I was living close to an army base.
It was interesting seeing the Soviet troops and trucks, On many occasions I tried talking to troops but never a response. Whether they had no German or were not permitted to talk to civilians I never discovered.
https://www.dw.com/en/world-pays-tribute-to-mikhail-gorbachev/a-62979226?maca=en-EMail-sharing
What Alexei Navalny said about Mikhail Gorbachev:
This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.
Michael Commane
I’m forever wondering how the world holds together. I’m forever asking what it’s all about. Most of the time I have no idea.
The total amount of wrongly claimed Pandemic Unemployment Payments claimed at the height of the pandemic runs at €34 million.
The Government is now seeking return of this money.
It would be interesting to discover some of the organisations that wrongfully claimed this money. It’s important that the State does a comprehensive study and have the money returned.
The Irish Catholic columnist Mary Kenny has a story in the current issue of that paper about how Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán is encouraging mothers to have more children.
Hitler and Stalin offered similar encouragement as does Russian President Vladimir currently.
Paragraph below is from an article by Simon Tisdall in the Guardian:
Inside the EU, Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, is seen as Putin’s Trojan horse. Like many on Europe’s far right, Orbán admires his intolerant nationalist ideology and shares his racist homophobic outlook and. He has repeatedly obstructed EU sanctions. Last month he cut a unilateral gas deal with the Kremlin. Orbán plainly cannot be trusted.
Imagine if when nazi thugs came to remove people from their homes the neighbours had said, no you can’t do that, what would have happened?
What if the loco drivers refused to drive the trains to the death camps, what would have happened?
Across Berlin and other German cities there are commemorative stones or Stumbling Stones -Stolpersteine - to commemorate those who were taken from nearby houses.
Imagine if large crowds came out on to the streets across Russian cities in protest against Putin, what would be the outcome?
But it seems most people stay with the status quo, whatever the group or organisation, whether it be civil or ecclesial society.
It’s worth recalling Pastor Martin Niemöller’s lines:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
On this day, August 26 , 1999 Russia began the Second Chechen War. It was in response to the invasion of Dagestan by the Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade.
Estimates of casualties in the Second Chechen War vary wildly, from 25,000 to 200,000 civilian dead plus 8,000 to 40,000 Russian troops.
This is an article from groundreport. This blog cannot guarantee the veracity of the content. It sounds somewhat strange or odd.
It’s about Russia offering an award and money to mothers who have 10 or more children.
On this day, August 24, 1941 Hitler announced the cessation of the systematic killings of mentally ill people.
The decision came about as a result of objections and protests made by the Catholic bishops of Germany.
What if they had continued their objections to Hitler’s plans for the executions in the extermination camps?
