Writing for life

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Fathers’ day is one of those days that I’m not really sure about.

Is it really a "special" day or is it just another one of those "Hallmark" days, invented to put the commercial squeeze on hard-pressed families… applying pressure to buy over-priced cards, eat out in over-priced restaurants and generally spend money that could be better employed elsewhere?

Actually the truth is somewhere in between. Fathers’ Day began, by all accounts, back in the early 20th century in America, as a holiday to celebrate fatherhood and male parenting; something to counterbalance the already popular Mothers’ Day celebrations. The earliest advocate of a male-orientated holiday was a woman — Sonora Smart Dodd — who was apparently attending a Mothers’ Day celebration in 1909, when she decided to hold a similar day in honour of her father the following year. So on the 19th of June 1910 Ms Dodd presided over what’s believed to be the first ever observance of a fathers’ day holiday.

It took some time for the holiday to become official. While the concept of Mothers’ Day was met with universal enthusiasm, Fathers’ Day, despite being supported by influential bodies like the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Church, was generally greeted with scepticism and amusement by the general population.

Slowly the idea gained traction… and in the 1930s, spotting an opportunity to boost commerce, the "Associated Menswear Retailers" formed a special committee with the sole purpose of legitimising and commercialising Fathers’ Day among the masses. By the 1980’s the chairman proclaimed the committee’s mission a resounding success. In the US at least, Fathers’ Day had become a three-week commercial extravaganza… a "second Christmas".

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I just got this via e-mail from Simon Berrow of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group.

Apparently the autopsy of the fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus) that stranded in Courtmacsherry bay in West Cork back in January is going to be shown in a new Channel 4 series called Inside Nature’s Giants.

Here’s the e-mail text:

All,

The post-mortem of the fin whale stranded in Courtmacsherry Bay in January 2009 will be shown on Channel 4 in a new series starting this week.

The programme is entitled "Inside Nature’s Giants" and the four part series covers an Elephant (29 June), Fin whale (6 July), Crocodile (13 July) and Giraffe (20 July). All programmes are at 9pm on Channel 4.

The IWDG were contacted by Channel 4 the day the whale stranded having picked up the story from our website. As we did not know what was going to happen to the whale, or subsequently its’ carcass, it was hard to know how we could facilitate and whether indeed a post-mortem could be carried out. We had never tackled such a large animal before so were literally going into the unknown.

After lengthy discussion Windfall Films decided to fly over a large whale researcher from the US. Even then access to the whale was not certain as Cork County Council policy was removal or burial. Fortunately everything worked out and Channel 4 got their autopsy, we learnt more about whales in Ireland, Cork County Council got the whale removed and Kilbrittain community got their skeleton !   Joy Reidenberg from the US was absolutely incredible and took us all through the process of post-mortem examination of a large whale.

See the amazing footage on Channel 4 at 9pm on Monday 6th July.

 

Sounds a tad on the gruesome side… but I, for one, will be watching with interest. The series kicks off tonight with the dissection of an elephant!

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Spotted (groan… pardon the pun) these beautiful flowers growing on the cliff above Silver Strand on Sherkin Island in West Cork last week.

Really gorgeous – but what really amazed me was how many of them there were growing in one spot.

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So the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, has said "it is no longer tenable" for the Catholic Church to manage 92% of all primary schools. What a revelation! And it’s taken the Church until now to work that out?

Dr Martin, of course, is furiously back-peddling, squirming to try and salvage some form of "face" in the wake of the damning Ryan Report into what it described as "endemic" child abuse by clerical institutions in Ireland, and the public backlash that has ensued both here and abroad. But there’s no face to be saved… the Church’s reputation is in tatters. Any parent worth their salt will tell you that its involvement in even 1% of our primary schools should be more than "untenable"… it should be absolutely criminal!

Those are emotive words because, quite frankly, when it comes to the safety and security of my children I am emotional!

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Just got an e-mail from Padraig Whooley of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group re. a possible walrus sighting of Co. Wicklow, Ireland.

At 19:30 this evening Tues. 23rd June, we received a call from a Johnny Byrne informing us that at 15:00 he had seen earlier what he believed to be a walrus off Maherabeg, heading north from Magherabeg beach, 50 yards off the rocks, towards Magheramor beach in Co. Wicklow.

Padraig, who is the sighting’s coordinator with the IWDG said he spoke to Johnny at length, and while he’s convinced the sighting is something unusual they can’t confirm a walrus just yet.

The IWDG has informed National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Irish Seal Sanctuary, as the animal could turn out to be another vagrant pinniped like a hooded or bearded seal, which have also been recorded in Irish waters.

There have been confirmed sightings of walruses in Irish waters before, with most sightings, perhaps unsurprisingly, coming from off the northwest coast.

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A while back I agreed to write four weeks worth of content for a new Evening Echo section on careers and recruitment. Dubbed “Career Moves” this new section would run on a Monday, and would focus on jobs, employment, education, training and career development.

Two-and-a-half years later and Career Moves is still going strong, and I’m still penning the content.

A while back I figured that it would probably be a good idea to take all of the careers related content I’ve amassed for Career Moves and publish it online, making it accessible and searchable for a much wider audience. But I’ve been busy with other things (haven’t we all?), so it’s taken me a while to get around to it.

Finally I’ve started to populate the all new Career Moves blog with content. I’ll be augmenting the stuff I’ve written for the paper with other bits and pieces too – so be sure to subscribe to the Career Moves RSS feed or visit the site and sign up for e-mail updates in the sidebar.

The Career Moves blog is very much in its infancy and is a “work in progress” that I’ll be developing and evolving as time allows – so by all means let me have your feedback via the comments system on the site.

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The little one was staring intently at the calendar this morning… her lips moving silently as her finger traced the days. She "shushed" me when I asked what she was doing, turned the page to the following month and kept on counting.

When she finally finished I asked her what she’d been doing. "Seeing how many days there are ’till my birthday," she said, brimming with excitement about an event that was still more than a month away. She was already making lists of who she wanted at her party, what sort of food she wanted, what games we’d play, even what she was going to wear.

That’s when it hit me… there was something coming a lot sooner than her birthday, something big that had approached under the radar and was now almost upon us. I grabbed the calendar, and the letter full of dates from where it was pinned by a magnet to the side of the fridge.

Sure enough, there it was in black and white: the kids only have two weeks left in school before they break up for the summer holidays! Two weeks… and then they’re home for more than two months.

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Voting is important!

Democracy is something that people all over the world have fought for tooth and nail… it’s something people are willing to die for, and in parts of the world they still do.

We tend to forget that having the right to vote is a remarkable privilege that we should all exercise whenever we get the opportunity. It’s a chance to make our collective voices heard, and to let our public representatives know what we really think. It’s our chance to have a say in who governs us, to put competent stewards in office who will steer this nation’s course to future prosperity. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

Democracy is at the very core of the freedom we experience every day of our lives. So it’s curious that exercising the right to vote in the local and European elections last week felt like such a waste of time. I went along, naturally… but it was more out of a sense of obligation than a genuine belief that by voting I could make a difference.

Am I the only one who finds it discouraging that voting has become an exercise in selecting the best of a bad crop rather than struggling to choose between truly exceptional candidates? Maybe it’s just that, like a big chunk of the Irish electorate I’m disillusioned by the ineptitude of government at local and national level, by a farcical and frankly completely un-viable opposition and by the relentless petty sniping of party politics on issues that should transcend political point-scoring.

We took the children with us to vote… it’s important to expose them to the democratic process… although explaining the intricacies of it to eight- and five-year-olds is a bit of a minefield. I think it’s vital for them to realise early on what voting is, why it’s important and what our public representatives do… or at least what they’re supposed to do… on our behalf when elected into office. They were fascinated by the procedure… the registration, the voting booths, and especially the ballot papers — complete with miniature photographs of the telephone-pole-politicians they’d come to recognise over the weeks running up to the election. If they could they would have taken a few sheets with them for "art".

While on the one hand I recognise the value of teaching children about democracy early on, I can’t help feeling that it’s steeped in more than a dash of irony. Parenting is not, after all, a particularly democratic process.

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We live in an old schoolhouse, and bisecting the garden is a six-foot stone wall — effectively separating what were once the boys and girls yards. It’s a charming throwback to a bygone era, a lovely original feature of the property, and this spring it’s also home to a family of blue tits. They’ve chosen to nest in a small hole between the stones about a third of the way up, the entrance secreted behind the leaves of a young pear tree that’s fanning across the wall.

I first noticed the parents coming and goings a few weeks ago, but thought I’d keep it to myself until I was sure the eggs had hatched. The girls love nature and wildlife, but their enthusiasm they can get the better of them sometimes, and the last thing I wanted was an abandoned nest. Once both parents were busy feeding their hungry chicks the likelihood of that happening was pretty slim, and so when I could hear the insistent cheeping that told me they’d arrived I showed the girls the adult birds’ comings and goings, the caterpillars and grubs they were bringing, and, in between the parents’ visits, I showed them the nest itself.

In the darkness of the hole you could just make out the bright yellow gapes of five hungry little mouths. The excitement was palpable.

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They’re back!

It’s election time again and the country’s lamp posts and telegraph poles have been festooned with an assortment of dodgy-looking mug-shots that do little to improve the view.

Let’s face it, by and large pictures of politicians aren’t pretty. Even the polished practitioners of national politics struggle to look good when their faces are blown up to poster-size and put on display. Local wannabe councillors have no chance.

One such unfortunate suddenly appeared on the telephone pole outside our house recently. When I went to bed at midnight the pole was bare… the following morning at 7am there he was, grinning down at the house like some voyeuristic lecher. Was this supposed to inspire me to vote for this man? Think again! It makes you wonder who’s giving these people their marketing advice.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t for the life of me work out how poster politics is supposed to work. Yes, it raises public awareness, but more often than not it’s the groan-and-cringe kind of awareness that does nobody any favours. And let’s be blunt here, on balance your typical local election candidate isn’t particularly pleasant to look at; it’s no beauty contest, that’s for sure. So what do you have? Just a bunch of ugly mug-shots sullying the Irish landscape, and for what? Do they tell me what these people stand for? Do they tell me what they plan to do for me, my family and my community if I help elect them? No, they just distract and irritate me, and if anything have the opposite effect.

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