Woooooo!

Inside the hall looking out, daytime.

I was up in Lidl the other day and saw oodles of Halloween stuff, so for once I thought I'd get something. I settled on a plastic picture with the intention of putting it in the porch for when the local kids called to the door.

I stuck it up earlier today and it looked great. Just fitted the glass panel on the door and let the light through, something which hadn't occurred to me when I bought it.

Outside view, daytime

Needless to say, the outside view in daytime was colourful but not spectacular.

Outside view, night-time

By nightfall, after 5.30pm, the thing really came into its own, and what you see above was the spooky welcome for the spooky kids.

Quite a few came to the door and they were all very well made up. There were vampires, dead brides, Darth Vader, zombies, Batman, witches and sundry corpses, to mention but a few.

Good night had by all.

Life of Brian NOT

This is Brian Lynch's second novel and it promises loads of sex and celebrity, junior Department of Finance types, Leeson St., and Dalkey. I have so much in common with the blurb that I can't wait to get into it.

Brian has been a writer since he was in my class in school. He had the good fortune, as did we all, to have an exceptional English teacher in Michael Judge. Not only did Judgie appreciate Brian's budding talent at the time, but he left his mark on all of us in one way or another.

Once he got the curriculum out of the way, he led us through the magic land of Godot, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the (anti) war poets, Sassoon and Owen. These were all stricly non-U at the time and, I suspect, were not done in any other school.

My first contact with Brian's actual public writing was his long poem Pity for the Wicked, a very powerful piece of writing which strips the romanticism from the Northern Ireland conflict and attempts to restore meaning to language.

So, to the present book. Brian, above, was anxious to stress that it was not autobiographical, hence the title of this post, nor were any of the characters meant to depict any living person. Clearly, however, there are bits of all sorts of people in it or there wouldn't be a book.

The actual official launch was performed by Paul Durcan, a long time friend of Brian's and a well known and much travelled poet. As Brian commented, doing a reading is one thing but making a speech is another. So the drill was that Paul read one of his poems, which connected with Brian at an earlier stage of both their lives, and he then simply declared the book launched.

Brian, left, in earnest conversation with Paul

Part of attending a book launch is buying a copy of the book and having it signed by the author. Then when he has passed on, and if you're still around, you can flog it on eBay for a fortune. Just joking!

The book was published by Brian's own publishing house, Duras Press. And it really is a family affair at this stage. One daughter, Clare, was responsible for typesetting and designing it and another daughter, Camille, for promoting it.

A novel feature of this launch was a cello recital by Zoe Riordon, daughter of Serena Condon to whom the book is dedicated. Dr. Condon, in another life, once smuggled Brian into the lying-In hospital across the road from our school. Zoe is a very talented young lady and the combination of Bach and the cello really has got everything.

I listened carefully up close but I think that for most of the attendees the music turned to wallpaper behind the babble.

But then the babble is also part of the fabric of a book launch, so you just can't win them all.

The launch was held in The Little Museum of Dublin on St. Stephen's Green. This little gem of a place is well worth a visit if you're in town.

Hanged for Murder

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There were 29 people hanged by the Irish State for (non-political) murders during the period when capital punishment was practiced (1923-1954). And Tim Carey, currently the Heritage Officer for Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, has written a book about them, all of them.

My contact with Tim was through his involvement with Dublin's Martello Towers, and in particular No. 7 in Killiney Bay. What, I wondered, was he doing writing a book about murders. Has he not got enough on his plate.

Turned out he was no stranger to prison, having worked in Mountjoy and already written a book about it and another one about the State's hangings for political murders.

So I got an invite to the book launch in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Hall. Launches are always interesting, as much for the people you meet at them as for the launch itself.

This one, however, turned out to be quite spectacular, at least as far as I was concerned. It was clearly stated on the classy invite that came in my letter box a while back, but it didn't really register with me.

Tim had got the State Pathologist, Marie Cassidy, to launch his book. How appropriate and what a coup. Apparently he just wrote to her, enclosing a copy of the book; she was hooked and agreed to launch it.

State Pathologist, Marie Cassidy, launching the book

It was clear from what she said, that she found it a gripping read. I was thinking to myself that the role of pathologist was really redundant in the case of those hanged as the cause of death was quite clearly known. But then there were the victims. And always the mystery to be solved, and it was clearly this aspect that attracted her. She commented that a lot of people would find old mysteries boring or irrelevant and be more interested in the present, whereas solving the mystery is the pathologist's life blood (after a manner of speaking) and when you have that cast of mind, a mystery is a mystery irrespective of its age.

Marie is also Professor of Forensic Medicine at Surgeons and at TCD, and this adds huge variety to her professional life on top of that as State Pathologist. She is not only dealing with the dead, but sometimes the very dead like ancient bog bodies from the midlands. So the mystery to be solved has an appeal and a fascination for her.

Tim Carey's few words

Tim gave us a bit of his own background and told us how the book had come about. The guts of it were in work he did for a TG4 series on the subject a while back but there was still a lot of blood, sweat and tears to go into getting the book itself into shape.

The longest entry in the book is the Harry Gleeson case (Tipperary - 1941). Many believe that Harry was innocent and there is a current campaign to prove this. Many of the campaigners had come up specially from Tipperary to attend the book launch. And from reading the book it is clear that Tim's sympathies lie with them.

Marie Cassidy signing copies of Tim's book

I'm not sure why, but I was surprised to see Marie Cassidy acceding to requests to sign copies of the book. Needless to say I took advantage and now have a copy signed by the author and the State Pathologist.

I actually have another interest in the subject matter, but my murderer cheated the hangman. He had brutally murdered his bitch of a mother with a hatchet and disposed of her body in the sea off Shankill. His daddy, who was a medical consultant, organised some medical opinion for the trial stating that he was insane and that was how the verdict turned out, "Guilty but Insane". So he spent a, not too taxing, 14 years in Dundrum Criminal Asylum and, because he was not found simply guilty, he could still inherit the mother's estate, which helped to finance his European tour on his release. He was as sane as I am, though that may not be saying much. And my interest? He was born in the same house as I was but some 18 years earlier.

I also met an Irishman with a Polish name whose people, some of them, hail from Kiltimagh.

Small world.

SPUKERQUINN

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Some lifesize Halloween spectres
hanging from the ceiling
in Superquinn, Lucan.

Lord Lucan

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Although I was overnighting in the Spa Hotel in Lucan, it was only when I saw the illuminated glass crest, above, on the wall that I realised I was in Sarsfield country. I always associate Patrick Sarsfield with Limerick, which is where he mainly figured in my simplistic school history. "Sarsfield is the name, and Sarsfield is the man". Passwords were simpler in those days.

Well, once this is established, the hotel does not let you pass on that easily.

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This, above, is a magnificent painting of a Sarsfield victory which hangs over the entrance to the bar. In general it corresponds with the type of glorious history we got in our school version. Heroic victories and the acclamation of the populace.

This artist, however, has been quite graphic in depicting the slaughtered Redcoats. Open chest wounds, blood oozing out the mouth and a southpaw sword hand chopped off.

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A stained glass depiction, above, of another battle, on the wall of the breakfast room, takes up the women's story. Armed with staffs, bottles, axes, bricks, and the kitchen sink, they have overcome the Williamite forces.

On seeing this depiction, a small girl was heard to remark to her mother: "Mammy, is that lady having a bad day?".

A rather good day I'd have thought from the look of things.

Again we have Sarsfield on horseback in the panel on the left and a wee bit of romance in the one on the right.

So, if you're ever in the Spa, you won't escape the echoes of history.

And I'll bet you were expecting this fellow.

Dumb Terminal

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This is a database. It was the most common kind of database for decades, if not hundreds of years. It is called a card index.

Each card records a source, a quote, an idea or just some plain information. They are filed alphabetically and can readily be retrieved. The images above show my initial database for my local history researches in the early 1970s. Clearly that particular one filled up pretty fast.

When the thing started to be mechanised, the whole area of databases and modelling made a quantum leap forward. The computer could do some amazing things with your data. But first you had to get it into the computer. This was done by filling out data sheets and these were sent off to be converted into punched cards. There was one card for each row of data on the sheet.

Fortunately the punched coding was also typed along the top of the card and could be checked. And, boy, did it need to be checked, meticulously. A real pain in the ass. But you had to be accurate or when you returned the "checked cards", the slightest error would throw the whole thing out of kilter and then you would have to find the problem, assuming you realised there was a problem, correct it, and resubmit the whole job.

This stuff could take weeks of physical to-ing and fro-ing. But it was cutting edge in its day.

Then came the "dumb terminal", which was an enormous advance. You could key in the stuff directly. But directly to what. This was definitely not a stand alone computer and it had zilch processing power. It was just plain dumb. What you typed in was fed to a mainframe, or mini, computer via a landline and if you messed up and put the mainframe into a loop, you were toast.

I lost count of the number of apologetic calls my local IT section had to make to HQ to get them to unloop me, and God knows how many others who got dragged into the loop.

Then came the home computers with a certain amount of limited processing power. There was the BBC Acorn, particularly for schools, and the Commodore 64, and Clive Sinclair brought us the ZX. This was as dense as your average black hole. The box was small, every key had at least three functions and there was no screen.

Well there was, and clearly had to be, but the ZX used an ordinary television for a display, and there were plenty of those already around in homes all over the country. The original ZX had a capacity of 16KB. That was the onboard capacity of the moon-landers. Today it would barely get you a full stop in Microsoft Word.

Nevertheless it brought home computing to the masses. There was even a specific version of Sinclair Basic adapted to the cause. I remember programming Xs & Os (or noughts and crosses or whatever) and even Eliza, though the lack of capacity probably got in the way of the latter passing the Turing Test.

Nowadays we all have computers, and we browse the web and mail each other. We even carry around what once would have been a whole building in our mobile phones.

I just thought today's young people, who take so much modern technology for granted, might like to get a feel for what it was like to be at the cutting edge of deprecation.

If you're still interested, you can catch up on a few stories from my cyber-past here.

The Nostradamus Department

The Institute for the Study of Male Stereotyping was set up in the 1960s. This was an era when feminism was beginning to make itself felt and the traditional male psyche was coming under some stress.

Like all institutions, it was not content to limit itself to its original mission and in the 1970s it branched out into the area of attempting to predict male adult lives based on the behaviour of young children.

This part of the Institute was christened the Nostradamus Department, hence the title of this post. The Department turned out to be aptly named as its predictive ability closely paralleled that of Nostradamus in total failure.

There were, of course, always signs that could be correctly interpreted in retrospect, but in prospect were wide of the mark.

Some examples may help to clarify. The two children below were randomly selected from a sample of those whose future the Institute predicted in the 1970s. Those in the sample were given letters of the alphabet instead of names in order to protect their anonymity. The two chosen at random from the sample were Child D and Child E below. So let's now see just what went wrong in their case.

Child D, above, was observed, even while still in nappies, to have a fondness for the typewriter keyboard and the Institute confidently predicted that he would become at best a famous author or at worst an infamous journalist.

This was way wide of the mark as the child actually became a major figure, innovator and critic, in the world of IT and Permaculture. So the keyboard, if it had any significance at all was not for communicating with his fellow humans, but rather with the computer.

Child E was confidently expected to become a permanent Civil Servant on the basis of his love affair with the teapot. Heading for the eternal tea-break, no less.

Well, it turned out that it was soup rather than tea that he ended up dealing with. He became a renowned geneticist.

When these blunders could no longer be covered up, the Nostradamus Department was shut down, but as it had by then become the major unit of the Institute, the Institute itself was soon to follow.

The only successful cover-up so far has been of the very existence of the Institute itself, but I have now blown that with this post.

Any further developments will be reported on here.

Happy Postday to Me

I am happy, and quite amazed, to find that this is my 600th blog post, between my four current blogs, and since November 2005:

Photopol (385),
An Cnagaire (112),
Bulls (28),
Dominusvobiscuit (75).

So feel free to enjoy this post as much as I am.

Hiraeth

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This is the Dublin Welsh Male Voice Choir in its early days at a gig in RTÉ. I came across the photo recently and wondered how many of those in it were still alive, or how many were still singing with the modern version of the choir.

I figure there are now only four from the photo in the current choir: Keith Young, Mike Hayes, Ralph Pendleton (baritones) and Alun "Ogmore" Tilley (bass). That is not to say that the rest are dead, though some are. Others have moved on or maybe just run out of steam. And there is no guarantee that everyone turned out for the RTÉ gig, though, at most, there would only have been one or two missing.

The man who introduced me to the choir, and who is to blame for my subsequent stint on a farm learning Welsh, is Hywel Morris, from Porthmadog. He's the guy with the beard and glasses in the middle of the back row. He was in the RTÉ design department and left soon after for HTV. I took over his Welsh classes in Mr. Quinn's pub in Aungier St. Apart from some non-Welsh Welsh, I had two Irish eminences of the Republican movement(s) in the class: Roy Johnston and Deasún Breathnach. I was intended to be a stopgap until a real Welsh member took over and I was only one page ahead of the class - not a comfortable station for a teacher. However, nobody volunteered and the classes petered out.

To the best of my recollection there were only two Irish in the choir at that time: me (middle front row) and Séamas Ó Buachalla (back row right - with the shades) RIP.

I am squarely between two very Welsh Welsh: Brian Powell (left), RIP, in whose TCD rooms, beside Kennedy's pub in Westland Row, we used to practice, and Howell Evans (right), RIP, who had been in Ireland since time immemorial. Brian, if I remember correctly, was from Llangefni where his mother had the post office. He was in charge of the Curriculum Development Unit in TCD, hence the rooms. Howell, who died recently, worked for British Rail and had been a member of the Welsh Chapel in Talbot St.

Garvin Evans (third row, left, with glasses) was a top-top tenor and known as the Llanelli Nightingale. He is the father of U2's Edge.

Next to him, in that row, is Monty Dalton, another Welsh Welshman, who was longtime longsuffering secretary to the choir.

Next to him is Og (Alun Tilley from Ogmore) still singing with the choir.

And next to him Mike Hayes who is also Welsh. Ralph Pendleton is directly behind Mike, and both of these are still members. [Update: sadly Ralph had already died in 2013 and I didn't know when I did this post, RIP]

Gavin Bowie (second from left, back row) was a lad from Yorkshire, who was studying industrial archeology. That was the first time I had heard of such a subject but it has since proved a fascinating area.

And no tour would be complete without Keith Young (second row, second from left), the choir's conductor for most of its existence, and recently figuring in the UK honours list. Keith is from Pontarddulais and has all the choral passion of his native town.

I won't name everyone but, if I get the time, I'll put up a mapped version of the photo on my website and link to it here.

And don't forget the uniform. Snazzy enough in its day, but a mile from today's blazered brigade.

Hwyl fawr.

Logoland

This logo caught my fancy in my local supermarket car park the other day. There is something neat about the subliminal conflict between the net and the hook.

It's good to see a decent logo nowadays. Most of them are either jadedly obvious or the product of some snappy PR idiot.

Take for example the thing that portrays the relatively new Government Department of Public Expenditure and Reform on which I have commented previously.

Nuff said.

Fit for a Prince

This is part of a giant poster for a Cinderella ballet on a hoarding at my local railway station.

It made me smile.

I still havent't quite figured out why.

White, Male, Catholic

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The title of this post describes my class in school, primary through secondary: white, male and Roman Catholic.

Not much cultural diversity there. Home life was, of course, a bit more varied. We had many Protestant heretics in our street and even one Jewman in the slightly posher houses on the bank of the river. But that was it.

No black babies, except for the little head-nodding fellow on the top of the donation box, and no foreigners. None.

So my first hand knowledge of Development and Intercultural Education (DICE) is nil. Mind you, I have a slight second hand knowledge via the next generation. My son's teacher in primary school threw a freaker when the son suggested that Jesus might have looked like a native of the Middle East. NO, NO, NO, he was WHITE. And this in front of the young Indian lad sitting next to the son.

However, fortunately, times appear to have changed, and I gather that my colourful stories are now the material of history.

But there is still a way to go. Schools today are faced with problems which would have been inconceivable in my time (come in No.2, your time's up!). They have to cope with multiple immigrant nationalities, cultures and languages. Some are coping well but others are just not equipped for the onslaught, the more particularly so at a time of diminishing resources.

So Thérese (above) and Aoife (below) thought it would be a good idea to condense best practice into a set of (very loose) guidelines for schools and colleges, particularly when it came to organising intercultural events.

The booklet was launched in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County (I nearly said Town) Hall last evening (17/10/2013). In introducing it, Thérèse outlined the background to its production, including the research and consultation, and she stressed that ideally an intercultural event should not be an end in itself but only the tip of the iceberg of ongoing cultural integration in the schools. Everyone needed to be constantly involved, children, parents, teachers and the whole school ethos.

The aim was not integration in the sense of uniformity, but positive acceptance of difference, the avoidance of negative discrimination and racism, and everybody pulling together to educate and develop the children in the richness of diversity and mutual respect.

Her co-author, Aoife, took us through the contents of the booklet, which is beautifully produced and clearly shows the amount of thought and effort which has gone into it. It is full of interesting thoughts which would certainly not have occurred to the likes of me, and the general feeling was that the two checklists, in particular, added to its usefulness as a guide.

The Immigrant Council of Ireland has a programme called Ambassadors for Change. The idea is that some immigrants, who have made a success of their life here, are trained up to go into secondary schools to mentor students and give them positive role models.

Two such ambassadors recounted their experience at the launch. Dovile Vildaite recounted her work with Lithuanian immigrants and Waseem Yousaf emphasised his Iranian/Pakistani background and childhood in Abu Dhabi and how he was now well integrated into Irish society.

The partner organisations involved in producing the booklet were: The DICE Project; Froebel College of Education; and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council's Social Inclusion Unit.

Councillor Niamh Bhreathnach (above) formally launched the booklet and she was an ideal choice. She is a native of the county and a Froebel graduate. She has been a teacher, Minister for Education, and Lord Mayor of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown.

She is clearly very engaged with this whole area and made some very interesting references to practice abroad. She had visited Canada where she felt that integration was weak and the different communities more or less simply did their own thing. In the USA she found that it was simply a question of the lowest common denominator.

So, no wonder she was enthused by the approach being put forward here. Drawing on her background as the grand-daughter of the last weaver in the Liberties, she said she saw society as a tapestry with each thread and weave making its own contribution to the whole and not being lost in some mushy stew. The "mushy stew" image is mine, not hers. I'm sure she had a more elegant term but I don't remember it.

I managed to get Thérèse and Niamh to pose with the booklet.

And this is some of the team. Most you know by now.

Camila Portela Byrne, a student teacher in St. Pats, Drumcondra, shows off her artwork on the booklet's back cover.

And there would be no point in a launch to an empty concourse, so you can check out some of the audience above.

One of the two very useful checklists in the booklet.

And finally, the intercultural jigsaw . This is an image which has been used by DICE before and it is both telling and subtle. You can think about it yourself.

Neither of the missing pieces will fit into the whole as presented.

Neat.

We are all in this together.

Hunter Gatherers

Seasonal hunter gatherers on the shelves of my local supermarket.