Knockananna

Photo: Michael Wayne
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It all started with an out of the blue email from Michael Wayne in Florida. When I saw the intro, "Mr. Póló", I immediately thought it was one of those spam things. Fortunately my curiosity got the better of me and I read on.

Some of Michael's people were Whelans from the Knockananna area in Co. Wicklow. He had Googled the place and come up with my web page on the village and then got in touch with me.

His main purpose was to enquire about a plaque he had seen on one of the family graves during a visit to Knockananna last year. You can see the plaque above. The Gaelic script led him to believe it was in Irish but he could not find a translation. The script is certainly misleading and the text turns out to be a Latin version of Matthew 20.1 "The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a landowner .." and so on into the parable of the Vineyard.

Photo: Michael Wayne

Once we got that out of the way, he told me this amazing story.

Some twenty years ago his mother had given him a plastic sealed envelope of papers and photos on the history of her side of the family: the Whelan’s. He wasn't hugely interested at the time and, after a cursory reading, chucked it into the back of a drawer. The bulk of the information in the packet was an essay and story based on much research done by a distant (Whelan) relative named Dan Wagner in the early 1970’s who had typed out this large volume of pages about the Whelan family history and the ancestral area around Knockananna.

This year, Michael and his wife Kendra were planning a visit to Ireland. "I decided then that one of the trips we had to take while in Ireland was to try to track down the family gravesites in Knockananna so I made a copy of Dan’s entire packet and the photos along with a “to whom it may concern” letter about who I was, and my contact information. I put it all in a waterproof envelope and figured if I did find a Whelan gravesite I would just leave the envelope at the site and see what, if anything, would happen".

Photo: Michael Wayne

In the event, he changed his mind and left it in the adjacent church. Instead, he left a bottle of Guinness at the grave.

Some while later, he got an email from a Whelan relative in Knockananna. Someone had taken the packet from the church and passed it on to the relative who was thrilled to get the information it contained. Her family had been aware of some visitor from the States way back who was collecting information on the family, but they knew no more.

And lo and behold, when I checked out my own photos of the graveyard from last Christmas, I found I had taken a photo of the very same grave, and it appears the Parish Priest had meanwhile confiscated (scoffed?) the bottle of Guinness. I had taken my photo because of the interesting way the illustration had been worked into the gravestone. This was a feature of a number of the gravestones there.

So there you are.

Isn't the internet a truly amazing place.

You can read Michael's own story and see a photo of his mother and grandmother.

My page on Knockananna.

Bono's House

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It's really all the fault of the Vico Road.

Everyone knows that the Vico Road is in Dalkey.
Bono lives on the Vico Road.
Therefore, Bono lives in Dalkey.

I'm fed up of reading that shite.

You see not all of the Vico Road is in Dalkey. Quite a substantial part of it is in Killiney and where Bono lives is in both the former urban district and current townland of Killiney.

Bono lives in Killiney. Enya lives in Killiney.

It's Pat Kenny that lives in Dalkey and who would want to end up in that neighbourhood.

Just so people will know the score, the map below shows the border between the former urban districts of Killiney and Dalkey and it's a good uphill walk from Bono's house, highlighted in yellow at the bottom.

Bono lives on the actual townland of Killiney, one of the constituent townlands of the former Killiney and Ballybrack urban district.

Strathmore Road

And when you take into account that the entrance to Bono's house was moved from its original position, which could have been argued onto the Vico Road, it is now unequivocally on the Strathmore Road. So Bono doesn't actually live on the Vico Road at all.

So there.

Where is it ? No. 34

To see all the quiz items click on the "Where?" tag below.

To see all the unsolved quiz items click on the "unsolved" tag below.

This one again solved by Felix Larkin.

Is he the only guy/gal in town with their eyes open?

As he's mentioned a clue, I should say that all I said to him was "You of all people!".

#SackTheSub

Eilis O'Hanlon
"Write a letter"
I have become so infuriated with typos and inaccuracies in the newspapers that I have adopted a Twitter hashtag #SackTheSub, the idea being that the Sub-Editor, whose job it is, should have picked up on this stuff before it went to print.

Sacking the Sub would not have helped in the little spat I had with Eilis O'Hanlon way back because in her case she had inaccurately, and detrimentally, misquoted Pope Francis. No Sub would have been expected to pick that up. That was the journalist's own job. I pointed out to her that she had falsely attributed a mysoginistic quote to the Pope, which she subsequently knew to be false, and I asked if she intended to correct it. Her response was to tell me to write in a letter as that how this is done nowadays.

I was very taken aback at this. Instead of correcting her error in the following issue she wanted me to try and correct it by writing in to the newspaper. This is nuts, I thought. But this week I read a piece in Phoenix which seemed to confirm her stance as what is now standard practice, in the Sunday Independent at least. Of course, that does not make it good journalism.

This is what Phoenix had to say:

Phoenix 29 August 2014 p12
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I understand the system works by allowing the writer/reporter to enter copy directly into a template of the page where they will have been allocated a certain space. The disadvantage to the reader is twofold.

In the first place the copy is not subject to checking by anyone other than the originator and that may consist of a simple automatic spell check.

In the second place, nobody is determining the relative importance of the item after seeing the copy. It could have fizzled out as an item but in today's competitive environment no journalist sent out for a story is going to admit this, so the reader will end up with inflated copy.

I would hate to undermine the enthusiasm of any writer of copy, but I do think they ought to be aware of this before their next filing.

It seems to me that this development partly undermines the mainstream media's claim to journalistic superiority over mere bloggers. The MSM have always boasted that their copy has to pass a screening process before it is launched on the public whereas bloggers type straight to print, as it were.

I suppose I should have been prepared for something like this from my even earlier spat with RTÉ Automatic Radio some three years ago.

Anyway, time to lighten up, so here's a piece of classy sub-editing from the pen of Gordon Brewster in the Sunday Independent of long ago, probably 1920s or 1930s.

Thanks to National Library of Ireland
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See original

Conkers

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It looks like there will be a good crop this year.

My attention was drawn to the chestnut trees the other day when I saw a group of youngsters gathered underneath them picking up some fallen chestnuts. They must have been blown down by the wind as what's there doesn't yet look like it's ready to fall of its own accord, though one did fall on the roof of the car with a loud bang as we drove under it the other day.

It's good to see the estate going through another generation of youngsters and them taking an interest. They also look like they understand that the wait will be worth it as the chestnuts grow to maturity and fall to the ground.

Not a stick in sight.