Buddleia
A chara, – Is there anything to be said for the rampant buddleia to be seen in recent weeks, sprouting from windowsills, carparks, scrubland and even chimney stacks? The species becomes more brazen by the year. And yet, no steps are taken to rein it in. It is on a par with the seagulls.
Is mise,
CORMAC O’CULAIN,
McKee Park,
Dublin 7
Anyone?
Rampant buddleia (Irish Times letters)
Sponsored Link
Lovely plat. Butterfly’s are mad for it like.
We bought two in Woodies just for that reason. There was literally a butterfly on it when we went to pick it up.
Only c**ts write letters into the Irish times and if you are a person who starts a f**king letter with “A chara” i already know all i want to do is punch you in your smug annoying face.
That’s disproportionately angry and abusive, no?
Have you ever read the letters section of the Irish Times? It’s quite infuriating the ramblings of morons that get printed in one of the largest circulating national papers in the country.
It’s not mandatory reading though, is it?
No but people take it as praise of there crazy causes, if they are printed in a national paper.
I’ve been told by someone in the IT that the letters page really is the best of a bad bunch and most letters are completely unpublishable due to them being either complete illiterate nonsense or libellous (or both).
I get that but some of the stuff that gets printed in there people take as promotion of their bonkers causes and run with it cause they where printed in a trusted national paper. If there are no good letters then the editor just has to cut the section that day instead of being lazy and printing any auld shite.
Imagine the Israel/Hamas pile. Buddleia good btw.
As opposed to the comments section on a popular international blog?
Having an anonymous opinion on a blog, is not the same as a national paper printing your words with your name attached.
Why does having your real name beside your opinion make you a c**t? Is anonymity the mark of a non-c**t?
It’s not your name that makes you a See You Next Tuesday, its thinking that the world needs to here your inane ramblings and writing them into a national paper and then them printing them while avoiding real stories and also justifying your cause be giving you national coverage, in saying that though my opinion is subjective so i can see how other people don’t think that.
How does the letters section in any way facilitate the avoidance of real news? It’s the letters section, in the back of the paper. It’s the comments section before there was a comments section. It’s a bit silly to complain about that in what is essentially the same thing but without much editorial input.
So it’s some sort of insidious plot on the part of the Irish Times to distract the masses from all those stories they have to flip by to get to the letters page. What utter nonsense. Have you even read the letters in the past while?
Just today we have letters regarding the Gaza offensive, an ongoing debate about a maligned figure in Irish independence, a dissection of an IT columnists motivations, a defence of a pay rise for new consultants (which I’m sure will attract responses for days to come), another ongoing discussion on the etymology of the word “craic”, and a few others. Where’s the corporate pacification? Where’s the distraction from the “f**ked up shit”? No, there is none of those things. In fact, it’s the opposite. People engage with the f*cked up shit on a national level. Would you prefer that they all just read the news and then that’s that, or that they post inane anonymous comments?
I think the letters page does have a place, it can show the marginalia that people were interested in to future historians. Though with letters like these I always picture them having a little chuckle as they write the letter, as the cup of tea and Jaffa cake sit neglected on the writing desk, and then buying five copies and leaving them casually open on the coffee table or in the bar at the golf club.
According to blah below it was something similar t that when he wrote this. Stewart that is a good point about historians though i will give you that.
Pretendgineer i think all those sections in the paper are pointless i think a newspaper especially the newspaper of record should focus on news first then the rest. This is part of why newspapers are in such disrepute in this country no one thrusts them cause they seem to worry more about click bate headlines then real news.
I’m not a huge fan of tv journalists there are some out there i thrust but very few, i do however follow a lot of journalists on twitter i don’t really read peoples comments on what they report but if you find the right people you can get the raw story and make your own mind up on whats going on.
None of what you have just said about newspapers is in anyway related to their having a letters page. Newspapers are in disrepute, which is a highly debatable notion, because their editorial bias is more easily recognised in the all seeing internet age. Just like any person or group of people who report news or pass along information, it is distorted by their own personal inherent biases. Your claim to get the raw story off twitter is ludicrous due to this same fact. There is no such thing as unbiased news although some people do try very hard.
Let’s look at IT headlines over the past week.
“Department of Justice chief steps aside as report criticises ‘silo-driven’ culture” – there’s also something about Gaza and the central bank.
“Obama calls for ‘immediate ceasefire’ as uneasy calm hangs over Gaza” – Also, tax in the budget and income inequality
“Howlin raps Kenny over water bills” – Also Ukraine, INM and Russia (Sunday Times)
“Consultants to be offered 24% pay rise” – also Israel
“Rebels have damaged MH17 crash site, claim inspectors” – Also Angela Kerins and Rent controls
Need I go on? There’s no clickbait there, just news. You’d not even be able to tell that there’s a letters page busy filling dead space near the back between the crosswords and the sports pages. You seem to be referring to tabloid nonsense, which is thankfully mostly absent from the Times.
I am just going to throw a couple of names out there and then we have a look at how it doesn’t do clickbait, john waters, Breda obrien, David Quinn and una mulally.
They’re columnists. It’s their jobs (except David Quinn, I genuinely don’t know why he gets in there sometimes. Probably something to do with his connections to the whole broadcasting industry.); it’s their jobs to write opinion pieces and columns, not the headline news. None of this is to do with the letters page or the content of the news.
You don’t have to read any of their columns, or the Irishman’s Diary or the editorials or any of the non-news items if you don’t want to. Regardless, the news is still reported and the letters are still only a fraction of the paper.
I get that, i just feel to much time and money is spent on the superfluous stuff and not on real journalism.
Without all of that I doubt they’d sell enough papers to give people the news. I’ve always assumed that’s why the BBC doesn’t have it’s own newspaper.
BBC news viewing figures would be nothing to turn your noise up at.
One of my favourite parts of The Irish Times. Journalistic theory, by the way, is that one letter to the paper represents 1,000 people with the same view.
Do chara go buan…
A Chara,
The internet has the 1-9-90 rule which makes it 10 times better mathematically.
Adios,
Stu
Seems moderate enough to me.
a chara, butterflies love Buddleia, even if some classify it as a weed.
Bees are also big fans of it and it is not like we need to bolster their population or anything so lets kill it off like yer man ciaran says we should.
a chara,
It appears that Mr. Drogg does not realise that bees are on the the brink of extinction, if we are to believe eminent scientists. Perhaps a nice warm glass of whiskey with honey should be administered to the said Mr. Drogg.
Is mise
I was being sarcastic, i well know the problems with bees and do as much a i can to promote them. Little tip plant lavender in yer garden its like bee crack you will have loads then to pollenate yer garden.
DROGG,
I THINK IT MAY HAVE BEEN A JOKE.
A Chara,
His address is at the bottom of the letter.
Have at it with your big balls.
Is Mise
Medium Sized C.
Just cause i am angry doesn’t mean i am going to track him down and beat the snot out of him, what sort of animal do you think i am?
The sort of reactionary idiot who calls someone who has the temerity to write a letter a ‘c**t’ ?
The sort of moron who wants to inflict violence on someone for the use of a single irish word?
How these things make you angry is beyond me, but it sort of answers the question of what sort of animal i think you are.
rotide if your going to write a letter why not write it in Irish completely? and why start an open letter with my friend, i don’t know you and ether does most of the readers of the irish times so we are not your friends. Finally saying if i was in the company of someone who uses “a chara” as a greeting would infuriate me and make me want to punch them is one thing. But i wouldn’t, human beings have this thing called self control where we control our responses to things even when infuriated.
So “A” isn’t an Irish word now?
A killer whale.
Nice thats a good animal, great social structures and very intelligent.
Only c**nts are so passionate about trying to stop people from using the Irish language.
I never said i was trying to stop people using the Irish language but if your going to start a letter in Irish write it all in Irish and don’t start an open letter with my friend when i don’t know you.
Jimminy-jillikers.
This is like Coltrane with all the Giant Steps around here.
I’m pretty sure that Drogg was neither seriously advocating violence against Comment section OG’s nor advocating stamping out the Irish language.
This is not Tumblr.
Its not that bad a day outside.
…pretty cloudy here. Warm tho, which is nice.
I need it to be cold again, I’m not built for these temperatures. It’s probably why i am so irritable.
Its Humid like a humid thing.
He should have got a few college lecturers and arts luvvies to sign the letter. That’s how you know you’re dealing with a complete, thundering c%£#
Its actually myself that wrote that letter.
Cheer up man, I was being a little tongue in cheek.
Cormac.
Ha ha that was pointed out to me above by Medium Sized C, i still hate starting a open letter with “a chara”. Dude you do realise you just gave up yer secret identity, its like we just found out superman is clark kent.
To be pedantic, it’s not an open letter, but a letter to the editor. He’s not addressing you. It’s why other letters begin “Sir” and they used to begin “Madam”, when the IT had a woman editor.
Estimado Drogg,
Tá fíor bhrón orm nar thaithní mo litir leat. Amach seo, gheallaim dhuit gur scríobhfaidh mé i Ghaelige gach litir a sheolfaidh mé do na páipéirí náisiúnta.
I invite you to write the address as published – if it doesn’t arrive, you can pen a letter about urgency for the postal service to recruit the brightest and best in the postal field (this is a pun on another letter in the Times), and who have suffered probably just over 20% pay reduction in recent years…yadda yadda yadda…..
I presume the irony (or is it) of this letter (on the topic of ‘online commentariat’) is not lost on you: http://www.irishtimes.com/debate/letters/the-online-commentariat-1.1880730
Continued success.
Beir bua,
C.
Blah i see this as the start of a beautiful friendship.
BBC did a story on this two weeks ago
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28196221
Time for an Isreal/Palestine post?
I’m getting itchy that there hasn’t been one for ages!
I need to express my ignorance.
…the Seanad has been recalled to sort out Israel….they might get round to the Buddleia scourge if there’s time before lunch.
Speak for yourself! I, for one, am glad to see any kind of colour/greenery in north inner city…
What’s with these “anyone?” posts?
The intonation reads like that of annoying Valleygirl/Southsider airhead?
It’s an invasive species, is that what you want to know? It’s all over Dublin.
yeah, we should say ‘story budd(liea)?’ instead.
a buddleia nicked my sandwich out of my hand on grafton street last night.
That’d be the triffids, not the buddleias.
That plant is growing every where at the moment!! Near me there’s a large shrub of it and it’s around 20ft tall and starting to sprout in other areas around it too.
Also I was looking it up to see what it was and read that although it attracts butterflies, they get no nutrients from it so their larvae are actually struggling.
Twats.
It’s the most successful plant (invasive species) ever to root on this island or the UK apparently. So all those holocaust and post-apocolyptic movies without a city covered in buddleias are wrong. So there.
more ‘successful’ than rhodedendron?
It’s beautiful and it’s made me appreciate the beauty of the city even more this summer. I love that it’s everywhere — Dublin isn’t this concrete maze for once, it’s got nice-smelling flowers blooming up wherever it can.
Be better if it was a number of different plants though.
As i said above plant lavender, it smells great, the colours are stunning and its great for promoting bees.
A chara dhíl
Lavender is great in France; in Ireland not so much because the season for its bloom is so short in our climate. Buddleia blooms all summer long. Ask any bee.
I thought the article had to be about Gaza, for it to get more than 100 comments.