Yearly Archives: 2014

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[From top: Kim Wilde and Brother Ricky; Enda Kenny and Kim ; Claire Byrne, centre, with Catherine Burns and Sarah Austen Jenness from The Moth American storytelling radio show]; from left: Loujein Haj Youssef from Radio Rozana in Syria, Broadsheet pal Liam Geraghty from RTE, Jupe Tuomola from Radio Nova in Finland and Jani Rajalin also from Radio Nova]

Scenes from today’s RadioDays Europe 2014 Conference  [a meeting of public and private sector radio staff from Europe and beyond]]in the National Convention Centre, Dublin featuring a performance by Kim Wilde. As you do..

RadioDays

(Mark Stedman/Photocall Ireland)

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“If you had 30,000 three-bedroom detached houses, you’d sell them all in a week. That’s the pent-up demand that’s there.”

Enda Kenny in New York last week

“If there is to be another orgy of house building in Dublin, it will have to be funded by foreigners. And this explains why the Taoiseach went to such extraordinary lengths to talk up the Dublin housing market while he was in New York.
He hopes, we presume, that some of the international millions flooding into the commercial property market from various hedge and property funds will spill over into speculative house building.
If the hedge funds take the bait, we may well be on the cusp of another house building boom, or at least a significant upswing which would be more welcome. It would be nice to think that we will avoid the corruption, bad planning and poor development which characterised the last one; the consequences of which we will live with for decades. That may be a bit optimistic….”

Planning still a shambles as house building promoted (John McManus, Irish Times)

(Getty)

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Heavy Load by Padraig Power, age 11, from Tipperary.

Meadhb Smith writes:

“Padraig was the winner of the primary senior category of the Trocaire and Poetry Ireland Poetry competition 2013. His poem compares a school child’s struggle to carry a school bag with the struggle of a girl in Africa to carry a heavy load of water. We posted the poem [link below] as part of our Lenten campaign/Trocaire box, which this year is about the global water crisis.”

Eleven.

Trocaire (Facebook)

manhole

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Photographer S. Morita captures the beauty of Japan’s stylised manhole covers – a phenomenon that apparently started back in 1985 when a high-ranking bureaucrat in the construction ministry hit on the idea of allowing municipalities to design their own, thereby making the high cost of sewage projects a little more palatable while encouraging taxpayers to take pride in their local area.

Nearly two decades on, with ongoing design competitions and much publicity, there are an estimated 6000 such sewage-related delights in place.

Hundreds more here.

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survey

“We couldn’t work out if we should use the word Mam, Mum, Mom or Ma to promote our Mother’s Day campaign, so we decided to ask the people of Ireland. What started out as a bit of fun ended up giving us some pretty interesting insights in to Irish people’s relationships with their mothers”

Lulu O’Sullivan, Founder of Gifts Direct

GiftsDirect

The online survey ran from March  14 -19.

Thanks Ross O’Mullane