Yearly Archives: 2017

Craig Boylan

Gardai are appealing for help to find Craig Boylan, aged 16, who has been missing from Geashill in Co Offaly since Tuesday, August 15.

Craig is described as 5’10” (178cm), of medium build, has short red hair and blue eyes.

When last seen he was wearing a black jacket and grey tracksuit bottoms.

Gardaí believe Craig may be in the Ballymun or Blanchardstown areas of Dublin.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Portlaoise Garda Station on 057 8674100 or any Garda station.

Via Rollingnews

There was a time.

When he owned the concrete.

Johnny Kennan (him off the telly) kicks it old school:

A friend of mine told me about his 12 year old son graduating from national school recently.

I cast my mind back to the day I graduated from national school. It was 30 years ago. I’m old!

I don’t remember having a graduation. I remember the principal telling us we were getting nothing because we were the worse class ever. Looking back we were just young lads finding our way through life and any trouble we got up to was just hijinks.

It got me thinking though. When I tried to picture myself sitting in that school desk the first thing to hit me was the memory smell of pencil sharpener. Usually I have to smell something to give me a sense of memory.

Then I remember the football match we used to have on special Fridays in the school yard. If we were good. All week we’d wait for that game. Because it was just our class that would have the playground to ourselves.

All week we’d wait just to be told we were too bold and we couldn’t play. But then on rare occasions we would get our game. For one hour on a Friday afternoon we were playing at Wembley on FA Cup final day.

We played with a tennis ball and that made it more magical. It meant the purists could play. I had eyesight in just one eye. Still have. It was very important to have foot- eye coordination. With my left foot and left eye I owned that concrete.

Then I got thinking some more.

Could I name my classmates from 6th class in 1987? 30 years ago? I have 32 in my mind. I don’t know why. One for every county or every chess piece.

After a lot of serious thinking I came up with 25. I know I can ring my friend Jim and he can name the rest. I think it’s better pay him a visit and catch up.

What I wouldn’t give to be back on that yard with those boys for one more day. Just to remember and feel what it was like to be 12 again.

Now I’m casting my mind back to the last line of ‘Stand By Me‘.

“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?”

FIGHT!

Pic: Shutterstock

University Hospital Galway

Dara Bradley, in the Connacht Tribune, reports:

A woman lay dead, undiscovered for up to 10 hours, in the toilet of a city hospital.

The deceased, believed to be a Polish national, was eventually found in a disabled toilet on the ground floor adjacent to the Emergency Department of University Hospital Galway.

The woman was not registered as a patient of the hospital, or the Emergency Department. It is understood she was a member of the public, and entered the building without the knowledge of hospital staff. A probe is underway into the death.

It is understood she may have fatally hurt herself, possibly accidentally, while inside the toilet and the alarm wasn’t raised until 10 hours later when it was being serviced.

The toilet was locked from the inside, a hospital source said.

Dead woman in hospital toilet was not found for 10 hours (Connacht Tribune)

Rollingnews

Miriam O’Callaghan and Louis Walsh on Saturday Night with Miriam last Summer

On Saturday Night with Miriam…

It’s deja view again.

Sinead Harrington writes:

Louis Walsh will join Miriam on the couch this Saturday night to look back on Ireland’s Eurovision bid and to reveal how he made it in the music industry. He will also discuss how difficult it is for up and coming performers to make it in a changed industry.

Ahead of his Irish tour, Russell Watson will perform the Mario Lanza classic ‘With a Song in My Heart’.

And the leaders from this year’s Celebrity Operation Transformation – Mary Byrne, Gary O’Hanlon, Triona McCarthy, Kayleigh Cullinan and James Patrice – will talk about why they want to take on the weight loss challenge in front of the nation.

There will also be music from Celtic Woman  will close the show with a beautiful rendition of ‘Time to Say Goodbye’.

*opens fourth bottle*

Saturday Night with Miriam at 9:15pm on RTÉ One.

Pic; Lovin.ie

Stayed up last night?

A warm, embracing thank you to clockwise from top left: ‘Preposterous‘, Olga Cronin, Johnny Keenan and Neil Curran.

The show can be viewed in its entirety above.

Distressingly, Olga found herself locked out of her own flat WITHOUT her house keys following a shift (newspaper subbing nothing naughty).

This left an all-male panel to expound on a variety of matters that included women’s forgetfulness the New World Order, the Leaving Cert and Neo-Nazis. Not in that order.

Some sweary bits.

Previously: Broadsheet on the Telly on broadsheet

Do you want to be on the telly? Join our panel by sending a short email to broadsheet@broadsheet.ie marked ‘Broadsheet on the Telly’

Colum Kenny

On Wednesday, a commentary piece by media analyst Colum Kenny about the Irish press, Charlottesville and Donald Trump was posted on The Irish Times website.

It was trending for a time.

Then it was taken down.

Without explanation.

Colum Kenny wrote:

Speaking in New York, at a combative press conference where he controversially renewed his claim that there was wrong on both sides involved in a street fight about a civil war statue of a Confederate general on a high horse at Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump was asked about chief executive officers leaving his advisory manufacturing council in protest.

He slammed them, saying, “they’re not taking their jobs seriously as it pertains to this country . . . If you look at Merck as an example, take a look at where their product is made. It’s made outside of our country. We want products made in the country . . . You can’t do it necessarily in Ireland and all of these other places. You have to bring this work back to this country.”

That a president of the US is singling out Ireland in response to lost US jobs is bad news. And it matters a lot more to Ireland than the details of a street fight in middle America. You would not think so from the relative media coverage here.

That street fight provides good self-righteous TV footage, easily and cheaply available, with cardboard cut-out bad guys in the form of Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members. Trump makes good copy.

He equivocated when it came to condemning those who perpetrated the worst violence at Charlottesville, but he voiced the reservations of many Americans when he claimed there had been violence on the other side, from a small number who reportedly came with baseball bats to confront a lawful, if odious, right-wing demonstration against the removal of a statue.

Trump is a sometimes odious and frightening president, but he was elected fairly under the American system.

Irish fascination with his antics is tinged by a certain air of superiority that leaves us open to accusations of hypocrisy.

We have, after all, attracted US jobs offshore by means of incentives that seem to have come to have no social bottom line.

We hide behind the shield of Nato without paying a penny for it, and cutely let the US buy facilities at Shannon while we take the neutral high ground.

And what of our own Civil War monuments?

We jettisoned various statues of Queen Victoria after independence, but what if we were to tear down monuments to those who rejected democracy in 1922 when most people accepted the Treaty, or various unofficial memorials to the later IRA? Would those opposing such iconography be dismissed as fascists?

Donald Trump has no monopoly on ambivalence.

Anyone?

The commentary piece can be read in full here

Pics; Irish Times