Superquinn founder Feargal Quinn

Supermarket tycoon and former senator Feargal Quinn, who helped revolutionise shopping in Ireland – including introducing SuperClub, the country’s first supermarket loyalty card, in 1993 – has died.

RIP.

Superquinn founder Feargal Quinn dies aged 82 (RTE)

Rollingnews

Meanwhile…

From top: Gibney’s, Malahide; The Frank and Walters

The Frank And Walters

Cork’s criminally underrated and overlooked indie guitar kings play a special one-off acoustic gig in the picturesque seaside village of Malahide in the People’s Republic of North County Dublin.

To get your juices flowing, here’s the video for their single ‘Stages’ from their excellent 2016 album ‘Songs For The Walking Wounded’ which features a spoken word verse from fellow Leesider Cillian Murphy.

Nick says: You’d be a langer to miss this one, boy!

Doors 8.30pm.

Tickets here

Frank And Walters

From top: US Democrat Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, Peter Butitigieg and Jow Biden, viewing an original copy of Ulysses in Trinity College’s library in 2016.

Weaponising Joyce

On the US campaign trail.

Via The New Yorker:

Beto O’Rourke comes to Joyce by way of Homer. Last April, he told a Texas radio interviewer that the Odyssey was “absolutely” his favorite book. He named his first child Ulysses—only, he has suggested, because he “didn’t have the balls to call him Odysseus.” That’s fine. Joyce, too, called his novel after the Latin rather than Greek name of the hero.

O’Rourke’s story starts to wobble, however, when you learn that his next child, a daughter, is named Molly, seemingly referring to Leopold Bloom’s wife—she of the twenty-four-thousand-word, eight-sentence, unpunctuated soliloquy that closes the novel. And his third child, another son, is named Henry. If you’re already in a “Ulysses” state of mind, you might recall that Leopold Bloom hides behind the nom de plume Henry Flower in his epistolary flirtation with the “lady typist” Martha Clifford….

…Pete Buttigieg’s Joyceolatry comes across as the best informed and the most authentic. I’ve known how to spell (if not how to pronounce) “Buttigieg” for a long time, because Mayor Pete’s father, Joseph A. Buttigieg, was a literary scholar who wrote a book about Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”

Taking that volume down from my shelf the other day, I saw that Buttigieg writes in the preface that “our son Peter Paul has contributed an uncommon measure of patience and tolerance” to the writing of the book. It was published in 1987, when Pete was five—patience and tolerance were no small thing.

…Joe Biden’s occasional references to Joyce over the years feel less strategic. He hasn’t been talking about Joyce as often of late—there have been other issues for him to address—though he has a habit of kicking around Joyce allusions like snuff at a wake….After seeing some of Joyce’s manuscripts in the Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin, in 2016, Biden called him “one of my favorite writers”

…But, given the controversy swirling around him, Biden should remember that “Ulysses” contains its own #MeToo movement, or at least moment. In the novel’s most vertiginous chapter, “Circe,” Bloom hallucinates a series of women accusing him of a wide range of forms of unwanted sexual attention

The Politicians Who Love “Ulysses” (Kevin Dettmar, New Yorker)

Pics: Getty/Rollingnews

Thanks Bebe

An extraordinarily complex, hand-cranked conveyer belt that uses the rattle and shuffle of its mechanism along with the click and swish of 2000 cascading marbles to create notes and rhythms.

Built by Swedish musician Martin Molin, it’s actually just part of Marble Machine X – a much larger project he’s been working on since completing his first such contraption – the Wintergatan in 2016.

awesomer

Vicky Phelan

In today’s Irish Times,  Health Correspondent Paul Cullen has an interview with Limerick mother-of-two Vicky Phelan – one year on from her High Court case where she settled a case against Clinical Pathology Laboratories Inc, Austin, Texas, for €2.5million.

Ms Phelan, who refused to sign a gagging order about her case, was diagnosed with terminal cancer following a cervical smear test error.

Following her case, it later emerged that more than 200 women diagnosed with cancer were not informed of an audit which revised their earlier, negative smear tests.

Mr Cullen reports:

“…Ms Phelan said the Taoiseach ‘just doesn’t get it’ in relation to fixing the problems that have arisen.

‘The classic example is him going on Six One News saying no woman would ever have to go into court, and look what’s happened. That’s still the case and not only that, the tribunal has not yet been established in order for that not to happen.

‘I don’t think he gets it at all. And it’s not just because he’s a gay man, I just don’t think he gets it.’

…’I think we got a lot of promises made at the time, not to shut us up but to “give them what they want quickly and get them off the pages”.

‘Until we have a situation in this country where people are held accountable for what they’ve done, these things are just going to keep happening and there’ll be another scandal,’ she said.”

Meanwhile, during an interview with Miriam O’Callaghan on RTE’s Today with Sean O’Rourke this morning, Ms Phelan apologised for and clarified her ‘gay man’ comment (above).

She said:

“I’m critical of the Government in general. I suppose, I think some of what I said was taken out of context and I would like to apologise to the Taoiseach for the comment in today’s article.

“What I said, I was trying to make the point that the issues faced by the women and their families are wide-ranging, they involve input from a wide range of players, from the Department of Health to the HSE, legal profession, the medical profession, and the Attorney General’s office to draft up this legislation.

“And basically any unwillingness or inertia on the part of one player can hold everything up and that is exactly what has happened over the last 12 months.”

Asked specifically what she was trying to say when she made the “gay man” comment, Vicky said:

“This is a women’s issue and it’s always about women, that was the point I was making. It wasn’t anything to do with the Taoiseach being gay, whatsoever. That was totally taken out of context.”

“We’ve seen it on a number of occasions over the last number of years, Miriam, between the different scandals that have happened to women. Bridget McCole, the Hepatitis C scandal…I think we have a very poor record and poor history in this country in dealing with women’s issues.”

Vicky Phelan criticises Varadkar for ‘unacceptable delays’ (Paul Cullen, The Irish Times)

Listen back to interview in full here

Rollingnews

From top: Peter Donegan (left) and Ed Burnham of Burnham Landscaping: Peter’s silver Medal-winning garden at the RHS Flower Show Cardiff

With silver bells!

You might recall earlier this month, we told you that Peter Donegan had become the first Irish gardener to have designs accepted to the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Flower Show in Cardiff, Wales.

Well, Peter’s design, for UK based garden charity Perennial and constructed by Burnham Landscaping, won SILVER at the 180-year-old competition.

Last year, the Dubliner was selected by a French jury to represent Ireland to design and realise the Irish WW1 Centenary Peace Garden at Chateau de Peronne in the Somme, Northern France.

The Perreniel Garden will now be relocated to Veterans Growth in East Sussex, England a charity who run horticultural therapy courses for ex-service men and women who have been diagnosed with a mental illness.

In fairness.

Peter Donegan

Previously: Blades of Glory

Meanwhile…

Ah here.

Broadsheet.ie