Big Mother is watching.
Melanie O’Connor writes:
Coming up on tonight’s show Colm O’Regan presents his findings in the field of knowledge known as ‘Mammyology’, which laughs in the face of conventional science… featuring Ireland’s most-loved Mammy, Biddy from Glenroe, aka Mary McEvoy!
Republic of Telly at 10pm on RTÉ2.
Pop lyric infographics by Gearóid’s cousin at Flight Design Co.
Available as prints in a range of sizes.
From top: Irish Press cover the morning after the fire; eight of those who perished in the fire; Irish Examiner cover in May, 2016 in which former Garda Frank Mullen denied any involvement in the House of Horrors and the Howard fire.
On May 3, former garda Frank Mullen gave an interview to Irish Examiner journalist Michael Clifford.
On the following Sunday, May 8, Mr Clifford broadcast an interview with Mr Mullen, and his wife Ellen, on Newstalk.
The subject of both interviews was Cynthia Owen and allegations she has made against Mr Mullen, a founder of the Garda Representative Association and former chairman of Dalkey United football club.
Mrs Owen has alleged that she was prostituted by her parents to a group of local men, including three local gardaí, in the 1970s.
In January of this year, she posted on her Facebook page photographs of the surviving men alleged by her to have been involved in this abuse. These photographs included Mr Mullen.
Mr Mullen strenuously denied the allegations in both interviews.
But Mr Mullen also referred to a fire that took place at 8, Carysfort Avenue in Dalkey in the early hours of Monday, March 11, 1974.
The fire claimed the lives of news vendor Derek (41) and Stella Howard (37), who was pregnant, and 11 of their 13 children – Louise (19), Derek (17), Jackie (15), Margaret (13), Jimmy (11), Collette (9), Marcella (8), Ronald (7), Catherine (3), Victoria (2) and Alan (1).
Three members of the Howard family – Louise, 19; Colm, 14 and Anthony, 12 – initially survived the fire. Louise later died on March 18.
In the Irish Examiner article, Mr Mullen explained that, during a Garda interview in 2014, as part of a review of Ms Owen’s allegations, he was shown a list of allegations against him that “numbered over 100”.
This was the first time, he said, that he learned allegations had been made against him concerning the Howard fire.
Mr Mullen told Mr Clifford:
“I was told a document came into their possession. He [a garda] read it out about the disaster of the Howard family where 13 of them were burned to death in Dalkey. He said there was an allegation that me and others broke into the Howard family home, murdered some of them with a pick-axe handle, and burned the bodies. And that I drove one of those left alive around and tried to kill him.”
In the article, Mr Mullen says he didn’t hear any more as, after being notified of these allegations, he passed out. An ambulance was called, but he recovered without having to go to hospital. Later that year, he suffered a stroke.
In the Newstalk interview, Mr Mullen talked again about the first time he heard there were allegations against him concerning the fire.
Mr Mullen said:
“Out of the blue, they produced an envelope and they said, ‘we’ve one thing here to mention to you. It’s the Howard disaster’. And I didn’t know what they were going to say and they said that myself and others had broken into the Howard house and murdered these people and then set fire to destroy the evidence. I got such a shock that I passed out. I physically passed out that week. I couldn’t believe it and that was the first I’d ever heard about it. And I have heard nothing about it since except that it’s beyond belief that the Garda Siochana would have that sort of information and that I was never told about it. And, what more can I say?”
During the interview, Ellen Howard said this exchange with the gardai took place on July 17, 2014. She also said that Frank Mullen’s father and Derek Howard’s fathers were friends as they worked in the corporation together.
In the Irish Examiner article, Mr Clifford wrote that it was his understanding that the allegations against Mr Mullen in relation to the fire, were made to the gardai via Ms Owen.
Mr Clifford wrote:
“The Irish Examiner understands that the allegation originated with the surviving member of the Howard family, who has died in the last year. It was passed on to Cynthia Owen, who conveyed it to the gardaí.”
But, in contrast, Ms Owen’s solicitor Gerry Dunne told Mr Clifford:
“A number of years ago Anthony Howard made contact with our client through social media and informed her that he had been trying to get the Gardaí to deal with his allegations for some time without success. Extremely serious allegations were made by Mr Howard against Frank Mullen, which up until then our client was unaware of. Our client understands that when Anthony Howard attended a Memorial Mass in Dalkey for his family in 2014 he repeated his allegations to various people.
“Our client has also been informed by Gardaí in recent times that they were seeking to speak with Anthony Howard who had made it clear that he wanted some progress made on his allegations. Unfortunately, Anthony Howard has now died and our client does not know whether Gardaí are continuing to follow up on any of Mr Howard’s allegations.”
Mr Clifford’s article also summarised the cause of the fire as follows:
“The cause of the fire has always been regarded as accidental… The fire in March 1974 was regarded at the time as a tragic accident. Mr Howard was a newspaper vendor and one of the rooms of the house was understood to be full of newspapers. An oil heater in the house was believed to have been the source of the fire.”
The Howard family home at 8, Carysfort Avenue was a two-storey semi-detached house. On the ground floor were four rooms. There was a sitting room, at the front of the house, while the following three rooms were at the back of the house: a kitchen, a toilet and a separate bathroom.
The front room (sitting room) was separated from the other rooms by a hallway and, at one end of the hallway, was a short stairway. It also contained a three-piece PVC-covered suite which included a couch, upon which Louise slept.Continue reading →
Overhead, the Albatross – Dublin post-rockers cover Hans Zimmer’s Time
What you may need to know…
01. Last we checked in with Overhead, the Albatross, they’d just launched their absolutely immense debut LP Learning to Growl.
02. Today, the band has released a wee stopgap between now and their big December gig in Vicar Street: their first ever attempt at a cover. Hans Zimmer’s Time, accompanied by Charlie Chaplin’s final speech from The Great Dictator. For the time that’s in it.
03. The video for same, directed by Luke Daly, is streaming above.
04. The band’s big year-end excursion happens at Vicar Street, December 9th. Tickets €20 plus various service fees.
Verdict: A brave take on a masterpiece, layered over with the pep-talk humanity needs at present.
From top: Donald Trump; Derek Mooney
Winning the Presidency while not getting more votes than your opponent does suggest that Trump the populist is not so popular.
Derek Mooney writes:
I closed last week’s Broadsheet column with the line:
“…the furore and turmoil of this divisive and nasty campaign will not end with the result. If anything, it is likely to get worse. The next President may well be faced with a task and a challenge which the conduct of the campaign has ensured they cannot fulfil.”
Though this came at the end of a piece where I predicted that Hillary Clinton would win, this part will remain the case for some time to come.
While, as Micheál Martin observed this morning on RTÉ’s Today with Sean O’Rourke, there is some evidence of moderation in the interviews that Trump has given since his election, that evidence is slight and is very far from conclusive. At the moment it is a hope, rather than a firm belief.
You know you are clutching at the faintest straws of hope when you view the appointment of the ultimate GOP and Washington inside Reince Priebus as Trump’s Chief of Staff. It is a key appointment and does suggest that Trump grasps the realities of the balance of powers in Washington, but its truer significance may lie in the opprobrium Trump was prepared to endure by this appointment.
As one of the more right wing and strident of Trump’s original band of political advisers, Roger Stone, tweeted when word of the announcement leaked out: “the selection… would cause a rebellion in Trump’s base. #RyansBoy”. Stone’s anger abated when he later learned that Trump was also appointing alt-right, anti-semite Steven Bannon as a senior adviser and strategist.
The signals coming from Trump so far are mixed, at best. He may ease off on his plans to scrap Obamacare and his wall with Mexico may not be a wall, but he does not plan to quickly shift to the centre and be the President of those who voted for him and those who didn’t.
Which brings us to one of the myths of the recent election, namely that Trump has created some mass popular political movement in the United States. As I have been saying here since last June Trump was riding a zeitgeist not of his own making.
While there was a sizeable chunk of voters, including the deplorables, attracted by his Putin-esque strong man message that he alone could save the US, the key swing voters viewed him a way to remind Washington and the big cities that their communities could no longer be ignored.
The division in America is as much geographic as it is class based. Look at a map showing the voting levels county by county and you will see that the main schism in today’s USA is between the big urban centres and small town/rural America: the so called “fly-over” communities.
These are the areas who feel both left behind and looked down upon, literally and figuratively. They are seeing what economic activity there is being concentrated on the big urban centres. It is a phenomenon we can relate to here.
As Enda Kenny discovered a few months ago, you cannot sell the “Keep the Recovery Going” message in areas which have yet to feel the recovery. Not only does the message not chime with these voters, it smacks of protecting the status quo
Trump did not start a movement, but he very effectively tapped into a great deal of hurt. He reached out to those disappointed by how trade agreements had shipped their jobs to Mexico and beyond and spoke out for them. He did the same on globalisation, on social change and offered to be their champion. The “those” and “them” in the last two sentences primarily refers to white, smalltown/rural Americans.
But while his appeal worked and he did undoubtedly switch people who voted Obama in 2012 to support him in 2016, Trump’s appeal was not as widespread and far reaching as he and his surrogates would have us believe.
This part of the story will slowly emerge as the full and final details of the results come in. As it stands (at the time of writing this), on the national popular vote – Hillary Clinton is about 1% ahead of Trump – approximately 600,000 votes. According to projections by Nate Cohn and others she may end up ahead by over 2 million votes – a margin of 1.5%.
Clinton leading Trump nationally by 1-2% is in line with most of the main polls and is certainly within the margin of error.
My own “Hillary will win” prediction here last week was based on my own guestimate that she would get 64 million votes and Trump would win 62 million – on this calculation I gave her 290 Electoral College Votes. I felt he would win Florida and Ohio (and said so on Twitter), but was confident she would hold traditional Democrats states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. I got that part wrong.
This is precisely where Trump won the Presidency and, when the final numbers are in, he may have done it by about getting less than a hundred thousand people in these States who voted Obama in 2012 to swing to him.
This was a specific and targeted operation – not some massive popular groundswell.
The Trump shift was not limited to this, he did gain more votes from Hispanics than expected, esp in Florida, but without those 100,000 so voters in WI, MI and PA he would not be President. But the fact is that he did and that a much weaker Democratic party campaign and disconnected messaging in these States allowed this.
This does not invalidate the result. Presidential elections are decided State by State with a weighted (not proportional) Electoral College deciding the result. Donald Trump will be President – there is not a doubt about that. He won the election based on the rules agreed and decided well in advance. But – winning the Presidency while not getting more votes than your opponent does suggest that Trump the populist is not so popular.
As a colleague of mine remarked on Twitter yesterday:
“The victory of Trump resembles the victory of Morsi in Egypt: suddenly their bigoted supporters think the country is theirs & act like it.”
Trump will need to do a great deal more than look down the lens of a TV camera and say stop. It will take a lot more and a lot longer to calm the turmoil stirred up by the campaign of the past year and a half.
Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010. His column appears here every Monday afternoon. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney
Pic: AP
A time lapse by Emanuele Fornasier showing 18 examples of electrocrystallisation wherein metallic crystals form in a chemical solution when a current is run through it.
This morning.
Mansion House, Dawson Street, Dublin 2
At The Safe Ireland Summit – bringing together “40 global leaders on domestic violence” – where Bray’s Hozier performed a couple of numbers, took questions from RTÉ’s Claire Byrne.and met with Maria Dempsey, mother of Alicia Brough who was murdered in 2010, Ms Dempsey was the opening speaker at the summit which concludes tomorrow.
Last week, as the death of Leonard Cohen was announced, we put up a pony to spend at any of the many Golden Discs nationwide, including Dundrum Town Centre (above) which opened last week (their biggest shop yet at 10,000 sq. ft).
In return, we asked YOU to nominate your favourite Leonard Cohen song.
You answered in your dozens.
But there could be only one winner.
Liam Deliverance earns the voucher with this heartfelt dedication.
On this sad day would you ever just play Leonard Cohen’s “Nevermind” because he lived his life, he lived it as he wanted to live it, not as the world tried to dictate how he should live it. If you want to feel sorry for somebody, feel it for yourself, you are still here, you still face the challenge of preventing the world from changing you into opinionless robot. Mr Cohen is gone now, he survived that challenge, he wears the hat and now he wears the smile.
In other highlights:
Gorugeen: “On this sad day would you ever just play Leonard Cohen’s Tower of Song please. It reminds me of doing night feeds. My babies all calmed down just nicely when i put this song on. So long Leonard. I will surely miss you.
Nessy: “On this sad day would you ever just play Leonard Cohen’s Anthem because “the dove is never free” but today, Leonard Cohen is. “Don’t dwell on what has passed away ….”
Verbatim: ‘On this sad day would you ever just play Leonard Cohen’s Closing Time because it reminds me of all that I’ve left behind and we all have a closing time.”
Kearnivale: “On this sad day would you ever just play Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man, because his label told him they weren’t sure if he was any good, and he came back with this stunner.”
Turgenev: “On this sad day would you ever just play the documentary Leonard and Marianne, about the years on Hydra and the goodness he left ‘for the sake of an education in the world’.”
Thank you all.
