From top: Taoiseach Enda Kenny addresses the all-island forum on Brexit; Michaél Martin
This morning.
Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin 8.
At the all-island forum on Brexit.
Fianna Fáil leader Micheal Martin criticised UK ministers for pushing a “crude and chaotic” Brexit agenda.
Urging Ireland to attempt to soften the UK’s exit from the EU, he said June’s “divisive and damaging” referendum result had profound short, medium and long-term implications for Ireland.
“Our agenda is the clear one of wanting to minimise the damage and division of Brexit and to maximise progress for all parts of this island,” he told the forum.
“Let’s explore radical ways of softening Brexit, but we also have to talk about the crude and chaotic Brexit which some in the London cabinet appear to be advocating.
“Unlike the Foreign Secretary (Boris Johnston), we don’t have the luxury of being pro-having the cake and eating it.”
Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams said the forum should “not be about a hard Brexit or a soft Brexit. It needs to be about moving beyond the consequences of Brexit and looking at alternatives”.
Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged session was released as a full-length recording on November 1st, 1994, months after the suicide of frontman/guitarist Kurt Cobain.
A historical article on the emergency landing of Captain Reuben Ocaña, in Mallow Racecourse in 1983 has been doing the rounds on local Facebook in the last week or so.
A Gulfstream II executive jet piloted by Ocaña made an emergency landing in the racecourse, and rather than transport the aircraft by road, insurers insisted on a temporary 3,000-foot tarmacadam runway to be built to fly the aircraft out.
The crew stayed in the North Cork town for five weeks, and became local celebrities, adjudicating the Rakes of Mallow beauty contest.
Their legend in the area endures to this day, with local nightclub Marakibo rebranding as Ocaña’s earlier this year.
Cammac66 writes:
Gerard Callanan, who owns a service station in Mallow, witnessed the landing. “I was opening up the garage at the time,” he says. “The next thing, I see this plane hovering around. It came around a second time, and I saw it landing. I kind of got a fright. It went down about 10 inches into the ground. It ran for about 100 yards or 200 yards, and the wings hit some of the fence posts
I could see the cockpit opening, and people getting out. I went over then, after a few minutes. The gardaí were arriving at that stage. When the captain of the plane came out, I said, ‘You’re welcome to Mallow’.”
“While Trump wants to make America great again, we have to ask ourselves, ‘What made America great in the first place?’… The short answer to that is simple. America was great not because of what our forefathers did — but because of who our forefathers were. America was founded as a White Christian Republic. And as a White Christian Republic it became great.”
01. Dublin indie/pop veterans Fight Like Apes announced their imminent split on social media this morning, following a prolonged radio silence. It closes a career that includes two Choice Music Prize nominations.
03. Streaming above is the video for Crouching Bees, the lead-off single from the aforementioned eponymous long-player. Not to pick favourites, but it’d be silly to just horse Jake Summers into their eulogy.
04. The band’s farewell statement included the announcement of their final gigs. Write the band:
Stick a fork in us, we’re done.
We’ve been quiet for a while now. We’ve had a lot of thinking and talking to do.
We’d be here all year if we started listing the people we wanted to thank, so we’ll just do that in our own time.
You’ll see us all again under different musical guises but, these 3 shows will be Fight Like Apes’ last. We want to call it a day while we’re all still pals and are proud of what we’ve done.
And we are very, very proud.
It’s a deadly time in so many ways to be in a band; you can have so much control over your work if you’re clever; you can release it how and when you like and in our opinion, right now, Ireland is the healthiest it’s ever been in terms of talent and diversity.
But, there are massive challenges for a lot of bands, mostly financial, that make this a tough job and sadly, those obstacles have become too big for us.
I think we all know that we’re going to hear announcements like this more often. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that we can’t keep producing records if you keep not paying for them. Bands are having to sell beautiful albums for €2.99, labels can’t give you as much support since they’re losing income too and our alternative radio stations* are practically non existent now, meaning so many wonderful bands will not get a chance to get played on radio as they’ll be competing with huge pop acts.
Please buy your music in independent record stores or directly from the band.
Don’t fool yourself in to thinking that your £10 subscription to Deezer and Spotify helps us at all. It does not. Look how many bands are on there and do the maths.
Please go to gigs. Please buy merch.
Thanks to all you entirely crazy, wonderful people who have supported us and danced and screamed with us over the past 10 years. We could never thank you enough.
I still can’t believe some of the amazing things we’ve done together and how far we came.
December 9th – back to where we had a our very first gig 10 years ago – Whelans, Dublin.
FLA out.
-MK, Jamie, Conor, Pete-
*RIP TXFM. We absolutely adore you and everything you’ve done for music in Ireland.
VERDICT: Another veteran act calls it a day in a time of transition for an active Irish music scene. They’ll be sadly missed, but this upcoming tour ought to be the New Orleans funeral that Fight Like Apes deserves.
Among the new emojis confirmed for the next iPhone update are two tributes to David Bowie.
Male and female emoticons portraying Aladdin Sane represent singers in a new pack of emojis representing different professions, which also include firemen, paramedics, etc.
Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year 2016, from Left: Sue Lowe, Alicia Lowe, A’Driane Nieves, Jane Maynard, Bono, Diana Lamon, Mazelle Etessami, and Carrie Cohen
Let the meninists stand up and cheer
For U2’s much loved balladeer
As well as making pop
He’s shot to the top
Of the list of great women this year.
An interactive infographic for exploringthe myriad interconnections of Europe’s royal dynasties. To wit:
Royal and aristocratic families are known for their fondness of marrying within their own clique. Restraining aggression between two families, creating a stronger front towards a third family, increasing territorial acquisitions, legal claim to a foreign throne through inheritance are some of the most common reasons. This leads to very interesting and entangled family trees which the visual tries to convey. It shows how all 10 of the current hereditary royal leaders of Europe can be connected to each other through their ancestors. We don’t have to look very far back. Even the most distant royal relatives have their shared forebears born after the year 1700.
