By Amsterdam-based director Ben Brand.
Right So
at
That was last time Prof.
Oh never mind.
Santry, Co Dublin this afternoon.
Thanks Aoife Mullan
Pamela Flynn writes:
This is a shore that was removed by Irish Water today. We were told that the workers were allowed sell these for scrap and use it for beer money. As you can see it weighs just under 5kg. How much would this bring as scrap value?- does anyone know? Could this money not be better used to offset the cost of the metering scheme?
Anyone?
Meanwhile…
In Edenmore, Raheny, Dublin, this afternoon:
Thanks STP
[Screengrab of today’s Irish Times’ story about Sabrina McMahon and her children]
Sabrina McMahon, who says she was forced to sleep in her car with her three children last week, spoke to Niall Boylan on 4FM earlier today and their discussion shed more light on her predicament.
It came after a ‘good samaritan’, who wishes not to be named, came forward and paid for Sabrina, a former dental nurse and carer, and her children to stay in Bewley’s Hotel for the next four weeks.
Niall Boylan: “How old are your kids by the way?”
Sabrina McMahon: “I’ve a five-year-old, Karl, he’s a boy, and then I have a three-year-old, she’s only gone three since January, and I’ve an 18-month-old girl as well.”
Boylan: “God, your hands are full, certainly. Give us a little background if you can, Sabrina, and how you ended up in this situation in the first place. You were originally living in Kildare weren’t you.”
McMahon: “I’m from Dublin all my life and I’ve up to Kildare, if would have been nine and a half years ago now but after, nine, after, it would have been seven years, seven and a half years, my boyfriend had walked out on us, so I decided to come to Dublin just for a Christmas, for the kids.”
Boylan: “Yeah.”
McMahon: “To my father’s, and when we went back up to Athy, junkies had taken over the house. They had smashed up the whole house and totally, totally ruined the house.”
Boylan: “OK, this was the house that you were renting at the time was it? Yeah?
McMahon: “Yeah.”
Boylan: “OK. So were you getting rent allowance then from…”
McMahon: “No, sorry, I wasn’t renting the house, I was supposed to be buying it.”
Boylan: “Right, OK.”
McMahon: “Then seven years later, after me coming back down to Dublin for the Christmas, when I went back up, after the house had been vandalised and everything, I had rang the bank and I told them I wasn’t going to stay there and..”
Boylan: “OK, so who was paying for the house at that time that you were living in it?”
McMahon: “I was. I thought I was paying, like I paid a solicitor, in 2005, 2,900 pound, thinking that I was going to be paying a mortgage. I got a piece of paper off him, I thought that was the deeds of the house and then seven years later, when I phoned back up – after the people had wrecked the house – I was told that the house, I’d never signed any deeds to the house.”
Boylan: “But who was paying for it, for the seven years? I’m just curious, nobody was paying for it for the seven years? And you were fooled into thinking you were eventually going to be allowed to buy it?”
McMahon: “Yeah, yeah, it was me who was paying for it.”
Boylan: “All right, OK, so you were paying a kind of rent every week then obviously, or every month?”
McMahon: “A mortgage it was.”
Boylan: “A mortgage. Right. Ok. And you were working at the time then, were you?”
McMahon: “Yeah, yeah.”
Boylan: “All right, OK. So what happened then, your relationship broke up?”
McMahon: “The relationship. Well it wasn’t that it broke up, he walked out on us.”
Boylan: “Right. OK. And kind of left you high and dry. So you were left in a situation. Now you’d already been on the council list [housing waiting list]. How long have you been on the council list now?”
McMahon: “I’m on the council list over a year now.”
Boylan: “Over a year. OK. And in the interim have they offered to give you a rent allowance to get you to rent somewhere in the meantime?”
McMahon: “They have, and even the council have said themselves that there’s nowhere accepting rent allowance. No landlord will accept rent allowance.”
Boylan: “Yeah, they are landlords who’ll refuse to accept it for whatever reasons. Yeah, they have different reasons for refusing people on rent allowance, I don’t know why they do that. It’s kind of a bit of snobbery I think more than anything else.”
McMahon: “I know, yeah. It’s terrible.”
Boylan: “So you haven’t been able to find somewhere in Dublin though, so it’s not the case the council wouldn’t give you the money. It’s just you haven’t been able to find somewhere to live?”
McMahon: “Haven’t been able to find anywhere to live, no.”
Boylan: “OK, well, you see, because the story kind of makes out in the paper that, you know, you’re being left homeless but it’s just a case of not being able to find somewhere, is it?”
McMahon: “Well, the homeless unit will not, they have told me to go back, the homeless unit in Tallaght have told me to go back to Athy because I lived there two and a half years ago, that was my last permanent address.”
Boylan: “Yeah.”
McMahon: “I’d to go back up there, onto the homeless, up there, try get a house up there, reschool my kids, my three-year-old child, she needs speech therapy, I’ve been waiting a year and a half for that, and she’s due that next month, and they told me I’d have to get all that done back up in Athy. I’m isolated up there…”
Boylan: “Because like everybody else, you have to go onto the list, the council list now is something live seven to eight years, depending I suppose on your circumstance and, like everybody else, you have to go onto that list I suppose.”
McMahon: “Yeah.”
Boylan: “So what are you hoping to get? Are you hoping that the council will kind of bump you up the list a little bit and will give you something in Dublin, in Tallaght is it?”
McMahon: “I don’t know what’s going to happen from here, you know? I haven’t got a clue what’s going to happen.”
Boylan: “But why were you sleeping in the car? When there was an opportunity I suppose, when you had the rent allowance, if you needed to go back to Kildare, you have relations here, your parents are here and your sister I think lives here as well.”
McMahon: “Nobody is allowed let anyone stay in their house. The council has even told me that, that I shouldn’t have been staying in anyone’s house at the start, that if you stay in anyone’s house, they’re going to be charged for rent.”
Boylan: “Oh, right. OK.”
McMahon: “If you have another person staying in the house.”
Boylan: “Oh right because they’re on rent allowance as well at the time, is it?”
McMahon: “Yeah.”
Boylan: “Oh right, OK. So if they have you, you’re technically a lodger, so they should be charging you.”
McMahon: “OK, all right. Well it’s all jumping through loopholes.”
Listen back in full here
Were you knocked about in the classroom?
By people other than brothers or nuns?
In a punishing week for teachers, Sean appeared on RTE R1’s Liveline on Wednesday to raise some outstanding matters with their unions.
Joe Duffy: “Sean is in Dublin 7. Sean, a different topic… what’s, what’s your issue with the teacher unions, go ahead.”
Sean: “Joe, I was listening to your program yesterday and I heard you talking about different skills we need and so on and it just struck me that we never heard from the teachers’ unions any apology for the way the lay teachers used to beat us up in school in primary and secondary school. Like all the other bodies like the priests, the Christian brothers, the nuns, they publicly apologised over, you know, stuff that happened over the years but I’ve never heard anything from any of the teachers ‘unions, I’m sure some of them would be only recently retired that used to be doing this stuff.”
Joe Duffy: “It’s a most dreadful line Sean unfortunately but what is ,what is your own experience?”
Sean: “Well, it just got me thinking, I mean it’s always been on my mind, I do remember like, just a particular, I’m not going to name the school obviously as a ten year old we used to get leathered by teachers, a lay teacher in particular for not knowing what the gospel was about yesterday so you had the whole class of 10 year olds crying, stuff that wouldn’t be tolerated, you’d get dusters thrown at your head…”
Joe Duffy: “Hang on, you say the whole class was disciplined?”
Sean: “Well anyone who didn’t know what it was about.”
Joe Duffy: “And what was the form of leather, you were leathered, will you explain to people that don’t remember the leather what that was?”
Sean: “A leather strap, you’d get four lashes two on each hand, you’d be crying, from the lay teachers now not the brothers, they’ll all had their own thing this was lay teachers for separate things now like not knowing what the gospel was the day before that always struck in my mind as one particular feature in the primary school, then in the secondary school, it was a CBS school but it was the lay teachers that were the big problem, everything from being hit with the hurl of the person in front of you, to have a hurl for training and one of the teachers would pick it up, I remember getting a belt of that across the back, other teachers would be grabbing people up by the hair and blood would come up from their head, this was all going on all the time but you see it was probably seen as normal, you know what I mean, even though some of the incidents were reported, I remember me ma reported one incident, and she was nearly you know ran out from the Department of Education,you know for deciding to bring it up.”
Joe Duffy: “And why did she go into the Department of Education?”
Sean: “She got no joy from the school itself.”
Joe Duffy: “And do you remember what the general incident was?”
Sean: “Well that one would have been hit with a hurl across the back by one of the teachers in the class.”
Joe Duffy: “And what was the context of that?”
Sean: “Well it was a mechanical drawing class, and just remember there would have been small things, even like cracking a joke or whatever, I’m not being smart, I’m not saying it wouldn’t have been wholly disruptive, but as a 13 year old getting a smack of the hurl from the fellow in front of you, from the teacher grabbing it from the fellow in front of you, his bag, this wouldn’t have been seen out of the ordinary in that particular school. These were lay teachers, again the point I was making was that all the other bodies eventually come along and said sorry for the way things were done but I’ve heard nothing from any teacher’s union over the years about what they did and what they classed as acceptable at the time, there’s other things I can remember, one fellow getting his head pulled up by the hair, and a whole patch came out of his head, the blood was coming out of his head, you know, and that was from a geography teacher like for not knowing what mountain range was somewhere or whatever, but it just got me thinking and the way they’re talking about the way they’re currently trained and all that, I mean these people were trained, it’s just a veil of silence, the Department of Education, they all must have known it was going on, I mean the principals knew, knew all about it…”
Joe Duffy: “But surely your ire is misdirected, but surely it should be the Dept of Education and the State you know who apologised for the abuse in the industrial schools, but surely it should be the Department of Education who should apologise not the teacher unions, what have the teacher unions got to do with it it?”
Sean: “Well if it comes from the Department well and good, but these are the people on the ground who were doing it they saw it as acceptable at the time they didn’t think obviously they didn’t think of reporting one another over it either.”
Joe Duffy: “But your mother must have been very courageous and determined if she actually went in to the Department of Education, I mean most people didn’t go nigh next or near the Department, wouldn’t know how to go to it.”
Sean: “I know what you mean but it was like a veil of silence came over the place. Yesterday when I was listening to it, I’ve listened to different shows over the years and I was listening to the Brothers and so on coming back on and making the statements they did, I just thought it would be nice if something came from one of the teachers’ unions.”
Joe Duffy: “And would you, I don’t want names but would you remember the teacher who attacked you with the hurl?”
Sean: “Yeah. Oh yeah. No problem whatsoever and I’m gone thirty years from school.”
Joe Duffy: “And would you remember the teacher who pulled the patch of hair from the bloodied head?”
Sean: “Yeah and if I mention his name a lot of your listeners in that area would probably know so I’m not going to do it.”
Joe Duffy: “Yeah don’t do it, no.”
Sean: “No, no, yeah, it was seen as acceptable that’s what I mean, it was seen as the norm. It wasn’t like if it happened now you’d have two programmes on it about it, I mean. With all child protection and stuff on now, which is rife, right across the board.”
Joe Duffy: “So on the one hand you remember Bertie Ahern’s apology in 2007 wasn’t it, to people who have been in industrial schools, you’re saying you’d want a wider apology to people who were beaten?”
Sean: “No, it just got me thinking that I’d never heard anything on it, I mean, I’m not in a position to demand anything but just saying, it got me thinking about it, you know, of all these things that have happened there was never anything from them and again they classed that as acceptable behaviour at the time. A lot of these people are still alive, some of them might be still teaching, they might be near retirement, but they didn’t think anything different of it at the time.”
Previously: Christian Brothers Stories
And the spicy soup.
And the better looks.
And the fairly moody service station assistants.
And those sausages that look like a plump man’s thing.
Bobc writes:
By now you might have seen the moving video from the Polish Embassy thanking Irish people for their welcome over the last decade since the Polish started coming here in large numbers.
I would like to return the compliment and create a video thanking the Polish Irish community in Ireland for what they have given us. Suggestions [Culinary, food, dress, etc.] from your readers would be very welcome….”
Anyoneski?
Experimental filmmakers Claire and Max of Menilmonde sez:
Antigravity and inverted world are Sci-Fi. But. Just imagine…Underlapse is a visual experience and shows how our brains can belost without its spatial cues. Some footage can cause slight dizziness on some people.
Ouija Pizza
at
Spirited promotional shenanigans by Vancouver ad agency MacL;aren McCann.