“The taxpayer will pay.”

Surly Fianna Fail grandee Ray McSharry (he bugged himself), appeared with Margaret Hayes (ex-civil servant) a fellow public interest director for Permanent TSB, before the Joint Committee on Finance Public Expenditure and Reform yesterday.

He informed Independent TD Stephen Donnelly what his idea of what a public interest director can do.

And to clarify that any form of debt forgiveness for customers… will mean the banks coming back to the state cap in hand.

Watch from 11.04, if stuck for time.

Thanks Steve Dempsey

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TrAGIcfKX8

The first trailer for History Channel’s upcoming nine-part drama series “Vikings”.

Made in Ireland, starring Gathering-slayer Gaybriel Byrne (above) plus a host of hairy Irishmen.

Meanwhile…
Gabriel as Uther Pendragon in Excalibur (1981).

‘Excalibur’ Documentary Wraps Principal Photography In Ireland (IFTN)

What you may need to know:

1. Michael Bay is the most successful movie director of the modern era, thanks to his work on such works of delicacy as The Rock (1996), Armageddon (1998) and the Transformers trilogy. We say his masterpiece is Bad Boys II (2003).

2. Bay is a key proponent of what film critics are calling Chaos Cinema.

3. When your movies make a couple of billion dollars at the box-office, you get to do what you want; in Bay’s case, it’s a low-budget true story about psychotic bodybuilding kidnappers, starring Mark Wahlberg,  the dude from Monk (Tony Shalhoub) and The Rock.

4. In France, they call him Le Rock.

5. Bay and Wahlberg are already re-teaming for (you guessed it) Transformers 4.

6. Truth be told, this looks rather good.

7. Think Coen Brothers on steroids.

Release Date: April 2013

Eileen Dunne.

Age 3 and 3/4.

Sibling of Daedalus writes:

From the archives of the Imperial War Museum, this lovely Cecil Beaton photograph of recovering Blitz victim Eileen Dunne, propped up on pillows in Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital.

The IWM cover note describes Eileen as having been injured in an air raid on London, but her profile in Life Magazine, which featured her as its cover girl for September 1940, says that she was hurt by a splinter when a bomb fell on her small village in Northern England.

The accounts are consistent on the question of Eileen’s age: 3 3/4 years old (rightly so, as the 3/4 bit was no doubt very important to her) and that’s definitely a doll she’s holding in the photo, not, as often incorrectly stated, a teddy bear.   Again, doubtless very important to her.

Eileen must have been of Irish origin, surely?  Gorgeous kid.  The beauty of the photo is the protective way in which she’s holding that doll, as if anything else in the world could possibly need to be protected from bombs and splinters more than her little self.

I think probably looking after something else  was what Eileen needed to keep herself going.  I hope she recovered soon.

 

More wartime Beaton photographs here. Interactive map of the Blitz, mapping the  bombs that fell on London, many of them on Irish immigrant areas, here.

Sibling of Daedalus

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