Ah here.
John Gallen writes:
BuzzFeed let go a load of staff writers… but they kept the best they had!
More than 2,100 people lost their jobs in a media landslide so far this year (Business Insider)
Tag Archives: vice
Signal Work
at
Demons
at
Valerie Cummins
Anything good in Vice?
“We collect the food here and then distribute it via local charities to people in need. We also set up community food banks where people get a voucher that entitles them to a week of food…Right now, demand is so high we can’t keep up. People are dropping in all the time asking for emergency parcels to get them through the next few days. I’ve been working with Crosscare for 25 years and I have never seen things so bad. People are more desperate than ever.”
Valerie Cummins, who works for Crosscare, a Catholic Church-run social support agency, at their food bank in Portland Row, Dublin 1
Ireland’s ‘New Poor’ Need Food Banks to Eat (Norma Costello, Vice)
Thanks Cathal O’Rourke
By Mick Flavin (H/T to Caroline).
“Mattress Mick sees himself at the forefront of the recovery of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger–mauled economy. “Mattress Mick is here to help the Irish people get a good night’s sleep,” he tells me, speaking of Mattress Mick as a character, not in first person (his real name is Michael Flynn). “Irish-made mattresses are the best-made in the world, and I wanted to get across the message that if you sleep well at night you can come back fighting every morning. We can get Ireland back on its feet.” His own best advertisement, Mick has turned himself into a living, walking meme on a shoestring marketing budget.”
The Mattress King of Dublin (Vice)
Previously: The Man Behind The Man Behind Mattress Mick
Pic: Vice
A collaboration between London-based game designer/illustrator Marija Tiurina and NeonMob art gallery, to wit:
Hidden for nearly 950 years, a withered parchment, yellowed with age, was pulled up from the dank catacombs beneath the Vatican in Rome. Now, as its contents are unveiled, the world will come to know the truth . . . that there are EIGHT Deadly Sins!.
James Nolan
On the lash in Dublin’s cultural quarter?
You know how this ends.
“…What I find once I leave that pub isn’t exactly pretty. Despite being in a good mood, not to mention pretty drunk, walking those streets for 45 minutes probably sours me more on Temple Bar than anything I’ve seen in the previous ten hours. As the tourists continue taking pictures, as they attempt to drink with dignity and enjoy late-night horse and cart rides, the Irish and British take over and go berserk.”
“It’s inevitable, I suppose, that in a melting pot of international drinkers, the two nations with the biggest love for getting shitfaced will rise to the top. Hen and stag parties spill out everywhere, wobbly cellulite and aggressive sweat stains running in chaotic formations down the cobbles. People jump out in front of strangers, startling them, whooping. Others fall down and puke.”
“A distaste rises in my stomach – I know, soon, I’ll have to leave. Needing photos, however, I persist – the camera needs only be held up for someone to dive in front of it, sticking out their tongue, their arse, and contorting their face into an expression that says, “I am a dickhead.””
“I find myself wishing that more tourists were here to force these people out, but in the long term, the opposite will surely happen. What right-minded person will come here, see this and return? How long until Temple Bar becomes – instead of a tourist attraction – something repulsive?”
“That said as long as drinking is considered our main means of coping with the frustrations of modern life, huge amounts of our populations will continue flocking to places like Temple Bar because, here, forgetting isn’t just tolerated, it’s encouraged.”
“Now I really need to leave, and the way I’m feeling, I kind of don’t want to come back. On my way to get a cab, however, I realise I need a piss – I’ve been walking for almost an hour with the dregs of eight or nine pints in me. In a 24-hour Starbucks I came to a conclusion. I’d gone out to discover something new and had ended up basically where I started. I didn’t want to admit it and be too cynical like people said, but late at night, Temple Bar up close looked like the same shithole it did from a distance.”
James Nolan, of Vice, on a night out in Dublin’s Temple Bar.
FIGHT!
I got pissed with strangers in Dublin’s biggest tourist trap (Vice)
[Conor Creighton as summer-loving youth]
It seemed to last forever.
No really.
Conor writes:
“I know you don’t normally do this but I wrote a piece for Vice about small town Irish summers. Maybe your readers would be interested. The small town is Sallins [Co Kildare]. When I lived there we used to brag that it was close to the Dual-Carriageway and in walking distance of Naas….”
You Need To Get Out Of Your Small Town This Summer (Conor Creighton, Vice)
Cannabis plants seized by gardaí last year
Rachel Browne of Vice reports:
In early 2012, a woman approached a Vietnamese grandmother and offered her a stable job in Europe as a nanny. The grandmother accepted, delighted at the possibility of earning enough money to pay off her heavy debts and support her family.
But she had been tricked. Instead of taking care of children, she says she was kept as a slave in a marijuana-growing operation on the outskirts of Dublin and forced to care for the weed plants. According to her lawyer, Aine Flynn, the woman was starved, had her documents confiscated and was threatened with violence by the men in charge if she disobeyed. She was arrested in November of 2012, during a police raid, and has been in prison awaiting her sentence ever since.
The Vietnamese woman – whose name is being withheld because Flynn is requesting that the High Court in Ireland grant her anonymity as a human trafficking victim – is just one of hundreds of trafficking victims, mostly from Vietnam and China, being forced to work as “gardeners” in marijuana-growing operations across Europe, human rights groups claim.
…
Grainne O’Toole, MRCI’s [Migrant Rights Centre Ireland] project coordinator, told me the police have been “finding people locked into cannabis grow houses in squalor conditions, malnourished, not receiving any money for what they were doing and living under threat”. She said that even though the police are trained in human trafficking, they still do not identify them as victims.
…
MRCI is currently reviewing 21 cases in the Irish courts believed to be possible instances of human trafficking and not drug crimes, O’Toole said.
Immigrants are being kept as cannabis slaves in Britain and Ireland (Rachel Browne, Vice.com)
Photocall Ireland
Thanks John