June 2011 – For the fainthearted . . .

Starting early

Back in the early eighties, in the memory, RTE radio’s daybreak news programme began at 8.15 am. It seemed extraordinarily late, but maybe it was convenient for farmers coming in from the opening hours of the day’s work and for the comparatively small number of commuters driving into Dublin, in those times when only a handful of railway stations were still open after the closures of the 1950s and 1960s.

By the 1990s, Morning Ireland had moved forward to 7.30 am. The Today programme on the BBC had been on …

Familiar ground

There wasn’t much choice about what to watch on television during the 1970s -BBC 1, BBC 2 and ITV – not even Channel 4 in those day. Maybe it was because all the resources were focused on three channels, but the programmes tend to stick in the memory.

There was a science fiction film where the final scene remains in the mind. The characters are transported to a parallel world, which is identical in every way, except the planet where they have arrived has two moons that shine together in …

There’s no point in throwing stones

The sad thing about the street disturbances and widespread strikes in Greece is that they will will only worsen the situation for the most weak and the most vulnerable in society. Frustration at governments that make ordinary people pay for the breathtaking arrogance of those who brought about the international crisis is compounded by the knowledge that there is not a thing that ordinary people can do about it.

Lines from Sebastian Faulks’ A Week In December capture the monstrous injustice of a world where the poor must pay to …

Changing shops

Looking under the desk to see what was lying on the floor, there was a Tesco Clubcard, unused for the past year for there is no branch of Tesco in the county of Kilkenny.

Tesco occupies a place in childhood memory as somewhere different. When the branch in Yeovil in Somerset began opening until eight o’clock on a Thursday evening, people thought it extraordinary. In those days when men tended to be those who went out to work, taking the family car with them, the opportunity to shop after coming …

Sweet memories

There’s a sweet shop in Portlaoise. Not a shop that sells bars of chocolate and bags of crisps, but a proper sweet shop that has its window and shelves filled with jars and where you have to go in and point to the jars and the assistant pours the sweets into a scoop shaped bowl that sits on the weighing scales and then tips them into a paper bag.

Meandering through the town late yesterday afternoon with an English companion. I remembered the shop. ‘Come on, I want to get …

Vultures, bankers and pastors

The second bailout of Greece is tonight reported as food for the vultures, the vultures being those who circled picking off government bonds at cheap prices; bonds that will now be underwritten by the generosity of the European taxpayers.

Wikpedia defines a vulture fund as follows:

“A vulture fund is a private equity or hedge fund that invests in debt issued by an entity that is considered to be very weak or dying, or whose debt is in imminent default. The name is a metaphor comparing these investors to

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