IRISH REPUBLICAN WOMEN 1922-41

Thanks to my friend Vanessa O Loughlin who runs the wonderful website writing.ie, I recently had the pleasure of interviewing the historian Ann Matthews who has written two books on Irish Republican Women.  What she has to say is fascinating to anyone with an interest in Modern Irish Politics or who wonders about how we get more women involved in politics.  You can read the article here.

Enjoy

STUNNING SPRINGSTEEN.

I am no expert but there are a couple of things I believe about music.  Firstly is that nothing is quite as evocative... aromas come close.. but music can bring you, body and soul to another place in a very complete way.  Secondly I believe that our musical tastes are formed when we are teenagers.. and the music you love then, as a young adult will remain forever the music that moves you, that touches your very core like no other ever will.  Sure as you get older you may develop an appreciation for classical or some other genre... but the music that you listened to in your formative years will forever be a part of you.

Arriving into the RDS last Wednesday I recognised myself in other middle aged women who dressed in the timeless uniform of jeans and tee shirts, their saggy middle bits and life worn faces seeming to lift as they prepared to be transported backwards in time.  As I munched on a spring roll I tried to ignore the damp patch on my shoulders where my rain jacket failed in its waterproofing.  I was slightly soggy but delighted to be inhaling the excitement and anticipation that was palpable.

On the pitch we stood making some small talk with those around us, afraid to drink our water as neither of us wanted to have to use the facilities.  It rained some more and once again like good teenagers we did our best to ignore the discomfort of water dripping down our necks.

Slowly the sky started to brighten.  A patch of blue appeared.  A watery sun was doing its best in the western sky and we divested ourselves of our jackets and tied them around what once was a waist.  The lights on the stage were being tested.

Moments later, without fanfare or fireworks, Springsteen appeared and that gravelly voice, so deeply familiar was filling the arena, accompanied only by his guitar and harmonica.  So it began – almost three and a half hours of a non stop, solid rock music masterpiece, enhanced by flashes of folk and gospel.   Overhead the clouds continued to melt and the sky became almost translucent.  A silent aircraft tore a vapour trail eastwards and seagulls seemed to wheel on the notes bouncing in the warm air.

The Springsteen themes of the working man, hard times and the struggle of life seemed particularly poignant at times as the night carried his music high into the sky in Dublin 4.  Spingsteen as preacher encouraged us all to recall those we missed and who were no longer with us.  An almost transcendent moment for me as I stood in the fading light on what would have been my brothers 48th birthday had he not chosen to leave it some 16 years ago.

There is an authenticity about Springsteen’s music which is only matched by his pure unadulterated joy in performing.  His smile filled the RDS time and time again on the big screen and more than once I found myself grinning back at him.. forgetting that I was not alone in the arena.

As the light seeped away we danced and sang the oldies, Born in the USA, Glory Days, Born to Run and of course The River.  I was 20 again...  and it was magic.

As I shuffled off the pitch at 11pm, my aching back and sore feet complained that 5 hours of standing was something I probably should have gone into training for.  But boy was it worth it.  And somewhere above the music I am sure my brother did too!


WITH THANKS TO IRENE WINTERS FOR THE TICKETS!!!

HAVE MARKETING DEPTS LOST THE PLOT OR WHAT?

Recently I have seen two ads which have made me cross.  The first one I encountered some weeks back, over my breakfast while perusing the Irish Times (one of my most cherished times of day).   Turning the page my eye was caught by an ad for Harvey Nichols which featured a woman who had quite clearly wet her pants.  Yep, Harvey Nichols was appealing to women to come and visit their sale where we may wet ourselves with excitement!   A woman who had supposedly pee’d her pants is not the image I expect to see in my Irish Times of a morning.  Most off putting of one’s breakfast.  The bad taste of the ad was staggering.  I don’t shop in Harvey Nicks (and I don’t generally pee myself with excitement about shopping generally) but are they not considered a high end store?  What was being said in this ad?  Is it now socially acceptable to pee your pants?  I was annoyed and stunned.

You can therefore imagine how doubly stunned I was the following day when the scene repeated itself almost exactly – breakfast, Irish Times, Harvey Nichols ad – but this time it featured a male model – and he had no wet stain on his pants! Dry as a whistle he was.  Now I was really mad.  So, Harvey Nichols thinks only women pee themselves with excitement.  However some chat about it all on twitter indicated that the same ad had appeared in a different newspaper a few days earlier and the male model had a wet patch.  Had the Irish Times called a halt on the peeing models?  All I can say is ‘yuck’.

Today Twitter brings to my attention a flyer that Centra are apparently distributing which is advertising a range of their ‘special offers’ under the banner ‘Children’s Allowance Day Deals’.  All kinds of products are advertised including a box of beer?  It was not just me who was annoyed.  Twitter was alive with comment – which as far as I could see was all negative.

But it got me thinking.  Both of these ad campaigns are so clearly ‘wrong’ - are they deliberate?  Have marketing executives and departments become so cynical that they think if they produce something in very dubious taste or clearly morally a bit suspect it’s bound to generate comment.  Are they operating under that old adage that ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity’

I cannot believe that both companies were so blind to their marketing guru’s line in patter that they could not see the poor taste and lack of judgement evident in both of these very different ads.  And both ads are clearly aimed at different target markets.

I would be fascinated to know the truth.  Either way I don’t agree with the ‘all publicity is good publicity’ philosophy.  I would be terrified to shop in Harvey Nichols – imagine trying on a pair of trousers that someone may have gotten over excited in?  Nah. Thanks.

A MAGAZINE FOR REAL WOMEN?

A new magazine dropped onto my desk this week......

You have no idea how I have longed to use that phrase.  Are you picturing me working in a fabulous office where, a constant stream of products drop onto my lap seeking my imprimatur?  In fact my desk is in my emigrant eldest daughter’s bedroom, where I work at a desk facing a purple wall!!  But I digress....

Regular readers will know that I harbour a dream of upping sticks and moving out of suburbia and into the country.  Wexford or Kilkenny would probably be my counties of preference as I would not like to be too far from the city of my birth.  I have been known to while away long hours when there’s nothing on the tellybox, surfing websites such as DAFT and MyHome looking for my alter abode.  In fact if I am to be truthful I actually have a saved list of properties on DAFT and on a day when I need to dream a different life I visit this list and drool over these quirky houses with orchards, vegetable patches, room for donkeys and hens... sigh.  My other dream is to bail out of life for a year and rent a cottage on the Aran Islands..... but that’s another story!  Suffice to say that although a Dub born and bred I seem to have the call of the country somewhere deep within my soul! Perhaps this stems from the generally happy memories of Irish Farm family holidays in the 70s.

Women’s magazines drive me nuts regularly... with their over emphasis on beauty and fashion and dieting!!  Pages and pages of impossibly gorgeous, very skinny, very young women interspersed with only perhaps one meaty article worth reading.  I know this is a massive generalisation and it does seem to apply more to UK than Irish magazines but still after years of trying everything from Cosmopolitan to Prima and Good Housekeeping I have given up.  I rarely buy magazines now... as a 50 year old woman with only a passing interest in clothes and makeup, I find them just too depressing.

When I cast a cold eye over the cover of the new Irish Country Magazine (from the Farmers Journal, dontchya know... yee haw) I was delighted to see a photo of a real woman, Catherine Fulvio, - looking beautiful but normal!  Some Irish magazines have often been guilty of taking Irish celebrity women and totally over-styling them so that you have to look twice to recognise who they are!

I am happy to say that my delight in the cover of ‘Irish Country Magazine’ continued as I perused the innards of this new publication.  I found meaty articles aplenty and some beautiful writing.  I was particularly taken with a column by Cherone Duggan who is an Irish farmers daughter studying in Harvard and who wrote about the joy of rain.  I hope she will be a regular contributor.

There is also a feature on daughters and fathers, and a wellbeing section which leads with an article by that wonderfully wise woman, Maureen Gaffney about regrets.

There is one fashion shoot (and again is not over styled but relatively normal looking), there is one beauty feature but there is also lots of gardening, interiors and food (with Neven Maguire and cover woman Catherine Fulvio).

So if you, like me, are not a fan of women’s magazines (‘cos they make you feel cross and depressed), perhaps have a look at Irish Country Magazine.... I liked it.  It costs €2.99 and is quarterly.  The summer edition is in shops now.

Now... I wonder would they consider a column by a Dublin ole wan who decamps to Inis Oirr for a year?

HANDS OFF MY AIRLINE

What is this nonsense about Ryanair possibly going to buy Aer Lingus?  Ryanair – that cheeky upstart of an airline, which I accept was almost entirely responsible for making flying affordable for us Irish, stranded as we are on this rocky, green, damp island on the western edge of Europe.  But take over Aer Lingus... that august and proud airline, that erstwhile symbol of national pride, I bloody well hope not!

I am resisting the temptation to rant on about why I really hate flying Ryanair.  I will not describe the nervous heap they reduce me to while I stand for hours in a queue at a gate which manages to be on the far side of the airfield from the terminal, wearing too many clothes so that my hand luggage weighs less that my handbag normally does.  I will refrain from pouring scorn on the sweaty leather seats and the garish blue and yellow interior of their aircraft.  But the blaring of a fanfare when we arrive on time is a step too far and really is an appalling way to treat customers.

Oh no, give me Aer Lingus any day.  I think Aer Lingus like me and are happy to have me onboard.  Ryanair seem to be out to get me and they definitely don’t like me much, a fact that could be due to the perspiration on my forehead I guess.

Aer Lingus and I have a long shared history.  In the 1960’s my father worked in Customs and Excise (as it was called then) and occasionally on weekends I accompanied him to Dublin Airport at Collinstown.  The original terminal building with its feminine curving lines was as beautiful inside as out.  I can still see its large, airy and bright main hall dominated, if my memory serves me correctly, by a huge wall clock.  The airport was a portal to exotic and wondrous foreign shores and adventure.  The tingle of anticipation was heightened by the whiff of jet fuel from the nearby apron.  To a little girl Dublin Airport was somewhere very special indeed.

In 1971, I was nine years old when Aer Lingus took delivery of its first 747 Jumbo Jet.  I remember standing in our back garden in Blackrock watching as this huge aircraft passed overhead.  This kind of flypast became a bit of a habit for Aer Lingus 747s; they did it again in 1979, a low pass over the city of the Papal flight, although this time the Jumbo Jet was  flanked on each wing by two Air Corps aircraft.  Being a cool teenager I took great delight in having no interest whatsoever in the Pope’s visit.  However I did feel a certain pride when I realised that his arrival on our national carrier was the first time a Pope had ever travelled on an airline other than Alitalia.

As a child of the 70s, Aer Lingus was one of the very first things that made me proud to be Irish.  This little country, which was seriously lacking in pizzazz or excitement, had an airline which was deemed to be as good as any on the planet, at a time when air travel was the ultimate in glamorous living.  Sure hadn’t it got an office on 5th Ave in New York to prove it?  Aer Lingus symbolised an Ireland that was beginning to believe in itself.  

Perhaps it was in part my early exposure to the charms of both the Airport and the airline that led me to a job in the travel business.  I joined the JWT set and in the early 80s spent one winter working as a Holiday Rep in Gran Canaria.  At that time the bulk of the Irish holidaymakers arrived on the island on a chartered Aer Lingus 747, which delivered to us a staggering 470 passengers.  This caused some logistical problems on the ground as it meant that all Irish holiday companies had arrivals and departures on the same day and at the same time.  As Reps we had to book our coaches well in advance or our clients would be left making the transfer in some old bone shaker of a rickety vehicle which normally functioned as a school bus.

During the ‘90s my love life was complicated.  My boyfriend lived in London and so we spent every second weekend commuting back and forwards across the Irish Sea – always with Aer Lingus.  There were more than a few occasions when I arrived a bit ahead of schedule at Gatwick and used to ask at check-in if I might change to the earlier flight.  Invariably the nice Aer Lingus people would tell me to go ahead to the gate with my bag and if they could, they certainly would put me on the first flight available.  It usually worked and no one ever had the audacity to ask me for payment.

My experiences with Aer Lingus have always been positive.  My travel memories are interspersed with those hours of waiting at various airports for my flight back to Dublin.  Tired, tanned and tetchy at the end of a holiday, that first sight of the familiar green and blue livery descending from the sky was always a surprising source of national pride.  I am not ashamed to admit that I still feel that way today.  And does anyone else fondly remember the aroma of Irish Breakfast that used to waft through the cabin on an early morning flight home....  sure we were home before we ever left the ground!

I admit I seem to have a slightly irrational and very emotional attachment to our national carrier... but I doubt that I am alone.  Aer Lingus is our airline.  And it is still one of the safest and best airlines in the world.  So who’s going to tell the Troika we ain’t selling it?

IRISH FANS REMIND US THAT IT'S ALL ABOUT DANCING IN THE RAIN

So, Euro2012 wasn’t quite an Italia90!

Back in 1990 things just kept getting better as our national soccer team led the entire country on a magical journey all the way to the semi finals where if I am not mistaken we were finally beaten by Italy.  It was a special time when you could almost feel ‘Ireland Inc’ (sorry – I hate that expression too) beginning to develop a self confidence and a realisation that we were as good as any other nation on earth.

Bear in mind that this football odyssey came just two short two years after Houghton put the ball in the England net in Stuttgart and five years after Live Aid.  I know we didn’t play football at Live Aid, but it was another iconic event which led many of us who watched it, to realise that U2 were well on their way to becoming the biggest rock band in the world and that  Bob Geldof was a force of nature to be reckoned with.  I remember noticing Irish flags near the stage and the slow dawning realisation that perhaps we not only could breed great leaders and musicians but maybe Ireland was also cool. Italia90 confirmed all of these possibilities.

But added to this burgeoning confidence were the army of fans (Jack’s Army in 1990) who travelled to Italy to support the team.  Sky News was a new 24hour news station in 1990 and I remember their reporters in Rome for the semi finals interviewing Irish fans who were there for ‘the craic’ and who couldn’t believe our good fortune in getting all the way to the quarter finals.  Their delight and pure joy in the experience was palpable and catching and a revelation to the British reporters who were more used to football fans being hooligans.  Back in 1990 we were proud of the team, of honourary Irishman Jack Charlton and of the brilliant supporters.  It was all damn near perfect!

So here we are 22 years later (can you believe it is that long ago?) and the Irish soccer team are back at a big international tournament and again we are being managed by a foreigner... this time Italian Giovanni Trapattoni.  The fans mobilised by air and by land and headed east to Poland, a country with whom we now have strong links after our Celtic Tiger economy attracted so many of their countrymen and women to our shores to work.  Expectations were high.  Alas, as we all know, things have not panned out the way we might have hoped.  In football terms the whole thing has been a disaster.

In 1990 Ireland was on the brink of conceiving her Celtic Tiger and we were all feeling good about ourselves.  Now, in 2012 we are very much a broken country, traumatised by the collapse of our economy and giving away of our sovereignty and many of us trying to come to terms with crippling personal debt.  There is a horrible feeling that we have lost control of our lives and indeed to a large extent we have.

To a lesser country the dismal football performances would have added to this feeling of depression and self loathing.  Our having the ignominious glory of being the first team out of the tournament could serve to reaffirm our belief that we are as capable of playing football as we are in managing our economy.  To a lesser country at the very least this would have led to an army of supporters coming home down and depressed and thoroughly fed up.  Like those of us who feel we have no control over our lives as we struggle through this quagmire of financial disaster, our supporters might rightly have felt that no matter how much they sang they couldn’t seem to influence things on the field.

But the one thing we always have control over (listen up now - this is important) is our attitude to disaster.  We are the only ones who can decide how we face each day.  We can do so depressed and fed up or we can make a concerted and deliberate effort to greet the day with a smile and a spirit of optimism.  It’s not easy in the face of all the huge financial problems we have... but it can be done.  And if there is one thing we should take from Euro 2012 it is just that.  We Irish have been gifted a great sense of humour.  We love a party.  We invented the craic.  Don’t underestimate how a precious these gifts are.

How many countries with far superior soccer teams to ours would love to have our supporters?  Our army of madly dressed men and women, who had the longest journey to make to Poland, but arrived in their thousands – many in converted ice cream vans and ambulances and clapped out vehicles.  They knew they were backing one of the weakest teams in the tournament but they were determined to bring good humour which they showcased beautifully with their witty banners and signs – one of which even make the cover of German newspaper Bild.

Before and after matches our supporters partied with those of the very teams who crashed any dreams we might have had of winning an odd game.  And last night in the face of a humbling defeat they gave a ten minute rousing rendition of The Fields of Athenry.  Put simply if Carlsberg did football supporters they would do Irish ones...

As that saying goes ‘life is not about waiting for the storm to pass but rather it is about learning to dance in the rain’.  Our soccer supporters showed all of Europe how to dance in the rain.   And they did so with grace and humour.  I am so proud of them.  They reminded me of just how bloody great it is to be Irish!

YOU CAN'T BEAT THE LOVE OF AN ANIMAL

A client of my husband’s arrived at our house recently to collect some photographs.  It was a Saturday morning and she was accompanied by her gorgeous daughter who was about 2 years old.

Arriving at our door can be a bit hectic as not only will you be greeted by one of us 2 leggeds,  but you will also be met by Dylan Da Dog who gets ridiculously excited at the appearance of any visitors – known or unknown.

As I opened the door that Saturday morning I did my best to restrain Dylan while trying to retain some semblance to normal human behaviour so as not to completely overwhelm this little person on my doorstep.  I need not have worried.  “Doggie” she exclaimed and immediately opened her arms to hug a delighted Dylan.  The honest and genuine warmth of this little girl who had no fear whatsoever of our madly dancing, manically tailwagging dog was a joy to watch.  “She likes dogs,” I offered.  “Yep,” her mother confirmed, “she loves them.”

Gay Byrne used to famously say every year on the Late Late Toy Show that the greatest gift you can give a child is the gift of reading.  I agree.  But the second greatest gift you can hand your child is the love of a family pet.  My heart breaks every time I meet a child who has a fear of dogs or cats.

I have always lived with animals.  In fact the only time I was without a cat in my life were the two winter seasons I spent in the Canary Islands and it was a loss I felt keenly and which led me to talk to every stray, scrawny Spanish moggie I met.

My kids obviously have always shared their lives with animals too.  For me, there are few life lessons as important for children than learning how to respect and care for a pet.  We have all learned about love, life and grief from sharing our life with our 4 leggeds.

Yesterday my mother handed me a book, entitled ‘A Street Cat Named Bob’.  Very simply this book tells the story of former homeless man and recovering heroin addict James Bowen who became adopted by an amazing cat called Bob.  Bob the cat was in a bad way when he first showed up and James had to nurse him back to full health with the help of the RSPCA.  In turn James credits the love he got from Bob with helping him turn in his life around.  It is a beautiful story that illustrates perfectly how I think God intended us to share this beautiful planet with our animal brothers and sisters.  Mutual respect along with love freely given is key.

Naturally I am a huge supporter of the work here in Dublin of the DSPCA.  All of my four cats are rescues and we are regular fosterers of kittens also.  Getting a pet is not something anyone should do lightly.  Along with all the love and fun and good stuff there is hard work too.  And when it comes to cats and dogs, there’s the matter of a commitment that could run to near on 20 years.

But if adopting an animal is something that you are curious about or if you would like to support the work of this amazing charity, why not pop along to their PetFest at their HQ on Mount Venus Road, Rathfarnham on Saturday June 16th from 12noon till 4pm. Panto Queen June Rogers will be there as will 98FM’s Teena Gates who will be judging the ‘Scruffts’ dog show.  There will be food stalls and information about the work of Ireland’s oldest animal charity.  The kids can enjoy the face painting and bouncing castle. But most of all you can learn about adopting an animal, from the people who know best how to advise you.

But even if pet ownership is not for you, why not go along so that your children can get up close and personal with some 4 leggeds.  I can’t think of a nicer way to spend a Saturday!  And sure you never know, you might make some new friends!!!