Last week, it was highlighted in the media about the GAA clamping down on keeping scores for under-12 games. I fully support the need to clamp down on this as coaches need to focus on developing players, not on winning matches.
I’d just like to share my experience with the sport of gymnastics. My daughter who is 10 trains in tumbling gymnastics club nearly 10 hours a week. She loves the sport. Gymnastics Ireland has several competitions every year in which gymnasts are encouraged to compete. Age categories go from U6 to adult.
There are different categories for children of all abilities to compete in. Participation medals are given to all children as well as first, second and third places. Scores are uploaded live onto the gymnastics website and you can see where your child is being placed as the competition progresses.
Gymnastics Ireland prides itself on encouraging children to keep participating in gymnastics for as long as possible. Is this an appropriate way to do so? While the GAA has found that competition at young ages tends to "nurture the best and forget the rest" why is it so much condoned in other sports?
However, Gymnastics Ireland even go a step further!
My daughter participated in the National Series Championship lately. There were four children in her competition. All four girls were from the same club. They train together every week. (On entering my child in the competition I expected there to be more than this in it.)
Gymnastics Ireland saw it fit to give a first, second, and third place medals to the girls and leave one girl out, one girl devastated with tears rolling down her cheeks as she looked at the good friends being awarded places.
Is this an organisation that nurtures gymnasts' development and encourages them to continue with the sport well into their teen years?
Why am I leaving my child take part in this, one would ask? My girl loves the sport. What am I to do? I have contacted Gymnastics Ireland regarding this and have been ignored.
M. Buckley
Blarney
Cork
Devastating to see these wrong calls
Having watched the Limerick v Cork match, isn’t it about time the GAA introduced VAR for big matches?
Two calls went against Cork, first the Cahalane pick off the ground and the Gillane penalty, which yielded 1-1 . Now if VAR was in play they wouldn’t have been given. Considering Cork only got beaten by a point, something has to be done about these bad decisions.
The other point I like to make is, only three teams from Munster qualify for the All-Ireland series and yet four from Leinster. Where is the sense in that?
Cork out of the hurling because of two bad refereeing decisions. Sometimes you can live with bad decisions but not when there is so much at stake for our hurling team.
The sooner they introduce VAR or TMO the better for all concerned.
Neil McLellan
Hanwell
London (originally from Castlemartyr)
Provincial finals not competitive now
The recent provincial football finals were three one-sided affairs with the only competitive game being the Ulster final.
The All-Ireland group stages lack peril, with only one team being eliminated from each group.
Mayo almost tacitly admitted after beating Kerry that they had effectively opted out of the Connacht championship and gone on holidays instead.
Too many meaningless matches.
Time to finally lose the provincial championships, finally stream the All-Ireland by ability, rather than sending out so many lambs to the slaughter.
In addition, I dare to predict that this will finally be Mayo’s year, now that the “curse” no longer applies.
Aodán McCaul
Sundays Well
Cork
Growing our own veg so important
Ireland’s vegetable growing area is down 10% on 2022. This follows a pattern of recent years where vegetable farmers, who supply the most wholesome fresh produce, are unable to compete with the low-cost selling of imported veg.
Ireland imports over a million tonnes of veg every year. Twenty years ago, the figure would have been half that tonnage. Since Brexit, veg wholesalers and importers in Ireland have increasingly shifted from GB to mainland EU as preferred supply routes.
Now the consumer is being warned that inclement weather in Europe, global supply chain issues, and high energy prices has caused a shortage of imported veg and a spiralling in price.
It’s high time to support home-grown produce to protect the sustainability of veg farms and the few remaining greengrocers.
Vegetables are the mainstay of Ireland’s staple diet, as our temperate climate enables veg growers to deliver a high-quality yield year after year. Freshly grown Irish produce is far healthier than its European alternative and is a natural source of nutrition.
The Irish spud, supported by two or three homegrown veg, is always the dependable full back on my dinner menu. Noodles, rice, spaghetti, pasta, and couscous will never play senior football on my plate. When I was growing up, potatoes and veg were served every day in some form.
My mother regularly sent me across the street to Tom’s greengrocer, a man whose personality was as effervescent as the fragrance of natural freshness that wafted out the shop door. The shop was a colourful montage of home-grown produce including carrots, parsnips, cauliflowers, cabbages, turnips, onions, apples, pears, and strawberries.
Tom was especially proud of his potatoes, the early Queens and Roosters and the later Golden Wonders and Kerr’s Pink. “How’re the spuds this year, Tom,” I’d respectfully ask. “Balls of flower, Billy boy, balls of flower, the best in Ireland,” was the standard reply.
Billy Ryle
Tralee
Co. Kerry
Brutal behaviour by the Brothers
I read with interest Brian McDevitt’s letter (Irish Examiner, May 27) relating his very unhappy experience during the Leaving Certificate year in Donegal in 1969.
I am also in my seventies, and I concur with his sentiments, having also suffered terribly as a student in the CBS Secondary School in Kilkenny about the same time. I was beaten with leathers and sticks, boxed in the face, and shockingly verbally abused by both Christian Brothers and lay teachers alike almost on a daily basis.
I have to say that those assaults which I was forced to endure at that most awful time of my life still affect me to this very day.
I know that I should have spoken to someone at the time, but as I was so traumatised I just was not able.
I thank God that the brutality of the sixties and seventies in Irish education is now a thing of the past.
Liam Burke
Dunmore
Co. Kilkenny
Forgoing meat was my best decision
A short story: I was 30. I had been eating meat and fish all my life. Chicken legs, wings, and breasts. Steaks, roasts, beef and mutton stews. Rashers, sausages, black pudding, burgers. Lamb and pork chops, steak and kidney pie, fried liver. Salmon, cod, mackerel, hake.
In France, I’d ordered, on more than one occasion, steak tartare, a dish consisting of a heaped plate of uncooked minced beef with a raw egg yolk sat atop the mound of rotting flesh.
For 30 years, I never once thought about the food I was eating as coming from a fully alive and sentient animal. It was what I had eaten all my life.
And then, over the course of one year, everything changed. Eye-opening conversations with vegetarians and animal rights activists. Books and articles on animal rights, on vegetarianism, on factory farming.
A never-to-be-forgotten viewing of a landmark documentary, The Animals Film, a couple of years after it had been broadcast to a stunned UK TV audience.
By the end of that year — it was 1985 — I had turned my back on meat, on fish, on all animal flesh. It took a few more years for the penny to drop on dairy and on eggs, and when the veil finally fell away, I was following a vegan lifestyle and no looking back.
I’ve been a vegan for 35 years. It was and continues to be the most positive life choice that I have ever made.
Gerry Boland
Keadue
Roscommon
Avondale lads perform miracle of Innishvilla
Avondale United’s U16 A team had a league game recently at Innishvilla. They were 3-0 down playing with nine men for most of the second half as two of their players got injured and they had no subs.
With five minutes left, they went for glory and got three back. It ended 3-3. The ref said he’d never seen a comeback quite like this one and he wasn’t a young fellow either!
Well forget about the Miracle of Istanbul, now we have the Miracle of Innishvilla.
Robert Sullivan
Bantry
Co. Cork
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