The house of horrors
News to me. In my distant past I have a memory of a vigorous debate with Mr Kenny, though it wasn’t on a constitutional matter so much as a run of games played by a League of Ireland team.
In a previous life your correspondent spent his working day in Leinster House, described by one of its denizens as the cockpit of democracy, and described by others as, well, your imagination can do the rest.
That meant time spent in the Dáil, where I once heard a midlands TD outline what a team from his county would do to Cork’s Nemo Rangers in the All-Ireland club championship (“Who’s he codding?” said a Cork TD whose club had suffered many a time at the hands of Nemo), and in the committees, where I once observed a French foreign minister reduce the assorted females in the room to jelly.
I thought Gallic charm a myth until I saw the man who oversaw the French diplomatic corps – hair styled just so with the grey over the temples, a suit that deserved a GQ pull-out – turn on the full force of his personality.
And time in the Seanad. The first time I sat in the Seanad chamber I heard a man describe a certain bird as being faced with total distinction, and matters did not really improve from there on. On another occasion a Senator said that recent events had upset the apple tart; in another debate a Member suggested putting a Minister for Agriculture up on a pedestrial, which I imagined to be a plinth with legs that stopped at a zebra crossing.
I was surprised the Seanad survived the referendum on its future, because you’d think that offering to get rid of politicians was the something everybody in the country would accept sight unseen. It was hard not to laugh at some of the arguments about its retention: in almost 10 years I only saw the ‘checks and balances’ claim operate once, when Shane Ross spotted a loophole in legislation about coverage of elections.
Generally speaking, the Senators didn’t help themselves, a lot of them combining pompousness and stupidity: one strong voice for retention often spent a good 10 minutes in the Chamber picking his way through a newspaper crossword (’Irrelevant, full of windbags, 6’). Another Senator who often chaired the proceedings had the monitor near his desk tuned to the day’s racing, and you could catch the closing stages of the 2.45 if you came in at the right angle.
Anyway, to loop back to the beginning: my lengthy discussion with the Mayo TD who now leads the country occurred around Christmas time at a party held by his party, then in opposition.
Over the course of a drink or two I found myself talking at some length about Athlone Town’s exploits in Europe: I have no problem in admitting to being well refreshed on the evening in question, as those are the only circumstances in which I would have an opinion either way on Athlone Town.
I can’t speak for Mr Kenny, but he had strong opinions on their performance. Maybe a referendum on the League of Ireland might entice him to chat.
Talking of debates, there’s some discussion now across the water about dealing with your GP by Skype, a scenario where the doctor will try to guess your illness by a flickering image that blurs in and out of focus.
This is the thin end of the wedge, surely, and has provoked a predictable response. How are you going to be able to read all those six-month-old copies of Hello! Magazine in the waiting room, after all, if you’re peering through a laptop screen smeared with last night’s curry?
On a serious note, this development should be viewed with some trepidation by sports fans. If face- to-face contact is unnecessary between a doctor and a patient, who says that sports people have to be on the same continent any more? Say goodbye to teams having to line up in the same dressing room. You need only flick on your computer at home and you’re ready to go: no tiresome travelling to the venue, you just dance a jig with the ball on Skype with your direct opponent on-line, and nobody gets injured.
Or wet. Or cold.
Move beyond team sport, and it gets even more attractive. Usain Bolt won’t have to leave the warmth of Jamaica — he can just run on Skype, the same as everybody else, and an official timer, also on Skype, will produce a winner and runner-up. Granted, Bolt won’t be able to — euphemism alert — party with the Swedish handball team, as he did at the last Olympics. Or maybe he will. Virtually.
You think I’m joking. I’m not. This is safer and more cost-effective for sports bodies everywhere, not to mention opening up all sorts of broadcasting opportunities. The brave new world beckons: be afraid.
I have good news for all of Bartlemy and Rathcormack, the two villages in east Cork which provide Bride Rovers GAA club with its members.
Brian Murphy has been found, alive and well.
The eagle-eyed observers at balls.ie – seriously, do you guys do any work? — noted that Murphy, who starred for Cork in the All-Ireland SHC final replay last Saturday week, had been mysteriously omitted from one Sunday newspaper’s photographs of Clare’s win over Cork.
Other outlets had run the same photograph, with Murphy looming over Clare’s Shane O’Donnell, but for some reason he didn’t figure in one newspaper’s coverage.
The Bermuda Triangle? The Bilderberg Group? Crop circles?
Nothing would do this intrepid investigator, so I touched base with Murphy during the week. He’s fine: not invisible, after all.
But now I think of it, our communication was all by text: no verbal exchange. Maybe he’s still floating somewhere in the space-time continuum, like the poor souls in Lost.
It wouldn’t do to extrapolate everything from one match, but watching Douglas and Ballymartle in yesterday’s Cork SHC reminded me not so much specifically of last Saturday week’s All-Ireland final replay, with three late goals, but of American football games in general.
Invariably, American football teams work a two-minute drill when they’re behind late in the final quarter, and you’d wonder why GAA teams don’t work on something similar, a pre-planned set of moves to try to engineer even a point on a once-off basis, when that’s what’s required.
Both Douglas and Ballymartle were looking for goals late on yesterday, so it wouldn’t really have applied, but still, if your team is looking for one score late on, wouldn’t you feel a lot more confident if there were a plan in place to try get you over the line?
