Search Results for 'De Valera'

Well, what a varied week of events we have had locally, nationally and indeed internationally!

Well, I had a lovely event last Saturday night. Ray D’Arcy had invited me on to his chat show and I really enjoyed the chat with him and with so many of the audience I met afterwards.

We have finally jumped from 2017 to 2018 and even though I am compiling this on January 4, it seems as if half the country has not yet gone back to work. There is a general air of ‘let us wait until the children go back to school’, which will be next Monday. So for the moment there is still the remnants of festivities around.

Pete Lane, now in his 80s, who went to Ballindereen national school, spent most of his busy working life ‘on his knees thinning beet’. He had a friend Tommy Staunton from Lough Cutra, who had fought in World War I. Before Tommy went ‘over the top’ he was delighted when each soldier was handed a ‘little glass of brandy’. After which, Tommy claimed, you had no fear in the world. One day they were fighting the Germans, and managed to drive them out of their trenches. There they found a boiler of tea. It was still warm. The men settled down for a good cuppa but the officer warned them that the tea might be poisoned. Nobody cared if it was poisoned or not. ‘We were so exhausted an killed out’ that they enjoyed the break while the fighting continued.

An interesting story has emerged linking a badly burnt survivor from the SS Athenia, a Galway pharmacy, and Glasgow’s Riverside Museum.

Well, this week we will begin with a tale of woe: Ireland versus Scotland on Saturday in the Six Nations Cup.

Ireland’s greatest short story writer is probably the late Frank O’Connor (1903-1966). Born in Cork city, his autobiography An Only Child (1961) is ironically a celebration of his vivacious but fastidious mother, and their survival from his alcoholic, and at times brutal, father.

If the Nobel Academy awarded an annual prize for generosity then the Irish people would surely have won it many times over. This thought came to mind as Insider perused the secluded Tara China site, with the historic Mervue House, standing on three acres of gated grounds, surrounded to the front by trees.