It Occurs to Me: How the NCT is driving us mad

Despite delays in MOTs in the North, at least one’s car is legally roadworthy from the actual date of the test. Not so with the NCT!

I heard Gabija Gataveckaite of the Irish Independent on Ireland AM last week talking about her experience. Her test was due in February 2023 but the earliest she could get was July 2023, and was informed that her certificate would only then be valid until February 2024, some 6 months. That is disgraceful and yet another example of the horrible Nanny state that Ireland has become.

Also, once you receive a delayed date for MOT in the North, you can present the correspondence to the PSNI and they show leniency, as do the insurance companies.

Not here! The gardaí may show individual leniency but as reported in the Mail on Sunday newspaper, Zurich insurance said bluntly that it will not “pay out” if a car does not have a valid NCT cert and a barrister admitted that claims could be “void” in the circumstances.

Now, to compound matters, the Road Safety Authority stated that no customer was allocated a free NCT test last year, despite a promise in the NCT customer charter that tests would be provided free of charge where an appointment cannot be offered within a 28-day period.
Be it road tolls or NCTs, we are now driving in a money gathering State, and I for one am disgusted.

WHERE BURNS MEETS BRONTE

Rossnowlagh man and Robbie Burns aficionado Richard Hurst is relishing yet another new challenge. Almost a century ago, Vaudeville stage comedian, silent film actor and playwright Charles “Chic” Sale from Illinois, first introduced audiences to “The Specialist” character of “Lem Putt”, a talented carpenter who carved more than a niche for himself in the building of outhouses in rural middle America and into Appalachia.

Richard Hurst is relishing yet another new challenge

In a fun-filled performance Richard reimagines and brings back to life the “carpentry craftsmanship” of this expert privy builder and shares a few trade secrets when it comes to making sure that all is going to be right and proper when you need to go!
Richard has been treading the boards as an award winning amateur actor for over four decades and on Friday last, in lovely Rathfriland in County Down, he performed his one-man show.

Janet, Colin and James Henry, regulars in the Beehive in Ardara, musically took audiences to the heart of “Lem Putt’s” stompin’ ground with a number of original songs and some traditional old-time and bluegrass standards before the professional privy producer took to the stage.

This coming Wednesday, January 25, I will join Richard as we take part in Rathfriland’s inaugural Burns Supper in Chandler House.
The village is the birthplace of Patrick Brontë, father of the writers, Charlotte, Emily and Anne and I relish the thought of the ghosts of Burns and Brontë hovering over the next few nights.
The Rathfriland Regeneration Project is an astonishing success story and a perfect template for any community north or south who want to inject new life into their town or parish. In Andy Peters and fellow members they are blessed with a vibrant, positive and cross-community enterprise.

CROKE PARK THUGGERY

Let’s not call a spade a long-shafted agricultural instrument…it’s a spade.
Thank God none of the Stewartstown Harps players were carrying any or we’d have more Fossa casualties than Paudie Clifford’s busted mouth.
The Harps players tried everything to thwart the finest footballer in generations but David Clifford survived pulling, dragging and after-match provocation. No harm to the ref, Seamus Murphy, but when the four minutes injury time was up, he should have blown his whistle, as it was obvious Stewartstown had lost.

Fossa players David and Paudie Clifford

His two red cards for the Clifford brothers looked like levelling up for the sake of it. David Clifford was generous in his post match comments, Paudie less so, but then the latter’s elbow from Anton Coyle could have inflicted even worse damage.
As Eamonn Sweeney pointed out in the Indo:
“Four of those (cards) went to Stewartstown who’d almost completely lost the run of themselves by the end of the game. Some in their camp even seemed keen to continue in the same vein after the final whistle.

“Had Fossa been willing to oblige things could have got very nasty. There’s no point pretending both sides were equally to blame. Had Fossa faced the Clifden team Stewartstown beat in the semi, it’s unlikely the game would have ended like this.
“The Tyrone champs have form. Four years ago an ugly brawl between both sets of players in a county championship match against Strabane hit the headlines and led to multiple suspensions. And…2006 they had five players suspended, two for 36 weeks, and the club was fined £2,500 after a post-match melee in an Ulster match against Ballymacnab of Armagh.

“Tyrone as a county also has a reputation for this kind of thing. They tend to blame anti-Northern bias. But Derry or Down or Fermanagh don’t have the same rep. Tyrone’s hasn’t been concocted out of fresh air.”

Neither do Donegal, Eamonn, but maybe you mean Northern in a Six-county rather than geographical sense? In any event, bar Clifford’s beautiful football, it was a sorry spectacle. All those years later, Pat Spillane’s ‘Puke Football’ has acquired a contemporary and sadly relevant new meaning.

FAREWELL TO INISHCOO
Dan McCarthy had a lovely article on Inishcoo in the Irish Examiner before Christmas and reminded us that “The bulk of the island’s population lived on the south of the island and reached a peak in 1867 at 47 people.”

I have fond memories of travelling on the ferry to Arranmore on quite a few occasions over the years and Rutland, Edernish, Inishcoo and Eighter are the islands that surround the channel.

In an article headlined “Nature wins battle for Inishcoo,” the Belfast Newsletter described on December 15, 1965, how the island’s last resident Charles O’Donnell departed his home the day before.

“This is the only home I have ever known,” he said. The newspaper stated that tears were running down his face as he left his home of 80 years.
“The island had been inhabited for 300 years, the paper reported, with islanders eking out a precarious living from the rough pasture and augmenting their income by fishing.

“And for the previous 200 years the O’Donnells were kings of the four-square-mile island. However, when the hardship of living on the island became too much for them, the remaining O’Donnells, comprising three men and two women, knew they had to depart. Charles was the last to leave.

Inishcoo: The last resident left in December 1965

“Even though Burtonport was just under 1km from the island the difficulty of remaining proved too much. The family secured accommodation in a disused police station in the fishing village.”
The paper signed off by saying that the only sign of activity after they had left was a blinking red light warning ships of dangerous rocks.

IN FAIRNESS TO BERTIE
I was very impressed listening to Bertie with Pat Kenny last week. His grasp of the NI Protocol controversy was first class and his experience in Northern affairs is head and shoulders above many contemporaries.

One of these weeks I’ll reflect on The Good Friday Agreement and my memories of an extraordinary day in BBC Radio Foyle.
Bertie famously described the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the US in 2008 as: “That decision will in history be written as the biggest mistake that American administration ever made, because Lehman’s was a world investment bank. They had testicles [sic] everywhere.”

Well one thing’s for sure…when it came to the Peace Process, Bertie Ahern did not make a ‘balls’ of that!