It Occurs To Me: Looks like President Connolly

Enoch Burke haranguing Catherine Connoly probably ensured a few other undecided votes for her. His support for Heather Humphries will do her no good at all. Wouldn’t you just wish the Burkes would go away?

Catherine Connolly has probably benefited from being harangued by Enoch Burke

Sammy goes Gaga on Gaza!

In fairness I suppose, if Trump is Maga, it’s appropriate that one of his biggest Norn Iron fans is Gaga. Firstly, let me go back to 2008 and a piece I wrote here: “I’m not the better of it!

A few months ago, the youth wing of the Northern Ireland Green Party presented the Green Wash Award to DUP MLA Sammy Wilson for his pro-nuclear vision for Northern Ireland. The Green Wash Award is annually presented to the person considered to be the biggest threat to the local environment in the north, and the bould Sammy walked it. And guess what? Last Monday, new First Minister Peter Robinson appointed Sammy Minister for the Environment! When he was Lord Mayor of Belfast in 1986 Rhonda Paisley accompanied him to official engagements and the same year, their official Christmas card read ‘Belfast Says Noel’.

After they split up, Sammy seemed to suddenly find himself “at one with nature” (possibly his earliest flirtation with the environment) when pictures of him frolicking naked with a woman were published, and up until a few years ago in the Short Strand, there was a mural of Sammy wearing nothing except for his mayoral chain and a DUP rosette!

In any event, he must now embrace a colour he has so despised for decades. Is this the final nail in the coffin for ‘naked’ sectarianism?”

Meanwhile, and up to date in the British parliament, one of my favourite columnists, John Crace in The Guardian, had this to say: “Here’s the thing. The Donald hasn’t orchestrated a ceasefire because he regards it as a moral duty. Part of his office. But because he is doing the world a favour. Everything is transactional. He needs adoration. And a Nobel peace prize.”

Crace then said of Kemi Badenoch, the hapless Tory leader: “After a fairly neutral opening couple of sentences in which she welcomed the return of the hostages – she had nothing to say about the return of the Palestinians or the reconstruction of Gaza: she takes her partisanship seriously – Kemi started launching an attack on Starmer and the country’s status in the world.

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The prime minister was just welcoming the terrorists back into Gaza, she said. Except he wasn’t. He had spoken at length about Hamas having no part in a future Palestinian state. Kemi was not to be denied. The only MP to channel his inner Kemi was the DUP’s Sammy Wilson. Kemi should think long and hard about this. If your target audience is Sammy, you’ve almost certainly picked the wrong side.”

This gave me a good laugh. I decided to check Sammy’s utterances about Gaza which so impressed Kemio ‘Badenough’. Here he goes:
“No-one should be taken in by the SDLP, Alliance and Sinn Féin call for a recall of Parliament to discuss the situation in Gaza. Should Parliament sit for a year and discuss nothing else it will make not one ounce of difference to what is happening in Gaza whilst Hamas continue to ruthlessly hold hostages, starving them to death, and continues its terrorist attacks and rocket assaults on Israel… The DUP have no part and will have no part in such pointless exercises. We support the Israeli government in defending its people and its territory and defeating the terrorists who threaten them.”

The hostages weren’t starved… thousands of Palestinians are still being deprived of food. As for ‘defending’, surely almost 70,000 deaths is serious overkill? But hey… as John Crace says:

“If your target audience is Sammy, you’ve almost certainly picked the wrong side.”

Good hurling?
Most of you are probably too young to remember 1977! I was reminded of one 70s sports launch recently when I heard a great story about a businessman in the midlands who was stuck with hundreds of a so-called revolutionary type of camán way back then.
It seems that in 1977, ash was getting scarce, so Wavin (the Pipes people) launched a ‘virtually unbreakable’ synthetic hurl made of plastic components.

‘Plastic hurleys? They laughed at first at the very idea,’ one advert line ran. ‘But then they played with the Camán Wavin — and now it has caught on with schools around the country.’

An immediate problem encountered was a very sharp unpleasant sensation felt when two plastic hurls met with some force — sending a painful shudder up the holder’s arm.

Their hard and durable material was sore in the extreme bodily contact. Ultimately the plastic pretender didn’t feel natural enough to supplant ash or challenge it in the market as a viable alternative. It was claimed at the time of the launch that the hurl was virtually unbreakable — young kids at the time tested its claims by bending to such extremes that the toe almost touched the handle top. It had a suggested retail price of £2.40.

Sales manager Joe O’Rourke worked in Wavin for almost 40 years. “Sure they were grand but they’d sting the hell out of you. You could never say they were the same as an ash hurl. We had a big stock of them piled up in the factory and I remember this man came in, a priest down in Cavan, he was training the junior camogie team and he said they trained in a car park over the winter and he thought they’d be ideal for playing ground hurling. God, he took away 50–60 of them, and he came back to tell me, as far as I know, that they won the junior camogie title. It could have been 1978 or ’79 or ’80 or something like that. He thought they were great for training, though he did admit they still used the ordinary hurleys for matches. He used to say the art of ground hurling was nearly gone at that time.”

For a while Wavin was very supportive of the idea, added O’Rourke. “They were a talking point at the time but it fizzled out. The product wasn’t totally suitable. Shops were keen to stock them, there was no trouble getting them out the first time, it was the repeat business that was a problem… some kept them for souvenirs. It came to the stage where you had to decide are you going to stay with them or get rid of them.”

One of the shops belonged to a friend of a friend, who bought hundreds of them but there was no shift on them at all. However, one day a couple of bucks landed in and asked him how much to buy the lot. They came to a deal and off they went.

Sometime later, he read a press report about a mighty schemozzle between two rival travelling factions and was mortified to see that the ‘victors’ had been armed to the teeth with ‘plastic hurls’! He kept the head down and mercifully heard no more about it.

As a matter of interest, the late Colm Connolly did an RTÉ news broadcast in April 1977 called ‘Clash of the Plastic’ when the Wavin hurley was tested at Croke Park with the Chairman of the Dublin GAA Jimmy Gray and Dublin Senior Hurling Manager Jim Boggan.

Jim Boggan thought the Wavin hurls were better quality than the juvenile ash hurls then being manufactured and would be happy to see the Wavin hurley used at senior level. It never happened.

On a lighter note
Well, not ‘lighter’ if you were a woman. I want to thank Martin McFadden for unearthing this gem from the Irish Press in 1937.

A Sligo PP, Father Stenson of Collooney, said that “All the women were good for nowadays was smoking, dancing and having a good time, and keeping away from their houses as much as possible. The drudgery of the kitchen was not for them. They did not know how to sew, darn a pair of their socks, or keep a house clean. They would not know how to look after a husband.”

God save us, if the Taliban treated women like this (and they do!) we’d be up in arms. God love his poor housekeeper.