It Occurs To me: Getting shirty with our Ryan!

Cavan people get a hard time about being ‘thrifty’ but as a cousin said to me years ago in McShane’s pub in Cornafean, “I’d give you the shirt off me back…if I had a shirt!”

Meanwhile in Tyrone, as you can see from the accompanying photo, there is a Red Hand tendency to take the shirt off your back! Not that it deterred Ryan McHugh in McCumhaill Park, or ‘our wee Ryan’, is he as referred to by a passionate female fan, someone who would take lumps out of the shirt pullers if she got her hands on them! 

'There is a Red Hand tendency to take the shirt off your back'

Some 16,500 in Ballybofey…10,000 or so in Croke Park, and don’t tell me the missing Dubs had decided to watch GAA Go! Farce heaped upon farce! 

                                          Wake me up before you GAAGo!

Another woman was determined to see the Donegal/Tyrone game on the box, and despite her reservations about GAAGo, she tried her very best to get it on her LGTV. Half an hour later, she was still being told that her e-mail wasn’t recognised, despite it being the one she used to first register!  “Thank God for Highland Radio!” she finally exclaimed to me in frustration, and like many listeners, then had to wait to see brief highlights on the Saturday Game on RTÉ. 

When the Taoiseach, Tanaiste and 74% of people in a recent poll think it should go…it should go! Originally devised as a service for the Irish diaspora, here is a reaction from  Padraig O’Neill in Sacramento in California: “What a waste. Tried to log on on three separate devices without luck. Tells me email is invalid even though it is the one I always used. Service used to be much better. Of course, no human support available. I am cancelling my subscription!” Eoin wrote: “Kilkenny Wexford game went down for 10 minutes. I emailed GAAGo and was told it was a problem with RTÉ’s coverage. However, I was watching Dublin Galway on RTÉ at the same time with no issues. Disappointing, overpriced service.” David fumed: “Absolute disgrace. Skipped the entire time at the last game I watched. Prices are too high especially considering I’m not even at the game just watching online. Corruption at its finest. Unfair to the elderly who want to watch games as well. My grandfather can’t watch all the matches anymore.”

It’s about a year since Age Action’s Celine Clarke told RTÉ’s ‘This Week’ that:  “People experience digital exclusion because of lack of skills, lack of internet connection or affordability…Unfortunately, older people are expressing great frustration at the push by private enterprises or organisations like banking or the GAA to move things to a digital first policy. Whether that’s the streaming services like GAA Go or cashless turnstiles, it really deepens the digital exclusion and therefore the social exclusion as well.” 

Clarke estimated that nearly 300,000 older people were not using the internet – among over-75s this is over half of the age group, which “discriminates and excludes those not using the internet”. She added that affordability was another problem, as a smart device is required for GAA GO, at a time when “we already know that older people are increasingly at risk of poverty” amid the cost-of-living crisis.

Meanwhile on Newstalk’s On The Ball, retired Wexford hurler Tom Dempsey was incensed. He said that it was not fair to older GAA fans, remarking: “I’m not patronising, because I’m heading in that direction myself…We’re trying to promote hurling … certainly internationally, it’s a small-populated sport.” He added that it was “absolutely crazy” that certain matches were not accessible to the public. “It’s horrendous marketing. People will say they can (use) GAAGo or whatever, but … these are the people who are paying for the club lotto, the county development draw. I don’t think it’s right. I’m really angry at depriving those people of the big games.”                                                             

                                              Feeding the weans?

Picture the scene…two sets of adults, four children, sat at a restaurant table; the grown-ups  perusing menus, the children already buried in their tablets. I witnessed this, and other examples, on a number of occasions, and was struck by the contrast with Spanish and Italian families, for whom a meal is a happy and vocal family occasion. In this instance, one mammy occasionally lifted a chip and stuck it in a wee lad’s gob, while he furiously tapped his screen. Teachers will tell you that far too many children are landing with little or no vocal skills to school compared to years ago, and is it any wonder? 

For God’s sakes, can we not feed the weans with conversation as well? Leave their phones and tablets behind until the meal or celebration is over…otherwise, we’re heading into a world where silence isn’t golden at all, but a mere rusted relic of what will be nostalgically remembered as ‘Oul chat’. 

                                              Drookit, daft and desperate

Although we tend to associate the Lowlands Scots with East Donegal, the Laggan in particular, the Carrigart/Mevagh area too had pockets where you could have closed your eyes and been transported ‘tae’ Carrigans or Convoy, or Donemana/Plumbridge in Tyrone.  A young lad from Mulroy who went to Gortnabrade NS, when asked by his granny why he was soaking wet, replied: “'I got totally drookit on ma wey hame fae the scuil'”. I was reminded of ‘drookit’ when I saw the hapless Rishi Sunshine launch the 2024 General Election outside Number 10, Drowning Street, with no minion holding a Joe Brolly over his ‘heed’, and the rain skiting off his £2000 suit, like water off a duck’s arse. He then tore off to change into a new ‘shuit of clays’, as they say in St Johnston, and since then, he’s had two or three doses of the ‘buck sturdies’ which will probably ensure annihilation on July 4th. On the original date in 1776, some  colonists celebrated Independence Day by putting on mock funerals for King George III of England—symbolizing the death of the Crown’s rule in America. King Rishi’s wake has started early. 

Meanwhile, the Reform Party, who hope to hoover up disgruntled right-wing Tory voters, published their manifesto, which includes the suggestion that no  British team should be playing in the European championships, as Brexit means Brexit. 

Anyway, back to Rishi Sunshine…he addresses a circle of high-vis jacket potatoes in a biscuit factory in Derbyshire, only for the press to discover that two of the jacket potatoes are Tory Councillor plants! (Is a potato a plant or a vegetable?) And a biscuit factory? Puns including ‘crackers’, ‘flaky’ and ‘oh crumbs’ come to mind. In any event, he tears over to a brewery in Wales, and trying to be ‘laddish’, alludes to their chances in the forthcoming Euros, only to be told that they hadn’t actually qualified. Oops! Had his PR people forgotten to ‘leek’ that gem of information? I doubt poor Rishi is ‘toast’!

    In memory of Aidan O'Donnell: Dunkineely And Bogagh

Did we fish in the ‘srúthan’, or just gaze in wonder

At three-spined sticklebacks and ‘pinkeens’? 

You laughed when I called your stream a ‘burn’,

We compared big cities in-between,

Carrigart or Carrick? Milford or Killybegs?

High balls in Kilcar, echoes from a Downings pitch, 

With Big Manus shouting…”Bury him Anton!”

Uncle Frank in Towney rising from the ditch.

Brothers-in-arms, cousins in blood, 

We took on a townland from behind the whins,

From the Top of Bogagh to Far Straleel,

We ‘rose’ the neighbours, kith and kin.

We pushed open the dark barn doors,

And held our breaths in the dying light,

You told me of Campbells from the Cruachs,

Of  jigs and reels and wild ‘Big Nights’,

Of Johnny Doherty, and grandad Francie,

Of sneaking a peek till the early dawn,

I close my eyes and hear my mother,

The rafters lilting with her twilight song.

Aidan, Aodhán, ‘Bringer of Fire’,

You lit up my summers, may God rest you,

As the fiddles rise in Dunkineely,

The bows are bowed for now ‘In Through’.