Why is RTE’s flagship news so dull?
An Enda Kenny filibuster from hours ago is not news
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- Anchors away: Bryan Dobson and Sharon Ni Bheolain
Why are RTE’s flagship news bulletins so dull, predictable and safe? The same heads, the same tales … drawing the same reactions. Yawnarama!
I have my iPhone and my laptop, so I’m fairly up to speed on what’s happening. Surely Bryan Dobson and the team have something new, or value to add? Footage from Roy Keane’s press conference 13 hours ago scripted in that dramatic present tense just doesn’t cut it!
News: “Newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent events”, says Google. So how does an Enda Kenny filibuster in the Dail, from six hours ago, qualify as newly received — or noteworthy — however breathless it might make poll corr Martina Fitzgerald?
Litter and sewage spoil Rush beach stroll
Will the dog poo always be with us?
At play on the North Beach in Rush, Co Dublin. Just don’t mention the raw sewage being pumped straight out to sea nearby by Fingal Council
A low swathe of diaphanous cloud is puffing across a clear denim-blue sky as down Kilbush Lane we go, Bella, my wiry black and white terrier mix, and I. We’re on our way to the North Beach in Rush, Co Dublin, for our early morning ramble.
There’s a north-easterly wind would cut through you though, and an old salt who has stepped out from a galvanised shed for a roll-up, welding mask pushed to the top of his shaven knobbly head, remarks, “It’s a bit blowy.”
“Tis a bit,” I reply in kind.
Blowy? The fur on Bella’s black face is parted and her ears are flat against her head, making her look like a startled hawk from the front.
Aleppo and Syria a tragedy for us all
Weapons manufacturers must be called to account 
This is one of those ones where you stick your neck out and risk being denounced as a dunce, or a simpleton. I’m talking about Aleppo.
Most of us are looking on from our comparatively cosy TV lounges and wondering what the hell is going on. What kind of hell are we witnessing? Or are we even witnessing it? Every emotive hand-held camera testament to Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter is open to question. Every stock shot of every devastated city streetscape, every line of ragged bodies beamed out to the world is either history in the making or wicked propaganda, or some immeasurable mix of both. Who is right? Who is wrong? What do we do? What can we do? Confusion reigns and the destruction continues.
It’s all so confusing. All faction and counter-faction. Elements splitting and transmutating all the time, colliding and dividing to spark ever more deadly fissions and fall outs in ungovernable space.
WAR declared on teenage terrors
(Inspired by my experiences as father of a teenage girl)
It was the ticket and information caravan parked on the plaza for our town’s recent festival that gave me the idea: a one-stop shop for the frazzled parents of unmanageable young teenagers.
Welcome to our rather more discretely located Wild Angels Response (WAR) unit.
Maybe son number two is magnetically drawn to the naughty goings-on in the town’s shadier parts? No worries: we know where they — and he — are and we will have him home in no time. He will soon get over the shock. Call it tough love. He’ll understand. Sometime.
Your 13-year-old daughter slinking off to lock braces with that hair-gelled budding Lothario in the woods? Juliette and her Romeo will be parted before they’ve even met. Young love hurts, but not as much as low-voltage electricity.
Walking Dublin city blues
(As Perceived Quarterly, Volume 1, Number 1, November 2016)
St Patrick’s Park, Dublin … where the soft drift of mellow voices wafts over me.
Don’t you just love those moments when the dark clouds you took for granted roll back and your whole world lights up? It’s like someone, somewhere, has turned up the dimmer switch to the max and everything, everywhere, is brighter, clearer, kinder.