Donegal poet Annemarie N\u00ed Churre\u00e1in to launch new book early next month<\/a><\/p>\nThe prime minister was just welcoming the terrorists back into Gaza, she said. Except he wasn\u2019t. 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\u2019s Sammy Wilson. Kemi should think long and hard about this. If your target audience is Sammy, you\u2019ve almost certainly picked the wrong side.\u201d<\/p>\n
This gave me a good laugh. I decided to check Sammy\u2019s utterances about Gaza which so impressed Kemio \u2018Badenough\u2019. Here he goes:
\u201cNo-one should be taken in by the SDLP, Alliance and Sinn F\u00e9in 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\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The hostages weren\u2019t starved\u2026 thousands of Palestinians are still being deprived of food. As for \u2018defending\u2019, surely almost 70,000 deaths is serious overkill? But hey\u2026 as John Crace says:<\/p>\n
\u201cIf your target audience is Sammy, you\u2019ve almost certainly picked the wrong side.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 cam\u00e1n way back then.
It seems that in 1977, ash was getting scarce, so Wavin (the Pipes people) launched a \u2018virtually unbreakable\u2019 synthetic hurl made of plastic components.<\/p>\n
\u2018Plastic hurleys? They laughed at first at the very idea,\u2019 one advert line ran. \u2018But then they played with the Cam\u00e1n Wavin \u2014 and now it has caught on with schools around the country.\u2019<\/p>\n
An immediate problem encountered was a very sharp unpleasant sensation felt when two plastic hurls met with some force \u2014 sending a painful shudder up the holder\u2019s arm.<\/p>\n
Their hard and durable material was sore in the extreme bodily contact. Ultimately the plastic pretender didn\u2019t 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 \u2014 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 \u00a32.40.<\/p>\n
Sales manager Joe O\u2019Rourke worked in Wavin for almost 40 years. \u201cSure they were grand but they\u2019d 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\u2019d be ideal for playing ground hurling. God, he took away 50\u201360 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 \u201979 or \u201980 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
For a while Wavin was very supportive of the idea, added O\u2019Rourke. \u201cThey were a talking point at the time but it fizzled out. The product wasn\u2019t 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\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Sometime later, he read a press report about a mighty schemozzle between two rival travelling factions and was mortified to see that the \u2018victors\u2019 had been armed to the teeth with \u2018plastic hurls\u2019! He kept the head down and mercifully heard no more about it.<\/p>\n
As a matter of interest, the late Colm Connolly did an RT\u00c9 news broadcast in April 1977 called \u2018Clash of the Plastic\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
On a lighter note
Well, not \u2018lighter\u2019 if you were a woman. I want to thank Martin McFadden for unearthing this gem from the Irish Press in 1937.<\/p>\n
A Sligo PP, Father Stenson of Collooney, said that \u201cAll 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
God save us, if the Taliban treated women like this (and they do!) we\u2019d be up in arms. God love his poor housekeeper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Enoch Burke haranguing Catherine Connoly probably ensured a few other undecided votes for her. His support for Heather…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103270,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1485,34422,34423,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-103269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-donegal","tag-donegal-democrat","tag-frank-galligan","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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