Month: June 2017

 

I have not been blessed with too much good fortune in my sporting career so far. I blame poor coaches, lack of opportunities, clueless talent scouts and very little support or encouragement. It had nothing to do with my ability or lack of it.

When I was a young teenager I decided to try my hand at rugby. I was always tall for my age and I thought that this was a game that might suit me. I had an Irish rugby jersey that I used to wear when I was messing around with the lads on the green. I could see myself wearing the real thing and getting lots of caps for Ireland and probably a place on the Lions team as well.

So, I took myself off to the local rugby club to give them the benefit of my expertise. I put on my boots and took to the pitch. There was a guy running away from me with the ball under his arm so I decided to take it from him. I dived at him with the intention of catching him around the hips but I was a bit late and missed. As I went down, his heel came up and caught me straight in the mouth.

Every tooth in my mouth shook and the blood that escaped from my body could have been used to save many lives. My nose felt as if it had been relocated and a drum solo was playing in my ears. I was sent home for treatment and I knew, there and then, that my rugby career was over. I had no intention of becoming disfigured for the sake of a game of football so I threw in the towel.

I tried my hand at G.A.A. football as well and I enjoyed that. The only difficulty I had, was that I never really knew what to do when I had the ball. There was never any shortage of experts on the side-line shouting pearls of wisdom but it got complicated when all the instructions contradicted each other and no matter what I did with the ball, I was always upsetting someone. Eventually, I had enough of it.

I also had an interest in soccer and I followed Leeds United. My bedroom walls were covered with photos of the players that I had cut from Shoot magazine. As far as I was concerned, it was only a matter of time before I began my playing career in England. My parents would have to get used to the fact that I was going to be living in Yorkshire but the huge amounts of money I would be sending home would make up for that.

But that never happened because in spite of the ability I was convinced I had, the talent scouts that came to see the youngsters in local clubs and street leagues didn’t do their jobs right and they never spotted me. The clubs didn’t want me either so they too had a problem with recognising talent.

But I was never one to be down hearted so, with my football career in tatters, I turned my attention to tennis. I always had a huge interest in Wimbledon and I used to sit in front of the telly for the two weeks of that tournament and watch it all day. I was also in love with Chris Evert and I knew that it was only a matter of time until we were playing side by side in a mixed doubles event.

So, in 1972, I bought myself a timber racquet and off I went to the local tennis club. With my natural ability and athletic prowess, it wasn’t going to take me long to hit the professional circuit. It soon became obvious though that the other players in the club were holding me back. There was no other explanation for my lack of progress. I had to act fast because Chrissie was running out of patience.

I got some coaching but the coach told me that I would never be a professional tennis player. I was gutted and I had to break it to Chrissie that her dream of us playing together would never materialise. I’m sure she was devastated. I’ve never actually spoken to her but she must have been distraught.

Once again, like Phoenix, I rose to the challenge. I bought a set of golf clubs, joined a club and off I went to set about getting on the Ryder Cup team. For some strange reason, while I played tennis with my right hand, I played golf with my left. There were some who suggested that I played golf as if I was using the wrong hand but that was probably just jealousy.

More obstacles were put in my way. Course designers put trees in the very places that I used to put my ball and the holes on the greens never suited my style, so I gave up.

So, as you can see, I have been dogged with bad luck and poor management throughout my playing career in every sport I have been involved in. But all that is about to change.

Recently, I had my first game of croquet. If you’re not familiar with this game let me explain. It’s played on a green and it involves hitting a ball through a series of hoops using a timber mallet. This suits my aggressive, competitive nature and I’m certain that it’s only a matter of time until I am recognised as one of the greatest players of all time.

My first outing was a bit of a disappointment though, but that was only because the green was uneven, I had a bad mallet, the ball wasn’t great and it was windy. It wasn’t my fault.

 

 

I came across a story recently and while it was hardly earth-shattering news, it still grabbed some headlines. Gordon Ramsey, a TV chef, declared in no uncertain terms that he would not eat airplane food. He didn’t put it as simply as that and he stirred a few expletives into the pot but the point was the same. He wouldn’t touch it with a forty-foot fork.

He was once involved in preparing food for an airline and he won’t eat it because he knows what it takes to prepare the meals and the length of time the food is hanging around before it is eaten. So, I assume that when Mr. Ramsey takes a flight somewhere he brings a packed lunch.

I don’t know what exactly he expects. The primary function of any airline is to get us from A to B as efficiently and as safely as possible. On long-haul flights, passengers will get hungry and at thirty thousand feet there aren’t too many options available to the cabin crew. They can let you starve or they can supply you with some pre-prepared food. Ok, so it’s not going to be mouth- watering but at least it’s edible. Presumably it is subject to some hygiene and food safety regulations so it should be safe as well.

I don’t think that anyone, apart from Gordon Ramsey that is, expects Michelin type meals when you’re flying above the clouds. Most of us want something to fill a gap and at that height you can’t be too fussy. In my own experience, I have found that airplane food has improved over the years and I have yet to be poisoned by any of it. Which is more than I can say about some of the food I’ve eaten at ground level.

There was a time when our knowledge of food was limited to a decent beef stew or a nice bit of bacon and cabbage. The most important thing was to have a flowery potato. After that, everything else fell into place. If there was a really special occasion you might venture to a restaurant and treat yourself to a steak. But there had to be a good reason for that.

Then, we started to get a bit cocky and if the steak wasn’t done to our liking, we sent it back. If the soup wasn’t warm enough, back it went. Effectively, we were telling the chef to get his act together and maybe that didn’t go down too well.

It’s probably our fault that chefs decided they needed to become aggressive in the kitchen. They got angry and learned to shout a lot. Having temper tantrums and throwing pots and pans was essential for a life in a white hat. Or maybe that was only for television.

There is an abundance of cookery programmes on the television these days like Master Chef, Jamies 15 miniute meals, Can’t Cook – Won’t Cook, The Naked Chef. There are more celebrity chefs than you can wave a blender at and they all have their own way of doing things. Some of them often lose the run of themselves.

I came across a story involving Jay Rayner, a food critic with The Observer, and he described an experience he had at Le Cinq, Four Seasons Hôtel George V, in Paris. He went for a meal with a female companion and the bill, including service and modest wine came to €600.

This place is a Michelin three-star restaurant, or the scene of the crime as Mr. Rayner described it. In terms of value for money and expectation Le Cinq supplied by far the worst restaurant experience he has endured in his 18 years as a food critic.

If you are going to fork out €600 for a bit of grub, you are entitled to be miffed if you’re not happy with it. The canapé, he said, released stale air with a tinge of ginger and his companion said it was like eating a condom that had been left lying about in a dusty greengrocer’s.

He described the main course of pigeon as being served so pink it just might fly again given a few volts and it arrived with a heap of couscous and a tiny portion of lamb for €95 and it tasted of little.

He described the dessert of frozen chocolate mousse cigars wrapped in tuile with an elastic flap of milk skin draped over it, like something that had fallen off a burns victim. He said the cheesecake tasted of grass clippings.

They each drank one glass of champagne, one glass of white and one of red, chosen by the sommelier from a wine list that included bottles priced at €15,000 each. The drinks bill was €170 and the total bill was €600. As for the overall experience, he reckons that If he works hard, one day, with luck, he may be able to forget it.

I don’t know anything about food critics but I really enjoyed Mr. Raynor’s review and it made me laugh. On the other hand, it made me wonder about how restaurants like this survive. Obviously, there are people who are prepared to pay these outlandish prices because they either enjoy the experience or they don’t know any better. A touch of the Emperors’ new clothes maybe.

I don’t have a very sophisticated pallet and I love nothing more than a nice feed of bacon and cabbage with some flowery spuds and a knob of butter. I don’t know what Mr. Raynor would make of that but for sure, restaurants would struggle to over glamourise it no matter what language they used.

It is what it is. Good food for less than €600 and you don’t need any Michelin stars to produce it.

The Leaving Cert is upon us again and it’s a stressful time for our young students. But they shouldn’t worry if they don’t get the points they want. In fact, they may even be better off if they don’t.

When I was a school kid, I never got too much encouragement from the teaching fraternity to reach for the stars. As far as I can remember, I never received any type of career guidance. In those days, there were two categories of student. Those who were academically inclined and those who weren’t. The former group got all the attention and the latter group of no-hopers were left to their own devices. This group included me.

There was a kind of unspoken understanding that the achievers merited the extra interest so they could reach their full potential. While the rest, well they would find their own level with a trade or a factory job. They’d be fine.

There were certainly some guys in every class who were completely oblivious to what was going on around them. They lived in a bubble. They had absolutely no interest in what was taking place and it was an achievement to even get these characters into a classroom. But there may have been reasons for that.

Not much was known in those days about autism, dyspraxia or dyslexia or the myriad of other inhibitors that make learning difficult for some people.  Conventional teaching methods didn’t work for everyone. The supports weren’t available for kids suffering from these ism’s so they were left to struggle on. Maybe I’m being hard on the system of the time but that’s how I remember it.

Things have progressed a lot since then and there is much more recognition and understanding of the various conditions that can have an impact on a child’s ability to learn. Teaching methods have changed and special needs assistants are a great addition.

So now, every child has a decent chance and we want them to make the most of their opportunity and to be whatever they want to be. Hopefully, they will be content with their lot and be happy in themselves and that’s as much as we want for our kids.

At the other end of the scale, as we get older, things change.  We realise that time has moved on and some of the stars are no longer within reach.

I was lying in bed the other night and I woke around 3am and my mind was racing. It dawned on me that I was never going to be an Olympian. I am too old to run anywhere and too fat to jump over anything and I have a lower back that has a mind of its own.

For those same reasons, I will never climb Mt. Everest, I will never play football for Liverpool and I will not compete against Roger Federer at Wimbledon. I will never be an explorer nor am I ever likely to discover anything unless it happens to be lurking in my garden or resting somewhere near my recliner.

I can live with that, but I can’t help wondering at how it came about so quickly. The years between my school days and grand-fatherhood have disappeared in the blink of an eye.

I remember as a young garda in Dublin getting advice from an old hand and he told me to enjoy my service because the time was going to fly by. He said that the first ten years would pass quickly. The second ten years would go ever quicker and the third ten would pass in a matter of miniutes and soon, I would be heading for retirement.

I was twenty-one at the time so I wasn’t listening because thirty years was an eternity and way off my radar. How right he was though.

When you look at the bigger picture, it’s incredible to think how little time we have on this planet. In 1979, I walked through the gates of the Garda Training College in Templemore. Then someone pushed the fast forward button and here I am writing this nearly forty years later.

I have encountered many who are obsessed with their careers, with a burning desire to achieve greatness or simply to make as much money as possible. Very often they leave casualties in their wake, including their own families. They work in stressful environments, often away from home, beavering away to get more. Never seeming to be satisfied with what they have.

But like me, one day, they too will wake up to find that the kids have grown up and have gone off to make their own lives. They will realise that time has passed them by and they are now elder lemons and are more likely to be talking about pensions, nursing homes, prostates and gout.

I know guys who hardly have time to stop for a chat because there is always something more important to be done. They can’t take a day off because, in their minds, they can’t be done without. They’re the essential cog in the wheel and without them, work will grind to a halt.

The bad news for them is that everyone is dispensable. Anyone who imagines that their services can’t be done without, is not living in the real world. There is always someone waiting to take over and the wheel will continue to turn as if they were never there.

So, maybe all those years ago, the system did us some good. Maybe the system did identify the high achievers and pushed them on because they knew what lay ahead and maybe they also realised that the rest of us would have a better life just plodding along.

If that was the case then maybe I’m not giving them enough credit.

 

 

 

On Wednesday last, I spent a few hours watching the meeting of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on the Internet. They are trying to get to the bottom of the financial shenanigans at the Garda College in Templemore. The official title is, ‘Matters arising from Interim Report of AGS Internal Audit Unit on Financial Procedures at the Garda College Templemore.’

This probably wouldn’t be most peoples’ idea of fun but I find that kind of stuff entertaining. The whole business concerning the state of financial accounting in Templemore is a heavy subject with lots of details about dates of meetings and who was present and who said what to whom being bandied about. But it’s all good stuff.

From the garda side of the house, there were three main civilian witnesses. There was the head of Human Resources, the guy in charge of doing the audit and the guy in charge of Finance. There were others but these three were the stars of the show. It soon became obvious that there was some hostility between these people and there was a bit of finger pointing going on.

There were moments when the contents of letters and reports were read out in public. Sometimes they contained comments made by one witness about the other which was a little awkward considering that they were sitting side by side. They appeared to be uncomfortable at times and looked like they wished that they were somewhere else instead.

As I was watching it, a couple of things came to mind. Some of the committee members appeared to be behaving very aggressively towards the witnesses, occasionally, they were bordering on being rude. This committee is questioning witnesses and looking at the evidence presented to them with the intention of finding out what happened and presumably furnishing a report based on their findings.

I didn’t see the need for the amateur dramatics and grandstanding. It should be possible to carry out this function without screaming about how outraged they are and about how this is probably the worst thing they have experienced since they entered politics. A bit of civility wouldn’t go amiss and people need to calm down. As serious as it is, it’s not the Nuremberg Trials.

The Chairman of the Audit Committee, who is no longer in that position, got a hard time from Mary Lou McDonald for not being better prepared to answer questions. The guy was only asked the previous Friday to attend the meeting and he didn’t have access to records because he doesn’t hold the position anymore. He did turn up to the PAC staff the day before to have a look at the paperwork that was available to him so he could refresh his memory. He did his best.

The other irritation was the amount of time allocated to the committee members to ask their questions. They got a few miniutes each but it wasn’t enough time so they all ended up running over and rushing at the end. Sometimes without getting the answer to the last question.

Some of the politicians spent most of their allotted time making long winded statements and that didn’t help.

While the subject matter is serious, just watching the carry on can be entertaining. Sean Fleming of Fianna Fail is the chairman of the committee and he has a habit of banging a spoon or a pen off a glass when he gets a little excited or when he wants attention. Nobody apart from Sean seems to take any notice of it.

He was challenged at one point by David Cullinane of Sinn Fein on why he wouldn’t let one of the witnesses make a comment in relation to another witness and he got very animated. He looked as if he was afraid that the stewardship of this committee might be taken from him. He pointed out that he was the chairman and he was doing it his way. He was a bit excited.

Sean then got a bit stressed about the contents of a letter that compared the goings on in Templemore to the events that unfolded at Console, the charitable organisation. Sean went to great lengths to explain why this letter was bothering him so much and why it was so important.

Alan Kelly of Labour got stuck in and you can always count on him to put on a good show. He didn’t pull his punches and always seemed ready to bite someone’s head off. Catherine Connolly, Independent, on the other hand, gave the appearance of not being too sure about what was going on. She came across as being somewhat lost while Bobby Aylward, Fianna Fail, seemed very sure of himself but I had no idea what he was on about. He seemed to be asking general questions to nobody in particular.

This process has a long way to go yet. So far, it appears that whatever went on in Templemore wasn’t for the personal gain of any one individual. It seems more likely that all this bad governance and poor accounting was a result of lack of ability more than criminality. The sums of money involved were enormous and there was no expertise there to deal with it properly. Every time someone got an idea, they opened a bank account. There were 48 of them.

Many people will struggle to understand how things could get to this state. How there could be such bad governance and mismanagement in An Garda Siochana and why so many issues were left unchallenged.

I am one of those and I will be tuning in to the next meeting to find out.