Month: February 2018

There was a report on one of the Sunday papers recently suggesting that the anti-tobacco lobby group, ASH, had criticised RTE’s drama series Striking Out because some of the characters were seen smoking cigarettes.

ASH chairman Patrick Doorley, revealed the lobby group had written a letter of complaint to RTE about the “normalising” of cigarettes through showing smoking on screen. It also contacted the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI).

ASH says it is concerned about scenes in Striking Out which portray two characters smoking heavily in an office. There were two smoking scenes in the first episode of the second series of the legal drama and the letter questions RTE’s policy on the portrayal of smoking in their programmes.

Mr. Doorley is obviously a man with time on his hands. I get that he doesn’t like smoking and would like to stamp it out and, he’s concerned that we might be rushing outside to light up once the programme is over.

But I can make up my own mind and it annoys me that he is trying to influence what the rest of us can or can’t watch on TV. I presume the programme in question is trying to be realistic when depicting scenes of ordinary life and, in the real world, some people do smoke and to ignore that fact would be a bit foolish.

Colin Coyle had a piece in the Sunday Times about another complaint that was made to the BAI.

A lady called Niamh Turley, made a complaint about a scene on the RTE2 comedy show Bridget & Eamon in which Eamon, a character with ginger hair and a ginger beard, suggested going upstairs with Bridget’s mother. She responded: “With the lights off so I can’t tell that you’re ginger.”

Turley complained that this remark was “racist” and demonstrated “discrimination and prejudice against people with different hair colour”. She argued such casual racism promoted bullying against redheads, leading to “alienation”.

Thankfully, the BAI used some common sense and said that suggesting someone with ginger hair is unattractive does not constitute discrimination and concluded that “people with red hair are not considered a separate ‘race’ or group in society”, and therefore did not require specific protection under the BAI code.

Where is this nonsense going to end?

I watched a film on TV the other night called Calvary with Brendan Gleeson and it was made in Sligo. In one scene, Brendan, who plays the part of a priest, went to the pub and drank his loaf off. It was an excellent scene, but it didn’t encourage me to go down to my local and get plastered.

Two other guys in the pub with him were sharing a joint. I have never smoked cannabis or injected myself with heroin and that scene didn’t send me to to the dark net or to my nearest drug dealer to get a fix.

There was another character in the film who was in prison and from what I could gather, he had eaten some of his victims. An Irish version of Hannibal Lecter if you like. Brendan Gleeson went to visit him in the prison because he asked to see a priest. Brendan went along with the request thinking that the guy was looking for forgiveness for having these strange dietary requirements.

They had a chat and the villain of the piece explained how he thought that human flesh tasted like turkey meat. Whether it does or not I have absolutely no idea and neither do I have any desire to find out. Having watched this footage, I am no more inclined to go out and eat my neighbour than I was before I saw it.

There was another scene where the priest went to the pub and he had a bit of a row with the publican. He pulled out a gun and started taking pot shots at the various optics and bottles behind the bar. There were bullets and broken glass flying in all directions.

I enjoy going to Tom Kelly’s for a quiet pint and I think I get on ok with the gang there. We might disagree on some things from time to time but, I can assure Mr. Doorley, that I’m not likely to head off to the pub with my AK47 even after watching this film.

The film ended with Brendan Gleeson confronting the villain of the film, on a beach. That demented soul had been abused by a priest in his younger days and carried a lot of hatred towards the clergy around with him. He had issues.

He decided that the best way for him to resolve those issues was to kill Brendan, so he pulled out a gun and shot him in the head spilling blood and guts onto the sand.

If a person had a mind to, they could find a lot to crib about in that film. Sligo Tidy Towns could have an issue with depicting the beach as being a suitable location for spreading human innards. Gun clubs could moan that firearms were being used to promote violence. Pacifists could be offended by the portrayal of violence as a way of solving problems.

If the cribbers had their way, this film would never have seen the light of day. To meet their standards the entire film would have been shot in one room with Brendan Gleeson talking to himself. He wouldn’t have cursed, he wouldn’t have had a drink, he wouldn’t have had a gun and he wouldn’t have made a mess on the beach.

It’s television, it’s entertainment, it’s make believe and most of us can decide for ourselves the difference between reality and fiction. I personally don’t need Mr. Doorley, Ms. Turley or anyone else acting as a censor on my behalf.

I was driving through Midleton the other day when I stopped at a set of traffic lights. As I sat there I saw two things that surprised me.

The first one was a young woman sitting next to me in a spotlessly clean white SUV and before I could figure out what make of car she was driving I was immediately distracted by what she did next. She stuck her finger up her nose and started having a good root around.

I turned my head to the other side and what I saw in that car was even worse. There was a guy sitting on his own with all the windows closed and he was puffing away on a cigarette. He was sitting in a cloud.

I can only imagine what the smell was like inside that car. Not only the interior, but his clothes, his lungs and his entire body must have been stinking. He was a human ashtray and it wasn’t a pretty sight. He didn’t see anything wrong with it because he has probably been doing that for years and it is just habit at this stage. It’s normal to him.

Before we go any further, I must put my hands up. From my teens to my early twenties I was a smoker. Then I gave up the dreaded weed for about sixteen years and never thought of it again. Until one day, I can’t remember why, I reached for a cigarette and I was back on them.

Then I gave them up again and for a few years I had an on-off relationship with cigarettes. There was a time when if I was stressed I would have one but then I figured out that I was deliberately stressing myself at times, so I could have a fag.

Then I went through a period when I would only have a cigarette if I was having a drink. But I had to stop that too when I found myself going out for a drink more than I used to, just so I could justify having a smoke.

There was a friend of mine who used keep a packet of cigarettes on a shelf in the local pub. Whenever he went there for a pint he would take down the packet, have a few cigarettes and when he was leaving he would put the packet back on the shelf again.

I tried the same thing, but my system didn’t work so well though. I was practically living in the pub so I could smoke and doubled my chances of having an early death from either cancer or Sirois of the liver. That was when I decided to quit altogether.

I haven’t touched one for years now and I don’t miss them either. I can’t say that I feel any healthier but I’m sure I must be. People will often comment about the money that smokers spend on cigarettes and how much better off financially they would be if they quit.

But it doesn’t work that way and you don’t have any extra money in your pocket because you just spend it on other things.

But anyway, apart from all that, I rarely smoked in the car. On the odd occasion when I did, I had the window fully open to keep the air and the car as clear as possible. The guy I saw that day in Midleton, probably didn’t even realise how sad he looked or maybe he did but he just didn’t care.

Smokers, and I know this from my own days, don’t listen to the negatives. They convince themselves that they don’t smoke much so they’re not really doing any harm and they’ll quit soon anyway before any real damage is done. There is lots of evidence to support the fact that smoking is bad for you, but smokers don’t listen even though it’s staring them in the face.

According to the HSE, tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death in Ireland with 5,500 smokers dying each year from tobacco related diseases like cancers, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD) and heart disease. Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body.

Back in 2004, Ireland became one of the first countries to introduce legislation banning smoking in the workplace. Publicans claimed the ban would sound the death knell for the Irish pub. Minister Micheal Martin who was driving the initiative wasn’t very popular and in Cork, they called for him to be sacked for “being a zealot”.

There was huge opposition to the ban. One publican reported that he did a survey of his own customers, and that 82 per cent of those polled said they had no problem drinking in a smokie environment.

That’s not surprising either because back in the days before the ban, we didn’t think anything of sitting in a smoke-filled bar because we didn’t know any different. It was what we grew up with. We’d probably have a little moan about the smell of smoke from our clothes after a night out, but it didn’t take us long to get over it.

But the ban went ahead. Nobody died, ash trays disappeared, and the air became clean as the smokers were forced to go outside to pollute the atmosphere. When the hysteria died down, it was generally agreed that it was a good idea.

It wasn’t until we were able to experience having a pint in a clean atmosphere that we realised how toxic the old way was. It didn’t take us long to get used to that idea either and it has become the new normal. Now we’re horrified if we see smokers having a fag in their own cars.

For those of you trying to quit, stick with it. You won’t regret it.

I heard a comment on the radio recently about an incident that occurred at sea during the Second World War which resulted in 168 German sailors being rescued by an Irish vessel. They were plucked from certain death and brought to Cobh in Cork Harbour after they had been recovered by the MV Kerlogue.

This was news to me and it was the first I had heard of that story so I had to find out more.

On December 29, 1943, the 142-foot-long coaster, the MV Kerlogue, was carrying a cargo of oranges from Lisbon to Dublin on behalf of the Wexford Steamship Company. They were in international waters and were aware that they could be heading into a war zone.

So, when the crew of MV Kerlogue spotted a plane approaching the ship, they took notice.

It swooped down towards them but instead of strafing them with gun fire, the plane signalled them and dropped flares away to the starboard bow of the coaster trying to alert them to an incident nearby.

The coaster realised that something was wrong and altered her course. When they reached the area that was lit up by the flares, they were astonished to find the sea all around them was full of men, hundreds of them, holding on to life rafts and other objects in very rough seas.

More than 700 men were in the water and the sea all around them was littered with bits of wreckage and corpses. At first, they had no idea who these people were, but it soon became clear that they were Germans sailors.

Two British cruisers had earlier shelled a flotilla of German ships. They sank a German destroyer and two torpedo boats leaving more than 700 Germans, some dead, others burned and injured, floundering in the ocean.

For at least 10 hours and well into the night, the Kerlogue’s crew pulled men into their boat. There was no doctor on board, so the crew treated the Germans as best they could. They put them in cabins, storerooms and just lay some of them in the alleyways.

They put more of them in the engine room where it became so crowded that the engineers were unable to move around to attend to the engines. They used hand signals to get some of the able-bodied Germans to carry out certain tasks.

The rescue effort was relentless. The sea was rough and it was long, backbreaking and heart-breaking work. Many of the men hauled aboard were dead and had to be slipped back into the sea to make room for others.

Finally, the Captain of the Kerlogue had to make a difficult decision. The ship was packed tight and he was unable to take any more men aboard. He had no choice but to turn away, leaving hundreds of the men still in the water, facing certain death. A head count later revealed that they had taken 168 German sailors onboard.

The crew were exhausted from the effort and were soaked to the skin. All their spare clothes had been given to the Germans and all the ship’s stores had been used up very quickly. The Captain ordered the cargo of oranges to be broken open and the crew made hot orange drinks for everyone.

The story began to emerge slowly. Three days earlier, a German flotilla of ten ships, including three destroyers, sailed from Brest to meet with a merchant ship from Japan with a cargo of materials vital to the German war effort. As they waited to rendezvous with it, two Royal Navy Cruisers, “H.M.S Enterprise” and “H.M.S.Glasgow” who were also out searching for the merchant ship, appeared on the horizon.

A battle ensued but it didn’t last long, and the Germans were no match for the allied fire power. As darkness fell British planes flew over and dropped life rafts and flares to aid the struggling sailors. The cruisers had earlier left the area to avoid being spotted by prowling U-boats.

The crew of the Kerlogue didn’t hesitate to answer the call and they put in a massive effort to save the lives of so many. It wasn’t their first time either.
On April 2, 1941, German bombers attacked a British convoy, and a ship called the Wild Rose, was left in a bad way and sent up flares.

The Kerlogue altered course and went to the Wild Rose and took the 12-man English crew aboard and towed her to Rosslare strand on the Wexford coast, saving her from sinking.

Two years later, In October 1943, two planes, which were later identified as RAF Mosquitoes, attacked the MV Kerlogue, 130 miles south of Ireland, even though it had sailed under an Irish flag, and had ‘EIRE’ painted in white letters on its deck and sides. For 25 minutes, cannon shells rained down on it.

Several crew members were injured, and the captain was shot in both legs. Water flowed into the engine room, but the pumps kept enough water out until the ship limped into Cork harbour. Ironically, it was the boat’s cargo of British coal that saved it. The coal absorbed the cannon fire, and protected the hull.

But back to December 1943. The Kerlogue headed to Cork Harbour with its cargo of 168 German sailors. As it made its way home, it was passed several times by German a plane which tipped its wings to acknowledge the crew of the Kerlogue.

It arrived in Cobh on New Year’s Day at 2.30 a.m. Emergency services treated the survivors in Cobh, before moving them onto the Military Hospital in Collins Barracks and then to internment at the Curragh, Co Kildare.

The MV Kerlogue and its brave crew punched above their weight and their efforts were later recognised by the German Government.

 

I grew up in Cobh in Co. Cork which, as you probably know, is an island, and as youngsters we all messed about in boats, so we learned to swim at an early age.

As soon as we were old enough to go near the water, we were shown how to do the basic dog paddle. This would usually be enough to get you out of trouble unless you found yourself in seriously deep water with strong currents. In that case you might need some help.

Local fishermen were always keeping any eye on us to make sure we were safe. This was ironic in some ways because many of the fishermen couldn’t swim themselves.

A lot of them refused to learn because they believed that if they had an accident at sea and ended up in the water, they wouldn’t last long anyway. They didn’t see the point in prolonging the agony by thrashing about in the water when they were eventually going to succumb to it. Many of them didn’t even wear life jackets.

They wore a lot of clothing to keep warm while fishing and they believed that the weight of the wet clothes would pull them under. And even if they could manage to prevent themselves from sinking, the cold would probably kill them anyway so why fight it?

I don’t have much interest in swimming anymore and even when I go on holidays these days, I don’t swim too much, apart from the odd dip in a pool.
There is one reason that I’ve gone off swimming in the sea and it has to do with the creatures that live there. Jelly fish in particular. I hate them with a passion and with good reason.

Years ago, I took the kids down to Inch beach, outside Midleton. It was a beautiful sunny day and I had a few hours to spare before I went to work so I headed to the seaside. I was paddling around the edge of the water, watching them splashing about, enjoying the moment and minding my own business.

Suddenly a piece of what looked like brown seaweed, floated on top of my foot. I went to kick it off me, but it wouldn’t go. It was then I realised that it was a large jelly fish and he didn’t want to leave.

I got a fright and lashed out with my foot and a few seconds later I felt this stinging sensation. It was as if I had been stung by hundreds of nettles in the one spot. I eventually got the thing off me, but I was in agony. The pain was worse every time I stepped out of the water and the only relief I got was when the foot was submerged.

I heard somewhere, once upon a time, that urine is a good antidote for jelly fish stings. Well, let me tell you a little secret, that’s rubbish. It doesn’t work so don’t even bother trying. Apart from the fact that it’s a waste of time, it’s not easy to pee on your own foot while you’re hopping around on one leg. Trust me.

The other issue I had was that I was due to start work in a few hours, so I couldn’t stand around in the sea all day, I had to get home. When I got back, I went straight to the doctor and he gave me a shot of anti-histamine or something. That eased it a bit, but the pain stayed with me for the rest of the day.

So, ever since then, I have a healthy fear of jelly fish and I won’t go near the water if I see any sign of them. I don’t even have to see them myself. If someone tells me they saw one, that’s good enough for me.

But that’s not all. A few years ago, we were in Brisbane in Australia as a family, visiting my daughter who was living there at the time with her boyfriend.

We went to a beach one day and their dog had a great time running in and out of the water and fetching a little ball. It was mid-week, so we had the place to ourselves. The only company we had was in the form of a cabin cruiser sitting off the shore, about 200 metres away. It was close enough to see, but not close enough to identify anyone on board, but it looked like a nice boat.

I was at the edge of the water for a long time playing with the dog and I was watching out for my enemies. I hadn’t seen one in all the time I was there, so I got a dose of courage and decided to go for a swim. I still wasn’t completely relaxed, but I decided to stick near the shore and swim parallel to the beach and everything would be fine.

I had my swim and when I came ashore, I set off to the car park to get some grub from the car. When I got back to the gang on the beach, I could see them in a huddle together and they seemed a little excited.

They told me that while I was gone, the guy on the cruiser jumped into a smaller boat with an outboard engine and came in to the shore. He told them to stay out of the water because a few sharks had been circling his boat for the previous hour. He said that all our splashing about had probably attracted their attention. I felt sick.

I took his advice though, because I’m pretty sure that peeing on a shark bite is unlikely to be any more effective than peeing on a jelly fish sting.