Comhrá - the general chat thread

[JaneJeffer]

Hi Craicnetters!

I was looking for the other thread and see it's fallen way down the list so I decided to make a new one for all our daily musings ☘️

I'm encouraging my dh to become a freelance consultant when he retires, whatever that is.
Joe Duffy didn't look well last night, and no presidential announcement. Maybe he is waiting to be approached by a political party.

Watching the Bad Nanny documentary about Carrie Jade on RTE…

I bet she’s a Mumsnetter 😆

I think it is time to give up on Eurovision.

We don't seem to get it right.

Writing a song that reminded people of the cruel and lonely death of a dog might not have been the wisest choice.

Marty Party about Marty Whelan and Marty Morrissey would have worked better. 😀

And Martin McGuinness and Martin Mansergh, St Martin of Tours (a famous uncle) and St Martin de Porres (animal lover, would not have killed any dogs).

There must be LOTS of other famous Martins and Martys loved by Irish people.

That could be a very entertaining Lisdoon-period Christy Moore type song. We would storm it.

I wonder if Martin Mansergh is a Eurovision fan? I wonder if his family and friends call him Marty.

Marty party in Croker

GAA should run National Song contest, 32 counties in case a new Dana is waiting to be discovered.
Maybe let Australia in, like combined rules.

I wonder if there is a breakthrough in the Annie McCarrick case? Fingers crossed.

I really hope so. So sad that she loved Ireland and wanted to live here, only to have her life taken so abruptly. And so shocking that the person responsible has been going about their normal life for the past 32 years.

I really hope there is. Seemily he was living in Meath when arrested and a business man. How does someone go about their life for so long.

Hopefully the Gardai have enough evidence, should hopefully hear this morning something further.

Very quiet across social media, people are usually posting up all they know and the usual armchair detectives.

🙏🤞Annie’s Mum and loved ones will get answers. Closure.
My heart goes out to her mother. The heart break and pain she and her late husband have suffered losing their only child. The cruelty of that. Unbelievable 🥲

I think Drew Harris really needs to consider a cadaver dog. Imagine her friends were concerned 30 years ago. I wonder who started the Johnny Fox lead.
Hopefully this can be solved.

This case was really botched.... I remember it so well - they seemed so sure she had gotten the bus (on a drizzly day) and gone off to the Wicklow Mountains on her own. Leaving a bag of unpacked shopping on the table in her kitchen.. Her friends in America had said she was in a troubled relationship and yet that wasn't the narrative around this case at all..

Still no update. Are they searching today ? Or are they finished with the old family home.

I'm still not getting much from social media, all I can find is that the Gardai went to France then the man in Ireland was arrested, questioned and released. So putting 2 + 2 together I'm assuming this man in France is the brother HB to the man here PB ?

There's 2 professional business men when googling with PB initials, lots of people saying he's to do with property and others saying it's the other guy who works for that big company beginning with C. The 2nd guy fits the age bracket. My detective skills are rubbish.

I find it strange too that if all the journalists were outside waiting for him to be released how come there's not one single photo online ,

I presume the media are being very very careful so as not to jeopardise a trial if there is one.
As we should be on this thread. Or any thread discussing a court case or a case like this with no one charged.
I’d hate someone guilty to get off because they didn’t get a fair trial 🙄

Preliminary works to enable the excavation of the former Mother and Baby Home in Tuam are starting today.
Finally !!!
Catherine Corless is one of my heroes.
She kept fighting for justice for those poor children.
How could the nuns, who professed to be Christians, do what they did.
Just dumping the bodies.
No burial records for 796 babies and young children.
Their short lives blighted from birth.
Their poor mothers 🥲
I’m sure Tuam is not the only place.
Bessborough, Sean Ross Abbey ………..

Very sad to hear that a teenage boy has drowned in Meath. Such a tragedy for his family and friends. There are always reports of drownings when we get lovely weather like this.

Inland waterways always look so calm and peaceful, it's so sad to lose someone to drowning on a summer day.

What happened in Tuam and other places is bad enough without saying the babies were 'dumped' by the nuns - I think even Catherine Corless has objected to that word.

We know there were 796, we know each of their names, because each baby was named, baptised, their birth registered, and their tragic death, the date it took place and the cause of death were also officially registered - how do you think CC was able to find out so much about the babies? Because it was all in official records.

Over the space of several decades, disused underground spaces dating from Victorian times were used as a communal grave to inter them. The area has a number of old communal graves, from the old Workhouse, later military barracks, the convent, etc. They weren't properly marked and some of them were built over in the 20th century.

We know who the babies were, we know the area where they were interred, but we don't know where exactly each one was buried as there were no grave markers. The Memorial Garden built over the graves commemorated each and all of the tragic little lives.

So not exactly 'dumping'. What happened to women and children in Ireland in the past is grim enough, the infant mortality rates were bad enough, society's abandoning of unmarried mothers and excusing of unmarried fathers was bad enough, the inadequacy of social care in early independent Ireland was bad enough, the outsourcing of care to the church without adequate resourcing or oversight was bad enough - the historical facts are bad enough.

Thanks @MarieDeGournay . A very thoughtful post. This has been nagging away in the back of my mind but I couldnt articulate it. In the past the Irish State outsourced Health Education and Welfare to the Church. Because they wanted it all done on the cheap.

Now we are a rich country and many people are in headlong flight from religion. At best they find our previous piety keenly embarrassing. But the Church is still useful : we can delegate blame to it for all our social ills. There are some unintended consequences however. Anything the Church does is bad and anything it says is wrong almost by definition.

Hence it becomes difficult to critique anyone who is diametrically opposed to the values of the Church or churches . This helps to facilitate the rise of groups like TENI , Belong To , Mermaids and Stonewall, the Tavistock Clinic et al. We just outsourced everything to a different religion.

Even more, politicians of the new state, including De Valera, were determined to close the workhouses, but the functions they fulfilled were still needed, so the church got handed the administration of them. Some of the places that were most problematic had already been getting negative reports in the 1870s, long before the transfer of responsibilities happened.

And the respectable rate payers represented by the town councils did not want to pay a penny more than they had to for support of the poor. My mother never forgot her shock at the way their fellow schoolchildren in Tuam spoke about the 'homes'.

Mind you, she also never forgot her shock at the contrast between the beautiful clothes of the niece of the Reverend Mother in Tuam, who lived in the convent, and those of the home children.

AND whatever will we do without Joe Duffy?!?