Frankly, Simon, wild-weather water sports enthusiasts don’t actually give a damn
WHENIheard Simon Coveney had been tweeting about the “damn fools” who took to the water this week while the rest of us were bulk-buying Tayto and tying down our garden furniture, I wondered if the former housing minister was channelling his inner Clark Gable.
I imagined him leaning stoically into the wind, perched on some rocky outcrop on the Cork coast, shielding his bespectacled eyes from the stinging sea spray as his tie flapped around his neck furiously, before delivering his boomy damnation into Ophelia’s stormy bosom.
It’s more likely he issued his critique from the relatively calm confines of Government Buildings, but it has been a fairly dramatic week, so forgive my flight of fancy.
But the Foreign Affairs Minister wasn’t the only one slamming those who ventured out on the waves. Micheál Martin and others went so far as to call for fines and even custodial sentences for those caught defying Teresa Mannion’s mantra to not make unnecessary journeys.
But here’s the thing: for experienced water sports enthusiasts, the conditions leading up to the storm were ideal for getting out on the water. In fact, in similar conditions on another day, people would have barely registered the sails on the horizon, perhaps only stopping to shove their hands a bit deeper into their pockets and think how freezing it must be out there.
No one wants to put the lives of emergency crews on the line unnecessarily, but
I’m not sure that criminalisation is the answer. Surely it is pretty common that some form of negligence or irresponsibility lies at the heart of rescue operations? The reality is that you can’t legislate against stupidity, and we shouldn’t try to – even though the temptation is unbelievably strong sometimes. That way lie the shackles of a nanny state.
I might, however, make an exception for the Happy Pear twins, those sickly-sweet guardians of all that is good and wholesome.
The brothers found themselves at the sharp end of Twitter on Monday after taking an early-morning dip at their local outdoor swimming spot. Fools, indeed. Any chance someone could also table a motion for the criminalisation of 5am headstands?
House that for original?
IRELANDis–incase you’ve been living under an overpriced rock for the past few years – in the grip of a housing crisis. The biggest issue is one of supply, so news of a new development on a commuter-friendly part of Meath’s so-called Gold Coast is definitely welcome, though excuse me a second while I execute an exaggerated eye-roll at that piece of marketing nonsense.
I wish, though, the developers had been as creative when they were coming up with names for their new houses. They stretched their imaginations about as far as the end of their noses and settled on four great Irish writers – all men and all dead, of course. Is everyone else as fed up as I am of the same handful of late literary titans hoovering up all the naming rights? From pubs to roads, bridges to naval ships, libraries to office blocks, we just don’t tire of honouring our dead male writers by naming something after them.
Without doubt, our rich literary heritage is something to be proud of, but surely we could give it a rest for a while? And if not, would it be too much to ask that some of our not-so-male and not-so-dead authors get a look-in? Bowen Bridge has a certain ring to it.
I also wonder what the names are supposed to signal to buyers. If you had your eye on the entry-level three-bed semi, ‘The Kavanagh’, you might expect something quite modest and austere.
But if I was splashing the cash on the five-bed ‘Wilde’, there wouldn’t be enough chintz in the entire Strictly Come Dancing wardrobe department to meet my expectations of flamboyant ostentation. And the ‘Joyce’? No doubt a modernist masterpiece, structurally experimental and stylistically bold, and while everyone raves about it, only a select few have actually viewed it.
American invasion
FOR the second year in a row, a US author has won the Man Booker Prize, from a shortlist that was 50pc American. The eligibility rules were changed four years ago, allowing US writers to vie for the lucrative prize for the first time.
Since then, there have been lots of British literary types banging away angrily on their keyboards about the squeezing out of homegrown talent.
A very British problem, you might think. But the reality is that the widened pool is also making it more difficult for Irish writers. Indeed, none made the leap from longlist to shortlist this year, and it’s been 10 years since the last Irish winner, Anne Enright. Perhaps we should join our neighbours to repel this American invasion.