Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Marie’s ‘compelling’ story is triumph over adversity
Players should be banned too
THE GAA are good for a laugh in suspending managers for their teams breaking Covid rules by having group training sessions — despite clear guidelines there should be no collective gettogethers.
Talk about getting a slap on the wrist with a dandelion. Suspending Dublin’s Dessie Farrell, left, and Monaghan’s Seamus Mcenaney is a joke when you realise that their teams will be unhindered, and the 12 week suspension will have zero impact when we get to the deep end of the action in August and September.
If the GAA was serious about sending out a tough message they should have also suspended every player who was present at the training session that breached the guidelines.
That, of course, will never happen.
I was watching Outback
when one of the segments was about a guy who travelled around Australia drilling water wells. He arrived at Lake Nash, way up in the Northern Territory, where the narrator explained it hadn’t really rained in years. What I found riveting was the sheer size of the place. Lake Nash station is three million acres. One farm is half the size of Belgium which has more than 11m people.
AFTER months of confinement at the request of Micheal Martin and the Dublin government, myself and the wife broke for the Border on Saturday.
We headed up by Coleraine, on into Ballycastle and then into the Glens of Antrim where we had fish and chips sitting on a bench in Carnlough. It was like being in paradise. Free at last.
As we were sitting there in the sun on the pier a guy close by shouted “look at that seal with a fish in his mouth”. Just as I was about to suggest some sort of medication, I looked and by God he was telling the truth.
There was a seal with a fish in its mouth.
Freedom and free entertainment – what more could you ask for?
And my senses were almost filled to breaking point just moments later when a woman went past smoking a cigarette, ‘Major’ I think, that I haven’t smelt in years.
It’s the little things, isn’t it?
“You can believe your eyes – it’s murder” … Prosecuting attorney, Jerry Blackwell in his opening remarks at the trial of former police officer, Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd, a killing that has convulsed America’s race relations.
“I suggest that you let common sense and reason guide you” - the response of defending attorney, Eric Nelson, who
I WAS contacted by a number of people in the wake of a column I wrote in February, on the less than happy experiences of a man from Australia I met when I was a newspaper editor.
The guy had been born in Derry but ‘exported’ to an orphanage in Western Australia as a ten year old.
People clearly identified with the story for a whole variety of reasons, not least that some of them had also been raised in orphanages.
One was a woman who suggested she had a story I might be interested in, me being a Donegal man and her story having a massive cross-border connection. Smart woman. She was right.
Let me set the scene. It’s rural Ireland in the 1950s and a respectable businesswoman has an affair with a visiting stranger in a small town in south Donegal.
She owns a hotel and he’s an engineer brought in to work at the local pier.
She gets pregnant and to cover it up she travels to Belfast where she gives birth to a baby girl.
The lady disappears forever leaving her baby behind to face a life far removed from the one she could have given her. That’s it. Potted history over.
I’ll cut to the chase here by saying the child had a life of misery, bullied and beaten – as was the norm at that time – by nuns who were far from kindly.
She grew up uneducated and shortly after leaving the orphanage at 17 had a nervous breakdown.
I could go on but I am sure you get the drift. Put it like this, life in Belfast in the 1960s for a lonely and isolated girl was not Shangri La.
Marie Therese Rodgers-maloney is the name of the woman who contacted me.
I found her story fascinating in that it turns out to be a story of a kind of triumph over adversity. She qualified as
suggested to the jury that underlying medical factors had led to Floyd’s death, not the actions of the defendant.
I’ll leave it to you to decide who this guy on Facebook was referring to - former US President Donald Trump (right) comes to my mind for some reason: “The difference a nurse, went looking for her mother and found out a lot about her, and then, almost by accident, discovered who her father was and was able to connect with his family.
As her story unfolded it became specific for me personally.
She refers to a female solicitor in Donegal, who played a major role in her story, and I realise I went to school with that woman’s son.
And then she referred to an uncle being a GP.
I recalled being at a dinner party about thirty years ago and sitting beside this quiet wee man, a conservative Catholic type, and sure didn’t it soon emerge he was the uncle she was referring to.
She even talked about going to a village in south Donegal and talking to a local historian who, contrary to the mother’s belief, seemed to know all about the fact she had gone to Belfast to have a baby.
I even knew that guy, the historian she had been talking to!
Anyone wanting to suggest the 1940s/50s were some kind of glory days and that we should yearn for a return to the morality of that time and place has got to be kidding.
Hypocrisy and cruelty frequently took centre stage.
And while we might have been divided politically, when it came to this sort of thing the orange and green establishment very much sung from the same hymn sheet.
The Pope and Paisley, as it were, had that much in common.
Marie Therese Rogers-maloney – there is even a story in that long name – has written a book. It tells of her search for her identity, to find out who she really is.
The BBC’S Darragh Mcintyre has described it as “a compelling story”.
I agree. Unfortunately there are a lot of folks still out there who have similar tales to tell.
between humans and animals? Animals would never allow the dumbest of the herd to lead them…”
Mohamad Safa on Facebook had a good one too: “Have you noticed the people who don’t want to help refugees ‘because we have our own poor’ also don’t want to help our own poor?”