Opinion
Fair days in Callan
By John Fitzgerald PART ONE Callan in the early years of the twentieth century was a thriving market town-thanks mainly to its monthly fair and weekly fowl markets. The fair was on the third Wednesday of each month, and saw the town transformed into a hive of wheeling and dealing. Buyers and sellers of livestock …
Presenting the Oscars and a 12 minute standing ovation!
FURTHERMORE By Gerry Moran It’s not every day of the week that a man gets to present an Oscar, two Oscars even! But that’s exactly what yours truly did this time (ie. Oscar-time) last year. And I did it in Cleere’s pub. I presented the Oscars to two of the co-founders of the Monday night …
Q&A: the auto-enrolment pension scheme
BY JOHN ELLIS, FINANCIAL ADVISOR There is a growing interest in the new auto-enrolment pension scheme with employers and employees requesting more information. Here are some of the common questions I have received recently. Who is it for? Everyone from 23 to 60, and earning more than €20,000 a year, will automatically be auto enrolled …
The stress effect on your gut
BY CLAIR WHITTY Stress is part of everyday life and it’s important to keep you alert and aware of your surroundings so that you can avoid danger. But unfortunately, excess stress is not good for your digestive system. It can have a negative effect on your gut because stress affects the production of digestive enzymes …
Making allowance for that time of the month
AS I SEE IT MARIANNE HERON Just as I was musing that social attitudes have reversed between North and South and that the North is now more conservative than we are, comes the news that the Six Counties may be taking a liberal leap. There are calls to do the decent thing there and follow …
Banshees and boyos… and male friendship
THE FACT OF THE MATTER PAUL HOPKINS In the multi-award nominated film The Banshees of Inisherin – the Oscars are this Sunday night – the central thesis of Martin McDonagh’s wonderful piece of cinema comes in the early exchange between the two main characters when Colm (Brendan Gleeson) abruptly ends his lifelong friendship with Pádraic …
Girl Auction
BY NED EGAN Part 7 “I’ve explained to you that if father finds us out, he’ll have me locked up until he can get that Paudhaun swine married to me. If that happens, we’re both done for. Then who’d help you? And who would you have to give cheek to then – smart little Missy? …
The Great Kilkenny Floods
By John Fitzgerald PART FOUR The 1947 flooding of the Black Abbey, where the water reached to a staggering fifteen feet, prompted an act of clerical heroism. When Dr. Gaffney O.P. saw to his horror that the water was about to reach the level of the High Altar, he cried aloud from the boat in …
An evening whooping it up with the Berbers
FURTHERMORE By Gerry Moran On Avenue Hassan 11 a small, bald, beady-eyed man approaches my wife and I. “Where you from? Where you from?” We ignore him. “Francais? German?” he persists. “No,” we say, walking quickly on. “English. You English?” “No,” we reply more vehemently as we Irish do when mistaken for being British. “Actually …
Five ways to cut back on high energy costs
BY JOHN ELLIS, FINANCIAL ADVISOR Believe it or not wholesale gas prices are falling but there’s no guarantee that energy bills will drop soon for households. Businesses are to get an average of 10% reduction on their electricity bills and an average of 15% on gas from March. In a previous column I gave an …
