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Archive for 2011

Remember this? A concerted effort by those in Leinster House to get “the youth” out to vote by making it cool ala New Labours Cool Brittania across the water a few years back. The criticism was quiet but produced the following video, summed up as “a satirical take on the mind-numbingly vapid rock the vote campaign in Ireland.” The legacy left behind by that campaign is that a large number of those it targetted have been forced to flee Ireland for shores new once again. It started slowly for me, but that trickle has become a flood and I’m hearing of someone else emigrating every other day now. In the video below, some of the faces may have changed, (thankfully McDowell has disappeared back to Hades or wherever he came from) but the sentiment remains the same.

Oh, and to read another cringe-worthy piece of journalism from Ruth Gilligan where she descries the disappearence of “convoys of Volkswagen Polos up to UCD, [with] collars up and speakers up even higher, blaring Kanye for all to hear,” go here. 

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Kathleen Behan.

Mother Of All the Behan’s on Katheen Behan is one of those great books so often overlooked. Her own mother was a maid in the house of Madame Maud Gonne MacBride, and I love this little tale from the book. I also scanned up the picture above, as I couldn’t find any decent sized image of Kathleen online.

I was in the ‘Deux Magots’ in Paris one time and an American that I was introduced to asked me if I had known James Joyce. I said that I hadn’t had that honour, but I told him that my mother had often served a meal to W.B Yeats in Maud Gonne’s house on Stephen’s Green and that the poet turned up his nose to the parsnips. ‘He didn’t like parsnips?’ said the American reaching for his notebook,’You’re sure this is factual?’

(…)

He wrote in the book: Parsnips- attitude of Years to. ‘And you say he didn’t like Stephen’s Greens either- now what kind of vegetables are they?’

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Strand Street Great, Dublin 1.

Stumbled across this recently.

As for what it’s all about, re-dress.ie is over here.

WHO

Re-dress was set up in 2008 by
Rosie O Reilly, Kellie Dalton and Kate Nolan.

WHAT

The Re-dress Better Fashion Initiative is an organisation dedicated to promoting better fashion practice.

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Ever so slightly unsettling this, not least because of the background music, Dublin Dilettante from the ever deadly Circumlimina blog gives us a look at what we might expect from a decade of “EU/IMF rule under Labour, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil (in whatever permutation.)” Scary to say the least!

“And remember, we’re all in this together.”

Cheers to Barra for the heads up.

The Republic of IMF, from thejournal.ie

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Update on the Nitelink.

Recently, we set up this Facebook group in response to the rumours surrounding the future of the popular and essential Dublin Bus Nitelink service.

Earlier today there was an interesting comment left by Labour Cllr. Cian O’Callaghan which thankfully answered a few questions, yet created a few more:

I got confirmation from Ray Coyne of Dublin Bus last Friday that Dublin Bus are not planning to discontinue the nitelinks. However they are planning to reduce the service and are looking at merging some routes and possibly reducing the frequency of service!

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Oh my god.

This comes via Cedar Lounge Revolution. (Though I see they’ve given the tip of the hat in the direction of Maman Poulet)

Can you listen to it the whole way through? Labour’s Dublin South Central candidate has a horse outside.

They’re going to need an MP3 section over on the Irish Election Literature Blog soon. Who could forget ‘VOTE ALAN KELLY’ during the last European Elections?

Rest Outside – Michael Conaghan by Maman Poulet

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"The Liberator"

This is a great video from Albert Hooi showing the hard work involved in setting up the recent They Are Us exhibition from Damien Dempsey and Maser at Smithfield. It shows the completion of the excellent James Connolly piece, my favourite artistic take on Connolly since Harry Kernoff’s great 1935 effort.

Excellent stuff. Well done to all involved.

A few images and a brief report from the launch night of the exhibition can be found over here.

Getting there at 5.15 or so, we were well ahead of time and ended up carrying sambos up the stairs with a woman who told us “you’s will get your reward in the next life lads”.

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I would. Distributed yesterday at the top of Grafton Street by members of the Shell to Sea campaign, the €540 billion euro note is creating quite a stir. I’ve about ten in my wallet, which makes me feel rich.

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A BaNAMA Republican.

"Gis them sweets young fella."

Captain Moonlight’s excellent ode to the Fianna Fail candidate deserves a look. It’s THE Fianna Fail candidate, watch the video. You know this man. He says things like “the old IRA” and “history will be kind to Bertie, even if nobody on your street will.”

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Kingsland RIP

While walking down Dame Street over the weekend, I was shocked to see that Dublin favourite Kingsland chinese restaurant had gone. In its place was a much more gaudy looking establishment called KingCharlies.

A quick google search led me to finding out that it actually closed back in May 2009!

Picture: infomatique (flickr)

Kingsland was a real Dublin institution. I’ve been trying to find out when it actually opened. The newspaper clip below shows that they opened another branch in Dalkey in 1984, so I guess the Dame Street restaurant dates back to at least the early 1980s? I’ve made the necessary correction on my list of Dublin’s oldest restaurants that are still open.

(c) The Irish Times. Tuesday, March 13, 1984.

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Murmurs on the docks

[murmur] is a documentary oral history project that records stories and memories told about specific geographic locations. We collect and make accessible people’s personal histories and anecdotes about the places in their neighborhoods that are important to them.

Murmur Dublin, another fantastic website/idea, in similar vein to the Story Map website which we covered earlier. You can listen to all the stories online.

Explore [murmur] Dublin Docklands:

  1. Go for a walk: bring your mobile phone, and head for the green ears on the map.
  2. Find the green ear, and call the number on it.
  3. Enter the code on the sign to hear people’s stories about the place where you’re standing.

Murmour Dublin

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