The nice people at YBIG (Or You Boys In Green)have uploaded their new online magazine, which you can check out here. When you’re flicking through it, be aware that the Star ads open fancy pop up video footage. Nothing like having headphones in, the volume up, and hearing Mr. Betfair Dunphy talking away to himself (while sitting on a swively chair in Tallaght Stadium)
An example of content.
Along with plenty of League of Ireland coverage, it’s got plenty on the national team, a nice historical piece on an encounter between West Germany and the Republic and some great video content. It’s the future. There’s even a video of that cheating French bastard (language, Timothy) doing cocaine. You’ll get it when you click it.
Hopefully this isn’t the end of the lovely bus-friendly regular YBIG magazine.
It’s not The Dubliners, anyway. While no doubt everyone knows The Dubliners ‘Seven Drunken Nights’ from 1967, this Tom Archia tune from 1948 always raises a smile too. You’d have to get a chuckle out of Wikipedias piece on ‘Seven Drunken Nights’, stating that: “Each night is a verse, followed by a chorus, in which the narrator comes home in a drunken state to find evidence of another man having been with his wife, which she explains away, not entirely convincingly”
While it’s far more likely The Dubliners learned the basis of Seven Drunken Nights from Joe Heaney and the Irish language Peigin is Peadar, this is brilliant.
This made my day, a great 1 minute 49 second newsreel from Dublin Zoo back in 1952.
Basically, it shows a dog acting as a foster mother to a tiger cub. The tigers mother had proved quite neglectful, but thankfully Tuts the dog stepped in,despite just giving birth herself! It’s probably between the tiger cub suckling with the puppies or the cub drinking from a bottle at the end for the ‘make your mother go ‘awwwwwwww, bless’ moment’
This bit, which brought about nice comments and nods of agreement from various League of Ireland supporters, was printed in the Galway United F.C match programme for the Drogheda Utd./St. Patrick’s Athletic clashes. More importantly than little old Come Here To Me, the match programme also featured League of Ireland hero Michael D. Higgins T.D
“We also need to mix the beautiful game in with other aspects of culture, like poetry, theatre, spectacle, and all the other glorious things of life!”
With the government set to introduce measures to tackle the growing problem of ghost and unfinished estates that have blighted many parts of the country, I’ve been musing over a few pieces that discuss how many vacant or half built estates there are out there. And to be honest, the result is shocking; It does go someway to explaining why the economy has gone arse over tits, when it placed it’s future on a building industry that was obviously over-supplying a demand that was sure to run out; A recent report by the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Planning estimated that there were over 600 “ghost estates” and a figure of 300,000 empty, newly built properties in Ireland. Mainly located in the midlands and west of the country in towns that were heralded as “commuter” and “gateway” towns like Mullingar and Tullamore, they were built to serve a steady stream of workers who, rather than pay the extortionate property prices in Dublin, preferred to pay the slightly less extortionate prices and commute the couple of hours every day. Madness.
What does this have to do with “Dublin Life & Culture” I hear you ask? Well, for while the Irish landscape is littered with ghastly looking ghost estates, we have ghostly looking mansions, castles and buildings of historical importance that are left to the throes of time also. “Abandoned Ireland” is a website I’ve been championing for a while now. The website is a personal project, started in June 2008 by Tarquin Blake. The idea is to document these buildings before age and rot erase them from our landscape forever. The website has the tagline; “Record it. Document it. Before it’s gone; Touch nothing. Take nothing. leave only footsteps.”
Bolands Mill, as Dev left it? Credit: Tarquin Blake, Abandoned Ireland
Phoenix Park Magazine Fort. Credit: Tarquin Blake, Abandoned Ireland.
I’ve spent hours trawling this website, there are some fantastic pictures here, covering everywhere from Bolands Mills and the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park Magazine Fort (two examples above) to abandned mines in Wicklow. You wonder somehow, in two hundred years, will the ghost estates of Dublins sattelite towns induce the same sense of wonder as the buildings AI is documenting? Somehow I doubt it.
I don’t swing through George’s Street Arcade as much as I should, to be honest.
Some of my favourite records (Yes, records), books, clothes and other odds and ends came from that place. It normally involves having a bit of time to root, and maybe it is a matter of time. Us Arts students are very busy people, you know.
Anyway, there are two things I’ve always got an eye out for in a corner shop. One is Irn Bru (jesus, I love Irn Bru) and the other is Roy of the Rovers bars. Addictive things. Every now and then you stumble across them, or another classic- Dipdabs, Highland Toffee, Animal Bars- all reminders of various things and times. All addictive too. Seems to be the reaccuring feature of things you shouldn’t indulge in, cruel world.
So on my last wander through, I came across The Sweet Life. Having only my busfare and a tenner that was due to go into someone elses hand, a visit was out of the question. Still, even the sight of it blew me away and made me a bit hyper.
In their own words, “We are a sweet shop located in Dublin’s City Centre, specialising in sugar free, gluten free, dairy free, no added sugar and natural chocolates and confectionary”
Bleh, none of that means anything to me really. It’s the retro-stand at the front of the shop I’m captivated by. EVERYTHING is there. Your local shop may have some of them (Palmerstown youths know the goodness of Blackjacks all too well…)but seeing them all there, in their old school glory (and at reasonable enough prices) is a sight to behold. All your teeth, fecked forever.
It’s a bit like one of those rare occasions when one of the ancient buses goes past you on the street,or a culchie relative shows up with a bottle of TK. Go for a look if you’re about town, they’re there Monday to Saturday between 10 and 6.
Using a variety of Windows Movie Maker sound effects, toy guns that make noise and doing their best not to laugh and ruin the whole thing, this effort is crude, historically all over the shop and a bit strange. Still, it is compelling, and I lol’d, as we say on the internet.
I spend a great deal of time flicking through Witness Statements, newspapers and other odds and ends to do with the Rising, but obviously think it’s important to be able to laugh at something that is, by the look of it, a school project. Some don’t agree:
“this is an appaling insult to a greatman”,
“If this was a kind of project the teacher should be made to clean the school´s lavatories and recite Yeats´s “Easter 1916″ a hundred times at least”
and
“they’re probably too stupid to take in any form of criticism against either the movie or their moral as well”
Are among the comments this production has produced from the general public, amazing. In Devs day, they’d be well and truly missing by now. I would have given anything to be sitting in that class when this was shown.
Have a look:
“An action packed satire on the shocking Easter day that James Conolly lead an army of rebels against the British Black and Tans”
“A number of people are occupying the head offices of the Anglo-Irish Bank in central Dublin”
BBC News, 10:54 this morning.
Just a few snaps from today, when Eirigi activists staged a sit in at Anglo Irish Bank, grabbing media attention for most of the day. I was nearby at the National Museum so swung down, and by that stage (1pm) the occupation had been underway for a number of hours. It continued until around 2pm, when protestors left the building, and no arrests were made.
Passing the Sean Russell statue in the car, noticed this. A serious glisten of it from the road grabbed my attention. Is it the remains of the last attack, from the ‘day of the swastikas’, or something new? In retrospect,the serious glisten off the statue could be the result of an attempted clean up, for example.
Sean Russell was a veteran of both the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence. He was instrumental in establishing the IRA’s bombing campaign in the United Kingdom around the time of the second World War, a strategy he swore by the merit of. In Adrian Hoar’s wonderful biography of Frank Ryan ‘In Green and Red: The Lives of Frank Ryan’ he states that Russell insisted to a friend that
“I am not a Nazi. I’m not even pro-German. I am an Irishman fighting for the independence of Ireland. The British have been our enemies for hundreds of years. They are the enemy of Germany today. If it suits Germany to give us help to achieve independence, I am willing to accept it, but no more, and there must be no strings attached”
He has remained a controversial figure in Republican history, as he was vehemently opposed to the left-wing break in Republicanism led by men like Peadar O’ Donnell and even Frank Ryan years previously. If anything, he embodied that old hardline (and hard headed) motto that “England’s Difficulty Is Ireland’s Opportunity”
Click on the book for more.
Click on the book for more.
Donal
Ciarán
Sam
Come Here To Me! 