Blog Archives - Reading the Signs

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The Black Pig's Dyke

16/7/2014

Often, there are phrases or expressions that I will hear in conversation or on the radio which I do not fully understand the origin or the exact meaning. Most of the time, by reference to the context I can make a reasonable guess as to the implications. The rest of the time, the phrase does not really matter and so it gets filed in the mental junk mail folder.

When in Leitrim, a few weeks ago, I was reminded of one of these expressions. I could not even remember where I had heard it before but it definitely has been in that junk mail folder for a while – possibly from the play ‘At the Black Pig’s Dyke’ or possibly somewhere completely different and completely of origin lost forever.

The title of the art installation did bring a spark of recall and the internet did the rest.

A Garda Welcome

15/7/2014

A ‘Garda Welcome’, or ‘Police Welcome’ for anyone outside of Ireland, has connotations of a group of Gardai waiting for you as you pass through arrivals at the airport; or, of a riot squad ready and waiting for rival supporters at a match. Maybe, that is an outlook and impression that is mine alone.

Regardless, I cannot imagine a ‘Garda Welcome’ as actually being welcoming.

It has been a few weeks since we were at Glencar Waterfall and I am still puzzled as to the welcome……

Medieval Arch

14/7/2014

I don’t know where it came from, but a while back our eight year old declared a wish to be an archaeologist in the future.

That did prompt me to purchase the Young Archaeologist kit.

It may also contribute to reason as to why I spotted this stone and plaque at St. Francis’ Church that I had missed upto very recently. I do like that the outcome of the archaeological dig is on display close to where it was found and not locked away somewhere miles away.

Dano

13/7/2014

A different county – Blacklion, Co. Cavan.

A musician whose name is new to me – Dan O’Hara.

Not my preferred style of music but I do like the commemorative plaque.

Dan O'Hara (Dano)

3-4-52 / 12-11-04

Around da Cuilcagh Mountains there’s a rugged lovely spot

Stands in County Cavan beside the Shannon Pot

There’s Glan, The Barrs, Blacklion goin down the old long braes

Where I rode my old black bicycle for fifteen bob a day

Needlework - A Life Skill

12/7/2014

I was in West Cork last week and was passing through Rathbarry. I stopped at the quaint little building – in reality, it was the sign that caused me to stop and investigate.

In the disposable world of today, where machine has substantially replaced handmade, where much clothing is made so far away in low pay factories, and where the custom made is rare, it was strange to try to imagine an age when needlework skills could be good for the c.v..

Courageous Mother

11/7/2014

“Their circumstances in Church Lane were dire and when his Mother fell ill the children took over running the household, including drawing water from the Robe River....

She eventually realised how serious her condition was, but having no money for medical care, she decided to auctioned off their few possessions and moved the family to England. Within days of their arrived she died. She had known that the family, as orphans and paupers in Ireland, could be split up and sent to the Workhouse or Reform Schools of which she, like many more abhorred.”

Historical Ballinrobe

I drove through Hollymount, Co. Mayo on Monday and spotted this plaque.

My first thought was that if plaques were erected for the mothers of all politicians, there would be an awful lot of plaques around the place.

Resorting to the web, some articles were located.

Different times and different expectations – imagine the employment and health & safety case that could have been brought by his father under today’s rules.

That was some decision by Mary Therese Cooney to try to keep her children together as a family – reason enough for a plaque, I think.

Alien Invasion

10/7/2014

Alive

Squashed to Death

Returning home each evening, I look for aliens. I suspect that not many carry out a similar task.

Growing up, as the eldest, I was delegated responsibility for grass cutting and supervised gardening duties. This succeeded in putting me off gardening for a long time. My first home had a small rear garden which looked its best when it was covered over in plywood for the barbecue held when I was leaving.

I mellowed with our current house and did learn to appreciate plants, gardening and even nice looking grass. I even became an attendee at the likes of Fota Plant Fair and would have visited gardens and gardening forums. This gardening bug was there for a few years but after experiences of the new dog digging up plants as chewing toys, creating holes in the grass as a good place to try to bury things, and generally thinking plants are good for walking over, I have mellowed into acceptance that ‘so long as it looks o.k., then fine’.

But I do like lilies.

Unfortunately the red lily beetle does also.

So before entering the front door, I can be spotted looking at the underside of the leaves on the lilies for the aliens and ending their existence. Often, I can be spotted with a paper towel cleaning off their excrement in which they hide their eggs.

Not quite as exciting as the science fiction movies……

And I speak a barbarous tongue

9/7/2014

I do like public poetry.

I am not a reader of poetry. I am in no way very knowledgeable with regard to poets and poetry. But I do like the placing of poems in public where it will tempt one to stop, read and pause for reflection – a moment of personal time.

After that contemplative few moments, one will remember that this is yet another idle and empty building - a building that once housed a family or a business; yet another sign of the town centres of the future.

“To a Child Dancing in the Wind

DANCE there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?
.
Has no one said those daring
Kind eyes should be more learn’d?
Or warned you how despairing
The moths are when they are burned,
I could have warned you,
But you are young,
So we speak a different tongue.
.
O you will take whatever’s offered
And dream that all the world’s a friend,
Suffer as your mother suffered,
Be as broken in the end.
But I am old and you are young,
And I speak a barbarous tongue.

William Butler Yeats

Tuam

8/7/2014

Travelling back after a funeral yesterday, I stopped in Tuam to visit the burial ground of the babies from the Mother & Baby Home.

It was a warm early evening. The adjacent playground had a number of different groups of children. There was well in excess of twenty children, all having fun. In July of 2014, one was unable to establish the marital or relationship status of a child’s parents – society has changed.

Of all that I read of the Mother & Baby Home, two articles have stood out for me by Fergus Finlay and Felicity Hayes-McCoy. Families brought their daughters to the home. Their neighbours and society expected it.

The Bon Secours Order do deserve some of the blame – not all.

But let’s not try to find too easy a scapegoat. For sure, religious orders and individuals did what they did in the name of some repressed, authoritarian and twisted version of their own ethos. But they also did it because Irish society wanted actively to stigmatise young vulnerable women, and to hide them from decent folk. We gave licence for everything that was done. Our state colluded. Public policy suggested that it was OK to treat people as criminals although they had committed no crime.

Fergus Finlay

“…there were, of course, people who knew. The families of the women and girls who were consigned to virtual prisons to hide the perceived shame of their pregnancies and illegitimate children. The individual nuns, priests and brothers who abused those in their care. The politicians and civil servants who allowed and supported the system.The members of the police force who assisted in tracking down escapees from institutions where effectively they were used as slave labour. The medical professionals who attended the inmates. Those who allegedly failed to register deaths lawfully. And whoever it was that carried those dead bodies to their graves in Tuam, and to all the other graves up and down the country where adults, children and infants were buried without decency or respect.”

Felicity Hayes-McCoy

As one enters the area of the playground, the most striking sight is a commemorative monument to members of Óglaigh na hÉireann who died at the hands of the forces of the state of the time.

It was interesting to note that the plaque also honours Mother Hortence McNamara of the Bon Secours. The same Bon Secours who are now being condemned by the political wing of Óglaigh na hÉireann – just one part of society that has changed its position.

The World Comes to Cork

7/7/2014

I spotted this artwork recently at St. Finnbarr’s Hospital.

I did like the theme.

I was well impressed with how well it was looking after nine years.

An Affront to Self

6/7/2014

I would have been with the likes of Ted O’Driscoll Joinery, Crossan Joinery, Lohan Joinery, and also Meath County Council.

To me the timber or plastic surrounding the window in a commercial premises is a shopfront. It is not a shop front.

I spotted this sign last weekend in Carrick-On-Shannon and was planning a blog on the wisdom of using a sign-writer who puts in gaps in words that they write.

I am glad that I checked the online dictionaries before continuing too far with that planned blog.

Maybe it is my construction training, maybe it is my sense of being right, but I find it difficult to accept shopfront as being an incorrect spelling. It might go in the same folder as window sill and window cill – that of multiple spellings in regular use.

Or maybe I will have to accept that I was incorrect……

“Sorry, no results for “shopfront” in the Collins English Dictionary.”

Collins Dictionary

“Sorry, no entries for shopfront were found.”

Chambers Dictionary

Killed by Heart Attack

5/7/2014

“A friend of Arthur Griffith, he worked with the Sinn Féin newspaper Nationality in 1916. He died prematurely of a heart attack following a raid at the paper’s headquarters at Harcourt St”
Wikipedia

I recently stopped to photograph this plaque in Loughrea. This did prompt me to stop in Naas on a subsequent visit to Dublin and record the plaque on the offices of the Leinster Leader.

It also caused me to do some internet searching as to Seumas O’Kelly – which in turn raised an old debate.

Sarah Medalie was the only person to die during the Burning of Cork. She suffered a heart attack as their home was forcibly broken into by the Black & Tans.

I commented elsewhere that, admittedly on the face of the limited reading that I had done, I had difficulty in categorising death by heart attack as a killing.

Seumas O’Kelly died of a heart attack following a police raid at the offices of the newspaper where he was working.

I did not see any reference to Seumas O'Kelly having been killed. He died. Was he killed?

Maybe the use of Irish, ‘Fuair sí bás’ or 'She got/found death', might avoid such debate or deliberation.

Loughrea

Naas

Moving Churches

4/7/2014

A while back, when out for a drink with Micko, I spotted this typo in an old ad on the wall of the LV Bar in the old Windsor Hotel.

It took Micko a while to spot the error.

The answer can be found here and here.

Irish Army

3/7/2014

Another blog driven by connections.

A while back, there was a comment from a radio listener to the effect that Ivan Yates, as a former Government Minister, ought to know that there is no such thing as an Irish Army – Ireland having a Defence Force.

This was news to me.

When I spotted this sticker on a car, it did prompt me to do some checking. The Defence Forces website does refer to the Army and not Irish Army.

There does exist an ‘Irish Air Corps’ and an ‘Irish Naval Service’. The Irish Army does appear not to exist, except for Naval Service history page – which has enough typos to wonder whether the name is actually an oversight.

“Tracing its roots back to 1913 and the very founding of the state the Irish Army has played a massive part in the creation and development of the Republic of Ireland. However the states water’s were controlled by the British Admiralty from 1922 till 1938 when Great Britain handed back the Treaty Ports and control of Irish waters, to the Irish Free State. The government, in May 1939, ordered 2 Motor Torpedo Boats (MTB’s) from Great Britain. “

Naval Service history page.

Kilty

2/7/2014

Regularly, I am reminded that knowledge is merely connecting the bits of information received from many different sources.

A month ago, I would not have any idea as to where Kiltyclogher is located.

Connection 1