Concerns over bowel cancer waiting list? I applied for bowel cancer a month ago and got it just two days later. I guess I was one of the lucky ones.
News
Brian Cowen really feeling the heat today.
Around 100 people have protested outside Kings Island Community centre in Limerick during a visit by Taoiseach Brian Cowen.
The group of parents and people with intellectual disabilities are protesting over cut-backs in respite services in Limerick.
…
The Taoiseach met protestors and gave them a personal commitment that he would look into the matter RTÉ NEWS
From looking at Brian there, I’m guessing he also gave himself a personal commitment not to let himself be put in an awkward postion like that again. After all that argy-bargy, he needed some respite away from angry Joe Public. Did you know that there’s a Joe Public football club? You do now.
Dyslexic woman loses Leaving Cert bias case
A WOMAN with dyslexia has lost her High Court claim that she was discriminated against by the attachment of special annotation to her Leaving Certificate indicating she was not assessed on spelling and certain grammatical elements in language subjects.
Before sitting the Leaving in 2001, Kim Cahill secured a waiver in relation to the examiner’s assessment of spelling and grammar in language subjects. She claimed the annotations or explanatory note on her certificate effectively labelled her as disabled, and she was greatly distressed by this.
The Equality Tribunal had upheld her complaint and directed the Minister for Education to pay compensation of €6,000 to her and to another student, Marian Hollingsworth, who made a similar complaint. It also directed the Minister to issue both students with new Leaving Certificates without the notations.
The Minister for Education appealed the decision to the Circuit Civil Court, which in 2007 upheld the appeal. Ms Cahill then appealed the Circuit Court decision to the High Court but, in a reserved judgment yesterday, Mr Justice Éamon de Valera dismissed her appeal.
IRISH TIMES
Kim Cahill will be heartbroken in about a week, when she finally manages to finish reading the verdict. She wasn’t available for comment yesterday; she had agreed to an interview with the Irish Times but turned up eight hours late, in the wrong city. Meanwhile, Éamon de Valera was clueless last night as to how or why he had been resurrected and installed as a judge. He spent most of yesterday moaning and begging onlookers to hit him with a shovel so that he would be put out of his misery.
I caught a clip of this Billy Nungesser guy on RTÉ News talking about the BP oil spill. Have they thought about sending him down there to plug it?
Have you ever read a more ridiculous article than this one in today’s Sunday Independent?:
Eventually, the best you can hope for is to, first of all, try to readjust, then learn to cope and then rebuild. My feeling is that Gerry Ryan had not yet learned to cope. He had been only two years into the readjustment. He had at least two to go, probably more.
So on those nights when he came home alone he would have got a taxi from wherever he was to wherever he was going. It would have been late; he would have been taking whiskey.
He would have turned a key in the door, he would have opened it and he would have been met by a coldness in the air. There would have been no sense of another presence, his children were not upstairs asleep, his wife was not warm and secure in his bed.
There would have been no children’s toys in the hallway, no coats hanging on the stairs, no warmth from the walls, no schoolbooks on the table, and no or precious little food in the fridge.
He would turn on the television, watch Sky News; he would feel tired, and would go upstairs. There would be a towel on the bathroom floor, the laundry basket would be full; there would be clothes discarded on the bedroom floor, his bed would be unmade.
There would be no scatter cushions, no candles, no bedside lights dimly glowing. None of this would have bothered him either.
But there would be no sound of his children gently breathing. He would be acutely aware of that. He may take a sleeping tablet to help get him through the night, or four or five hours of it anyway.
Before he lay down, he would have looked out the window at the night sky, and would seen the moon, and he would have thought of how it was shining, too, in Clontarf, over the house where his children slept; he would have wished that he was with them there, and he would have felt at a loss to know why he was not.
He would have ached to be not just under the same night sky, but under the same roof, so that he might at least feel that he could protect his children if protection they needed, to keep them safe.
This is the thought that would have bothered him, that would have upset him, the one that he would have taken to his unmade bed. He may have cried.
Jesus Wept.
Jody Corcoran doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. Let’s look at some of that again:
There would be a towel on the bathroom floor, the laundry basket would be full; there would be clothes discarded on the bedroom floor, his bed would be unmade.
..
This is the thought that would have bothered him, that would have upset him, the one that he would have taken to his unmade bed.
Another article on Gerry Ryan in the same paper reveals this interesting fact:
In his memoir, he talked about not being able to go to work until he had made the bed.
Perhaps the Sindo ‘journalists’ should knock heads once in a while.
I also spotted this in that same Sindo article:
Bono of U2 recalled, in his own inimitable style, how he heard the news. “I had just walked out of a meeting with President Obama and I had got into the car and Catriona, my PA, told me. From a really great meeting where everything seemed so possible in the outside world to just this very different reality where all the possibilities of Gerry have slipped away from us,” he said.
Jesus Bono, when you try to be profound, why do you always seem to arrive at empty by mistake?
Eamon Dunne, The Don of Dublin, has been shot 8 times in the head. He might have been a vicious criminal, but violence is never the answer. My thoughts and prayers are with Eamon’s family and I hope he gets well soon.
I’m going to start today.
After Comedy Central cut a portion of a South Park episode following a death threat from a radical Muslim group, Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris wanted to counter the fear. She has declared May 20th “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”
Irish Times
A Turkish journalist asked Mrs McAleese about the continuing controversy surrounding the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915. Turkey recently recalled its ambassador to Washington following a US congressional committee vote describing the massacres as genocide.The President replied that Ireland had no official position on the matter. “Of all people, the Irish understand very well the fracturing of historic memory and how people take very, very different views of events that occur in history,” Mrs McAleese said.
“I think there is probably no place more qualified to stay out of an argument than Ireland.”
Drawing on the experience of the Northern Ireland peace process, Mrs McAleese spoke of the importance of healing.
“We can understand the dreadful sense of loss that people endured, and we also understand in a very special way how important it is that memory is given a chance to heal,” she said. “We would certainly be very strongly supportive of all efforts in today’s world to heal memory and to try to achieve friendship in this generation – I think that is true both of the issue in relation to Armenia and in relation to the Kurds.”
There are different views, and then there are facts. Stop kissing ass, Mary.
Your man on the news was talking about the Cheltenham Festival and he said that the bookies are cleaning up over there. I get quite angry when I hear this type of thing; why aren’t the organisers of the festival making sure that these cleaning jobs are spread around a bit?
There are thousands of unemployed cleaners ready and willing to work, but what chance do they have, when all available jobs are handed out by corporations to their mates, as a perk, so they can earn some extra money on the side? These organisers are able to save a lot of money by letting the bookmakers do the cleaning, instead of bringing someone in externally. They’ve it all sewn up between them.
Fucking disgrace, if you ask me.
I keep reading that the Israeli secret agents, i.e. terrorists, who murdered some senior Hamas figure, i.e. terrorist, in Dubai recently, used Irish and British passports. Now, maybe I’m just being dumb, but how is that even possible? Did they make the guy choke on the laminated pages or something, because I don’t see how you would slit a throat with a passport? They aren’t even that pointy. Oh Christ, I’m having a stroke, help me.