Topics

How are the scores going to be written now, then?

Say a team scores two goals, five 2-pointers, and three points.

Is it:

A) 2-13
B) 2-5-3
C) 19

I suggest we go with option C and stop this archaic scoring notation (A) that's a hangover from the days when goals outweighed any number of points. You needed to know the number of goals back then to know who won the match, but that went out the door in 1892. You don't need to know anymore. Notation A is opaque and confusing to first-time viewers of the game. There's enough for first-time viewers to take in without having to have someone on hand to explain the mental arithmetic that's involved.

Ozzy Rules, Rugby, Gridiron, Basketball, and all the other sports that have different values for different types of score all display their scores with a simple total, not an algebra equation. Time for the GAA to catch up.

Is it just me or do a lot of young fellas in Ireland get involved in an unhealthy petrolhead culture? I remember ripping and tearing around the roads with my mates as soon as we could drive, and we had a whole language built around the act of unsafe driving. It's like the part of our brain that dealt with consequences hadn't developed yet. I look back in horror at some of the stuff we used to get up to in motors.

Every time I hear about roads deaths in the wee hours of the morning and "single vehicle collision" I feel like it could have been any of us back in the day.

"Thoughts and prayers" are all well and good, but I think we need to talk about the culture that surrounds driving, as well as the lack of enforcement of traffic laws at night time when the roads turn into racetracks.

Big Wave
Guinness
1981

(Please don't post Youtube links without telling us what's in them)

Irish Athletics seems to be having a bit of a moment. Is it just me or is there an unprecedented amount of Irish athletes in the top flight at the minute?

I hear the M7 by Naas got widened from two lanes to three. Did it fix congestion as predicted?

A lot to unpack in the All Ireland Rail Review. Some ambitious goals there, which is nice to see. Plenty of fodder for the "it will never happen" crowd but that's inevitable.

People have got to understand that a lot of these dormant routes remain untouched. Most of the tunnels, cuttings, embankments, viaducts, and even a lot of the bridges are still intact. A lot of the cost of building a railway is flattening the land, and this was already done for us over 150 years ago. Reopening lines like Portadown-Armagh and Portadown-Derry via Omagh are entirely achievable. It wasn't so long ago that there wasn't many miles of motorway in the south, now there's a whole network of them. Governments are well able to deliver big infrastructure projects when they put their minds to it.

Time to think big again, and this time do it for rail. There's not enough room in cities for cars and the days of building everything around them need to come to an end.

Right lads, little bit of help needed here with another bit of research, if you don't mind.

If you currently live on the island of Ireland, lived in town before, but have since moved to the country, I want to hear from you. I'm taking soundings about country living. Survey here:

https://forms.gle/9h89NPQQicripTBZ6

Many thanks!

Hi Gang,

Hope you don't mind me asking for a bit of help with a little research project I've got cooking.

I'm looking for examples of small towns or villages in Ireland (north or south) with a public square, i.e. a place that looks like it was originally designed as an open marketplace. If it has a historic town square that's been given over to car parking I'll take that too.

Examples of what I'm looking for:

• Donegal Town has a triangular "square" that's surrounded by traffic, but still a space that could in theory be used for public gatherings.


• Boyle in Co. Roscommon has what seems to be a historic town square that's been mostly given over to car parking.

Examples of what I'm not looking for:

• Lack Co. Fermanagh - just a straight road through it and nowhere to gather with your mates.


• Dromahair  Co. Leitrim - Seems like a nice village, but again I'm not aware of a clearly defined "public space" that's designed for just being there as a pedestrian, or could be utilised as such.

If you can find a place with <2000 people in it that has a public square, that'd be great. I'm struggling to find any.

And if you can't think of any, let me know because I'd find that helpful too.

Thanks!

Question about housing policy in Ireland. I get the impression* that there's popular opposition to build-to-rent housing schemes. Why? They're common in the US and they're just another part of the housing mix. What have people in Ireland got against them?

* Impression is just from anecdotal observation of social media comments, which are probably not representative.

48 teams. 3 extra slots for UEFA. Will it make much of a difference to Ireland's chances of qualifying?

Well-put-together piece here on the famine* and the long term effects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wViBPPjEdD8

Some fascinating alternative history possibilities here.

Without the famine, the population of the island could be as high as 36 million. I've seen some estimates as high as 40 million. Since there's about 42 million around the world claiming Irish ancestry, that sounds about right. That'd be far bigger than Australia (26m), far more than Netherlands (17m), not far behind Poland (39m). 36 million people living on the island would mean the place would be a lot more crowded, much more urban. Pick a town, any town, multiply its current population by about 4 (roughly speaking), and that's what you'd be looking at. 5 million in Dublin, 2.5m in Belfast, 0.8m in Cork, etc.. Even the small towns would be dramatically different. Lurgan would have 92,000 people living in it.

The country's influence on the world would be a whole lot bigger. Being more urbanized, it'd be more feasible to run public transport with all the big cities, so the railway network may well be bigger than it was in the 1950s instead of smaller. The place would look more like England or Japan in terms of how people live.

Without the famine, would there have been so much enthusiasm for home rule? Would the push for independence have looked more like what Scotland's trying to do now? Would we have left the UK regardless? Even if famine relief had been allowed, if mass starvation had been averted, there were still plenty of policies dating back to penal times that would have been fueling Irish resentment, so I'd say the push for independence would have happened regardless.

The famine was devastating to the Irish language. Without the mass starvation and emigration, I'd say Irish would have hung in there and today the Irish would be speaking English as a second language just like they do on the continent. We'd have a completely distinct sense of ourselves and probably less likely to be following English soccer teams, Scottish soccer teams, or consuming English media.

Would partition still have happened? Northern protestants would have been a much smaller minority in the early twentieth century. If the Brits were to partition the place, they probably would have carved out a smaller territory (say, Antrim and Down) that would still have included more than enough resentful fenians to oppose partition, particularly in Belfast which they were never going to cede. The unionists, being who they are, probably still wouldn't have been able to help themselves and would have discriminated against the catholics, so you'd see an alternate version of the Troubles playing out in a smaller area.

The diaspora would be a lot smaller. I wonder if the Irish would be as influential in Washington if they hadn't moved across the Atlantic in such big numbers.

Defence policy would be very different since we'd be 3 or 4 times bigger than Sweden where they build their own jets. We'd be bigger than Austria and Hungary combined. Energy policy would be very different since we'd be 4 or 5 times bigger than Norway.

Would the GAA still exist? I'd say yes, since soccer, rugby and cricket were making in-roads in Ireland when their respective bodies were founded regardless. The push for a Gaelic revival might be a bit more muted than what we got since the language would still have been going strong, but the influx of foreign games would still have motivated people to codify Gaelic games and get them organized. Counter-intuitively, Gaelic games would have probably made its way into foreign communities in a more widespread way since the Irish communities abroad wouldn't have been so large and self-contained. The same dynamics that spread English sports around the world (small number of people traveling abroad, inviting locals to play to make up the numbers) would have come into play, so Gaelic games would probably have a higher profile on the world stage, probably as big as Rugby is today.

I think it's fascinating to think about, and what was robbed of us. What might have been if we were allowed to control our own destiny.

*Some people find this term "famine" objectionable because they think it implies that it was a natural disaster, which we all know it wasn't. The word means a scarcity of food and does not refer only to natural disasters. Famines are almost never natural disasters, so I hope we don't get derailed into a semantics match.

Who here still makes voice calls on the phone? I've always hated it, and I'm delighted to see it disappearing. If I need to ring someone I've been known to put it off for days. There's just something weird and unnatural about taking to someone you can't see, it never sat right with me.

Is it just me or is she uniquely painful to watch?

Just starting a thread to see how much (or little) interest there is in this. Apparently 1.5 billion people watch it globally. I doubt if Ireland contributes much to that figure though...

Some of the commentary has been giving out about the GAA using penalty shoot-outs to decide a drawn game, which is understandable. You might as well toss a coin. I agree that shootouts look out of place in the GAA. But then replays aren't much better, they get criticism for being the "Grab All Association" when they do that.

So what's the best way to decide a drawn game?

In the states they do another period of extra time, and if it's still drawn then it's sudden death; next score wins. Would something like that work at inter-county level? Just play extra time and then go to sudden death?

I've rented cars from Dublin Airport before, but they fleece you in there. I've heard about Shelbourne car rentals, based in Newry and Portadown. Apparently they'll leave the car for you at a hotel at the airport (walkable from the terminal) and you can pick up and drop off there with less hassle and at a fraction of the cost of the likes of Hertz and Europcar.

Has anyone used their service? Is it reliable?

Help me out here. This is a genuine question. But what the hell is the big attraction to tea?

As far as I'm concerned it looks awful, tastes awful, smells awful, and burns your tongue so it hurts for days afterwards. So why do so many Irish people worship the stuff? Why do they drink it like water?

I was at my auntie's a few months ago and of course I went through the usual ritual of explaining that no, I really, honestly don't want any tea. Yes, water's fine. She said "that sounds awful that, a glass of cold water." Later when she topped me up, she topped me up with hot water from the kettle. I had to pour it down the sink and pour me a cold glass of water. She could not believe the evidence in front of her eyes that this, the most ordinary thing in the world, was all I wanted to drink.

When I'm thirsty I just pour a glass of water and drink it. Job done in a few seconds. When my dad gets thirsty he seems to go through this big elaborate ritual involving a kettle, a tea bag, milk, a teaspoon, and having to sit down for five minutes to drink the stuff. Even on a hot day.

I just don't get it. What is it about this beverage that people find so alluring?

I'm just curious. There was a report out today that says the unemployment figures in the north are a bit skewed because there's an uncounted number of people who don't work but want to. They can't because they have good reasons, like caring for a family member. The others though, I wonder sometimes. I know several people who don't work, I give them the benefit of the doubt because there are health issues in the family. But I know of at least one other who doesn't work because they feel like it's beneath them and they'll be better off on benefits plus the money their partner earns to prop them up.

I just wonder how widespread the phenomenon is.

Help me out here. My social media feed is full of youngsters going for confirmation and communion, and the comments include "good luck" beforehand, and  "congratulations," and "well done" afterwards.

Why?

Is it a skilled job to go through those rituals? Is it an achievement to utter the things you've been trained to utter? To stand, kneel and sit at the right time when everyone else is doing it?

I'm genuinely curious. I remember going through them and thought they were overrated.