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Dublin County Committee are delighted to confirm the appointment of Pat Gilroy as Dublin Senior Hurling Manager on a 3 year term.
Details of the full management team will be announced shortly.

Interesting to see who is team will be

This is brilliant
http://stacks100.ie/mikey-sheehy-1978-goal-recreation/

Some man for one man. Best of luck Jackie
http://www.kilkennygaa.ie/news/read/id/1857

Some legacy and some footballer. Good luck to him

Not that I'd think of stepping on muppet's toes but thought this was a good one

See Conal confirmed that he's retired from the hurlers. Great servant to the Dubs and the best hurler we've produced.

http://www.herald.ie/sport/gaa/jack-dubs-shock-34507147.html

What do you think of that Joe Brolly?

With the election nearly upon us here's an interesting link for guidance

http://www.smartvote.ie/

Looks like I'm a Social Democrat

Good long IC career and a great servant to the Dubs. Not too many lads around can say they lifted Sam. Thanks for the memories Bryan and enjoy the rest of your footballing career

You have to ask yourself what kind of country we live in when this happens?

We hear of this terrible story, of a father hounded by the banks for payments on a house that has been condemned, living in first a hotel and then emergency accommodation. Left by the politicians of this state to fend for himself and his family for 2 years. He took his own life this week after all the stress and misery.

Where is the political outcry from this tragedy? where is the leadership in this country?is there even any leadership?

Here is the latter from the lady to our Taoiseach

I have emailed you on many occasions, regarding my situation in Priory hall. You have replied once.
On July 15th mine and my children's lives changed forever, my beautiful, kind, caring Partner and father to my children took his own life. His name is Fiachra Daly. We miss him terribly.
My life will never be the same. My children's lives will never be the same.
Fiachra was the happiest man on earth, he lived for myself, Oisin (7) and Cerys (2), he never suffered from any form of mental illness or depression, we had been together for 17 years and I never once witnessed any signs.
That is up until the week prior to his death, when we received demands from banks, looking for payment of arrears on a property that we can't live in, asking us to fill out, yet again, forms to request an extension of our moratorium, all for a property we can't live in through no fault of our own. The stress, the worry of not being able to provide a safe home for us, his young children, eventually took its toll, as it has on every resident.

He was obviously a silent sufferer, he never complained, he supported me, when I was feeling low, he hated the idea that he couldn't provide a safe home for us, that I do know, but I thought we'd battle through this together. How wrong was I?
I now have no home, my children have no permanent home, but most importantly, I have no partner and my children have lost their wonderful dad. Our future, security and certainty changed the minute we were evacuated and not one thing has changed in two years, every email, phone call, letter seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
So I ask you, what will it take now for someone to listen and act on something that should've been dealt with two years ago and saved a lot of tax payers money and most of all saved a life?
Tom McFeely {Priory Hall developer] walks around scot free, he'll never suffer how we are suffering, he'll never lose what I've lost. He'll start again, I am left with a lifetime of heartache and my children will inherit that too.
Is there any justice in this country?

I've lost Fiachra, but I've not lost my voice.
Stephanie Meehan

Revealed: NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Americans Daily
Guardian Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama
by Glenn Greenwald

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers.

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.

The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.

The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order.

The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself.

"We decline comment," said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".

The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".

The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively.

It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders.

The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities.

For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.

Because those activities are classified, the senators, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have been prevented from specifying which domestic surveillance programs they find so alarming. But the information they have been able to disclose in their public warnings perfectly tracks both the specific law cited by the April 25 court order as well as the vast scope of record-gathering it authorized.

Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, explained: "We've certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of 'relevance' to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion." The April order requested by the FBI and NSA does precisely that.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act, 50 USC section 1861. That is the provision which Wyden and Udall have repeatedly cited when warning the public of what they believe is the Obama administration's extreme interpretation of the law to engage in excessive domestic surveillance.

In a letter to attorney general Eric Holder last year, they argued that "there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows."

"We believe," they wrote, "that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted" the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act.

Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited "metadata" is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens' communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication.

Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual's network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack.

The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth" and was "using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity." Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.

These recent events reflect how profoundly the NSA's mission has transformed from an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses increasingly on domestic communications. A 30-year employee of the NSA, William Binney, resigned from the agency shortly after 9/11 in protest at the agency's focus on domestic activities.

In the mid-1970s, Congress, for the first time, investigated the surveillance activities of the US government. Back then, the mandate of the NSA was that it would never direct its surveillance apparatus domestically.

At the conclusion of that investigation, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired the investigative committee, warned: "The NSA's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter."

Additional reporting by Ewen MacAskill and Spencer Ackerman
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited

http://www.atlassian.com/jirajr

Folks for the few lunatic Dub fans who want to welcome the reigning All Ireland champions onto the pitch before relegating them to Div 2

Any suggestions for decent B&Bs around that neck of the woods?

A fella I always had a lot of time for and who I thought got a raw deal last year but thanks for the memories Barry - And a sound fella as well. Interesting what he says about it being a young mans game. Not a bad three opponents either  

VERSATILE Dublin footballer Barry Cahill (31) has called time on his inter-county career but will still continue to line out for St Brigid's.

"To be successful at inter-county level – the training and everything that goes with it – it has to be your priority in life and it's just not quite my priority anymore," Cahill (right) admitted. "It has been for the last 11-and-a-half years but, at the end of last year, I felt I'd lost a small bit of motivation, and if you're not 100pc committed to it, you don't have any chance of being successful."

He estimates that inter-county training now involves 25 hours per week and is best suited to young men and students.

"After we got beaten by Mayo last year it was in the back of my mind, but instead of making a decision straight away I just decided to hold off for a few months to get my head right and be 100pc certain about it," he said.

An All Star in 2007, Cahill made his Dublin senior debut in 2001, played at corner-back on his first championship start and lined out mostly in the half-back line during a career that saw him amass eight Leinster senior medals.

But he was a particularly adaptable player and lined out at centre half-forward when the Dubs beat Kerry in the 2011 All-Ireland final.

He cited Tyrone's Brian McGuigan, Mayo's Ciaran McDonald and Kerry's Paul Galvin as the toughest opponents he ever faced.

Was going to put this on the gun culture thread but just check out what is in the trees behind the old guys right shoulder.

What do people think ?
Is it a reflection of life as per Dr Rowe or is Bob Ryan on the money?
My experience of lads is that I'm more in the docs corner   

The Cork County Board chairman Bob Ryan does not believe that binge-drinking in the GAA is a major problem confronting the association in Cork.

Mr Ryan was responding to comments made today by outgoing Waterford team doctor Mark Rowe, who declared one of the biggest challenges facing the GAA was the issue of binge drinking.

Dr Rowe, who stepped down last night as medic to the Waterford senior hurlers, said that the problem is just not in sport or in hurling or in Waterford hurling but it was everywhere.

"In a way the young hurlers are like a reflection of the community," he said.

"Even though many of them would be disciplined and focused, that self-destruct button of binge drinking can bring everybody down."

Dr Rowe described his time with Waterford as a great privilege, but expressed alarm at the amount of alcohol consumption among players nationwide.

"The thing with drink is this: 'If I am not drinking anymore than the other fellas, I haven't a problem and sure if I am off the drink for three weeks and then go on the lash, what's the problem'.

"There is a mountain of work to be done by the GAA on this issue, which is really empowering young people to improve their self esteem and confidence."

Responding to the comments, the Cork County Board chairman told the Evening Echo newspaper today that he wasn't aware of that happening in Cork — and he believed with the near-professional approach of intercounty players these days, it just would not be possible for players to be drinking heavily.

"I can only speak from a Cork viewpoint and I have certainly seen no evidence of what was reported in the newspapers today.

"The Cork players of today, at all levels, put in huge preparation and their training is immense for so many months of the year. You just have to witness them in training and the levels of preparatory work they do, I don't think drink is an issue with any of them."

Mr Ryan believes too that even at club level in the county, the bar has been raised so high in preparation that it leaves little time for the type of binge drinking that has been suggested.

"Yes, the club scene has changed a lot too, clubs put in a huge effort now in training and if the players were drinking heavily they just could not cope."

Just got this text and thought I'd bring it to the attention of the board
J.P OBrien, 22, Nobber player,was paralysed from the neck down after an accident with cattle on the road. The farmer had no insurance. To raise funds for his 24/7 care, pls buy a J.P United jersey from  J.P. United Jersey shop,Trimgate St, Navan-Beside The Central.

Not that we'll admit it but the kids can disappoint us on occasion but what about this lad?

http://www.irishexaminer.com/world/ex-submarine-captain-fires-salvo-at-his-inept-kids-214519.html

If it wasn't for them, Mum and I would not be too concerned, as each of you consciously, and with eyes wide open, crashes from one c**k-up to the next. It makes us weak that so many of these events are copulation-driven, and then helplessly to see these lovely little people being so woefully let down by you, their parents.

I can now tell you that I for one, and I sense Mum feels the same, have had enough of being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children's underachievement and domestic ineptitudes.

I want to hear no more from any of you until, if you feel inclined, you have a success or an achievement or a REALISTIC plan for the support and happiness of your children to tell me about.

Former Dublin Senior Football captain Paddy Christie announced as Dunshaughlin Senior manager for 2013.
Great news

Listening to Gabriel Byrne said last night where he said A lot of Irish Americans he said are pretty annoyed with this gathering thing. People he has met in his role as cultural Ambassader said "we were forced out. We have no work for ya. Get a job elsewhere and come back on holiday and give us your wages"
"a culture of gangsterism in Ireland" and most Irish Americans are sick of Ireland and its generational thing of ignoring the diaspora and only caring when the come back to "get the money outta them". People in Ireland "couldnt give a ****" about the diaspora .One irish american Byrne spoke to said it was "a scam" and that "he didn't need an invitation to visit his own country"

I'm more inclined to think it's a load of ould shite meself