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Very good. Slowly, slowly you'll get there.

http://www.irishnews.com/news/republicofirelandnews/2016/03/10/news/don-t-tell-the-bride-features-1916-rising-themed-same-sex-marriage-446117/?param=ds441rif44T
DUP heads are exploding this very minute

If it wasn't worth voting Yes before, it sure is now.

Always knew that Andy was all right.

An 'ignore comments about vile chants' option would go down a storm with a few people.

9/10. Anyone who gets 10/10 will have to admit to being familiar with the contents of a footballer's autobiography.

[Enough said no more questions from reporter]

Always remember Maurice Green's coach on the BBC when asked about doping in athletics and he asked the reporter did he drive a car? Reporter said yes and told him he drove a family saloon. Coach smiled and said would you say that your car and a Formula 1 car are the same just because they are both cars? Reporter said obviously not and then the Coach said do you think you'd put the same type of fuel in to both cars?? Enough said no more questions from reporter

I can think of plenty of follow-up questions.

My enjoyment of tennis is pretty shallow. I used only follow Wimbledon (natch) but in era of 24 hour coverage I'd follow the other Grand Slam events with a lot of interest. It's a golden age in the men's game in particular. I'm conscious through it all though that doping is likely widespread. Jacques Anquetil's line about not being able to ride Le Tour on mineral water could be applied to those five-set blockbusters that Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Murray have been treating us to for the last decade or so. If tennis can't deal severely with what is the doping equivalent of an open goal, or a simple volley when your opponent has crashed into one of the line judges, then any illusions about those contests are going to be stripped bare as far as I'm concerned.

The amount of asthmatics who are world class athletes is amazing

I've really come to enjoy tennis more in recent years. If they don't come down on Sharapova like a ton of bricks, I'm done.

And there was me thinking Bernie Sanders would only appeal to libtards. Some man for one man.

Justine McCarthy wrote a great piece recently skewering the community of self-loathing that questions the validity of the Easter Rising:

HISTORIC REVISIONISM MEANS THE TRUTH IS STILL A CASUALTY OF THE RISING
by Justine McCarthy, "The Sunday Times", 17 January 2016

The delectably named actress Perdita Weeks, who plays a classic English rose beauty in RTE's Rebellion, has said it is "no wonder" that British school children such as herself were not taught about the Easter Rising, since England's treatment of the Irish was "absolutely appalling". In Ireland, this news comes as something of a thunderbolt, 100 years after the event. England was mean to Ireland? Some mistake, surely.

Since the dawn of this commemoration year, and in its bristling approach, the loudest commentary in Ireland about those five days that sowed the seeds of this independent Irish state has spewed scorn on the Rising. It has been variously disclaimed as antidemocratic, fanatical bloodlust; Catholic fundamentalism; uncalled for and unwanted. The tone underlying each charge is one of communal self-abased apology.

To whom are these apologists saying sorry? To the insurrectionists who were executed? No. To the people of Ireland whose country continued to be occupied for another six years? No. To whom then, as a baffled Weeks might wonder.

The commentariat, by and large, is mortified that England was caused bother while its back was turned, dealing with the First World War. Can you think of any other country that makes craven mea culpas to its former oppressor for exploiting an opportunity to gain its freedom? One of the glaring deficiencies of this commentary is its failure to imagine how different history might have turned out had the government in Westminster agreed to negotiate a peaceful handover of power without the need for bloodshed.

The night before he was executed in Kilmainham jail, Eammon Ceannt, one of the seven Proclamation signatories, wrote: "This generation can claim to have raised sons as brave as any that went before. And in the years to come, Ireland will honour those who risked all for her honour at Easter 1916." Ceannt's valedictory prophecy proves that Ireland's patriot dead were not right about everything. Their critics, however, would have us believe they were wrong about everything.

One of the most common refrains is that the leaders of the Rising had no mandate for it. What were they supposed to do? Commission an opinion poll from Behaviour & Attitudes or, maybe, hold a referendum? Remember, just 30% of men in Ireland (compared with 60% in England) and no women whatsoever were entitled to vote in the last election held before the Rising, in 1910.

While John Redmond's Irish Parliamentary Party won that election comprehensively, Ireland's political landscape changed significantly in the intervening six years. Westminster had put Home Rule on the long finger once again. Edward Carson's Ulster Volunteers, who had the support of the Tories, had smuggled in 25,000 guns, and 57 of 70 British army officers at the Curragh quit rather than take on Carson's force.

Today's commentators would have us believe that everyday life for the citizenry in Ireland mirrored England's. This is a fallacy. The Rising came three years after the Lockout and its concomitant destitution, with civilians in some of Europe's worst slums left dependent on soup kitchens. It was two years after Erskine Childers's gun-running to Howth on the Asgard when, in response to jeering by a crowd on Dublin's Bachelor's Walk, British soldiers fatally shot and bayonetted four civilians and injured 38 others.

Ireland was not a benign, untroubled place. The Rising took place 68 years after a million people died in the Famine, during which Charles Trevelyan, the assistant secretary to the treasury, exported Indian rice sent to feed the starving.

Common wisdom has it that, if the British had not turned nasty and executed the leaders, the Rising would never have won popular support. This assumes that, until the executions started, the British had behaved impeccably. It is another fallacy, as evidenced by the fate of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, a pacifist arrested while trying to stop looters. He was taken as a hostage by an army raiding party in Rathmines, which was ordered to shoot him if it came under attack. Afterwards, they shot him dead by firing squad and never bothered telling his wife, Hanna, who was left to search the city for her husband.

In the absence of elections that genuinely gave the people their say, the second-best medium for assessing public opinion in 1916 is contemporary media coverage. This is largely dependent on the pro-establishment Irish Times and William Martin Murphy's Irish Independent. Murphy, a former Irish Parliamentary Party MP offered a knighthood by King Edward VII, was in the employers' vanguard against James Larkin in the Lockout. He was, therefore, not ideally placed to know or to express the mood of the majority. Even after the executions had commenced in Kilmainham jail, he was still writing in the Irish Independent that more of the leaders ought be put to death.

Ireland had its own powerful conservative class at the time of the Rising. They were stolid, middle-class men who wanted to keep the status quo because it served them well. They were the guardians of the establishment, with an Irish accent.

The insurgents, on the other hand, were a mixed bag. James Connolly was born in Edinburgh, Eamon de Valera in America, Tom Clarke in Hampshire. Roger Casement and Constance Markievicz were Protestants, as were Grace and Muriel Gifford. Ceannt's father was an RIC officer. John MacBride was a major in the Boer War. What bonded them was dissatisfaction with the status quo: they were nationalists, suffragists and intellectuals who yearned for a republic of equals. Their spiritual heirs still do.

To dismiss them as a handful of wrong-headed mavericks is a grievous fallacy. On Easter Monday, 1,200 men and women participated in Dublin's Rising. More than 3,500 were arrested after it. Had Eoin MacNeill not countermanded the rebellion order on Easter Monday, and had Casement's German guns not been intercepted in Kerry, who knows how many more would have taken part across the country.

Would the Rising have been the start of the Irish War of Independence? Most people do not glory in the deaths and injuries caused in 1916. Yet most people do ascribe to the right of a people to self-determination. It is a core principle of international law that a country should be free to choose its own sovereignty and political system, to set its own ethos and vision, to nurture its own culture and make its own mistakes. It is a principle rooted deep in human psychology, entangled in a mesh of self-respect and destiny, that no slanted history can undermine. When Ireland lost its economic sovereignty in 2010, the country better appreciated its hard-won self-determination.

Anti-imperialism was a growing movement around the world in the late 19th and early 20th century, but much of the analysis about Ireland suggests that independence was a mere bagatelle way down the list of a sane people's priorities. I, for one, am happy to have grown up in a self-governing country.

In the 100 years since the Rising, Ireland has endured a war of independence, a civil war and 30 years of the Northern Ireland Troubles. The propaganda war alone is the one that endures. The truth continues to rank foremost among its casualties.

Whether he is or isn't the same Maurice,do you dispute what he says in the letter?

Apart from the headline part - I'd agree it is absurd to be asking Arlene Foster to be involved in the celebrations - the letter is a farrago of nonsense.

And yes, I said 'celebrations'. An obituary for RB McDowell noted his belief that "the history of Ireland was the history of the British presence". As far as he and his ilk were concerned, there is no Irish nation separate from the other people in these islands. And before the Easter Rising, this would be a valid opinion. After it, it's claptrap. For standing up to the bully who had always maintained a monopoly on violence to maintain its hegemony, the men and women of 1916 should be celebrated.

Is Maurice Fitzgerald of Shanbally the same Maurice Fitzgerald of Shanbally who ran in the 2007 general election in Cork South-Central? The same Maurice Fitzgerald who got 30 votes? Even advocates of rate-payers democracy would struggle to conjure up a mandate from that.

I couldn't take Hugh McIlvanney seriously after his truly terrible documentary on Shankly, Stein and Busby. The premise was that there was something noteworthy about how these giants of the game were born within a few miles of each other. The reality was Hugh being driven around Scotland staring out the window at street lamps interspersed with interviews with his brother, whose standing as a poet obviously made him uniquely qualified to comment on the subject. The magazine 90 Minutes gave it both barrels in their cartoon the following week, with Hugh asking his aunt why they were so great - "ach Hugh, I told ya before, I canna stand fitba!"

I was watching it, waiting to see whether it would be worth recording the deferred match coming after (spoiler: it was) and would like to note that the second half of the football was tremendous.

In a world where there is a musical about a previous Secretary of the Treasury, I guess Trump getting the job isn't that far-fetched.