I’ve never really been able to bake. I’m a cook in the careless, “let’s see what happens” sense of the word, and that doesn’t really suit baking. Baking is all about precision, timing and patience. Not my strengths.
But since I got Lilly Higgins‘ brilliant book Make, Bake, Love, I’ve gone a bit baking mad. Not always very successfully, but with great enthusiasm. So when I got a press release about the Alzheimers Association’s Tea Day initiative I decided to challenge myself by holding a tea party to raise funds for a good cause (my Granny, a great baker, has Alzheimers), and to bake everything for it myself.
We held it yesterday and thanks to all my very generous friends who came and donated, we raised €600.
We had:
Lilly Higgins’ Lemon Drops
Lilly Higgins’ Vanilla Cupcakes (some were iced with berry butter cream, some with lemon icing and others with vanilla)
Lilly Higgins’ Lemon Madeira (I added some lemon drizzle icing because I love it so much)
Darina Allen‘s Flapjacks
Ginger cake & mini ginger cakes (confession: these came from an Aldi mix, and were super easy and delicious)
Berry & yoghurt muffins (really really easy & delicious)
Lilly Higgins marble cake – I’ve always loved this but I found it a bit beyond my technical skills – it was completely uncooked when I took it out of the oven first so it was left in for a lot longer than the recipe said. It was ok in the end!
Chocolate fudge cake & coconut buns (these were a big hit & went quickest) donated by some work colleagues!
I was feeling a bit crafty (again, not a skill I am known for) over the weekend and made two cakestands – plates glued to glass dessert dishes, or glass candlesticks. Simples!
It was great, too, that some of the neighbours came along, lured in by this masterpiece by Red Balloon in Ballincollig:
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Coat of arms of Cork (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I had this editorial written for last week’s paper, when the Vita Cortex news broke and bumped it! There is a lot to come yet on this story, I think…
It can only be the outstanding success of worldwide capitalism in recent years that is provoking the current fashion for privatising public services. Well, that or the absolute poverty of our local authorities, which used to both provide services and have some kind of power, but now appear to do neither.
Bin waiver controversies have been roaring throughout the country for the last number of years – Limerick about five years ago, Dublin only recently, and, next up I suspect, Cork.
Cllr Michael Ahern of the Labour Party, and Cllr Emmett O’Halloran of Fine Gael told last week’s meeting of Cork City Council that something must be done to protect city residents who currently are in receipt of a bin waiver for their waste collection. Cork City Council privatised its waste collection service last year, in rather a sudden move by management which apparently saw Councillors given no choice about the provider and no role in negotiating the contract.
While it was an executive decision – with commercial sensitivities that required a level of secrecy – there’s something very unsavoury about quite a large policy decision being taken over the heads of elected representatives. Country Clean, a big employer with a good track record based in North Cork, was awarded the contract, the terms of which included the extension of the waiver until April 2013. In comparison to the waiver system in other areas, that’s a decent commitment. In Dublin City – where the privatisation has been described by the public and the local authority as an unmitigated disaster – the waiver has just run out, leaving residents with no option but to pay.
The waiver has been there, traditionally, for a very good reason; some people just cannot afford to pay it. But now, the same people, many of whom will have seen their pay or social welfare cut dramatically, will be forced to pay a household charge, water charges, and now waste charges, to a company whose only commitment is to the market.
The good news is that the Programme for Government contained a commitment to investigate a National Waiver Scheme, in light of the wholesale privatisation of waste services from all but two or three local authorities throughout the country.
The bad news is that this is not exactly high on the Government’s agenda – in fact, a call to the Department of the Environment reveals that this commitment “to look into the matter” is contained within an overall review of the National Waste Policy. Which has no deadline. And which, apparently, has been policy since 2006.
So, for the pensioners and others in Dublin who must now pay for their waste, there’s certainly no immediate hope of a change. Those who can’t afford to pay in Cork will have some breathing space – until this time next year, roughly – in which they will have to work hard lobbying national government to provide some kind of shelter for them. Because calling on a private company to give away its product for free – without having this written into a watertight legal contract – is ridiculous. This is a classic case of local authorities seeking a quick buck from selling off services, without a thought to the public they are meant to serve.
Councillors should have had a role in determining the policy side of the contract with Country Clean in order to protect the citizens they represent, and if they did not, this presents questions about the accountability of highly-paid City officials. At this point, unfortunately, it’s a case of bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Cllrs Ahern and O’Halloran would do more for vulnerable citizens by lobbying their ministerial colleagues to introduce the mooted National Waiver Scheme than by asking a private company for charity.
Related articles
- Waivers and waste collection in DSCC (cedarlounge.wordpress.com)
- Dáil Watch: The Greyhound waste collection issue and the household tax… (cedarlounge.wordpress.com)
- Cork City’s crazy new parking policy (patphelan.net)
- More on Waste collection in Dublin… (cedarlounge.wordpress.com)
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Last night saw the end of a 139 day battle by 32 ordinary people for what common decency said was rightfully theirs.
These 32 defiant workers have spent Christmas, Easter and hundreds of hours in the cold bare factory that had been their workday home for a combined total of 847 years.
During the course of their arduous campaign, one of them, Henry O’Reilly, was diagnosed with and began treatment for cancer. Others missed out on countless family occasions, hot dinners, and all the comforts of home while they spent their days and nights in a chilly common room, in a hollowed out factory, betrayed by the employer to whom they had devoted so many years.
Their victory is a victory for the power of the ordinary person against the greed and arrogance of those who think they are immune from honesty and decency.
Goodwill poured into that factory from all over the world, with people as near as Mrs Cross who brought soup and sandwiches once a week, and Zico’s pizzeria which fed the workers every night, and as far as former President Mary Robinson, Irish football legend Paul McGrath and political theorist Noam Chomsky. The workers knew we were all on their side.
But at no point was there any certainty they would win their fight.
In a world where the news cycle is fickle and we all have short attention spans, the men and women of Vita Cortex are an advertisement for sticking to your guns; for standing up for what is right; and for not losing hope when everyone else around you has.
Although they became disheartened at times, they never gave up. They are a lesson to all of us and a beacon of hope in these troubled times that sometimes justice can be done, and the ‘little guy’ can get justice.
Those 32 people and those who supported them deserve our admiration and respect – as Taoiseach Enda Kenny said in the Dáil this week – they certainly deserve our respect.
What they also deserve is to go home to their families with the money that is rightfully theirs, knowing that they have fought the good fight.
And, finally, they can do it.
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- Vita Cortex workers attacked by company owner ” Inside Ireland (chomskywatch.wordpress.com)
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I’m in Gran Canaria this week on holidays with my mother. We’re staying at a nice resort, in a lovely apartment, and we’re 100% conscious of our comparative wealth here in a way I’ve never been in a country of ‘old Europe’ before.
On (budget) trips to Morocco, Egypt, and even Hungary, I have been super conscious of not being seen to flaunt wealth, of the gulf between holiday makers and our hosts and of the lifestyle we have versus that of the people paid peanuts to smile ingratiatingly at us as we eat food they can’t afford.
It makes me uncomfortable, but I always weigh it up and decide that tourism is a positive. It’s visible trickling-down.
Having the same feeling in Spain is strange.
I’m not wealthy, even by current Irish standards, but I am here, nonetheless. And boy do they need us to be here.
Puerto de Mogán, where we’re staying, is a beautiful little fishing village with some rather ugly modern hotel and apartment developments marring the surrounding cliffs. There is a Lacoste shop and some very nice restaurants – in short, it’s the kind of place that was ‘exclusive’ when there were hordes of tourists to push towards slightly less salubrious resorts in other parts of the island, and save the place for the real spenders.
Today, though, there’s a half built shopping centre (will it ever be finished?) in the centre of the recently built plaza, with most of the finished units empty or housing cheap Asian-made souvenirs in place of the boutiques they were obviously hoping for.
Most of the units away from the beach are shut up, and the restaurants, while retaining some customers, are by no means full. It’s off peak, of course. And it’s still a beautiful place to be.
But according to the pleasant North African man who sold us a pair of sunglasses yesterday – and, politely, let us know that we could be his only substantial (€25) customers that day – things are very, very quiet. “Things are very bad in Spain”, he said.
The same from Esther, the cleaning lady, whose smile lights up her face when she catches me, again, in the room when she comes to clean it (Does anybody know the etiquette in this situation? I think the balcony is a safe refuge after she clucks at me a couple of times).
Esther’s brother, a former bank official, works in London now, she told me. As a cleaner.
This is the kind of thing we are used to hearing, from ‘new Europe’. When I mentioned it on twitter a couple of people said “yes, I know a Polish cleaner who is a pharmacist” and that kind of thing. But is this a common story from Spain?
The country currently has 26% unemployment – higher than in the US during the depression – with 50% unemployment among the youth. That’s an awful lot of people affected by austerity. Starting wages for a graduate – if they can find a job – are about €800 per month here.
Without an open economy like ours, without English as a mother tongue, without emigration as a ‘valve’, how is Spain going to get out of this?
There are very few Irish graduates – former bank officials or otherwise – working as cleaners, anywhere. A little perspective goes a long way.
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Harland and Wolff crane, Queen's Island, Titanic Quarter, Belfast, Northern Ireland, April 2010 (viewed from Queen's Road) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Harland and Wolff, Belfast (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The home of Harland and Wolff is celebrating the Titanic centenary with an enormous tourism push designed to promote a once war-torn city as a weekend break destination.
Belfast is a city on the up. Beautiful old buildings the equal of any in Europe are interspersed with modern, glass-fronted complexes, in a gesture of defiance to those who would see the city as a warzone. Spotlessly clean with an enormous amount of public art in addition to the famous murals, the city is teeming with life, and has something to offer every visitor.
The Northern Ireland Tourist Board is making Belfast, and Titanic, the focal point of NI2012, a gigantic push for the area which signifies a real break from its troubled past. Belfast’s fascination, however, does lie in its history, and there is no better way to learn about this than from a local on the famous Black Taxi tour.
Driven and guided by the genial, considered Paddy Lamb, we toured throughout the city centre, including the world-famous Harland and Wolff shipyards where enormous yellow cranes, Samson and Goliath, dominate the city’s skyline. The shipyards are quiet now, from a peak of employing 65,000 workers at one time, and they are now home to a range of industries including renewable energy and aeronautics as well as a re-imagined docklands including the Titanic centre, the Odyssey and, like dockland developments the world over, some very flashy looking apartments.
With an opening remark, as we passed the infamous Northern Bank, of “I’ve got the balaclavas in the back, I’ll be the getaway driver”, Paddy’s well-earned black humour put us at ease travelling through sites everyone knows from the news, such as Stormont Castle, the Falls Road, Ardoyne and the Shankill Road. The personal approach works well for this tour as stories of real life lived in the Troubles are mingled with facts and figures of Belfast’s history. Politically, a very balanced approach shows the real progress being made in the city and a feeling that people are working together to bring Belfast into a troubles-free 21st century.
The Ramada Encore, a no-frills but friendly hotel catering to all sorts of tourists (including a plethora of tiny Irish dancers in oversized wigs when we visited), is well located in the Cathedral Quarter – near plenty of restaurants including the excellent, if hipster-ish, Made in Belfast and the superb, well-priced casual dining of Nick’s Warehouse. The city has a lot of good food options at reasonable prices and the atmospheric and gorgeous Harlem Café is also a good bet for a tasty bite, good wine, and a really fabulous and friendly experience.
The Ramada Encore is also near the beautiful St Anne’s Cathedral, a Church of Ireland cathedral with a beautiful spire resembling that in Dublin’s O’Connell St and a Catholic chapel off to the side, belying the sectarianism the city has sometimes been known for. Of interest to less devout types is the worship of shopping, and the Victoria Square shopping complex is one of the most pleasant I’ve visited, as it manages to combine being indoors with a feeling of space and airiness.
Sunday was the opening day of Titanic Belfast, the flagship effort of the international centenary celebrations. There is something a little crass about celebrating all that death, but Belfast needed an attraction, and boy is this it. At £13.50 per adult (£6.75 per child) it’s not cheap, but you’ll spend a good three to four hours in this exceptionally designed centre.
Technology is used to great effect, with genuinely interactive displays that include, for example, images of the Harland and Wolff drawing floor. This was a room where plans were drawn out – almost at full size – to make sure initial drafts weren’t faulty. The astonishing scale of shipbuilding projects pre-computer is well illustrated with this one, which projects the drawings onto the floor and challenges visitors to rivet the hull by stamping on the individual rivets – it might sound childish, but it’s a real imagination grabber.
The experience includes an impressive ride taking you through the enormous gantries on which the ship was built and showing how each part of the enormous structure was put together, almost entirely by hand, by thousands of workmen, while there’s an opportunity to view a film of the dive of the wreck, which stands in fascinating contrast to the perfect recreations of some of the rooms on board.
One of the remarkable things about the centre is how it works in the history of Belfast pre-1912. It truly was an industrial powerhouse, and it’s wonderful that the city now has a showcase for its proud story.
The exhibition deals with the sinking very sensitively and with a well-balanced lack of mawkishness. The final, despairing radio messages, communicated by Morse code to nearby ships, are displayed on the walls along with images and contemporary newspaper reports, and these alone are enough to move what appeared to be the majority of visitors, to tears. While there have been bigger, arguably worse disasters, the contemporary shock of the Titanic sinking is best seen in these messages from unbelieving crew on other ships – she was the ship that could not sink.
Fortunately, the fate of Belfast appears altogether happier. See for yourself as centenary events are set to run all year. See www.ni2012.com for more.
Published in the Cork Independent 04.12.12
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- Near and far – Titanic’s enduring legacy (scotsman.com)
- Titanic Belfast museum revives ship relics, invokes iceberg shape (dvice.com)
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Ruairi Quinn at a Labour Party Press Conference during the 2011 General Election. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn has announced an audit of schools to find out how many sports halls, labs and other facilities exist in various areas. In short, to find out what schools own.
The news comes shortly after the disastrous introduction of the new household charge, a precursor to a full-blown property tax which is being introduced on a voluntary basis largely so the government can find out who is eligible to pay it.
A 2011 census enumerator of my acquaintance tells of being sent to houses that no longer exist, and of having to fit into the paperwork homes that technically don’t exist in any record.
Both these initiatives follow the “loss” of €3.6 billion out of the accounts last year, when the Department of Finance miscalculated the Government Debt by that amount, showing our debt to be two per cent higher than it was.
As the blog NAMAwinelake puts it, this isn’t like losing a few quid down the back of the sofa.
Taken together, these three things beg one big question: What on earth has the State been doing all this time?
It takes around €50 billion a year to run it. Obviously a large part of that is spent on the wages of nurses, doctors, teachers, Gardai and the army, and other services that deal with the public directly (such as the people at the Passport Office, whom I recently found pleasant and very efficient despite a lot of bad press for them in the past).
But it’s probably time for management in large swathes of the civil service to take a long, hard look at themselves.
Every organisation – a charity, a business, even a family – has a dual challenge at all times.
For example, at the Cork Independent, we must produce a weekly product on time every time, but we must also take a long term view and plan strategically for the future, given changing technologies and the state of the economy.
Small businesses have a lot on their plate at the moment just surviving, but they are all required to think long-term as well as short-term – what’s the point in surviving until next week if it’s got all the same problems you’re having today?
Families, the same. Your children need feeding today but some day they will need to go to college. You don’t have the money now, but you’re definitely thinking about how you’re going to get it.
But this doesn’t seem to be the case, at all, in how the country is run. If all those people working in various departments haven’t been spending their time collating data on what the departments actually do, what have they been doing?
Why is there a Department of Environment, Community and Local Government – with a Junior Minister in charge of Housing – if it can’t tell us how many houses there are?
Why is there a Department of Education when, officially, it doesn’t have responsibility for most of the schools anyway, and it can’t tell us what they own?
It’s not like it’s a very big country.
There’s no business on earth that would get a loan – even from the owner’s mother – without a stock inventory. So for the Troika to loan money to a country that can’t count how much it owes or how much it owns, is a bit of a gamble – I can see why they’re nervous about the return.
Published in the Cork Independent, 12.04.12
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It was fantastic to see mental health and suicide being discussed on RTÉ Frontline last night. It can be unusual to see constructive discussion on current affairs programming, but I think that’s what the Frontline team achieved with the mix of guests – Minister Kathleen Lynch is a strong voice for mental health and within the constraints she has to operate in, I am confident that she will do her best to improve things.
A lot of what George Hook was saying made sense to me, and reminded me of much of John McCarthy and Mad Pride’s campaigning ground on mental health – that the medical model can be highly damaging, that nobody knows what to say to somebody depressed (trying to talk, instead of just listening, as we should), and that the pharmaceutical industry’s aim of getting as many people on as many different medications as possible suits an under-resourced health service. I was sorry John wasn’t around to participate, but I’m glad the conversation is happening.
Here’s my editorial from last week’s edition about John (originally printed in the Cork Independent).
“The world won’t be as much fun now that he’s left it.”
A user of the website Broadsheet made this comment when the site marked John’s death yesterday, and I can’t say it better.
John was a campaigner, a pugilist, a debater, a temporary politician, a poet and a rogue, but it was his fun that made him shine.
He had none of the hang-ups that the rest of us have, and it made him extraordinary.
The last time we met was in the new Marymount Hospice at Curraheen, where he had gone for respite. It was the best night out I ever had in a hospice.
We made Singapore Slings in plastic cups with glacé cherries, laughed, and argued.
He knew he hadn’t long left, and he was full of sage advice. Never one to beat around the bush, John asked my partner and I whether we loved each other, and if we had a good sex life, saying that nothing else really matters.
He was like that.
John adored his lovely wife Liz with the ardent passion of a teenager. He loved life with the same passion, and his death makes the world a little darker for those who knew him, even if it was just through this newspaper or his frequent radio appearances.
His writing was a beacon for those in pain, and his raw honesty about so many things was refreshing in a world of spin and cynicism.
My last communication with him was a text I sent him the morning he died, asking if he’d heard about Mary Raftery and would he like to write about her for his column this week.
John and Mary Raftery worked together on ‘Behind the Walls’, the documentary that focused on the horrors of our mental health system, past and present.
Both were fearless campaigners with a sense of justice and fairness that is rare. Both stood up for people who had nobody else, who were ignored or who just needed someone with a loudspeaker to shout, “This is not right”.
The loss of John McCarthy will be felt by a great many people. His family has lost a wonderful husband, son, father, grandfather, and brother, and his friends have lost a counsellor, an advisor, and a drinking buddy.
But those represented by Mad Pride have lost a fearless advocate, an unquestioning giver of support and love, and someone who understood that being mad is normal and human.
That’s why we called John’s column The Human Condition; because John understood the pain and joy of being human better than anybody I have ever met. He knew about despair and about great love, and his life was one lived to the full in every possible sense.
John was not one for prayers, but there will be thousands of people worldwide thinking of him and sending their love and light to Liz and their family today as he is buried.
And, as he said himself of love; “In this life it is really all that matters”.
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- Remembering John McCarthy (ztrek.blogspot.com)
- Rest in peace John McCarthy: founder of Mad Pride Ireland (beyondmeds.com)
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Café Bar Deli on Academy Street has been a firm favourite of many Corkonians since 2005 but a new focus on pricing sets it out from the crowd.
Main courses for as low as €10 and reasonably priced, quality wines mark it out as a perfect ‘go-to’ spot for couples, families and colleagues seeking tasty food and a cosy atmosphere which is still upmarket enough to be considered a treat.
We visited last weekend and the restaurant was surprisingly busy for a Saturday night in January. Our starters, a mixed plate of antipasti including some cured meats with an unusual, sumptuous smoked aubergine dip (€8), and a very large portion of delicious chicken liver paté (€7), arrived promptly and were eaten just as quickly.
An excellent value, very drinkable Pech Roc Merlot 2009 (€22) was a great accompaniment to the paté.
For mains, the Moroccan lamb tagine was served in a hearty portion and was pronounced delicious, with perfectly cooked couscous and a nicely spicy, but not overpowering, sauce. A scattering of feta cheese brought a lovely piquancy, and all for just €12. The Pepper Salami pizza, which also included red onion, pepperoni, chilli, red peppers and olives, was very tasty – and also good value, at €10. A shared mixed nut caramel sundae was delicious, and excellent coffee rounded off a great value, tasty meal. We’ll definitely be back.
This post also appears on http://corkindependent.com/blog
It’s been a while (ok, over half a year!) since I posted here directly, although I’ve continued to feed my editorials from the paper through here. What can I say, we’ve been busy at the Cork Indo!
The main reason for lack of posting here was that we were busy getting www.corkindependent.com revamped. The site now includes a blog of its own as well as much more comprehensive and regularly updated content. We’ve been busy tweeting, Facebooking, blogging and updating, as well as having some changes at the paper otherwise.
But, like every January, it’s time for me to pick this up again and run!
I’ll start 2012 with this site, which every journalist should keep an eye on – and not just journalists, but people who consume news. It’s well worth analysing your own motives and influences when writing a piece, and we all need a reminder once in a while about ‘framing’ in news. 2011 was a fascinating (if in many ways very depressing) year to be a journalist, with Leveson in the UK and the debate that sparked. I’ll be bookmarking News Frames and checking it often to remind myself that, even when I don’t mean to, I might be playing to someone’s agenda.
I interviewed Peter Aiken last week in relation to his hugely successful Live at the Marquee series in Cork. You can read it here:
http://www.corkindependent.com/stories/item/2516/2011-24/The-business-of-music
