…how people with full-time jobs are supposed to keep up with all the admin needed to hang on to daily life? I sometimes feel it’s a day’s work just to be an adult, own a car and live in a house, even before you get round to cleaning it or cooking dinner. In the last [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Ireland’
3 November, 2009
Halloween
Dot writes: the Irish do Halloween in a big way. When I first moved here I remember being startled by how big it was, and also by the fact that in addition to costumes, pumpkins in the window and trick-or-treating they have bonfires and fireworks. (Fireworks, as it happens, are illegal here, but they have [...]
18 September, 2009
New Arrival
New baby boy (as yet unnamed)
born 18 September 2009, 9:28am, at home, weighing 3.18kg (7lbs).
5 September, 2009
A tax suggestion for the recession
Ken writes:
Why do we have a tiered system of income tax in Ireland instead of a flat tax? Because it is felt that those who can afford to contribute more to the upkeep of society should contribute more. It is quite deliberately a form of redistribution of wealth. The rightness or wrongness of this aim [...]
5 September, 2009
Wheel Clamps and Wheelie Bins
Ken writes:
Grrr. One of our irritating neighbours has filled up the communal 1100 litre bin, actually over-filled it. Waste at our development is collected by a private company who refuse to collect over-filled bins. Now there is something to be said for this policy. It is useful to attach a negative consequence to behaviour one [...]
16 April, 2009
The Two Patricks
Ken writes:
I have just read a wonderful pamphlet by Thomas F O’Rahilly entitled The Two Patricks and published by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1942. My copy was the 1971 reprint.
O’Rahilly contends that the St Patrick of myth, celebrated on March 17th every year, is actually a conflation of two distinct Patricks; [...]
13 April, 2009
Kilkenny Castle and Brown’s Hill Dolmen
Ken writes:
On Saturday, Dot, Hugh and I drove to Kilkenny. It’s a really pretty and surprisingly built-up town and as it happened our visit coincided with a mini-festival celebrating a 400 hundredth anniversary of something (being a town? being a town of certain kind? receiving a royal charter? –Dot observed that there are statutes [...]
29 March, 2009
Lugnaquilla, Co. Wicklow
Ken writes:
I went walking yesterday with Michael Gallagher and Izzy Jack from UCD and Niall Connolly, Gwen Murphy and Pål Antonsen from Trinity. We climbed Lugnaquilla, the highest mountain in Wicklow and the highest outside Kerry. I’ve already climbed Slieve Donard in County Down, the highest in Ulster, so with Lugnaquilla that makes the highest [...]
18 March, 2009
Bad and getting worse
Ken writes:
The Dublin metropolitan area university at which I work has, I’ve found out, declined to offer a promotion to an ambitious and prodigiously talented young scholar which would have retained him in the face of a counter-offer from a university in Canada. This is just so typical! Obviously the universities are at the heart [...]
