A Motorcyclist dies after hitting a bridge in Dunmore Co Galway
The road on the left at Killavoher near Dunmore in Co Galway
A MAN has died after his motorcycle struck a bridge near Dunmore in Co Galway yesterday evening.
The 36-year-old man was fatally injured when his bike struck a bridge at Killavoher near Dunmore, Co Galway at around 5.15pm yesterday evening.
Gardaí say that the road is closed to facilitate a forensic examination by investigators.
An appeal for witnesses has been issued with anyone with any information about the incident asked to contact Tuam Garda Station on 093 70840, the Garda Confidential Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station.
Emer O’Kelly Says: The Food-ignorant mothers of Ireland need a healthy dose of reality
We shy away from telling parents they are failing their children by not giving them proper nutrition,
A LITTLE boy hadn’t known carrots and potatoes came out of the ground. Other little boys were each given a pea pod and then shown how to open it to get at the peas. They hadn’t realised that peas came in pods rather than singly; or for that matter where they came from in the first place.
A grown-up had no idea that mayonnaise, the “mayo” that she dolloped over every burger and sandwich, was made with eggs. It’s called “food poverty”. It should also be called “food ignorance”.
But it’s nothing to do with class, which bluntly is what we mean when we talk about “education”. There are probably damn near as many gym-using, manicured stay-at-home mums who haven’t a clue about nutrition as defeated single mums on deprived housing estates who think the specks of tomato in a mass-produced pizza count as healthy vegetables.
The children quoted above were all inhabitants of the O’Malley Park area of Limerick, not known as the most salubrious or privileged of districts. They were reacting to their experiences of taking part in the South Hill Area Centre’s Food Initiative, one of three around the country, where youngsters are given access to growing their own food. Their parents, who took part in this experiment, haven’t had much chance in life, and the children, unless something changes, are set fair to repeat the pattern of the previous generation.
The grown woman, on the other hand, is a middleclass American: a high-flying accountant earning a lot of money, and living with all mod cons including a swimming pool. She has one thing in common with the kids in South Hill (and indeed with their parents): they are all products of generations of thinking that progress means moving away from domesticity.
Everyone is too busy/too tired/too lazy/too bored/too stupid/too brainy to realise that there is nothing degrading about taking an interest in food and learning to prepare it. So we’ve spiralled down to the situation pointed out last week on RTE’s Ear to the Ground: that it’s 10 times easier for people to get their daily calorie requirement from convenience and pre-packaged food than it is from real food. That was pointed out on the programme by Sinead Keenan, the co-ordinator of ‘Healthy Food for All’.
And of course it’s not rocket science: but for a lot of people what does seem to be close to rocket science is the realisation that calories don’t mean health: they’re energy units, not units of nutrition. Eat a pizza, and depending on size, you’ll have taken on board something near your entire daily recommended calorie allowance. But you won’t have taken on board the nutrition you need: particularly for children with their extra requirements of nutrients to aid healthy growth.
And in Italy, home of the pizza, nobody would dream of eating a pizza without the accompaniment of a huge salad, probably followed by a piece of fruit. “Afters” in Ireland usually constitute some kind of mush or bar constituted from E numbers, sugar, colourings, and maybe a bit of sawdust. (I exaggerate: but not all that much.) In France, school lunches provided by the state as a result of high taxes are constituted from things like raw vegetables with dips, accompanied by real soup which has never seen the smell of a package. The children don’t say “Yuck” because that’s what they’ve been eating since they were weaned. In other words, they have tastebuds.
Ally that to a statement made a couple of weeks ago by RTE’s Damien O’Reilly on Radio One’s CountryWide. He was interviewing a potato grower, and together they were lamenting the state of the potato industry. “Why,” he asked his interviewee, “do so many people avoid the spud because they think it’s fattening? I mean, there’s not an ounce of fat in the potato.” It’s highly unlikely that Damien O’Reilly, a highly qualified agriculturalist, doesn’t know the difference between fat and fattening. Potatoes are fattening: they’re fattening because they have a high calorific content, not a high fat content. That’s the difference. And if the only vegetable your children will eat is potatoes, and those in the form of chips, you’re well on the way to a nice bedrock for heart disease, obesity, and low energy levels.
The various people interviewed by Ella McSweeney for the Ear to the Ground item, from the gardener Barbara Mulcahy whose enthusiasm for what she was helping the children to grow was infectious, through the various nutrition specialists helping to promote the three national food initiatives, also seemed to me to present a confused message. Sinead Keenan said we need a government policy on healthy food. No argument there. But, she said, it was cheaper and easier to eat unhealthily. Easier, maybe, but not cheaper, provided you have access to the makings of real food. As Anne Lawlor, a South Hill mother of five, and a supporter of the healthy food initiative, pointed out, it’s all about availability. And around South Hill, apparently, there’s one large supermarket, and a few other shops. There are vegetables aplenty in the supermarket, but if you haven’t got a car, you’re stymied.
Even in the large supermarket, Anne Lawlor said, all the deals were on the frozen food and chocolate. You don’t get two for one on a bunch of bananas, she said ruefully.
Should we blame the supermarkets for that? I don’t think so. It’s not their job to educate their customers. They’re there to answer demand. And if people want two-for-one on pizzas made from fatty ingredients, that’s what they’ll get.
What they need, said Jennifer O’Brien of the South Hill Area Centre, is access to the right kind of food on their doorsteps in order to tackle the estimated national figure that 15 per cent of people are living in some kind of food poverty. That’s being achieved in South Hill, but only on a tiny scale. And there are only two other such projects around the country.
Two things are wrong: we’re still trying to educate people at all levels of intellectual achievement to despise the simple skills of living. And we’re refusing to tell mothers if or when they’re failing their children. Try to get an expert to admit that, and watch them squirm. It’s always about the blame game belonging somewhere “up there” “corporately”. Or some other such term. And I happen to have enough faith in the mothers of Ireland, of all classes and levels of education, to think that if someone starts talking tough to them and telling them where they’re failing their children, they’ll respond: they’ll demand skills, and they’ll demand access to what allows them to exercise those skills: real ingredients. They’ll probably even enjoy it.
RTÉ is to air 1 hour prostitution documentary originally meant for‘Prime Time Investigates’
A screen grab from RTÉ’s ‘Profiting from Prostitution’ documentary, which was intended to be aired as a Prime Time Investigates show before that series was suspended.
RTÉ IS TO BROADCAST an hour-long documentary, originally intended as part of the next series of Prime Time Investigates, this week – marking the national broadcaster’s first investigative programming since the fallout from the Fr Kevin Reynolds affair.
The programme, to be aired on Tuesday evening under the Prime Time branding, is said to expose people profiting from the sex trade in Ireland, and report on the growing demand for paid sex with younger, foreign and vulnerable women.
The investigation, from reporter Paul Maguire, discovers prostitutes – often being advertised as ‘escorts’ – being available in every county, and includes an interview with a 19-year-old woman who works almost 100 hours a week in a Co Kildare room which she rarely leaves.
The show marks a return to screens, of sorts, for the Prime Time Investigates series – with the show having been originally intended to air as part of a new series from that strand, which has since been suspended.
RTÉ said the programme had been researched and partly filmed before the broadcaster had opted to shelve the Prime Time Investigates strand, pending an investigation into editorial processes in its current affairs division.
That review – carried out by the Press Ombudsman, Professor John Horgan – was completed in December and is awaiting publication.
Production of Tuesday’s programme had been undertaken by the Prime Time team and had continued under the supervision of Steve Carson, who is acting Editor of Current Affairs.
‘SERIOUS ISSUES OF CRIMINALITY’
In a statement RTÉ said it had decided to air the programme now “because of the serious issues of criminality and exploitation of vulnerable women involved in the sex industry”.
The full-time Current Affairs editor, Ken O’Shea, and the managing director of RTÉ News Ed Mulhall, stepped aside in November pending the completion of Horgan’s review and that of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, which is separately investigating the broadcast of the programme about Fr Kevin Reynolds.
RTÉ had agreed to pay damages to Fr Reynolds following a broadcast in May which falsely claimed he had raped a teenage girl and fathered a child while working as a missionary in Kenya in the 1980s.
The broadcaster later admitted the story was “wholly untrue” and it was revealed that the station went ahead with the programme despite Fr Reynolds denying the allegations and legal correspondence to the same effect.
The executive producer of the Reynolds show, Brian Páircéir, and reporter Aoife Kavanagh, have not been contributing to on-air programming since the admission. The producer of the programme, Mark Lappin, had left RTÉ in the meantime and now works for CNN.
RTÉ said the BAI had been informed, as a courtesy, of the decision to broadcast Tuesday night’s documentary. The programme had been “finalised and checked in the context of the recommendations by Professor Horgan”.
15 schools in Leitrim are under the threat of losing teachers
Leitrim teachers and parents will join a national campaign to shout “stop” to the threat of school closures and the further decimation of local communities and rural Ireland at Dail Eireann this evening, Wednesday, February 1.
Eight schools in the county face losing a teacher based on 2010 enrolment figures while seven more schools could be downgraded if their pupil numbers fall by over five in the next two years.
Over 300 concerned parents and teachers attended a meeting organised by the Ballinamore Breifne INTO Branch in The Commercial Hotel, Ballinamore on Monday night, January 30.
The local branch covers 12 schools in the region, five of which may lose a teacher if recent budget cuts are allowed to proceed. The meeting was attended by a large crowd of parents and teachers inside and outside the region, who wanted to get local information and voice their opinion.
Teacher Clare McLoughlin outlined the number of cuts and hits small schools have had to deal with on top of the new change in the teacher pupil ratio.
By 2013 rural schools will need 20 pupils to retain two teachers, 56 pupils to retain three teachers and 86 pupils to retain four teachers. The fact is that this will leave a number of small rural schools struggling to survive.
Many schools could be forced into one teacher schools and this could lead to closure and amalgamation.
There are three Church of Ireland schools in Leitrim and these are also very much under threat. Clare asked “Why should our children be the victims?”
Noreen Flynn President of INTO said “Tearing the heart out of the Irish countryside will not put this country back on it’s feet.”
Helen O’Gorman, Small Schools Rep said there is a possibility many schools will be downgraded to one teacher and she believes these are “not safe.” At least four Leitrim schools may be one teacher schools by 2014. She said in a one teacher school there are health & safety issues, as well as child protection concerns. She said the value for money review on small schools has not yet been published and this decision has been made without it.
She requested to “hear the Celtic Tiger roar, Rural Ireland is alive and well, we need to tell the Minister to leave our schools alone.” She asked parents to “jam” local politicians clinics, write letters and get a motion from the council.
Jim Connolly of Rural Resettlement Ireland noted that our way of life is “unique to Europe” and we are being crushed “by our own.”
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