The names of the people charged are in the article
OOOFFFFFTTTT, the lads down the station telling Raylan nawthing
So much the same folk were arrested last year is my reading of it with similar amounts of items seized? Sure this will just go on. Did they get any sentences last time?
Theyâre charged from previous searches etc. Thereâs a different crew of heads that got charges for yesterday. Yer man that got the horse charges is only out again after a 14 yr sentence, was a main player previously.
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Jackie McCarthy-OâBrien prides herself on being the only black woman to represent her country playing both football and rugby, but the battles donât end there. At the moment Jackie is involved in a long and difficult process to adopt her 14-year-old foster daughter and learning some painful truths as a result about her own childhood back in the early 1960s.
âThe lady who interviewed me researched into getting my records because after three applications I was told that they had none. She got them at the first time of asking and they said âplaced in industrial school due to illegitimacy and coloured childâ.â
McCarthy-OâBrien turns 60 at the end of this month and it is only in recent years that she feels she can talk freely about the first few years of her life. Born in Birmingham to a Limerick mother and a Jamaican father whom she would never meet, Jackie came to Limerick as a babe in arms. âMy mother wrote her dad a letter saying âI have my child, sheâs black, if you are at the station to meet me, then great. If not I will go backâ. Fortunately he was there and walked down the streets of Limerick with me very proud.â
Only a few months later however, Jackie was taken away from her mother, who neighbours would later tell her had to be restrained as she was kicking and screaming at the ambulance. âThe powers that be â the nuns and the priests â did not allow my mother to keep an illegitimate black child so they put me in an industrial school. I lived there till I was five.
âI remember making rosary beads as a small child because the wire would cut your hands. We would scrub floors and we were all bed-wetters. If you wet the bed you came down with your bowl on your head and got no breakfast. To this day, I donât eat breakfast. Punishment was a belt. Food was very scarce. People would come and visit us at Christmas and bring us toys, they were packed up and taken off us as soon as they were gone. It was a cruel, cruel place. My love was learned from watching John Boy Walton on TV.â
Her mother, Patricia, was also a fighter and came back for her, but Jackie ended up leaving home. âI was going to a womanâs house who said she was giving me my own bedroom and that I was going to be living there. It was the worst day of my life, because I lived in a dormitory with my friends and I was going into this room on my own. It was terrifying because you are institutionalised.â
Leaving the institution was made possible as Patricia had married a local man. âMickey OâBrien, was an All-Ireland hand-ball champion. One of the strongest, bravest men I have ever met. He has married a woman who everybody knows has had an affair because his daughter is black and the rest of his children are white, but he walked proud, he walked very proud, with me.
ÂIn action here for Shannon, McCarthy- OâBrien represented her country in football and rugby
ÂIn action here for Shannon, McCarthy- OâBrien represented her country in football and rugby
âHe recognised very early on that I was going to get a hard time so he encouraged my sport. Mam would be âwear a dress and do this and do thatâ and my dad would be âleave her alone. Jackie, there is a football over thereâ. I was down the handball alley at seven and able to play off of both hands. I could kick a ball and put it in the back of the net at any age. I signed my first soccer form at 11 and most of the girls on the team were 18.â
One of her teachers at Thomond Primary School, Rita Spring, was an inspiration, but others were cruel, sometimes unintentionally.
âMy down time was to go to the local park and just do laps of the track and that would be me getting my head around being a black child growing up in Limerick. A bit of head space. Even back then you knew there was something odd going on: âWhy are the girls not talking to me? Why is everybody staring at me? Why am I not invited into other girlsâ houses or to birthday parties? Because I didnât actually see my colour.â She did identify with Phil Lynott when she was growing up, and then Paul McGrath, who was of a similar age and background.
âI went from being called Phil Lynott to Joan Armatrading to Pauline McGrath, because I was good at soccer. And then I became Lenny Henry; whoever was the most popular at the time. You end up telling the joke just to fit in.â
Jackie was so good at football, however, that she got a job in a local electronics factory once she promised to play for the companyâs soccer team. Quickly recognised by Ireland, she made her international aged 21, by which time she had also married.
âWe were training five nights a week because we had to be much better than the girls in Dublin to get in the squad, who were seen by the manager on a weekly basis. We had to be super good to come to anybodyâs attention.â
Her knees gave up, just like McGrathâs, when she was in her early 30s, but while she had to retire from soccer she found that, with a proper weight-training regime for her knees, rugby was ready to embrace her, to the point where she played for Munster and then won her first Ireland rugby cap at the age of 34.
âIn both sports I had to pay my own way, buying my own jersey and paying my way up to Dublin as well as for accommodation if I wasnât staying with friends. The only time I was paid for soccer was weekends when representing Ireland. When I went into the rugby it was the same. The manager said âCongratulations you have been selected for the Irish team â have you got IRÂŁ4,000?â I said âif I have to beg, steal or borrow it, am I your first choice?â And he said âyeahâ. But I managed it thanks to a few fundraisers, mum and dad chipping in and working weekends when I wasnât training. Gleesons sports shop gave me the training gear and Limerick looked after me as best they could.â
Itâs one of the reasons why she feels no bitterness over the early years. âI learnt to have a good heart. It didnât make me bitter because I had great people in my life and I learned to play sport. I was determined to prove to myself as a person that I was more than they thought I was worth.â
Scoring a try in the 1998 World Cup against Holland in Amsterdam remains a career highlight and when Jackie assisted Munster rugby in introducing the sport into schools once she had retired, she found that the oval ball game had won over soccer in her heart. When she played her final game for Shannon aged 40, most of the emerging Munster menâs side led by Paul OâConnell were there to bid her farewell. She then threw herself into her own painting and decorating business, which she runs to this day.
A few years ago, Jackie remembers queuing for two hours in Limerick to get OâConnell to sign a copy of his autobiography. âHe looked up and said âJackie, you didnât have to do thatâ. Then he signed the book âfrom an ex international to a rugby legendâ. That has pride of place.â
Her soon to be adopted daughter Kaya never saw her play but the three older siblings were there for large parts of it. They will have been filling Kaya in about the irrepressible Jackie McCarthy-OâBrien, the true story of a Limerick legend.
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PaywallâŚ
Trouble in the balbec tonight⌠one person dead apparently.
What happened?
looks like Riverview
Ireland was one fucked up place in the old days
Young Simon casually doing a lap of the green in his dressing gown while shots are going off.
Where is that shithole?
Papa Ginos is gone iâm told, ye can have all the flash pizza dough ye want but he was the best in town.
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Not enough dough to go round?
Thatâs a pity, is he just retiring or what, itâs hardly losing money