Woeful Journalism

What a shit story this is in the Guardian. Why bother with the fake outrage at the design on a coin, particularly when it’s not wrong. It’s ridiculous to even talk about this but if the ball is passed to the triangle at the top left (as indicated graphically) then of course the fucker is offside. Stupid shit.

[size=5] New 50p coin aimed at explaining offside law ‘gets offside law wrong’[/size]

A new football-themed 50p coin designed to ease confusion around the offside law has been written off as “totally out of date” and “confusing” by refereeing experts.

The design, unveiled on Wednesday, is one of 29 coins produced to commemorate the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, each featuring a different sport.

The football coin – half a million of which are now in circulation – shows a midfielder about to pass to one of two team-mates, with the first player, on the left, marked as offside, and the second, level with the defender, not offside. But the diagram appears to illustrate the offside law as it was until 1995, when it was overhauled by the International FA Board to reduce the number of stoppages in matches.

The revision to the law meant that any player in an offside position when the ball is played is no longer automatically penalised. It states: “It is not an offence in itself to be in an offside position.”

Instead, for the past 17 years assistant referees have been told to wait and see whether a player in an offside position becomes involved in active play, either by “interfering with play, or interfering with an opponent, or by gaining an advantage by being in that position”. That means that if the midfielder on the coin passes to the striker on his left, but the striker chooses not to play the ball or interfere with an opponent, he is not offside and play continues.

The Royal Mint says the coin was designed “to provoke discussion”, but the Referees’ Association member Mal Davies, who works with the former head of Premier League referees Keith Hackett on the Observer’s long-running You are the Ref feature, said using such old information was “embarrassing”.

“The public will assume this has been thoroughly checked, but sadly it’s totally out of date,” Davies said. “And on parks pitches it will just encourage players to keep pressurising officials to blow the whistle immediately any time a player is in an offside position – and to abuse them when they don’t. It’s always good to see attempts to explain the Law to a wider audience, and the coin looks good – but unfortunately it takes us back to the last century and just confuses the issue even more.”

Launching the football 50p, Susannah Lee, a spokeswoman for the Royal Mint, said the reaction to them had been “phenomenal”. “It’s an unusual and eye-catching design and has generated significant interest from collectors and sports fans as a result,” she said. “The coin depicts a clear representation of the offside rule which I think is useful and easily understood for anyone who happens to find it in their purse or pockets. There are currently half a million of the offside rule 50ps in circulation.”

The coins are also being sold by the Royal Mint in presentation packs, for £2.99 each.

This is in today’s Irish Times. It’s a truly appalling piece of journalism.

First of all a single tweet from Oliver Holt is held up as a universal criticism of journalism and the media.

Secondly, there is no argument put forward at all as to why Suarez being foreign makes the case any different. That’s just the conclusion drawn based on the fact the author of the piece couldn’t seem to come up with any other conclusion.

Thirdly he only acknowledges near the end that Terry is enjoying the benefit of “innocent until proven guilty” at the moment - not that he has been cleared.

Fourthly, there is no mention of the fact the FA can’t prejudice the police enquiry by handing out their own punishment first.

Fifthly, is this a defence of Suarez or not? There are no double standards with Terry yet because there’s a long way to go in the Terry case. Only a biased imbecile would conclude at this point that Terry has been protected and Suarez hung out to dry.

Sixthly, it’s disingenuous at best to avoid the issue of Suarez’s guilt or otherwise by half-heartedly mentioning the “harmlessness” of what he said - again by comparison with Terry. The FA didn’t charge Suarez with saying something worse than Terry. Adams is deliberately conflating the two issues to create confusion and to imply a defence of Suarez. If racism is an important issue, as he claims, then he’s doing the topic a huge disservice by using Terry as a point-scoring defence of Suarez.

There’s nothing worse than a journalist with a chip on his shoulder given air-time.

When is a remark racist? When spoken by a foreigner

The fight against racism in football has not been helped by the savaging of Suarez, Dalglish and Liverpool, writes DAVID ADAMS

‘IS CALLING someone a ‘black c***’ racist? Spoke to a black player today who said racism is words like cn, n-word, w, etc. Don’t know.” This crass query was posted on Twitter less than two months ago. It refers to what the England and Chelsea football captain, John Terry, has admitted calling QPR’s Anton Ferdinand during a premiership game last October.

Terry will appear in court next month, charged with a racially motivated public order offence. He insists that his remarks were taken out of context, and must be presumed innocent until proven otherwise. The tweeter, however, appears to suggest that Terry’s outburst might not be racist at all, regardless of context.

Worryingly, the tweet was posted by the chief sports writer of the Daily Mirror, Oliver Holt (who has authored two books on Terry, under the pen names, Ollie and Oliver Derbyshire). Strange that a journalist, of all people, is not entirely clear on what constitutes racism. Stranger still that Holt and his newspaper, along with most of the rest of the British media, have of late been adopting what they imagine to be a high-minded, zero-tolerance approach to this issue.

They have been relentless in condemning Liverpool’s Uruguayan player, Luis Suarez, after he was found guilty by the English FA of “racially abusing” the Manchester United footballer Patrice Evra, by referring to him as “negro”. Aside from the fact that Evra’s South American team mates at Manchester United also call him Negro, I would have thought this word to be far less offensive than what Terry has admitted shouting at Ferdinand.

Increasingly, the media has also been savaging Liverpool and its manager, Kenny Dalglish, for continuing to insist that Suarez is innocent. Oliver Holt went so far as to suggest in a column last Saturday that their support for Suarez makes Dalglish and Liverpool partially culpable for a racist insult directed at a young Oldham player at Anfield the previous night.

Self-evidently, Holt et al believe that Suarez and Liverpool have no right to question an FA ruling. This is another strange position for journalists to adopt. They, of all people, should realise that even a proper court can get it wrong, never mind the FA’s “kangaroo court”, as Everton manager David Moyes recently described it. The FA secures a conviction rate of 99.5 per cent, as Irish sports lawyer (and Liverpool fan) Stuart Gilhooley has pointed out.

An unnamed sports lawyer has told the BBC that the FA acts as “police, judge and jury all rolled into one”. No wonder Suarez, his club and its supporters are up in arms.

Undeterred, the British media is presenting the FA’s handling of the Suarez affair as a shining example of best practice, while doing all it can to shift attention away from the finer details and on to the broader issue of racism. This involves making pantomime villains of Suarez, Dalglish and Liverpool.

In truth, even before the case was heard, the bulk of the media had made plain its position. Suarez was never afforded the same innocent-until-proven-guilty treatment that John Terry has (rightly) enjoyed.

From the moment Evra’s complaint emerged, hardly a day passed without it being highlighted. Yet within days of John Terry being charged, sportswriters and football commentators were commending the Chelsea captain for a “courageous performance”, “despite the pressures he is playing under”.

Suarez was fined €48,500 and banned for eight games by the FA. Somewhat conveniently, Terry was reported to the police by “a member of the public” and shuffled off to a criminal court where the evidential threshold for conviction is massively higher than that of the FA, and the maximum possible penalty decidedly lower (€2,500).

I am not a disinterested observer, having supported Liverpool for more than 40 years. But then, who is? (Lord) Herman Ouseley and Piara Powar, two of the most vocal and widely quoted critics of Suarez, Dalglish and Liverpool, and strident supporters of the FA’s ruling, are both invariably described by the media only as anti-racism campaigners. That the first is also a member of the FA and on the board of the Manchester United Foundation (Evra’s club), and the second is a director of the Chelsea Foundation (Terry’s club), is never mentioned.

Why has a basic tenet of good journalistic practice, highlighting possible conflicts of interest, been dispensed with? Ultimately, the FA has scored some imaginary political point against Fifa’s Sepp Blatter; anti-racism campaigners have had their (extremely important) issue raised to stratospheric heights; and the British media has been able to flaunt its supposed anti-racist credentials. That the reputation of a “Johnny Foreigner” has been destroyed in the process, and a great football club and its manager tarnished, is unfortunate. But at least it wasn’t an England captain.

Not sure what you would class this as:

http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/s320x320/384813_10150538798867888_221220497887_8900411_673474418_n.jpg

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Eilis O’Hanlon: Tell us truth on Thatcher offer to end hunger strike[/size]
[size=4]We should be told why the basis of an offer to end the hunger strike was never put to the prisoners, says Eilis O’Hanlon[/size]

[size=4]Sunday January 08 2012[/size]
[size=4]A FEW years ago, Danny Morrison was interviewed for a BBC documentary on the Brighton bombing.[/size]

[size=4]Later he expressed dissatisfaction with the programme because it failed to include comments by him which, Morrison said, placed the attack in context, not least his belief that “the bombing was a direct response to 1981, the hunger strike and what our community experienced under Thatcher”.[/size]

[size=4]His problem was that, even then, the idea that it was British intransigence alone that led the hunger strikers to their graves was already becoming unstitched.[/size]

[size=4]Two years previously, Richard O’Rawe, who had been the IRA’s second-in-command inside the Maze prison during the hunger strikes, published Blanketmen, one of the most detailed analyses yet of the republican prisoners’ struggle for political status. O’Rawe’s central contention was that there was an offer on the table from the British in early July 1981, which would have been acceptable to the prisoners had they been fully apprised of it, and which would have saved the lives of six of the hunger strikers. O’Rawe also argues that the prisoners were deliberately kept out of the loop by an outside cabal which, despite peddling the line that the prisoners’ fate was in their own hands, decided to reject it.[/size]

[size=4]When Blanketmen was published, it caused uproar in republican circles. Versions of these allegations had been circling for years; but O’Rawe couldn’t be dismissed as one of the usual anti-republican suspects. He had been there at the heart of one of the Provos’ most iconic events; as close to its martyred saints as it was possible to get. Many of the figures around at the time backed up his memory of that time, including fellow prisoners and others who had acted behind the scenes to secure a deal.[/size]

[size=4]Morrison, in particular, started to feel the heat, because it was he who had acted as a bridge between the two camps, one inside and one outside the prison, in that period. He insisted that O’Rawe was wrong to say he had brought a possible deal to the prisoners on Sunday, July 5 – a date that continues to be the focus of intense argument.[/size]

[size=4]The release of the state papers from 1981 in London and Dublin this month was bound to reignite the debate as both sides sought to find further evidence for their respective positions in the now published secret documents. Morrison was quickest off the blocks, pouncing on a Downing Street memo which showed, in his interpretation, that the British did not formulate a final offer until the day after he went into the Maze. He went so far as to state that this “demolishes” O’Rawe’s claims.[/size]

[size=4]O’Rawe, in turn, said the state papers confirmed his own analysis, which was that a deal was there to be had [/size][size=4]that weekend, following the deaths of the first four men and with the life of the fifth man, Joe O’Donnell, hanging in the balance. Indeed, he points out, Danny Morrison had previously conceded in interviews that he delivered an offer to the prisoners that day. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, fellow members of that IRA cabal outside the Maze which O’Rawe had accused of rejecting the offer, are on record as conceding the same. They’re merely downplaying the significance of the offer now in order to counteract possible criticism of their own role, with their stories changing accordingly.[/size]

[size=4]So the stalemate remains. Morrison is a sociable chap who has influential friends in the Irish media happy to peddle his version of events. He’s been given a fair wind. O’Rawe is having a rougher time of it. He’s cycling uphill against a strong gale of Sinn Fein propaganda. But his story needs to be told. Maybe too much has been written already about the 10 men who died on hunger strike and not enough about the more than 60 victims killed by the IRA that year as violence escalated on the back of the H Blocks protest, whose lost lives were no less precious. But the characters of the actors involved in that terrible period matter.[/size]

[size=4]Northern Ireland came closer to civil war that year than at any time during the Troubles. Down here, the atmosphere was no less febrile and overheated. Two hundred people were hospitalised after violent protests outside the British embassy in Dublin; the country came to within a whisker of deploying the army against its own citizens. The idea that this atmosphere was deliberately stoked for political advantage is not only shocking, it remains relevant.[/size]

[size=4]Sinn Fein rose to influence on the back of the hunger strikers, and continues to commercially exploit their iconic image (Bobby Sands’ tea towel, anyone?) They are people for whom headstones are more like stepping stones to where they want to get; not even the prospect of civil war reins them in; and they’re ruthless when challenged.[/size]

[size=4]Most of the fiercest critics of Sinn Fein from within the republican movement have been forced to leave Belfast because the atmosphere for their families became too unpleasant. Richard O’Rawe stuck it out. It can’t be easy. A private man, he has been accused of seeking some kind of glory with his claims.[/size]

[size=4]I even remember, when his book was published, the absurd whispers going round Belfast that he was only saying what he did because he needed the money that a sensationalist bestseller would bring. It was a reminder of Sinn Fein’s attitude to dissent. History has different versions, those involved have conflicting memories, but for them only the single officially sanctioned version must be the one to prevail, because it remains as useful to them now as it ever was.[/size]

[size=4]They can change and refine and fine-tune their stories as often as they like, but they’re merely playing semantic games. What they’re clinging to now is the line that there was no “final” deal on offer before Joe O’Donnell died, but O’Rawe never said that there was, only that there was the basis for a deal which, with clarification, could have ended the hunger strike sooner. His enemies are engaged in the classic rhetorical tactic of refuting things he never said.[/size]

[size=4]Morrison leapt upon the newly released State papers with all the smartaleckery of a student debater who thinks that by unpicking minor details in his opponent’s case he can thereby render the whole argument invalid. The main thrust of O’Rawe’s argument was confirmed by the state papers, which showed the Irish and British were not only increasingly convinced that the hunger strikers were being used as pawns in a political game, but also well aware of tensions between the leadership inside and outside the Maze.[/size]

[size=4]They also confirm the most important point of all. There was an offer. The details may have remained to be thrashed out, but there was the bones of an offer that may well have been acceptable to the prisoners, but for some reason it was rejected by an inner circle in the republican movement which didn’t even clear its decisions with the IRA leadership, as Ruairi O Bradaigh, on the Army Council at the time, has confirmed.[/size]

[size=4]Why that offer was rejected will be debated for a long time to come; more revelations may yet emerge; many state papers are still embargoed. But Sinn Fein did very well out of the decision to continue the hunger strikes through six further agonising deaths.
[/size]

[size=4]Where do the Sindo keep finding these dense fuckers?[/size]

hasnt a renowned scholar looked into o’rawes claim and said they are shit

Yeah his name is Danny Morrison. Renowned for talking through his hole more than anything though.

Adams and McGuinness lust for power and
control of the SF/IRA mob is still evident today. I’d believe the account of O’Rawe above that of Marty ‘I left the IRA in 1974’ McGuinness any day. The move from the SF mafia to discredit O’Rawe is shameful but hardly surprising

its academia that have proved o’rawe is talking shit.Professor Eamonn Phoenix has been studying the documents in Belfast, London and Dublin and has said the picture emerging does not support O’Rawe’s claims.

also the fact moloney is shitting himself about the boston tapes is very telling

It isn’t a fact at all actually. All journalists want to protect their sources. Moloney is no different. He has little to fear himself considering all he has wrote about the IRA. Can’t remember any libel cases being taken against him.

he will lose credibiilty

Muck re superbowl

BRIAN O’CONNOR
TIPPING POINT : Unlike so much around us now, sport can still come up trumps; even overhyped sport of the American variety
THE 46th Super Bowl takes place next Sunday. No, I hadn’t realised either. It’s not like we hear or see much about American football, and funnily enough, now that we all have information at our fingertips, we hear and see even less. In fact, given that the New England Patriots are about to play the New York Giants, there would have been more chance of coverage in those antiquated, pre-digital media days of yore than there is now.
You see, the Patriots’ quarterback is a gentleman called Tom Brady. No, I don’t know him either. But everyone knows his wife. She is Gisele, the Brazilian supermodel who is in possession of a body that makes middle-aged men all over the globe burst into spontaneous rounds of applause.
Fadó, fadó, in the days when Irish audiences briefly experimented with the idea of getting interested in American football, Mrs Brady would have been manna from heaven in newspaper terms. Those were the days when newspapers were still put together manually, when Irish Press sub-editors would delve into cupboards, pull out actual hard-copy photographs and inform a reporter: “We have a picture of x. Get a story on him”.
Now in that sort of “resourceful” environment, can you imagine the mileage that could be got out of a picture of Gisele? Sure, the link to gridiron would have been tenuous but that never stopped us. And it wouldn’t have been like one famous occasion when a story about the rather austere English horse trainer Tom Jones was topped off by a picture of his hairy, medallion-clad Welsh namesake. There would at least have been some connection. But now, with pictures of Mr and Mrs Brady’s postman’s cat taking a squirt readily available to everyone with a touchpad, there’s going to be hardly any mention of this weekend’s big event in Indianapolis.
We’re not alone in that however. The belief that the Super Bowl is watched by a billion people worldwide still exists out there, but the reality is more prosaic. What the NFL say is that the game will be available to a billion people globally. It’s just that most of us can’t be bothered. One estimate is that up to 93 million in total will watch the game. Only a fraction is expected to be from outside North America.
Ordinarily that would be a cue to indulge in some Yankee bashing, point out the arrogance of that uniquely American predilection for describing the winners of their indigenous sports as world champions when the rest of the world barely bothers to participate in them.
Football of the American variety is wide open to such sniping. Behemoth players whose sole requirement is to collide forcefully into their opposite number clearly haven’t got to their present size and circumference from mother’s apple pie alone.
Pimple pills are obviously being flung around the locker room like tic-tacs: not like our rugby behemoths, obviously, whose bulk is solely due to a devotion to the gym and an expensive private education.
Then there’s the mind-numbing tedium of a game that continues for hours, even excluding ad breaks, and which seems to fundamentally exist for the purpose of allowing American couch potatoes to continue their metamorphosis into farm animals by eating their meals out of ever-expanding buckets.
And then there’s the moronic exchange of trite clichés that passes for commentary, a never-ceasing torrent of irrelevance in which information is mistaken for enlightenment.
But why then does it look so good? It’s those negatives to a non-American sporting eye that can make the game so alluring cinematically. All that stop-start stuff is perfect for a camera. That’s why Denis Quaid looks right as a veteran quarterback in Oliver Stone’s bombastically brilliant Any Given Sunday.
The action looks realistic because the nature of the game is so defined, and everything is so fitfully crash-bang-wallop. American football fits into a camera. Soccer doesn’t. Neither does rugby or most other fast-action field games. Their elasticity is what’s so hard to film. American football gets Quaid and George Clooney. Real football got Escape To Victory, a movie so memorably dire it makes one wonder if John Huston was drunk for the entire duration and one in which the only cinematic elasticity employed was the one holding in Michael Caine’s gut.
So with the can-do spirit of a sporting frontiersman, this corner is gearing up to give American football another go. It starts on BBC1 just before 11pm on Sunday night and goes on until four in the morning. That’s a big ask, sitting on your backside until the darkest hour before the light, staring at something strange and incomprehensible. But it’s gotta beat watching The Late Late Show.
The trick is to eliminate all the statistical nonsense from your mind. That’s not going to be easy. American football relies on statistics the way a drunk relies on a lamppost.
Everything is measured. Measurement of talent comes in yards: how many yards the ball covers when the quarterback throws it; how many yards one man-mountain pushes another one back: how many times some knee-pumping wide receiver avoids getting mangled to a pulp by a predatory linebacker. The pitch itself is a monument to geekdom, covered as it is in trigonometrical detail. Cricket has the same wheezy devotion to figures but at least manages to keep the field uncluttered.
It’s all bogus anyway. Never forget that 97 per cent of statistics are made up on the spot. And more importantly stats can never substitute for judgment. That’s a fact in any sport, even gridiron. If you doubt that go back four years to the 2008 Super Bowl, the impact of which will continue to reverberate throughout this week’s build-up.
The Patriots were on a roll of Super Bowl appearances, the established kings of the game, Brady the Beckham of his era. But the Giants stubbornly stuck with them and in the dying minutes, their own quarterback Eli Manning exhibited a sporting temperament that even the most ignorant among us can appreciate.
First of all he wriggled out of the clutches of half a dozen Patriots aiming to dislocate his spine and shot a pass to David Tyree whose one-handed overhead catch shames most anything you’ll see in Croke Park. A couple of plays later, and with the clock ticking down, Manning shot a match-winning pass in the corner to Plaxico Burress.
The names are exotic and the surroundings different but check it out on YouTube and try to scoff at the athleticism, nerve and sheer drama of it all.
Manning is back again. So is Brady. Maybe Gisele will be there too. Hopefully she is. The half-time entertainment is going to be Madonna. And maybe amidst the corporate, pom-pom shaking sheen we could be treated to the same sort of core humanity which lit up the game four years ago. The wait could be fruitless as well as interminable. But unlike so much around us now, sport can still come up trumps; even sport of the American variety.

Brian O’Connor should stick to boosting cars.

:lol:

Has anyone been following the story about the Polish bird and the story in the Indo professing how she is milking the social welfare system for all she can? It’s a real beauty so I’ll put the details up here in the order they were released.

This article appeared in the paper today as well as online. Quotes from a local representative in Donegal thrown in for good measure.

A POLISH waitress living here has sparked fury after she boasted about living the good life on Irish welfare benefits. ‘Magda’ (36), not her real name, described her life on the dole in Donegal as a ‘Hawaiian massage’.

She revealed how she had packed in her job so she could spend her days walking along beaches with her partner.

He in turn bragged about the county’s wonderful golf courses.

Magda claimed she earned €67 more a week on the dole than she did while working and that her welfare payments are €182 more every week than back in her native Poland.

The shocking boasts in a Polish newspaper have ignited another debate on welfare tourism, with one Labour senator last night offering to pay for her flight home.

The ex-waitress told the Polish newspaper ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ that instead of working she takes advantage of free education courses and goes surfing.

“How do I live? Wonderfully. I get an allowance of €188 a week plus €59 for the flat. In the winter I get an extra €20 for fuel. It’s €267 a week,” she said.

Magda doesn’t identify the town in Co Donegal where she lives but she does call it a “s***hole”.

Asked to describe her lifestyle, she went on: "The day starts in the same way. I go to the beach to watch the sunrise. It energises me for the rest for the day.

"Sometimes I sleep till noon and the nearest beach is five minutes away.

“What’s our house like? Well, you can hear the ocean from the windows,” she added.

Her partner Robert also bragged about life on the dole in Ireland, saying: “I won’t get out of bed for €8 an hour especially when I have the sound of the ocean, golf courses and beautiful scenery.”

Welfare

The Polish newspaper article compares Madga’s life on benefits with what she would earn working as a waitress in Poland, where the average weekly wage is just €85.

Dole payments in Poland are less than in Ireland, averaging just €36.50 a week.

There is no housing benefit and there are strict time limits on social welfare payments.

Welfare claimants can only claim for three months if they quit a job and six months if they are fired, said the report.

Instead of working Madga said she spent her time at a local surf school and learned how to do sign language at the local VEC college.

She also noted the ‘generous’ winter fuel payments of €20 a week which compared with no such payments in Poland, where temperatures yesterday dipped to -13C.

Last night a Labour senator based in Donegal said the claims were ‘outrageous’.

Senator Jimmy Harte told the Irish Independent: "This woman is doing an enormous disservice to the Polish community in Co Donegal and to other hard-working non-nationals.

“She has clearly taken advantage of Irish hospitality. I would like to see her go back to Poland and if we can find out who she is, I’d gladly pay for her flight home.”

He added: “Apart from her clear intent to take advantage of our social welfare system, to describe her home as a s***hole just adds insult to injury.”

  • Greg Harkin and Norma Costello

So after it appeared there was outrage from both Irish and Poles that someone could get away with this. But mid-morning it appeared there may have been some translation errors in the article in the Indo. Broadsheet covered it early this morning with the tagline “Anybody Speak Polish?” “So we can translate this and become fully enraged?”

Various radio stations then covered it at lunchtime saying the article was interpreted completely incorrectly and Today FM in particular had one of their Polish staff talk through some of the mistakes. Again, Broadsheet talks through them.

Using Google Translates, Reddit contributor Tetch compares today’s Indo article on that Polish waitress with her original in Gazeta Wyborcza :

From the Irish Independent:

‘Magda’ (36), not her real name, described her life on the dole in Donegal as a ‘Hawaiian massage’.

From original Article (badly translated)

Magda is doing a basic massage, Hawaiian and hot stone, which she learned at the free course of office work: hot stones moves on the back, until they go down all the tension.

From Irish Independent:

Magda doesn’t identify the town in Co Donegal where she lives but she does call it a “s***hole”.

Original:

Donegal, a county on the northern tip of Ireland, but for some the most beautiful place in the world, for others – the biggest shithole. Wherever you look carefully, green hills and beaches to the horizon, like a postcard.

Irish Independent:

Sometimes I sleep till noon and the nearest beach is five minutes away

Original:

Day start is always the same: go to the beach to see the sunrise. It charges me for the rest of the day. Once, I slept until noon, now pity that life.

Irish Independent:

Apart from her clear intent to take advantage of our social welfare system, to describe her home as a s***hole just adds insult to injury

Original:

Do I have a problem with the fact that I am on benefit? Wonders. Yes. I do not want to live at the expense of the state, so I treat it as a support that will allow me to set up their own business. In the afternoon we go for coffee for 3 euros. The same can drink at home, but the point is – explains Magda – to support local businesses.

Irish Independent:

He in turn bragged about the county’s wonderful golf courses.

This last one confused me as I could not find any reference in the original article to the guy playing golf. Notice this though, it does not actually say he plays golf. Just that he is “bragging” about the golf courses. This is an interesting line as it creates a false illusion in your mind. He says in the original article that Donegal has nice scenery and good beaches and golf courses – is this ‘bragging’ or stating a fact?

The Today FM person confirmed all the translation errors. How can the Indo publish something that appears to be so badly wrong?

Because they are cunts.

I read the article this morning and was pretty sure it was a crock of shit.
That’s horrendous journalism.

That’s the type of shit you’d expect from a downmarket UK tabloid trying to stir up trouble about ‘those bloody foreigners’ or something.

I thought it was a fair and well balanced piece by the Indo

Keep up the good work Greg Harkin and Norma Costello
:clap:

:shakefist:

Mooching war widows

:lol: