yep, a lot of bitterness about her school being called pill hill many many moons ago, so it as karma that they got fiddled by the priests. AFAIK, they did lose some advertising over it
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The Irish Times provides a home for a certain kind of wally, male or female. See Patrick Freyne and Conor Pope, for other instances.
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These wallies, Freyne, Pope, Ingle, Breda O’Brien, Jennifer O’Connell, Una Mullaly, Michael McDowell, get to write columns full of bilge, week in week out, year in year out regardless of any quality control. They’ll blame the internet but this crowd would have shed thousands of readers in any era.
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Some of those are good writers generally.
Not O’Brien. Not McDowell. Mullally is an average writer but generally on the correct side of things.
I don’t read Pope’s stuff so I don’t know whether he’s good or crap. I don’t read much of anybody now because I find it too difficult so I’m largely going off memory up to 2022.
Even good writers can throw in a stinker of a column.
Finn McNepobaby is obviously not a good writer. She’s not even a Galway Freesheet level writer. She’s a terrible writer. She gets clicks though because she’s so terrible a writer with such intelligence insulting opinions. That’s the world we live in now. Shitness sells.
I think that in general though cynicism in modern day life has soared to such an extent that even Hugh McIlvanney or Con Houlihan or Kevin Cashman would be widely panned and widely hated were they around now.
Everybody hates everybody now. Hatred by all of all is soooooo hot right now.
What’s wrong with freyne? Don’t read him often but he can be very funny. He just does media reviews is it?
How did you not mention that gobshites mcredmond?
Mullally winds up the headbangers something awful so should be kept for that.
I forgot about McRedmond. Says it all in a way. She’s about the worst of them. I don’t find Freyne in the least bit funny.
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Very correct on FMcR. Pure (Louboutin) mule.
Always remember that Kevin Myers had a big following. He was a nasty writer – and, more importantly, a really poor writer.
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A cunt Myers most definitely was and is now more than ever but he had considerable writing talent in his heyday.
Ah, but PF can take the piss out of Dermot Bannon.
Which is like someone hurling for Dublin being able to take a sideline cut.
I do not agree. Had only one gear.
His best writing for the paper came when he was sent for a while to cover the Balkans War.
Jennifer O’Connell is some dose. And Brian O’Connor.
Best writers in there by far are Keith Duggan, Miriam Lord and Justine McCarthy.
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I found this funny, shoot me - maybe it actually is a rare instance of right wing comedy being funny in its stereotyping - but it was an indication that Myers sailing close to the wind was soon to become sailing over the edge.
An Irishman’s Diary
Thu, Jan 10, 2002, 00:00
We interrupt the normal service of grave political comment in this space to ask: What really is the importance of names in deciding one’s future?
The question comes from watching Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love on television recently. That damned name, Fiennes: what is so special about it and about the tribe who bear it? After all, there is Ralph Fiennes, of The English Patient; there is Magnus Fiennes, the musician; there is Ranulph Fiennes, the ex-SAS man and explorer; there is Martha Fiennes, the director of the film Onegin; and of course, there is Joseph, who prompted this mad angst. Needless to say, all these Fiennes are pronounced Fines, a mispronunciation which is a true sign of high birth in England.
The Den
But do the English Fiennes have any less fortunate cousins? Is there a Wayne Fiennes, football hooligan extraordinaire, who is to be found every Saturday smashing heads outside The Den at Millwall and who concludes every sentence with no-wharmean? Has he a brother Kevin, or rather, assee a bruvver Kev, no-wharmean?
Is there is no Sharon Fiennes, aged 23, the mother of seven children, in some tower block in London? She too, no doubt, belongs to the nowharmean linguistic subgroup. Her delightful offspring are of various racial origins, with an uncertain number of fathers (owing to drink having been taken on most of the nights in question, nowharmean; maybe even the odd threesome or two, eeer, wotchadoin, o-aw-righthen, nowharmean). Possible fathers might exceed the dozen, though no one really knows, least of all Sharon, and of course none of these fine lads is paying a single penny in maintenance, no-wharmean.
And can there really be no Elvis Fiennes, 22, who makes a living selling crack and stealing white kids’ mobile phones in Hammersmith, but is branching out now with a couple of bitches turning tricks for him down Paddington way? And are there no Irish Fiennes, aside, of course from that aberrant sect, Shin Fiennes?
Is there not a Manchester United-worshipping Craig Fiennes in Tallaght with a ring through his nose, tattoos all over him and a pitbull on a chain? Or a James Connolly Fiennes, an INLA drugs dealer in Dundalk who clips off the fingers of the opposition using industrial shears? Or a Rocco Fiennes, with a few African girls in Fitzwilliam Square, and a boatload of cocaine coming in from Peru any day now?
Arbour Hill
And is there a Seamus Fiennes, doing time in the sex offenders’ unit at Arbour Hill after being in caught in flagrante delicto in Dublin Zoo having his way with a stoutly but nonetheless vainly resisting boar hippo? Is there a Pius Pearse Emmet McSweeney Fiennes who yearns for the Troubles to start again so he can bump off a few off-duty peelers, die on hunger strike and get a gable-end all to himself, and who knows, maybe his very own cumann? (“We are gathered here today to rededicate ourselves to the struggle for which young Pius gave his young. . .”)
Is there is a Whiteside Oliver Cromwell Mawhinney Fiennes, LOL 666, who in appearance is remarkably similar in every way to his cousin Craig in Tallaght, most especially in his tattoos, and his pitbull and football enthusiasms, except he has one further ambition: he has a great desire to blow the bejasus out of them there Fiennians on the Garvaghy Road, that being his culture, so it is.
To all such speculations about aberrant Fiennes we can say a definitive No. For, generally speaking, the name Fiennes excludes improper possibilities, characters and characteristics. Fiennes are all sensitive, artistic, brave, creative, handsome, musical and probably superb in bed: it is merely one of the siennes of the deplorably weak tiemmes that we live in that somebody hasn’t done the whole bloody lot of them in.
Serving lass
Yet how is this nomenclatural integrity possible? Surely, however much an ancient Norman family such as the Fiennes may guard their privileges, and mind their offspring, inevitably, even in the most vigilant family, a son or two will be tempted by the loins of a serving lass, so bringing the name into a lower class. Yet not so: there are no Fiennes in working-class housing estates anywhere; nor are there Montgomerys, Tollemaches, de Montmorencys, Plantagenets, just the common old Murphys, Myerses, Kielys, Bradys, Browns and Nolans, unlettered tattooed proletarian louts all, who steal glue and sniff cars.
And all that a mere passing aside before coming to the main item of the day: the Debussy concert at the National Concert Hall, which was cancelled after the September 11th attacks, has been relocated to next Sunday afternoon at 3.15.
Moya O’Grady, she of the tribe of illustrious ones too numerous to count, and the mother of many, leads large sections of her clan in a celebration of the music of the truly great French impressionist composer whose musical genius changed the world’s love of music. Three sonatas, and La danse Sacrée et Profane for harp and strings.
Debussy’s mother was probably kin of Ralph and Ranulph: Fienne girl you are.
KEVIN MYERS
I try to give O’Connell the hop of the ball because she is from Waterford and I occasionally see her shopping in Ardkeen. But she is genuinely hopeless. She had a column a couple of weeks ago about buying a car (a Seat Cupra as it happens) that was about the most dull pointless column I have ever set eyes on.
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Well, fair enough, in a way. Shows Myers in a wider angle – true enough.
But I do not rate that kind of writing at all, for same reason I do not like the tv series Toast. This craic is essentially the same joke made twenty times over, one after the other. So predictable. If you had left off the last sentence, I could have guessed its ‘clinching’ pun.
you forgot kitty holland
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I hear yah.
But she does not even deserve that hop of the ball. She is ferociously and inanely anti GAA.
Miriam Lord and Justine McCarthy are the best writers, I think anyway.
I like Patrick Freyne, I think he’s funny and I liked his book. He’s definitely an anathema here as a man who doesn’t like sport.
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Peoples humour changes as they age
I like Justine McCarthy. I think she occasionally gets things badly wrong and shows an extremely poor grasp of certain topics (I recall columns on neutrality and eileen Gleeson) but for the most part she’s fairly good.
Freyne is funny.
Miriam Lord is a national treasure.
Freyne gets a pass for this masterpiece
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