When it comes to prostitution, we prefer a strange fantasy

I wrote about this for an editorial in early December 2012 that wasn't, for space reasons only, published in its entirety. In particular the bit towards the end about the men, the customers, was left out. This is a subject that annoys the hell out of me, not least because it involves such a avoidance of reality.

The critical faculties of many members of society appear to depart them when they consider the issue of prostitution.

There is the quiet, but strongly held view that quite a good percentage of the women who work as prostitutes in every town in Kildare are doing so of their own volition, that they are simply businesswomen who have chosen this activity as a way of making a living.

The Leinster Leader views that train of thought with its most jaundiced and sceptical eye.

It is known that a large number of these women are controlled by a pimp and that they are trafficked into this country in order to service a booming market. The evidence is undeniable.

It is alleged that some are not controlled by a third party, that they are “just doing it to pay the bills”.

But even if we are to take the broadest view of the matter, it is surely not relevant whether a woman is trapped, coerced or forced into prostitution by a pimp, a trafficker or by economic circumstances.

Prostitution is and remains an offence to the human dignity of any woman who finds herself performing sexual favours on strangers for money.

Also, are we to believe that a woman with very little english who flies into the country on a holiday visa can, with no assistance whatsoever, find herself in a matter of weeks, with an advertisement on an escort website that is both well written and in english, have a lease in an apartment in some suburb of the greater Dublin area, numerous, Irish registered mobile phones, and a steady flow of clientele?

Another quiet but strongly held view is that the men who avail of the services of prostitutes are innocent of all blame, and that society would somehow break down, come to a grinding halt, if men were to stop using prostitutes.

This leads to resistance to the idea of tackling prostitution by targeting and prosecuting the users rather than the providers of the services.

We are asked: “What would that do to his marriage or his children?”

Clearly, it is a widely held view that the sexual urges of the male side of the population must be managed - as if prostitution were to be considered a handy pressure release valve.

It is devastatingly depressing and disappointing to consider the inherent inference that a man can be so beholden to his sexual urges that he can banish any pause for concern from his mind about whether the frightened naked woman with very little English, whom he knows for all of 10 minutes and who is now performing sexual favours on him, is there by choice or not.

If we are to tackle prostitution in this country, it must be from a humanitarian point of view with the well-being of the women involved as the guiding principle of our actions.

Unlike the men who use their services, they are the vulnerable ones.

Bringing the Irish wine story to the stage

                    Susan Boyle chases the 'wine geese'.

A Kildare woman is set to bring the history of wine in Ireland to life in a new play.
But it's not the story you might assume.
A couple of years ago Susan Boyle was working on a TG4 documentary when she realised that despite not being able to grow vines, the Irish have actually played a leading role in the development of the wine industry down through the centuries.
At points throughout the last millenium, the Irish were the biggest exporters of wine amongst non wine producing nations in Europe.
She learned that many of the famous 'wild geese' families who left Ireland in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries brought their educated wine-noses with them.
In particular in the 17th century more than 200 Irish families moved to Bordeaux in France and changed what we now know as the wine industry.
The names of these, including the Phelans, Bartons and Lynchs, can still be seen today on some of the world's most desired bottles of wine.
As a result, Susan has spent the past few months working on a theatrical re-telling of the story of what she calls the 'Wine Geese'.
The result is the aptly titled 'A Wine Goose Chase' which will have its debut as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival in September.
The play is written and performed by Ms. Boyle with direction from the award winning director, writer and actor Gina Moxley.
Susan says she was fascinated by why the Wine Geese left Ireland for France. “And how did they go on to influence wine-making in Europe and across the globe?”
The play intertwines this fascinating history with her personal experiences of the contemporary wine world.
And appropriately enough, the performance of the play will double as an interactive wine-tasting event as well!
Ms. Boyle hopes to tour with the play following the Fringe Festival.
Susan grew up in Kildare town where the licensed trade is in her blood. Her family have been publicans for at least five generations.
She went to school in Newbridge College and followed it up with a BA in Drama and Theatre Studies from Trinity College Dublin, a stint as a University of California scholar, and an MA in Performance Studies from the University of London Royal Holloway.
She's well known for her childrens art classes, summer camps and her annual Joy to the World exhibition at Christmas time.
She has also been attending professional wine tasting for almost 15 years, and generally loves wine and talking about it.
The show will take place in La Ruelle Wine Bar, Joshua Lane, just off Dawson St from Septmber 11, 12, 16, 17 and 18, starting at 6:30 pm.
Previews will be on September 9 and 10 at 5pm and 6:30pm respectively, with an early evening show at 5pm on Sunday, September 15.
Tickets are available from www.fringefest.com at €14/ €12 (concession)/ €10 (previews).
For more, see http://www.fringefest.com/programme/a-wine-goose-chase

When you get a husky, do you know what you're really getting?

Cute? Yes, but if anything they suffer from being so good looking.


In the 1920's, many parts of rural and isolated Alaska were threatened by the kinds of diseases we never hear much about anymore.


In late 1924, the fishing town of Nome on the west coast was under threat of an epidemic of dyptheria.

The story made headlines all around America and the race was on to get an antidote, in serum form, to the people of Nome, who were more than a thousand kilometres away from the nearest outpost.

With temperatures, on a good day, hovering at about minus 50 Celsius, it was up to husky teams and a few brave men to make the trip.

Over the course of what it now known as the “Great 1925 Serum Run to Nome”, 150 dogs and 20 men relayed the medicine through a wall of blizzards.

Some of the dogs died and the men often arrived at their drop off point with their hands and faces black with frostbite. But they delivered the serum, entirely intact (although obviously frozen), and saved the town of Nome.

It took five and a half days, with 20 separate husky teams pulling their masters and sleds between 60 to 146kms (40 to 90 miles) in one stint. 'Balto', the lead dog in the final section of the relay is commemorated in a statue in New York's Central Park.

Huskys are amongst the most beautiful looking dogs around, and for that reason, and that reason alone, they have become highly popular here.

There several different types, but the most common in Ireland is the Siberian Husky. They are boisterous and affectionate, and good companions for a very active family with lots of space.

A little known but salient fact is that they have the DNA of wolves in them.

Why? Because the Siberian husky is a dog that has been bred to pull heavy loads very fast and very far. Along the way, they were crossbred with wolves – and let's just say, it wasn't to make them fluffier.

They have fur that can be an inch and a half thick, and that needs, in our particular climate, to be brushed regularly.

On a scientific physiological level they're way off the scale. The average elite athlete has the ability to process one and a half times as much oxygen as the average couch potato. I won't bore you with the science, but on the test to determine this, couch potatoes score somewhere between 30 and 50, elite athletes are somewhere between 70 and 90.

Huskies hit 250. They are not elite athletes. They are freaks.

I took a husky for a walk recently. She dragged me for 10kms across bogs, down canal banks, through hedges, under bridges, around lakes and back.

At the end, I was on my knees - she was a bit thirsty.

For such a big dog, she was quite light, but amazingly strong. She was growled at by umpteen dogs, whom she completely ignored, as if they were flies.

The other day, I saw a rather large and rotund man, leading a rather large and rotund male husky on a lead. The man walked approximately half a kilometre from his house to the local shop. There, he got somebody to hold the dog while he went inside to buy something with lots of sugar in it. Then, they both waddled home, as the rotund man drank the stuff with lots of sugar.

It was one of those warm days and the dog was panting hard, in a way that looked that suggested that he uncomfortable and in distress.

Clearly neither of them were getting enough exercise. The man could do with walking another four and a half kilometres, the husky, another 29 and a half, in a climate that's 20 degrees colder.

Dan Donoher of Kildare Animal Foundation says there's a clear problem with people owning them, and not really knowing what it is they actually have in the back garden.

“They're not being exercised enough and they're getting all these problems. They're becoming hyper, getting stressed out, losing weight. And their mental health suffers as well.

“They're cute and cuddly when they're puppies, but when they're six months old, it's a different story altogether.”

He's quite clear: “The simple fifteen minute walk just doesn't cut it anymore. They can go for hours and hours.”

Dan blames films for making them popular and irresponsible breeders for essentially taking the money and running.

“We get a lot of them in here, people asking us to rehouse them,” which, he says, is difficult.

And if that wasn't bad enough, people are confusing them with Malamutes, which look similar, but are bigger (over six stone rather than four) and far stronger and need even more exercise.

These breeds have been created over centuries by humanity for specific purposes. Looking pretty and fluffy in suburban Kildare backgardens is not one of them, and is, in fact, a cruelty.

It is cruel to impose upon any animal an environment and lifestyle so foreign to them that it makes them unhealthy.

It's time to do the responsible thing.

If you insist on owning a husky, either be prepared to adopt one from Kildare Animal Foundation along with a new lifestyle that includes long distance running - or get a Jack Russell.

Anytime you mention this person's name, people always ask: "The singer?" She may well sound like Maria Callas when she's in the shower but in the context intended by the question, no, she's not THE SINGER SUSAN BOYLE. By virtue of an accident of fate, or of names, or whatever, she is also called Susan Boyle, and is, I'd respectfully suggest, just as interesting. Anyway, when writing the piece, I decided to avoid any reference to the 'other one'. I can't really explain it, but it seemed inherently un-necessary.

First published by the Leinster Leader in May 2011.

'The' Susan Boyle

Susan Boyle: Bringing arts experience to the children of her native county

One of the great things about a county of 230,000 people, like Kildare, is that there are bound to be numerous interesting people living and working there.
Whether they are natives or new arrivals, they all have a history, and there-in lies many great stories.
Kildare town woman Susan Boyle has one such story.
Having spent the past decade or so studying and working in the arts, she's now back in her home town, breathing new life into the corridors and rooms of her family's old house in the centre of the town.
The past decade has seen her being the red-headed object of curiosity amongst dark-haired Mexican children as she tried to teach them about the Children of Lir, “rolling around on a floor for a year” (her words) at a prestigious London university and working with terminally ill children in Barretstown.
Now she's giving local children their start in the wonderful world of art.
Her studio is in a large, bright room beside the family pub, over-looking Kildare's Market Square.
“It's beside the pub, go in through the green door,” was the instruction on the phone to this reporter who had arranged to meet Ms. Boyle one bright Wednesday morning a few weeks ago.
So the Leinster Leader duly arrived at the door and knocked. There was no answer.
Pushing the door, we entered the house and immediately saw a sign on the far wall that directed us up an old staircase.
A series of further signs, 'almost there', 'just a little bit further', 'around the corner' brought us, finally, to the end of the corridor where Susan was inside, making tea.
Art has been Susan Boyle's life for the past decade, and her walls are adorned with paintings, drawings, books about painting, and a row of plastic dog's tails upon which to hang up your coat.
It sums her up – somebody happy to operate in that sweet spot between art and practical humour.
After school she went to Trinity College Dublin to study Drama.
The well-regarded course included a year abroad and she chose the University of California, Irvine where the course was “practical and arts related”.
There, things were on a different scale. “They had eight different theatres on campus, and one of them could accommodate up to 500 people, just on the stage.”
“The director of the course realised that the college's biggest resource was the students,” she explains.
This lead to a programme whereby students would go into the communities and schools of the southern Californian city and work with the people.
She ended up in a school, peopled mainly by the children of Mexican immigrants who were fascinated by her red/blonde hair.
“It was a great cultural learning experience,” she said, adding that one of the things that fascinated the children was when she invited them to take their shoes off.
“That's something you don't do in Mexico.”
After completing her degree, Susan started working in Barretstown as a drama specialist.
“It was tiring and exhausting. It was a high energy job and the kids were great to work with.
“It was great fun to use drama, because even though they were ill, or in a wheelchair, or didn't even speak English, there were no limits to drama.
“It bridges a lot of gaps.”
However she described the emotional toll of the nature of working at the Camp. “A lot of kids just don't come back,” she explained.
A chance encounter with an old teacher lead her, soon after, to teaching primary school which she did for a little while before deciding that she would have to choose between it, and the arts.
This lead her to the University of London, Royal Holloway, to complete a masters in performance studies which had, she explained “a very practical understanding of drama”.
However, as she discovered, “you were expected to act, which I didn't like.”
Eventually, despite her initial reservations, she threw herself into it and “spent a lot of the year rolling around on the floor”
Back in Ireland some time later, Susan was approached to do some arts consultancy, and following some initial work, “word of mouth” enabled her to get more and more work.
In the meantime she worked with Kildare County Council's 'If I had an artist for a day' programme which involves a team of eight artists who are available to schools for a day.
“Some want you to design a programme and deliver it to the kids, while others want you to work with the teachers.”
This coincided with a “a big push on drama in primacy schools” and it is quite popular, although, not as popular as it should be she feels.
In more recent times, with the economic recession, much of the consultancy work has dried up.
But, ever resourceful, Susan has started to teach art to a group of youngsters.
“This allows you to have more control over what you're doing,” she explained, adding that she's now teaching up to 50 children a week.
Something she has noticed is that the older children (she has some teenagers) are starting to learn from the younger ones.
Recently, she gave all of her students a mirror and told them to draw themselves.
“In a world where we are all creating our own portraits on Facebook and Twitter, it was good for them to see and try to recreate their own portraits.”
It's fun, it's practical and it's art. Right up her street!

Some day I'll go into it in more detail but I'm involved in a thing called the Galway Cycle. I have a couple of different roles within it, but one of them is as one of the co-ordinators of the training for the big event. I've long been fascinated by the very different approaches men and women take to training. Truth be told women make better pupils, but more men turn up. The difference comes down to confidence. First-time men assume that with a bit of training it can be done. Women think that with loads of training and a bit of luck, they might just about get there. The reality is that while you spend a lot of time in the saddle over the course of the weekend of the event (400kms), it's not particularly difficult (there's no terrible hills). So an average power-to-weight ratio is all that's needed to achieve it. Women aren't as strong as men, but then, they weigh less, so it all evens out. We've done a lot to even out the balance and to make it more attractive to women, and I'm happy to say we've been quite successful, moving, in my seven years there from having less than 5% women, to in or around 35%....ish.
Anyway, I was reminded about all that when I found myself doing this story. And getting a little depressed about it all. The top piece is an opinion piece I wrote on the subject, while the second bit, after the picture, was the big interview I did with Caroline Ryan, one of Kildare's greatest athletes. She's really really good at what she does, but with the struggles she faces to finance herself it seems that riding her bike is the easy bit.

This was published in the Leinster Leader, edition Tuesday, April 24, 2012.

It doesn't matter how good you are, sportswomen get a raw deal



Caroline Ryan, bronze medalist at the points race in the World Track Championships in Melbourne, with her coach Brian Nugent.


One does well never to assume anything, but it's probably safe to assume that most of you have never heard of Giorgia Bronzini.
She is an Italian professional cyclist, and for the second year in a row, the current reigning women's world road racing champion.
Her specialty is sprinting – and like many sprinters, she pays her dues off the road and on the track because the discipline and skills needed for cycling on the wooden track in a velodrome is great training for sprinters.
Last Thursday week, April 5, at the World Track Championships in Melbourne, she came fourth, just outside the medals, in the final of the points race.
She was beaten by bronze medal winner Caroline Ryan. Ever heard of her?
Well she's from Johnstownbridge but now lives in Straffan, both in the fair county of Kildare.
She's a Garda but has taken leave of absence to pursue a dream
Having tested her in a lab, and seen her quick progress since she took up competitive cycling in 2008, her coach Brian Nugent realised that - in cycling parlance – she had a big engine and that she had an ability to suffer. (Suffering is a big thing in cycling).
So he sat her down and told her she had the ability to medal in the World Track Championships and if she went at it full time, with a bit of luck, it was hers for the taking.
You'd think that would spark a flurry of support from all quarters, that the cycling and sporting fraternities would rally around, that forward-looking companies would beat a path to her door to sponsor her – that nothing would be left to distract her beyond her training and getting that medal.
It would be wrong to say that there has been no help. Cycling Ireland isn't exactly flush, but they have done what they can. Bus Eireann has come on board to help as well, and her colleagues in the Gardai, being the Gardai, have been a great help as well.
But Caroline Ryan has had to fork out thousands for travelling all over the world to train (because Ireland has no velodrome) and to take part in competitions, training camps, bicycles, testing.
Her father, Willie Ryan, told me that he sometimes puts credit in her phone. She says he helps with her mortgage.
Admirably, she steadfastly refuses to get down about it. “It's very hard for people to understand how much money is involved,” she told the Leinster Leader.
“You'd get very annoyed thinking about all that. But we don't have time to waste thinking about it.”
Anyway now that she has a medal, it has been worth it. “It's paid off.”
Instead she focuses by thinking back to the medals ceremony. Watching the gold medal around the neck of the Russian winner Anastasia Chulkova she thought: “I want to upgrade to that! I want to stand on that podium again and hear Amhran na Bhfiann ringing out.”
Bronzini was quoted recently on the state of women's cycling in her own country: “It’s very hard, so much that when I’m asked for advice on women’s cycling, I immediately say that it’s better to stop or not even start, and devote yourself to something else.

“But then I add that if you have passion and desire, cycling brings emotions and adventure, discipline and character.”

Ryan and Bronzini are extraordinary women. It's not just that they were born with the ability to produce more power than the rest of us (Ryan knows this because she paid €3,500 for a power meter on her bike), but they have the dedication, in the face of such adversity, to want to pay to fly half way around the world to completely empty themselves on a bike just to hear Amhran na Bhfiann or Il Canto degli Italiani.

They deserve our support. Have we done enough to deserve their dedication on our behalf?



The dreaded ramp test!



Caroline Ryan - a lady in a hurry

It sounds impressive – third in a race at the World Track Cycling Championships – but it's not, it's extraordinary.

If Mr. Spielberg is watching, he might consider it for a David and Goliath themed movie script.

When Caroline Ryan wheeled her Cervélo bike up to the start line of the Points Race in Melbourne on Thursday, April 5, if she looked around her at her fellow competitors (including current world champion Giorgia Bronzini), she might have felt a little different.

For one, she was the only one who had paid her own way.

Secondly, she only started cycling four years ago after 10 years at the upper echelons of another sport entirely.

Many, if not most of those on the starting line with her would have been cossetted in their national programmes since they were teenagers, support systems that gave them a decent wage and paid their costs.

She had none of those things. She's on a very small Sports Council grant, and scrapes by with help from some sponsors, friends and family.

But there's more. Four years ago when Ryan first saw the high banking at the turns in the wooden track in the velodrome it scared her. It took a while to get the hang of it, and also to get the hang of racing in a crowd of boisterous fellow riders, to get the hang of sitting directly behind another rider, your front wheel milimetres from their back wheel, travelling at 50kmh (30mph).

Her competitors would have been doing it since they were teenagers. Ryan took it up when she was 28.

So where had she been until then, this johnny come lately?

Well, she's been rowing, a lot. Her dad, Willie Ryan, and his brother Ted were big rowers and represented Ireland in the 1976 and 1980 Olympic games.

She got into it in her late teens. Her father felt it necessary to warn her it would involve a lot of work, such was her lack of interest in sports as a child.

“I brought her down to athletics in Johnstownbridge,” Willie says. “Nothing, didn't bite at all.”

“I often ask him why he didn't push me more when I was younger,” she says.
Maybe it was for the best. She says now that she had a chance to see a bit of life before getting heavily into sport so that she'd know what she was missing before she gave it up.

Willie says with some pride, that when she took up rowing: “She didn't miss a training session.”

She excelled and was selected to represent Ireland in the World Rowing Championships at Eton, England in 2006 where she narrowly missing out on selection for the Beijing Olympics.

She won five national championships and in 2008 became the first Irish woman to win the Henley Royal Regatta when she won the Princess Royal Challenge Cup.

In 2008 a new initiative called the Cycling Ireland Talent Transfer and Identification Programme created a buzz in sporting circles. It followed a similar and wildly successful one in the UK.

Lady luck smiled on Caroline when a friend of hers had to pull out of a trial and asked her to go in her place. She did well, and her father, who had coached her in rowing told her: “There's another 10% in you yet.”

She showed promise in more tests and was selected as a pilot on the Irish Para-Cycling Tandem teamwhere she and the World Cup in Manchester in May 2009 they won silver medal and set a new Irish record.  Another silver medal at the World Paracycling Championships in November 2009 soon followed.

But then rowing was still her first love, and while she loved track cycling, she saw it as good cross training for her rowing.

Physical testing plays a huge role in track cycling. Many cyclists hate it. Imagine sitting on a stationary bike in a lab, hooked up to wires and monitors, pedalling for forever as the resistance is constantly increased until you're exhausted and can't maintain your pedalling anymore.

And throughout all this lung busting, sweat-drenched effort, somebody in surgical gloves is squeezing drops of blood out of your ear lobe every few minutes. See the picture attached above.

Highlighting the difference between top athletes and the rest of us, Ryan says she likes it.

“I like it while the numbers continue to go up!” she says. Those numbers prompted her coach Brian Nugent to sit her down and tell her: “You have something here. You can do something on the track. You can medal, or higher at the worlds.”

He said her she had a chance to go far, but that she'd have to go at it full time.

Going at it full-time. Hmmmm. Who's going to pay the mortgage, or pay for three bikes that could be as much as €5,000, or €3,500 power meters or €1,700 training camps or to travel to Switzerland for training, or to Columbia, Kazakstan and Melbourne for competitions?

“It can done alright,” she says brightly. She says everything brightly. She is incurably optimistic, personable, likeable and utterly unaffected by the fact that she's one of the 10 female cyclists in the world - and Ireland's most successful track cyclist in over 100 years.

Even though she's the one doing all the pedalling, she sees it as a triumph for her coaches as much as herself. It's never “I”. It's always “we”.

Former US Olympic coach Andy Sparks who has helped with her training echoes this: “Caroline works hard and it could not happen to a nicer person. She actually had people from about 10 different countries cheering her on (during the race) it was really cool to see how happy it made these other teams to see her do well.”

She says that the British team were cheering her on and were delighted for her after her win. With a budget of £22 million, you can be sure none of them are searching Ebay for bike parts.

“My father was worried when I said I'd take a career break from the Gardai,” she admits.

She has received assistance the Sports Council, Cycling Ireland, sponsorship from Bus Eireann, Richies Bike Shop (affiliated to the Garda club) family and friends.

“We have no track here in Ireland so all our training is done abroad in Majorca, Newport in Wales or in Switzerland.
The points race where she won her medal wasn't even her main goal. “We were mad racing it. It was only going to be an opener, to get some racing into the legs instead of sitting around. I was in really good form, the fittest I've ever been.

Her main event is the individual pursuit where you face off against another competitor for 3kms or 12 laps of the ring which she can do sub 3.35. That's holding 71.6 kmh or 44 mph for more than three and a half minutes.

“There's not that many girls doing that,” she notes, adding that she's improving all the time, a good sign for the future.

She came ninth in that in Melbourne and knocked 10 seconds of her own and the Irish record.

“To look at the pursuit, it looks like you're not working that hard, but there's massive work. You've got to pace yourself around the laps. The last four laps of that are really hard.”

As well as all that, she's picked up six Irish records along the way.

As well as the power, Caroline was born with a love hard work, or as they say in cycling, “a love of suffering”.

She loves training camps. “There's no distractions. You get up at seven or eight, have a bowl of porridge. Out of a ride on the road for two or three hours.

“Then back to download all the information from the power meter and send it off to Brian.

“Then grab some lunch, get a half an hour snooze, and get back to the track in the evening.”

The power meter, which she paid for herself, (€3,500) measures the power she puts through the pedals in watts.

Nugent can analyse her power output, and when matched up against her heartrate (which it also measures) can tell how much it's taking out of her.

When she's in Ireland, the roads of Kildare are her training grounds, and she can end up anywhere from Blessington to Edenderry. But she also loves going out with her local Leixlip club because she doesn't have to think about the route. “They pick a route and change it if the wind changes!”

Food is “pasta, chicken, lots of rice, fish is great and a bowl of porridge in the morning – and coffee.

“I really should wean myself off the coffee!”

Rest is another important element. “I realised that this year. Rest is as important as the hard work.

Ryan's next goal is the Olympics. She's missed out on qualifying for the track, but the road race is still a possibility.

In two upcoming races, in Canada and Belfast, in the next six weeks, she must finish in the top 5 to score 30 points.

She knows there's a lot of hard work ahead of her, but thinks it's very achievable. In the meantime she races with the men to get her speed up.

“Do you beat some of them?” we asked.

“Ah stop it!” she laughs. “You need that speed. The women's races just aren't long enough, fast enough or hard enough. Better off to be hanging in there with the men to get that speed up.”

It's all a struggle trying to fund herself, but she refuses to get down, or dwell on it. “You'd get very annoyed thinking about all that. It's worth it. We're getting there.”

It's the 'getting there' that she likes. After the world championships there was lots of official and media stuff to do. Speaking to her the following Saturday, she was generous with her time, but clearly she was itching to get back to training.

“On Monday it's back to business with a bang. I've a job to do. I just need to focus.”

Darren Scully missed the bigger picture

This was a huge story that was notable for the speed with which it broke and the flew around the world. On Monday night, November 21, 2011 and again the following morning, Darren Scully, the then Mayor of Naas went on two radio stations and volunteered the fact, without much persuasion, that as a result of negative experiences with what he called 'black Africans' he was no longer willing to deal with them. Despite saying this, he believed in his heart and soul that he wasn't a racist.

I felt on the one hand that he lacked a true understanding or insight into the whole issue of racism, direct and casual. On the other hand I was surprised that he didn't see why pub talk should be kept separate from his comments in public.

Hence the title of the story.




Throughout this entire affair Cllr Darren Scully exhibited a remarkable ability to miss the bigger picture.
Based on what he has described as a negative, although presumably limited experience of those whom he called ‘black Africans’, he came to the conclusion that he would probably have a similar experience with all members of that category of people.
By latest estimates there are a billion ‘black Africans’ in the world. The possibility that he might have a more pleasant experience dealing with at least a handful of those billion apparently didn’t occur to Cllr Scully.
Whatever about his views, the manner in which he advertised them also showed great political naivete.
Speaking on 4FM and then on KFM, he forgot that as a councillor, and especially as Mayor, he was effectively speaking on behalf of the people of Naas.
It presumably shocked him to learn that by Wednesday morning, thanks to the viral nature of the internet, countless news organisations across the globe, including the Guardian and the Mirror in Britain, Der Speigal in Germany, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC South America and the Sydney Morning Herald had informed millions of readers that the Mayor of a town in Ireland called ‘Naas’ won’t speak to black Africans.
It took less than 48 hours for a new word, ‘Naasist’, a mixture of ‘Naas’ and ‘racist’ to enter the popular vocabulary.
Reaction to his comments was immediate and polarised. While many have condemned him, it is the considered view of the Leinster Leader that in Naas at least more people are willing to support, if not the comments, then certainly the sentiments at the root of what he said.
Some of that is as a result of a feeling of personal sympathy for Cllr Scully who, let’s not forget, has been a consistent poll-topper for Fine Gael. Whether that’s a good thing or not, we’ll leave it to the reader, but one thing is certain, a lack of willingness to have a public debate on the orderly integration of immigrants has left a vacuum for these kinds of comments to flourish.
And Cllr Scully may well have finally, either prompted that debate or opened a can of worms, or both.
In an email he sent to 4FM, the former Mayor said “…it pains me to see people born and reared in my town unable to get a council house who are well entitled to it but....many Africans (are) now housed because the system states that larger families get jumped up the list”.
Did he think it wasn’t right that Africans with large families be treated the same as Irish people with large families? And did he think that people who are not from Naas were somehow less entitled to their right to housing?
Later he referred to a lady from Sierra Leone who was given a house in Sallins and who asked for adjustments to be made to it to create more room for her large family. “A council colleague quickly asked her how big was her house in Sierra Leone. She lived in a hut.”
What is it about living in a hut that should make a person less entitled to appropriate accommodation? If they had lived in a hut in Ireland would they be less, or more entitled to appropriate accommodation? It appears he seemed to think that because of having lived in a hut, she should be grateful for the crumbs from the white man’s table.
Cllr Scully may be absolutely convinced that he is not a racist, and has attacked what he calls the “PC brigade” for suggesting that he is, but it’s hard to avoid the reality that he has certainly left himself wide open to that interpretation.
He may object to political correctness all he likes but that is to once again miss the bigger picture.
While there are those who see this as an uncomfortable encroachment on free speech, others will view it as a way of improving the lives of the kinds of minorities that have traditionally suffered at the hands of the majority.
“Political correctness gone mad” is a common refrain in society now – an often missed salient point is that political correctness is and has been a worthwhile influence on society.
Most people now understand hat terms such as 'nigger', 'paki', 'faggot', 'bastard' and 'cripple' are no longer acceptable ways of describing people – and our emmigrants no longer encounter the 'No blacks, no Dogs, no Irish' sign either.
Presumbably even Cllr. Scully couldn't disagree with that.

The day science fiction became fact

Years ago, there was a programme on the telly called 'Beyond 2000' which, by reporting on strides and advances the scientific world was making, gave us a picture of what life would be like, as the title suggested, beyond the year 2000.

So here we are, 11 years after that magic year, and I can honestly say they got it terribly wrong, on so many levels. They never saw the iPhone coming, or the indeed the general ubiquity of mobile phones and the internet.

They somehow thought we'd all be living in giant cities under water and that holograms would be a big deal.

Eh, yeah, whatever.

The only thing they kinda got right was electric cars, but they completely missed the boat on hybrids.

But one thing they had lots of, was people sitting down with harnesses on their heads and a load of wires flowing, medusa-like, from their head to a bank of computers.

And that's why, when I found myself last Friday evening sitting in a lab with a harness on my head and wires flowing to a bank of computers, I felt a little nostalgic, and giddy – although as I soon learned, giddy was not a good idea.

A friend of mine, Kevin Sweeney, is a Ph.D researcher at NUI Maynooth. A few weeks ago he put out an appeal on Facebook (something else the Beyond 2000 people missed) saying he needed volunteers for his research.




This be Kevin.


So I volunteered, without entirely knowing what I was I was volunteering for..

I emailed Kevin, who is a former pupil of the Salesians in Celbridge, and made the mistake of asking him.....

“What I am looking at is the noise that can be embedded on the fNIRS records due to the movement of the recording optodes. And my PhD is basically trying to remove this noise. So I will be getting you to do some small test while I record the change in the oxygenation levels in your brain,” was his prompt response.

“And then as you do that I will be disturbing the recording optodes intermittently to create motion artifact. I can then use that data in my post processing.”

Now, aren't you glad I asked?

Not admitting defeat, I turned to Google (something else they missed) and typed in fNIRS and came across a paper written on the topic. For the record, it stands for functional Near Infra Red Spectroscopy.

I started reading the paper, and recognised words like “at” and “the” and “and”, but nothing else.

And then I noticed that the authors of the report were Darren J Leamy, Tomás Ward and Kevin T. Sweeney. Yep, that would be the same Kevin Sweeney.....the man himself.

Anyway, I confessed my ignorance and general confusion to him. He reassured me he'd explain it all to me in laymans' language when I saw him.

And, actually when he did, it was pretty straightforward.

Kevin is part of a team that is aiming to improve our ability to measure what's going on the brain.

There are all sorts of practical applications for this sort of work, including working with people who have brain damage or have had a stroke, etc.

Current technology can give doctors and scientists a certain amount of information. Kevin and the lads are hoping to be able to come up with a method of giving doctors a clearer picture of what (if anything) is going on inside our noggins.

You can only imagine the jokes flying around the newsroom of the Leinster Leader when I announced where I was headed last Friday afternoon.

“What if they don't find anything......,” was the general gist. Oh the wit!

So I turned up, and made my way to the Engineering building on the north campus of the college. Inside, Kevin met me and brought me to a small-ish room on the first floor.

He showed me everything, and how it would all work and why he needed the information.

I was to be one of about 15 people the test would be done on.

The measurement essentially works by measuring the oxygen levels in the blood that flows around the brain. This can be measured quite simply. Those of us who have visited hospital in recent times will be familiar with the small plastic clamp the nurses put on your finger.

The clamp shines a light which is similar to infra-red light into your finger and measures the response. This tells them if your blood is properly oxygenated. Effectively, what it's really monitoring is to see if your heart, lungs and blood are all working properly.

In the case of the brain, there's a slight difference. When a certain part of the brain is activated (if, for instance, you decided to raise your arm) oxygenated blood is sent to that part of the brain.

So by measuring the level of oxygen in the blood, you can measure the level of activity in that section of the brain.

But rather than putting a giant clamp on my head, Kevin used a strap with a couple of small optodes resting against my forehead. The optodes contain the lasers that fire the light into my brain.

“You could fire that light into a glass of milk if you wanted and you'd get a certain reading,” he explained. “What happens is that a certain amount of the light comes back out, and by measuring that, we can tell how oxygenated the blood is.”

I was instructed to sit on a chair. It was a little bit funny because it was a carseat. I couldn't tell what kind of car, but it looked a little odd surrounded by computers and wires. The idea was to make the person feel more comfortable than they would on one of the normal office chairs, and it worked.

Having attached the strap to my head, turned on all the computers, computer programmes and sensors and given me a pair of big laser-proof glasses to wear, I was told to sit still for nine minutes.

This is a lot harder than you think! You suddenly starting itching in places you've never itched before, for no good reason – but you can't move a muscle!

One of the optodes pressed against my forehead was really uncomfortable, and threatened to drive me nuts.

I moved once, two minutes into it, and he had to start over.

However during the third nine-minute period of stillness I discovered that closing your eyes and trying to sleep was as good a way as any to keep still.

Every minute or so, one of the computers would beep, and Kevin would move one of the optodes on my forehead. This varies the data which he can then analyse later.

After the first nine minutes, he gave me a test to do on a computer screen. I won't explain it all here, but essentially it involved trying to match up cards on the screen. There were three different patterns that could be used to match up the cards and you initially had to figure out which pattern it was.

I sat there for another nine minutes, doing this test, and not moving except for my finger on a mouse.

The third nine-minute period was the same as the first and then the fourth one involved doing the cards again.

Although I was pleased to hear that I'd done well in the card test, the results were somewhat irrelevant. The purpose of the test is to activate a certain section of the brain.

Throughout the testing, there were several computers around monitoring what was going on inside my head.

One of them, to my left had about a dozen different graphs with various sized yellow lines going across the screen. God knows what it all meant.

Kevin said that he couldn't tell much from what the various graphs were showing him during the test – it would only be later on, when he analysed it all that he could tell anything.

The only thing that stands out is your heart rate. For each beat of my heart, a spurt of blood would run through my brain and this showed up as an even series of spikes across the screen.

But I suppose at least I can go back to the (nit)wits in the Leinster Leader newsroom and assure them I do indeed have a brain!



This was the result. Nope, still don't understand it fully, but at least confirms that I have a brain, and it works reasonably well.....