SomeNiceHurlingClips

Magic....JohnMoriarty

[Picture: John McManus - PictureOurLand Irish Photos]

Listen to this when you get a chance and you have time to absorb it. [click on the post heading above]

John Moriarty's "Invoking Ireland":

'Invoking Ireland is a miscellany of parables and aphorisms by which, as individuals, and not as a herd, we might find a way of living authentically on this island ... Moriarty writes a prose poetry in whose doorways we can discern the shades of William Yeats and Dylan Thomas, David Jones and Jack Yeats. Who else but Moriarty could combine in his palette the voices of Blathmac and Traherne? Moriarty's conversation is a dialogue between Christianity and pre-Celtic Ireland. If there is a saving evolutionary, environmental moment, it is what the painters of the Renaissance saw: that when, in Gethsemane, the disciples fall asleep, Christ stays awake. Invoking Ireland is an elucidation of Patrick Kavanagh's prayer: "We must be nothing/Nothing that God may make us something." Strange to surmise that in twenty years from now ... one will see in tcd under the severe, genial eye of Bishop Berkeley the new John Moriarty Chair of Wisdom Literature.'
- Paul Durcan, The Irish Times

'Moriarty's work is written with a glorious innocence and a knowing wisdom, ranging between superb storytelling and rhetorical flourishes, and it would be my dream that everyone would read this book, take its truths to heart, and take from Irish society the harshness of the legacy we are currently bequeathing to a sorry future.'
- John F. Deane, Irish Independent

'Invoking Ireland is a collection of commentaries on various folktales and mythic stories which have had relevance for Irish people over the centuries É It is a whirlwind of powerful imaginative prose. Moriarty is a writer who, over a number of significant works, has been trying to tell us that we are capable of being awake in a deeper, more visceral and more potent way than merely by thinking thoughts. As we gaze into the misty realms of Irish mythology, he wants to undress our mind of its reason, and plunge it into a sense of being which transcends ego-ic parameters. He wants us to share his exploration of Irish myth at this deep psychological level, so that we can find new meaning in the old stories, and so that the old stories can bring a new perception to the way we live out our lives. And he succeeds so well that something new emerges. The thin line between commentary and creative expression vanishes, and the pages of this book deliver up extraordinary poetic thought.'
- Michael Harding, The Sunday Tribune

Invoking Ireland takes us on a "safari of stories" around Irish mythology, and Moriarty recreates them in a way that we have never experienced them before. There is an attempt here to prod us into feeling what it was like when Aimhairghin and his pards sailed up the Kerry shore. The original old or middle Irish poetry and tales, he quotes accurately. His translations are new and pristine and inventive. They are the kind that scholars should do if they entered into the spirit of their literature. Because it is the spirit that always inspires him, and the wrestling to make imaginative sense of what our country has said. We meet Manann‡n, Crom Dubh and Lugh, Christ, the Buddha and D.H. Lawrence. Dylan Thomas and Orpheus and Ted Hughes light our path or lead us into the sidings. This is a wild shaggy-haired ride along the mountains of the moon, it is a Catherine wheel of imagery, it is a great belch of the goodness of life. Moriarty's Birdreign will never come about because we can never fly with feathered wings. We are the metallic Iron people clomping around the earth that he rails about. Life may refuse definition, but we are busy building the stockades around us. What he does magnificently is, however, to reach out and touch what it must have been like before tame philosophy, before plodding discourse, before our teeming brains straightened themselves out. This book can only be read as mythic poetry with all its beauty and with all its roughness and with all its artlessness. It is not a book to be compromised with. It can only be embraced with fervour.'
- Alan Titley, The Irish Book Review

'The Ireland offered here is at once an image which subsists behind its physical appearances and an impress of all nations as inscribed in their key mythologies. Taking a line through Orphean legend, Hindu cosmology, Blake's Prophetic Books and Greek and Nordic mythology, Moriarty offers a reading of the great ongoing war between matter and spirit É In his view, that ancient Ireland of Spirit, coherent with Nature prior to its conquest by the "cormorant tongues" of "Fomorian" man is still, potentially, realizable. His quest, as an earlier poet put it - for Moriarty is as much poet as novelist - is to "feel back along the ancient lines of advance". But not only so. He would like to make us feel, and hear as we read, the rhythms of those ancient tongues. John Moriarty is, I believe, a genius. If our civilization manages to survive in a form which is still capable of recognizing genius when it is pushed under its nose, it is possible, in due course, that he will be acknowledged as such.'
- Robert Lumsden, Adelaide Review


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I WENT out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

WBYeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus"

Out Of Hibernation To Announce The Imminent Arrival Of The Wee Bro's Photography Website

Cork vs Waterford - 2007 All Ireland QF Replay

Hurling in America Has a Problem -- Too Few Irishmen [Wall Street Journal]

Hurling in America Has a Problem -- Too Few Irishmen

The Lure of the Old Sod And Immigration Issues Make for a Player Shortage

By CONOR DOUGHERTY July 26, 2007; Wall Street Journal, Page A1

For five years straight, the Clan Na nGael sports club in Atlanta sent a team to the North American Hurling Championships. That ended a year ago: Try as it did, Clan Na nGael could muster only 12 players, and it takes at least 13 to make a team."We didn't play any competitive games last year," says Jim Whooley, vice chairman of Clan Na nGael. "We just played scrimmage games among ourselves, six on six and five on five."Hurling -- a centuries-old sport that has elements of field hockey and lacrosse -- has an immigration problem. With the Irish economy booming and the U.S. tightening borders, Irish expatriates are returning home and fewer newcomers are taking their place.The New York board of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) has lost four of its eight hurling teams in the past three years. In Boston, the Wexford Hurling Club is worried it will soon lose one of its two teams. And ever since the San Jose, Calif., team folded a few years ago, Northern California's two remaining clubs have played each other, and only each other. They settle the local "championship" with a best-of-five competition. Hurling "is becoming extinct," says Tom Flynn, an Irish immigrant who started with a New Jersey team in 1954 and remains involved with the club's management. CONTINUE

FOR THOSE OF YOU UNAQUAINTED WITH THE BEST SPORT IN THE WORLD, HERE IS A YOUTUBE CLIP

Memo to the Queen:

June 18, 2007

By DON SANTINA

Dear Elizabeth II,

What a dandy duo of imperialism you and our own George II made during your recent visit to Jamestown. How appropriate that together you celebrated the 400th anniversary of the theft of indigenous lands in the Americas.

It wasn't long after the settlement of Jamestown that your country introduced the plantation system into Ireland, forcing the Irish off their lands and replacing them with loyal British settlers. And then there was the rest of world to seize.

Those pesky Irish were always rebelling, so-between Cromwell and the Penal Laws--your people turned that country into a charnel house of cultural genocide which included denying people access to the resources of their own land. The subjugation of the Irish was an illustrative model for our own George II as he and his corporate comrades made plans to lay waste the people and culture of Iraq and take their oil. The tragedy for the people of Iraq is that our own George II didn't read the part where people don't like being occupied by somebody else and will fight to the death over the right to their own land. Of course, maybe he just didn't get it; the original story was prettied up by the embedded historians, like most of our Anglo-American history books....CONTINUE

Savvy and the preaching of the Gospel, by Desmond Fennell [Follow-up to article posted below]

...Beyond this basic role which savvy plays in all effective evangelisation, there is a further role it can play if, rather than being merely instinctive and approximate, it is intellectually profound and exact. When the savvy of the evangelisers has this quality, their cannily chosen language not only reflects the secular situation; it also clarifies it – and does so to a much greater degree than the politically conditioned explanatory discourse that the situation exudes. Their profound and exact savvy performs this function even when, because of limited time or the limited cognitive interest of an audience, they revealonly, so to speak, the foreground of what they know. Always, from the profound and precise background of their knowledge, flows an informed understanding of the immediate and particular. And this, regardless of time available or of audience, enables them to supply coherence to the disjointed perceptions of most people, of whatever educational background, regarding the way things are.

As occurs with the mere reflection of the shared situation in the evangeliser’s discourse, so, too, with this clarification of it: it furthers acceptance of the Gospel in either of two ways. When the recipients are well-disposed, it evokes gratitude towards the evangeliser as for a gift received, and consequently a greater trustful openness to his message’s Gospel core. When the recipients are ill-disposed, it disconcerts them by its perceptible but unwelcome truth, reduces their public standing (if they have such) as definers of the situation, and consequently lessens their ability to offer confident opposition to the Church’s teaching and to build support for this. (Even a superficial perusal of the Gospels shows that this is a very Christ-like manner of dealing with opponents of the Good News.)...CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

THE END OF IRISH CATHOLICISM? By Vincent Twomey

(Veritas Publications, 7 Lr. Abbey St., Dublin, Ireland, 2003), 220 pp. PB $18.95 [Available in the U.S. from Ignatius Press]

During the past few years we have seen much speculation about the rapidly declining state of the Church in Ireland after a series of clerical scandals and a drop in religious practice. Many are wondering if Ireland is still Catholic and where is Ireland going. Fr. Twomey, a Divine Word priest and Moral Theologian at the Pontifical University in Maynooth, offers us an analysis of this situation...

...First, Twomey examines the situation of the Church and Irish culture prior to Vatican II to see if there are any causes beyond dissent and the confusion after the Council to account for the present situation. Due to the loss of independence the Irish had to define their identity primarily in terms of Catholicism. Unfortunately, their loss of political autonomy and the Irish language separated the Irish from their rich Catholic medieval heritage. He notes that an excessively legalistic moral theology prior to the Council led to an overreaction marked by laxity. He also asks whether Jansenistic tendencies may also have caused some later problems. Although there was less public dissent over Humanae Vitae than elsewhere, there was much passive resistance and few defended the teaching of Paul VI with any vigor. A certain sense of superiority and complacency in Irish Catholicism may have rendered the Church ill-prepared for the changes of Vatican II and the greater secularization of the culture.

Second, the author also asks how deep are the roots of Catholicism in Irish culture and society. His own experience of a deeply public Catholic culture in Germany enabled him to see a certain impoverishment of Catholic culture in Ireland. For example, he contrasts the traditional Irish attitude of attending Mass out of a sense of pure obligation with the richer continental celebration of Sundays and feast days as religious and community events. Although at times he overly emphasizes the defects of Irish Catholicism prior to the Second Vatican Council, he also describes its many strengths and even heroism under persecution.

What path should Irish Catholicism take in the wake of its present decline? The greatest danger according to Twomey is complacency or a "sterile orthodoxy" that is conformist and simply maintains the status quo and does nothing. He decries the lack of imagination on the part of the hierarchy and clergy to a crisis of faith. I suggest we are not dealing with a question of "orthodoxy" but of a sterile conformism and unreflective and anti-intellectual approach to the Catholic faith as well as a certain inertia that arises from original sin, complacency and sloth. He contrasts this Irish situation of stagnation and decline with the new Catholic springtime that is slowly bearing fruit in other secularized European Catholic nations with an increase in priestly and religious vocations and the rise of new orders and dynamic lay movements. So far, the Irish Church has experienced few of these positive developments. The Church and an intimidated, silent clergy also need to regain a public face and moral voice. He points to Cardinal Lustiger of Paris as an example of a bishop who does not hesitate to speak on controversial issues in the public square in a manner that does not merely repeat various dogmatic statements but attempts to persuade others and offer new approaches to problems.

He also maintains that Irish Catholicism needs to rediscover its rich medieval contemplative heritage, which was destroyed by the Reformation. Most religious orders in Ireland have been active ones, justly esteemed for their work in education and health care; however, the Church must also gain new strength from its spiritual roots and the life of monastic contemplation. He also laments a certain anti-intellectualism within Irish Catholicism and the lack of esteem for theology. The modern world is searching for answers and only those whose lives are grounded in deep theological reflection can provide answers to their questions and dilemmas. He is surprised to discover that despite the rich tradition of missionary work of Irish priests and religious throughout the world, there is no serious center devoted to missiology in Ireland. He rightly suspects that these missionaries may provide new pastoral solutions to Ireland's present crisis.

Twomey makes several interesting proposals. We note that he is not calling for dissent. First, he calls for a reorganization of the hierarchy by reducing drastically the number of dioceses and concentrating more of the Church's resources in urban areas. The provincialism of the diocesan clergy is seen as an obstacle to cooperation. Second, he calls for the Church to rediscover its moral and cultural public voice. Genuine democracy cannot flourish unless there is a moral discussion to which the Church must contribute. Democracy which avoids discussing issues of truth and justice will quickly degenerate into politics based upon pure power. Politicians must be encouraged to speak and vote according to their conscience and avoid being intimidated by party discipline, which is far stronger in a parliamentary system of government than in the American system. The bishops should establish an academic center in Dublin to enter into dialogue with the culture as the German bishops have done in Berlin. The laity need to discover their legitimate role and autonomy and be guided by Catholic wisdom as they seek to find solutions to various problems. Third, he calls for a new theological vision for the Church based upon an authentic interpretation of the Council. The present inertia of the Irish Church must be confronted by theological and spiritual vision. Catholic Ireland must open itself to the experience of other Catholics in Europe who deal with similar problems yet have experienced some signs of new life and growth Finally, he insists that the Church must issue an invitation to all members of society to do public penance as a way to move beyond the impasse of various clerical and governmental scandals.

This reviewer is convinced that the author offers us much sound analysis and good advice despite some of his harsh comments about the defects of Irish Catholicism and some of his comments are applicable to the American scene. I do wonder to what degree a certain "dour" and puritanical attitude among Irish clergy and laity maybe a reflection of attitudes present among the Anglo-Irish ruling classes in Ireland as opposed to Jansenism alone. This book should be read by anyone concerned about the future of Irish Catholicism.

Edmund W. Majewski, S.J.

St Peter's College
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Another [quite similar] Review HERE [click]

Dr. No finally buries the hatchet?

Still trying to digest this. Plenty of discussion and analysis at SLUGGER O'TOOLE

SportAsPoetry2

Hurling

'The Clash of the Ash'
Pam O'Connell










'The Blockdown'
Paul Downey

SportAsPoetry

'The Grab'
Paul Downey

'Ger Loughnane'
Jim Burke

How Irish Are You?

came across this at http://arseendofireland.blogspot.com

What kind of tea?
a) Earl Grey, thanks.
b) Supervalu Own Brand
c) Barrys.

And the bikkies?
a) Hobnobs
b) Bourbons
c) What's left in the Rover tin?

Settled in? Alright, off we go.

You're off to the US on a 3 month holiday. What do you bring with you?
a) Your passport, a scared expression, no ties to the IRA
b) Taytos, Barrys tea, Galtee rashers, brown bread.
c) A good pair of work boots.

What's the best kind of tractor?
a) A Massey... er... O'Callaghan?
b) One driven by a man in a flat cap.
c) A Honda Civic

What's the best thing to hear in an Irish niteclub?
a) Johnny Moy
b) Amhrán na bhFiann
c) The Baywatch Theme

Why are you still in Ireland, anyway?
a) The economy
b) The Craic
c) The Mammy

What can you smell when you venture into the Great Outdoors?
a) Camping gear, fleeces, GAA jerseys.
b) Freedom!
c) Honda Civics

And what can you smell when you go home to your Mammy's house?
a) Espresso
b) Good home cooking
c) Yesterday's carrots, Pledge, bleach.

What's your drug of choice?
a) Cocaine
b) Guinness!
c) Whatever's going around. Preferably free and in a can.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are
a) So last year
b) A bunch of feckin' yanks
c) God

How do you vote?
a) Fia... Actually, that's confidential.
b) Sinn Fein
c) They'll tell me when I get off me arse and register.

Christ! What's that smell?!!
a) Wild garlic
b) Silage
c) Bad pint.

Where do you swear?
a) In the pub.
b) Everywhere!
c) I don't befuckinglieve you asked me that.

Which of these is funniest?
a) Dylan Moran
b) Brendan Grace
c) A B&B called Mount Bernadette

Her eyes they shone like diamonds, you'd think she was queen of the land...
a) That Glenda Gilson gets about, alright.
b) and her hair hung over her shoulders, tied up with a black velvet band!
c) With her ould lad slung over her shoulder, and half a pig's arse in her hand.

Priests are
a) An ageing breed
b) Pillars of the community, still.
c) Always asking for money

Bertie Ahern is
a) The Taoiseach
b) a Cute Hoor
c) a cunt

Ah, now. Check the comments if you want to know how you've done. Thanks, don't let the door hit you on the way out. By the way, how are you getting home?

a) Lexus RX
b) My tractor
c) Walking. Some cunt burned out me Civic.

Posted by The Swearing Lady at 10:03 AM 8 comments Links to this post

The Swearing Lady said...

Well now. Let’s see.

Mostly As – You’re Middle Class Michael! The Celtic Tiger has blessed your tastebuds, bud.

Mostly Bs – You’re Second Generation Shawn! Feckin’ yanks, you always try too hard.

Mostly Cs – You’re Ciaran the Cunt! If you could get your hands on that tiger, you’d ride it, you would.