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Suranis
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#26

Post by Suranis »

More from my Brother in law and his quest to find his Rocks. This time with a twist I've never heard of before.

https://www.facebook.com/keohan.david/p ... %2CO%2CP-R
First of all a huge thank you to Micheál mac Gearailt, for passing the information of these TWO lifting stones in Fahy (known locally as Faha) graveyard.
There is both the MAN'S lifting stone, (cloch na FIR) AND the WOMAN'S lifting STONE. (Cloch na MBAN)

I think this is the first time I've ever heard of this to be honest and it's absolutely brilliant.

AMAZING.

Brutes of stones too. Large, rectangular and dense as hell.

Est woman's stone 120kg (264.5547 Pounds)

Est mens 180kg (396.8321 Pounds)

Here's the piece I was sent, from the book written by Gerard Madden "FAS assisted conservation projects in East Clare" page 13.

"in Fahy graveyard, for example, we have a set of sizeable 'lifting stones' one each for men and women - which according to traditions were lifted in trials of strength during social gatherings (notably after funerals)"

The pattern keeps repeating. Graveyard, funerals, trials of strength. Fascinating stuff.

Met the most wonderful farmer a Mr Cyrill Conlan, ón whose land the graveyard is situated, who came down to witness the lifts. Cloch na mban came up grand, still a decent weight to be honest... and needed a few attempts at balance. But cloch na fir, between the weight, shape and the slippery conditions (-4c and frosty, the stones were frozen together! ) was beyond me today. But on a drier day I know ill get it.

Still a huge cultural find... and proof that mná na hÉireann Are Tough and powerful women. #stonelifter @stoneliftingsociety @stonesandsteel @liftingstones_org @oldmanofthestones @stevie_shanks @bigsexygrandad101 #stonestrong #irishstonelifting
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More photos and video at the facebook link
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#27

Post by Suranis »

This was shared on our local towns facebook page.
Pat Gillick · ·

DID YOU KNOW?
Remembering great Irish Women from Mystery Trails Ireland.

A small plaque on the wall of a bank in Newcastle West in County Limerick remembers a truly remarkable Lady. The record-setting, daredevil aviator Lady Mary Heath, who was born Sophie Peirce-Evans, was one of the best known women in the world in the 1920s. Getting over a troubled childhood (her father murdered her mother), Peirce-Evans moved to Newcastle West and lived with her grandparents.

She grew up and took a top-class degree in science, served as a dispatch rider during the First World War, competed at the world championships as an athlete in high jump, and Javelin. She was the first woman to hold a commercial flying licence but that wasn't enough she had to fly higher than anyone else, holding the record for the highest altitude flight. Now that she could fly she wanted to jump becoming the first recorded woman to do a parachute jump. Known then as Lady Heath, following her second of three marriages, she flew an open-cockpit plane from Cape Town to London, taking three months.

Making front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic, she was, for a while, one of the most famous women in the world, but she never forgot home, doing regular flyby’s over Newcastle West. The records kept coming when she later became the first female mechanic in the US, and it was there whilst performing at an airshow she suffered a serious accident. With the ejector seat firmly pulled on her flying career and her fathers hereditry illness taking hold she returned to England. Where she tragically died at the tender age of 43 when she fell down the stairs of a London double-decker bus. Her body was cremated, and her ashes scattered from her plane over her beloved Newcastle West.

Visit www.mysterytrails.ie and explore this amazing aviatrix's final resting place on the hunt for Gill O'Teens missing ????. #newcastlewest #visitlimerick #lovelimerick #aviationhistory #loveireland #desmondhall #discoverlimerick #greatirishwomen #ilovelimerick #limerick #irishhistory #mysterytrails
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#28

Post by Foggy »

Your brother-in-law is a little nuts barmy, but I like him. That's a dude I would really enjoy a conversation with ... well, except for the language barrier. :lol:

Cool story about Ms. Peirce-Evans. 8-)
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#29

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

Air mechanic. We gotz one of those! An unusual occupation. :biggrin:
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#30

Post by Suranis »

I'm sometimes afraid that this is the way I'll end up.

https://www.corkbeo.ie/news/local-news/ ... 0-25986086
Man who lay dead for 20 years in Mallow a 'sad and tragic case' as gardai rule out foul play

After a postmortem of the man's skeletal remains, gardai are ruling out foul play in his death

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A garda stands at the door of the Beecher Street home where the body was found

Gardai are not suspecting foul play in the death of a man whose skeletal remains were found at a property in Mallow at the weekend.

His body was found decomposed inside a small Beecher Street bungalow in the north of the town on Friday morning, discovered by council workers clearing out the property following a compulsory purchase order.

After finding butter in the fridge dating back to 2001, gardai are now working on a timeline that suggests he may have died in bed over two decades ago.

Neighbours believe he may be a man known to locals as being 'reclusive,' who was thought to have moved away to England.

A postmortem of the man’s remains by Assistant State Pathologist Dr Margaret Bolster on Saturday has confirmed that there is no indication of foul play in his death.

Gardai are now hoping that a search of dental records at local dentists will uncover the man's identity.

A source told the Irish Mirror “There is no foul play involved whatsoever and it is being treated as a sad and tragic case,

“This is now about getting the man identified and hopefully then relations can be found so this man can be given a respectful funeral and burial.”
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#31

Post by Foggy »

I am seriously getting weird in my dotage. I'm ready for another stone. :?

No, not to lift one. But your brother-in-law's stones are interesting and cool. 8-)
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#32

Post by Foggy »

Oh, here's one. A monster!

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#33

Post by Foggy »

Oh man, we need a Northern Ireland topic (moved a post to start the new thread). :blackeye:

Clonfad spelled backwards is Dafnolc.
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#34

Post by Suranis »

My brother in law gets into GQ magazine.

https://www.gq.com/story/the-quest-to-p ... of-ireland
For centuries, Ireland’s stones were more than just a feature of the rugged landscape: The ability to pick them up off of the ground had deep practical and spiritual meaning. Lifting stones were used in tests of manhood (and, in a few cases, womanhood), hoisted at funerals to honor the dead, carried at weddings in celebration of the couple, and used to determine whether a man was strong enough to earn work as a farmhand. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, during British colonization, the practice largely vanished. Most of the stones remained untouched where they were last lifted.

This is how the man they call Indiana Stones came to be standing in the middle of a churchyard 60 miles north of Dublin, bale hook in one hand, crowbar in the other. He notices that something immediately feels wrong about this place: It’s too new, too pristine. If he’s going to find––and attempt to lift––a 400-year-old rock once stood upon during secret Catholic mass gatherings, and used to invoke curses upon one’s neighbors, it’s not going to be here.

Just as he starts to fear his four-hour journey was in vain, an elderly man pops his head out of the church door. That stone he’s looking for is close, the man says, about a mile down the road in another graveyard that’s overgrown with eight-foot-tall weeds. So off he goes.

For the past year, this has become a regular routine for 44-year-old David Keohan who holds a kettlebell lifting world record and has lately become a star in the world of stone lifting, an ancient practice that’s experiencing a surprising resurgence. He’s traveling around Ireland uncovering the country’s lost lifting stones, and today he’s looking for the Flag of Denn.
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#35

Post by Foggy »

Indiana Stones!
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#36

Post by Suranis »

*Theme music plays*

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#37

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

:groupdance:
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#38

Post by Suranis »

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... old-claims
Ireland’s far-right party in crisis amid claims of stolen gold

It has the ingredients of a Frederick Forsyth thriller: stolen gold bullion, political intrigue, betrayal and a sprinkling of Adolf Hitler.
The saga of Ireland’s far-right National party and its vault of gold bars, however, has played out more like an Armando Iannucci farce.

On 23 July tweets on behalf of Justin Barrett, the leader of the tiny anti-immigrant party, said a “considerable” amount of gold had been removed from the party’s vault in south Dublin and that Barrett had asked police to intervene. The tweets called the alleged theft despicable and traitorous. “We will emerge from this fire and trial. Heat makes iron into steel.”

Gardaí promptly retrieved the gold, estimated to be worth €400,000 (£344,000), but two weeks later it remains unclear if the gold really was stolen, who owns it, what it was doing in the vault – and whether Barrett remains the party’s leader.

Media reports say police believe the party owns just a small fraction of the gold, with senior party members owning the rest. Barrett said it was stockpiled in case of a collapse in currency values.
Emma Blain, a councillor with the ruling Fine Gael party, has asked the Standards in Public Office regulator to investigate reports that the National party has not filed accounts for several years nor explained funding sources.

Barrett, who polled 0.7% in a 2021 Dublin byelection, and has quoted Hitler, appears to have lost his party’s support.

A message on its website on 31 July said he had been removed as president “due to an overwhelming lack of confidence from active party members” and replaced by his deputy, James Reynolds.

In a post on his Telegram channel, Barrett disputed suggestions he had been ousted and called the party’s statement farcical. “I was and am the president of the National party in law,” he wrote.
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#39

Post by RTH10260 »

:confuzzled: i wonder if that stash has been correctly managed according to EU money laundering regulations :?: I guess there will be wailing cause the potential owners cannot the ownership.
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#40

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#41

Post by RTH10260 »

Ireland under water in storm Babet


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#42

Post by Suranis »

It was the very southern counties and Cork City, but ya.

It wasn't the storm. It was the fact that the local councils are chronically underfunded, and they have been neglecting the water system in general, and the Drains in particular, for years. So when this unexpected bunch of water rained down, the drains couldn't cope, got blocked, and suddenly all this water had no place to go.

It didn't help either that the Irish Prime Minister Leo Veradkar visited the area and very plainly could not give the tiniest shit about what was going on. The News only showed his face for a second to hide it but his completely bored face was very obvious when people were talking to him.

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2023 ... motorists/

This talks about the chaos of flood relief schemes and how they are stuck in massive delays

https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/national ... r-AA1iAIMN
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#43

Post by Sam the Centipede »

I don't know about Ireland's drains, but a significant issue in many parts of Europe is the loss of "soft" landscape. In towns and villages, land is built on, gardens are concreted for parking or patios, artificial grass replaces natural, roads are widened, footways added. In rural areas, the same happens plus hedges are ripped out, land drains installed, fieldside ditches are cleared, mess is tidied away. Floodplains acquire houses protected by flood defenses.

The effect is that rainwater doesn't sit on vegetation, seep into soil, percolate into streams which fill and move slowly as the water works its way around partial blockages and emerge days later into smaller then larger rivers, which when overfull expand gracefully onto historic floodplains. Rather it rushes over the hard soil, whizzes down hillside streams engorging rivers which are now constrained between hard banks with flood defenses which simply push the boiling mass of water downstream to be somebody else's problem.

Add to that the issue of more frequent periods of heavy rain due to climate change. In areas where the land remains porous, the soil becomes waterlogged. In normal times that was fine, for a single shower, the soil releases its burden slowly into the river system. But when heavy rain follows heavy rain, the soil can absorb no more water, so the new rainfall runs quickly over the surface into the overloaded streams and rivers.

Parts of Europe are becoming more accepting of reintroduced beavers (the Eurasian species, which looks identical to the American species but is genetically distinct and incompatible). Beavers can create species-rich habitats that are also great at holding back water.

I don't think there were ever beavers in Ireland, so that's probably not an option there. But in Europe and Great Britain they're coming back.

But yes, of course, lack of investment in and maintenance of drainage infrastructure also contributes greatly to flooding!
Off Topic
:boxing: Why no beavers in Ireland? And no moles, no snakes, lots of animals missing? It's because the Irish Sea (between the West coast of Great Britain and the east coast of Ireland is deep, whereas the North Sea (between the east coast of Great Britain and the west coast of mainland Europe is very shallow, shallow enough that it was dry (and inhabited by people, e.g. Doggerland) when sea levels were lower. When the ice sheets receded at the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago, animals could expand their ranges from southern then western mainland Europe onto the dry bed of the North Sea then into Great Britain, but the Irish Sea remained a barrier.
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#44

Post by Suranis »

Ya after I posted that, I read a comment on the Youtube link saying the same thing. It makes a lot of sense.
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#45

Post by Sam the Centipede »

:biggrin: :biggrin: Well, I couldn't find a way to blame the priests! ;) ;)
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#46

Post by northland10 »

Sam the Centipede wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2023 3:31 am I don't know about Ireland's drains, but a significant issue in many parts of Europe is the loss of "soft" landscape. In towns and villages, land is built on, gardens are concreted for parking or patios, artificial grass replaces natural, roads are widened, footways added. In rural areas, the same happens plus hedges are ripped out, land drains installed, fieldside ditches are cleared, mess is tidied away. Floodplains acquire houses protected by flood defenses.
When we had larger flooding around 10 years ago, so folks in the newer subdivisions NW of me were complaining about why there was so much flooding around them and in their basements. They really didn't understand the concept that 15 years before their location was either farmlands or wetlands, in a place called LAKE county.

Oh yeah, and the developers would build as close together as possible for the largest profit and maybe only design for it to handle a 5-year flood, not a 20, 50, or 100 year rainfall. Yes, they create some reservoirs but those are usually not enough to make up for the lost open land for drainage.
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#47

Post by Volkonski »

Not good.

Ireland has the worst potato harvest in recent memory and is now considered a 'salvage operation'.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1 ... ign=recent
The Irish Farmers' Association ( IFA) has called the 2023 potato harvest the worst in recent memory and is now a salvage operation. The culprit is heavy rainfall, an increasingly common phenomenon due to the disruption of global rainfall patterns due to climate change.

Sean Ryan, the chair of the IFA, reported that flooding had put the drills underwater following recent flooding. A drill is the mounds in rows of potatoes (see cover image).

Ryan stated that 60 percent of the potatoes grown in Ireland have yet to be harvested. Sizable fields of the crucial food tuber have already been lost. With the extratropical storm Ciarna and the rapidly approaching Diogenes on its tail, the outlook for the remaining crop is grim. Potatoes are grown in Europe and likely will affected by the same storm systems. The crop is also grown internationally in such countries as China and Australia.

“Met Eireann data shows some stations have already exceeded the average annual total rainfall and others close to it. Now that we are in November, we are in extremely difficult territory with this much crop left to be harvested,” he said.

“The heavy rain has washed most of the clay off the top of the drills which leaves the crop more prove to frost damage. A few hard frosts at this point will wipe out entire crops,” he added.

The 2023 potato season was always going to be a late year as crops were planted very late due to weather conditions in the springtime. Maturation was slow and crops were a minimum of six weeks behind schedule before the current weather conditions kicked in.

“This year, potato growers were forced to harvest in reverse due to weather conditions. Dry fields were harvested first leaving the wetter ground to be harvested now. Very little potatoes have been harvested into stores to date as the market absorbed a lot of crops as they were harvested,” the IFA National Potato Committee Chair said.

Farmers will be in serious trouble, may take an economic hit, and will only survive with outside help. Ryan ended by stating, "Growers will not be able absorb the financial hit if crops are lost due to weather damage and are going to need to be supported if we want to ensure the medium-term survival of the sector. "
Article might have noted that the USA is a fairly big potato producer. ;)

2021 potato production in metric tonnes-
1. China 94,362,175
2. India 54,230,000
3. Ukraine 21,356,320
4. USA 18,582,370
5. Russian Federation 18,295,535
6. Germany 11,312,100
7. Bangladesh 9,887,242
8. France 8,987,220
9. Poland 7,081,460
10. Egypt 6,902,816
11. Netherlands 6,675,59
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#48

Post by RTH10260 »

Time to build that Atlantik Wall to prevent the next Irish immigration wave ;)
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#49

Post by Foggy »

I was reading in Smithsonian magazine about the great Potato Famine and how the Choctaw Nation in the US stepped up to help, and apparently there's a bond between the Irish and the Choctaw Nation to this day. I read lots of cool stuff in Smithsonian mag.

Here's something about it: https://www.choctawnation.com/about/his ... onnection/
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#50

Post by Sam the Centipede »

Ireland is having another referendum on its constitution!

On Friday 8th March 2024 voters will accept or reject a pair of changes which adjust the 1937 constitution, which reflected a very traditional and church-derived view of family life.

RTÉ News (so should be accessible everywhere, I believe) has a piece that explains: Mary Regan: Countdown to polling on 8 March twin referendums
The questions, which had their origins in an intention by many governments to change the so-called 'women in the home clause' of the Constitution, have turned into something much wider than that, encompassing concerns around care, disability, taxation and the most Irish question of all: who might inherit the family farm?
The questions asked are described by the (official) Electoral Commission website

One vote is whether to add the red text:
Article 41.1.1° “The State recognises the Family, whether founded on marriage or on other durable relationships, as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.”
and to delete related blue text in:
Article 41.3.1° “The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.”
That seems to be fairly paraphrased as "all families are important." It doesn't say anything negative about marriage, so it's not clear why anybody should object to it … but of course the Irish Catholic Bishops do (probably still smarting from the kicking they rightly received on the abortion referendum). Less suprisingly the misogynistic bishops (not fans of Liberation Theology!) also object to the second bigger change, the "women belong in the home" vote. Here's the old deleted (blue) and proposed new added (red) texts:
Article 41.2.1° “In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.”

Article 41.2.2° “The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”


Article 42B° “The State recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision.”
Opinion polls are unclear on the expected result. A lot will depend on turn-out, which might also depend on whether people see the changes as significant or just pointless word games. Some might vote "no" just because they're happy with the status quo, so why bother? Some might vote "no" because they fear that emphasizing the status of all families might lead to more immigrant families bringing in relatives (or similar right-wing/populist fears).

We shall see!
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