Special Occasion Speeches – Project 1

Project one in this manual is The Toast. It’s time is 2-3 minutes. My big mistake was not to have developed a scenario for this toast. Talking with the evaluator before hand I did a quick few lines for the Toastmaster saying it was an extended family get together and that it would be a toast to one of their famous relations who had died in 1979. The problem was that was not matched by references to Toastmasters in the actual toast. This is something I’ll need to take on board for the rest of the projects in this manual. (The information in the speech may not be factually accurate.)

And then I read the Irish Times…

And what did I see but an opinion piece by Elaine Byrne with the byline – Loyalty to our country should stand before loyalty to any political party. An interesting analysis that I happen to agree with. She says “Fianna Fáil is not a political party, it is a national movement and loyalty sustains its success”. It seems that Parnell “was the first politician in the Western world to introduce the concept of the party pledge. To this day, upon election, all Irish politicians swear an oath avowing faithful allegiance to their political party”.

So I replied to Dan…

To: dan.boyle@oireachtas.ie Subject: Re: The end no longer justifies participation in government

Mr Boyle,
While I admire your tenacity and would certainly have agreed with your conclusions at the time of the formation of the government, I have arrived at the conclusion that there is now more harm being done to the body politic than is supportable by your stance. I have two son’s who ideally should vote for the first time in the upcoming referendum and subsequent local elections.

It doesn’t seem fair – What Dan Boyle thinks

I got all activist and decided to email Dan Boyle with the previous post. I was pleasently surprised that he (or someone on his behalf. How do I tell?) replied and so quickly. His response is worthy of inclusion as a contribution to thinking about the matter.

It just doesn’t seem fair

I’ve been reading a piece by Fintan O’Toole from Tuesday last and it follows on a series of articles by other journalists in recent weeks. I even cut various pieces out of the papers intending to write something that would express the sense of outrage that I was feeling but it petered out into frustration and it’s never much use to write from a sense of frustration. It tends to become a rant and is easily debunked for that.

Beyond Words by John Humphrys

An excellent little book and most enjoyable. I admit it was all the more enjoyable because Mr Humphrys seems to agree so much with me, but that’s always the case. I remember my sister once writing to tell me how glad she was that I had found someone who agrees with me when I wrote to tell her how wonderful The Road Less Travelled was. And it is so comforting and feels so supporting to have someone else lay out your thoughts for you.

Basically he is making the case for taking care with what we say and particularly with what we write.

A Social Wage?

Jim O’Leary writes an interesting piece in the Irish Times today. He says: “it can be argued that the great flaw in the social partnership model is that it has failed to embed the notion of the social wage and has instead promulgated the idea of tax as an unmitigated burden to be minimised”

So I did a search for Social Wage and found the following;

Where do we go from here?

Seems like bad news all round. Last weekend a teenager living within a few miles of me committed suicide. My daughter knows many of his friends and the news was a big shock among local teenagers who all considered him to be a nice lad. They simply don’t understand why? And the Principle of the local school choose the day everyone found out to start a new campaign to enforce the rules on school uniforms and threaten to cancel the debs for this years 5th years. On a day when many of the students were in shock and many were grieving!