ICTU says “Get up, stand up”.

Today I received some paper for recycling in the post. It has gone the way of all political advertising that I receive. I  took it upon myself to let him know my response by contacting him through his website unionconnect.ie.

Mr Begg, You saw fit to send me a letter and some stickers in the post. I, therefore assume the right of reply. During the 19 years I spent at work I was a union member and spent a period as a shop steward. My father was secretary of his union and advocated membership all his life. That tradition, that assumption that unions have a role to play that is always honest is trashed by years of compliance with IBEC and FF. You must bare your responsibility for the current crisis. You were perfectly happy to see builders at work, competitiveness eroded. For ICTU saw only the short-term gain and the money in members pockets. A curse on all your houses for you have failed us all. I can [not] believe you as I can [not] believe IBEC or politicians. You too have become a “vested interest group” and as such must be treated with suspicion. You failed to get up or stand up for future generations. You were short-sighted and you represent short-sighted people. And yet you, like your fellow travellers, seem incapable of acknowledging your part and as a result are doomed to repeat the mistakes. Your’s

This nonsense from Mr. Begg is symptomatic of the problems we face as a nation. It is further typified by the behaviour of management in CIE with regard to the fraud and theft that they are now attempting to cover up. These all belong to the same class of people who do not seem to realise that the game is up. We know what you have been up too. We know that Ireland has been governed and managed at all levels of society by individuals who represented vested interests and even as they fool themselves into believing that they are legitimate interests, the failure to recognise the interconnectedness of the society as a whole should be a source of shame to them all.

The reality is that if you gain someone somewhere else is loosing. Whether its a cleaner from Latvia or a farmer in Uganda or a factory worker in China, all services must be paid for by someone somewhere. We make a choice. ICTU oversees incompetent teachers at all levels in the system refusing to set any kind of standards. Surely it is not reasonable to give the same levels of protection to the incompetent and the lazy as to the honest and willing. The INO protects restricted practices that increase the workload of those fellow union members trying to make a broken system work. Unions protect the abusers of the workplace. We all know that civil servants treat sick days as annual leave days. It has always been thus and unions have not only sanctioned that but supported that.

Mr. Begg you have lost your way because in your heart you know you have become part of the problem. I had hoped that you were returning to your roots by fighting for the rights of migrant workers abused by Irish employers but now I wonder. Now you are back with your mates, shouting and screaming stupid slogans: “What do we want? blah, blah”. I remember it well. Student marches back in the 70’s. But I was young and innocent. I did not realise that our nation, our people do not see themselves as one nation, one people. They see only narrow sectional interest.

I’ll “get up, stand up” when you cease to protect and expel members from your unions that abuse the common good. I’ll support a political party when it acts in the interest of the common good and not for political advantage. Another generation is lost as we struggle to come of age, to mature sufficiently to recognise that what we do unto others we do unto ourselves. For we are a community, interconnected in ways we have yet to accept but which are easily understood. Will you watch as the planet burns? Still waving your banners in pursuit of the farthings and the hapennies. I suspect you will for in order to keep your job and maintain your position you too, like Ahern and Cowan and the bankers and the employers, you too must hear no evil, see no evil and thereby pretend you are not the devils sidekick.

Technical Briefing – Project 1

The speech involved a powerpoint presentation. The text below is the notes from the ppt but I didn’t use them after the first slide. Ran a bit over time at 11min+ but given the amount of information I was trying to cover I’m not surprised. Just need to be tighter on the extras. Pleased overall. Evaluation was good.

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Slide 1

Madam Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters and welcome guests.

More and more information is becoming available online about the history of our people and our communities. Accessing it is easy and following the footprints left by previous generations can be both interesting and enjoyable. Tonight, I want to show you just one source of online information: the National Archives of Ireland website. This website has made available, as recently as last August, census records from 1911.

Slide 2

Here is the welcome page from the online archive. As you can see there is a whole load of links here that you can brows at your leisure. What we are interested in tonight are two links: 1.The SEARCH CENSUS link , The BROWSE CENSUS link

Household Occupants

Slide 3

Which ever way you go you will end up on a page like this. This page is for an individual household on the night of the census. It shows the SURNAME, the FORENAME or Christian name, the AGE and the SEX of the individual. The National Archives have promised that this page will include the rest of the information entered on the form before the end of the year. But in the mean time we need to look at the image of the actual form itself if we want to know more.

This is the record of a single household

Slide 4

This is the most important form, FORM A.

CHRISTIAN NAME

SURNAME

RELATIONSHIP TO HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD

RELIGION

AGE

This is interesting for what else it can tell us. We can get the year of birth. If the person was born after 1864 then the registry office will have a birth certificate. That birth certificate can give you the mother’s maiden name and where she was living at the time of marriage. It also gives the fathers name and occupation and where they were living.

OCCUPATION

Here we have Vintner and that’s a big clue as to which famous Carrigaline Pub we are talking about. We see William was a Carpenter, Denis the son, an Assurance agent and Edward was a clerk.

MARRIED/SINGLE

YEARS MARRIED

This column again helps us find a new direction for our search. Margaret and Denis were 30 years married in 1911 making their year of marriage 1881. Again its after 1864 so there is a marriage cert for them. This will also given the women’s maiden name. It also has both father’s names and occupations.

CHILDREN BORN

This column gives the number of children born but also how many were still alive. It was quite common for families to loose several children at a young age.

CHILDREN SURVIVING

WHERE BORN

Another source of surprise can be this next column which tells were the individual was born. The parents may have been more in another county or have moved at some stage with different children born in different places. This can be very important information when searching for births certs.

SIGITURE

One other interesting item is the signature. Whereas the enumerator may well have filled out the form, here you will often have the actual signature of your ancestor. Sometime when they couldn’t write the name is written by the enumerator and an X is added with the comment “his mark”.

Slide 5

This is Form B1. This tells us about the families neighbors and who they were but it can also tell us about what the buildings around them were used for. Here we see Household 11 is a Public House. This matches nicely with the description of Denis Cogan as Vintner and lets us know the family were living in the pub. These columns tell us about the size and quality of the building, whether it was thatched and how many windows it had in front. All this gives an indication of how well off they were. Look at household number 8. It has 6 rooms and 5  windows in front. But there are also 14 out houses. This dwelling was occupied by the Cantellions. This last column tells us they owned the house because if they didn’t this column would tell us who the leased it from.

Form B2

Slide 6

This is Form B2. This can be a very interesting form because of what it tells us about the other buildings used by the family. The Cantellions had 3 stables, 2 coach house, 2 harness rooms, a cow house, a piggery, a boiling house, 2 sheds and 2 stores. I’m assuming this was Beaver Lodge which once stood over here behind the hotel.

Form N

Slide 7

This final Form is Form N. The form doesn’t add much information on the individual housholds because it only lists religious affiliation. But it’s the stuff up the top that can be useful in your research. We have the County as Cork East Riding. The Parliamentary Division as Cork South East. The District Electoral Division is Carrigaline. We can also see the official name of the town land or street, the barony and the Civil Parish. Note that the Civil Parish, the Roman Catholic Parish and the Church of Ireland Parish can be 3 very different things. All this information is very useful if your extend your search further to local maps and maybe even to the Griffiths Valuations maps of some 60 years earlier. But that will have to wait for another occasion.

Madam Toastmaster

An attempt to help myself

Sometime last friday morning a friend of mine took his own life. For whatever reason this man whom I have known for almost thirty years choose a path that leaves untold sorrow and pain in its wake. In recent years we were not as close as we once were. Our families were at different stages: mine growing into adulthood, his still children and teenagers.

I suspect that the relationship was also in some way a victim of the Celtic Tiger. I ignored the boom for the most part, seeking spiritual growth and enlightenment at a time when he was deeply embedded in the construction bubble that eventually burst. So the two families drifted apart except for birthdays and special occasions. My wife and I being Godparents to one of his children. My daughter babysitting once in a while and maybe taking on the role of a big sister on Bebo and by text.

I am left to wonder if had I paid a little more attention to the world beyond my mind would I have been able to say or do something that might have made a difference. You see no matter how many times you read about how it is not our fault, when it smacks you in the face you react just like everyone else. You ask the same questions of yourself, you feel the same sense of disbelief and delude yourself into thinking that you have the power to save someone, if only in hindsight.

The only way I could have helped is to have known. And I didn’t. I didn’t know the recent history of this man’s life. The ads are running on TV telling us to talk to someone. They are directed at teenagers and show the anguish of friends at their own inability to help someone who simply won’t talk about the problems they face. I know I was available. I know I would have listened with love and understanding. I know I would have helped… had I known. But I didn’t.

That I didn’t is down to the awesome responsibility of freewill. Freewill is an oft misunderstood gift from God. A God whose creation flows in a particular direction and with which flow we are invited to get in touch. Invited, not forced because it simply doesn’t work that way.

My current understanding of life tells me that death is not something we should be afraid of but neither is it something we should bring upon ourselves. The span of our lives is determined by our souls purpose and it is therefore for our soul to determine when that purpose is served or to decide that that purpose is no longer achievable in this lifetime. Given how unaware the majority of human beings are, it is probably wiser to leave the span of our lives to the circumstances of our lives.

My friend is no more. Yet all relationships continue at the level of the soul so in that sense there is no time and place, only experience. We will share time and space again even if we don’t recognise each other and in that I find comfort. But in the meantime there is the week ahead. There is the emotion of loss, of anger, of deeply felt pain. For those closer to him then I was, those whose daily lives have a terrible hole in them, the weeks will be months and the months will be years. My fervent hope is that they will not suffer in silence or go softly into the night but that they will scream their pain loudly so that we all can hear, and listen, and never have to say “if only I had known, maybe I could have helped”.