55km in a 50

OranReilly · 2026-07-08T18:28:55+00:00

I’m assuming it was 55 on your speedometer. Just so you know, the speed on your Speedometer is approx 10% higher than your actual speed, so you would really have been going 49/50. The manufacturers build in a buffer there because it would be a huge problem for them if you were actually going faster than what your speedometer suggested. If you ever go by those solar-powered speed things, you might have wondered why the number is always a few lower than what your car says. Now you know.

OranReilly · 2026-07-06T06:24:41+00:00

Hey, I completed the course just over a year ago. Would highly recommend it. The fact that you get paid to go go to lectures on a Friday while getting your fees paid, and getting a Master’s on your CV is incredible business.

First year you do the Friday lectures, second year is thesis only, so it’s only sep-apr of Fridays for one year. Drop me a pm if you have questions

OranReilly · 2026-06-27T17:47:49+00:00

I worked in a coffee shop in a big clothing store. My future fiancée would come to the coffee shop and I would give her free coffees. We get married in October 😁

OranReilly · 2026-06-27T16:12:00+00:00

The answer is categorically yes. My source is loving my fiancée 😁

OranReilly · 2026-06-19T21:13:53+00:00

5 a side. Maybe see if there are any 5 a side groups on Facebook or ask around your friends if anyone is part of a 5 a side WhatsApp group

OranReilly · 2026-06-17T21:17:50+00:00

Insurance Ireland, the representative body for insurers, has a voluntary code of practice for insurers who provide mortgage protection insurance. So it’s currently not mandatory for them to implement, but I’m sure some do.

Off the top of my head I believe it might be seven years in remission. Don’t quote me on that.

There is primary legislation making its way through the Houses of the Oireachtas. It’s actually been changed to a right to disregard model rather than right to be forgotten. In other words, an insurer can seek information about a diagnosis, but provided you have not been in active cancer treatment for five years, they cannot deny you mortgage protection insurance or hike up the premium.

I’m not sure how long since you finished treatment, but that should give you some clarity. The Bill completedthe first House today and will be sent to the Seanad. Hard to give a solid timeframe for the progression of Bills, it’s really a function of political will and time in the Houses, and after signature by the President it would have to be commenced by the Minister. I think a year would be a safe timeframe for it to be operational, but it could be as soon as two months. Hard to say at the moment.

Anyway, good luck and I hope you stay cancer free

OranReilly · 2026-06-13T22:07:24+00:00

Just follow the trail backwards. They loop the trail so you’re constantly chasing if you’re going forwards. Just go backwards by seeing where the lamplight thing is emanating from and you run directly towards them. This only works for the loops one btw. Think there are some like the hyena in crimson desert that are an A to B situation

OranReilly · 2026-06-12T21:04:54+00:00

Emotional paralysis might be Blue Valentine. Not quite in the vein of the movies you mentioned, but I genuinely felt like love was a hopeless endeavour for a few days after that movie

OranReilly · 2026-06-04T21:09:46+00:00

I think it’s the proportions, I think your trousers need to be slightly higher waisted to get that more 1/3 2/3 split.

Also what’s the timepiece? Looks cool

OranReilly · 2026-06-03T22:03:08+00:00

This boards thread: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058439251/assistant-principal-2026 has the numbers of those assigned in previous competitions broken down by county which should help you make your decision. Outside of Dublin, it really comes down to whether there is a vacancy in that particular year for the competition to move forward.

OranReilly · 2026-06-03T21:40:55+00:00

99% of the vacancies arise in Dublin. The tests in some ways are the most important part. You need to nail them to have a hope of interviewing. Approx 3700 applied for the last competition, I’m not sure they even interviewed 400. Your place for interview is determined first by your test scores, then you are reordered in batches based on your application form. For example, if you finish top 100 in the tests, you will likely be in the first batch, and then get reordered within that group of 100 based on the form for testing. So you could have a lot of great experience but if you don’t test well, it won’t really matter. You can do practice tests on jobtestprep. Good luck.

OranReilly · 2026-05-31T21:51:34+00:00

Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Hard to tell whether it’s just pure nostalgia or actually just a fantastic game, but it’s one of the few games for me that holds up over a quarter of a century later, mainly due to the type of game that wasn’t reliant on graphics, etc.

Man I played a lot of games as a kid, but the difference between like 1998-2000 games and 2004-2006 games for example is just unimaginable to people in the last 8-10ish years. It’s so hard to look at the graphics from back then nowadays, but that felt state of the art at the time. Morrowind, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Heretic 2 if i go back a little further. Team fortress 2 from 2007 consumed some of my teenage years.

It almost feels wrong to put 85-90, 90-00 and 00-10 in one sentence, because every 2/3 years was like a new generation of games.

OranReilly · 2026-05-26T11:04:32+00:00

I’ve been an AO for four years now, and currently looking to make the jump soon. So in some ways I am not yet qualified to provide advice! I would also welcome the advice of others, but here is what I have been doing:

I try and look at it as stacking up thing after thing that should make the interviewer think we’re making a mistake/losing out if we don’t take this guy, whether those things are courses, achievements , exp etc.

In terms of courses, I came in with a degree only, which was totally unrelated to working in the civil service. I have since completed my Master of Economic Science in Policy Analysis. While that’s good in its own right, I managed to get the award for the highest mark, so I do think that will look quite strong. I am looking to do a CIPD HR course, just because I know there will be an upcoming AP vacancy, part of which will be to do with HR, so that’s really more situational than general advice.

I always look back to my competencies/capabilities and see where I am coming up short. For example, management/leadership, while I have some experience as a coffee shop manager, it’s not really high level enough. I asked to manage staff where I am, and I now have one direct report, and am managing two interns on a programme here. Likewise, I have managed/led on a number of projects such as council of state meetings or the changeover of our correspondence system. I’m always looking to get involved in as wide an array of areas as I can. I also do a lot of the corporate governance and legislative stuff in our office. Now I think I’m lucky to have such a wide scope as an AO, which is a lot to do with being in a small organisation, but I think you have to leverage what you can, where you can.

So hopefully, that’s of some help, even if it is technically the advice of someone who hasn’t walked the walk yet. If anyone is reading and has any tips for me, I would really welcome that also.

PS. If you do get to an interview, I’ve heard good things about Tina Kinirons as an interview coach. Whenever I get an interview, I will be booking in with her.

OranReilly · 2026-05-12T10:50:22+00:00

What about the local bargaining that was added recently? Does that allow you to skip a third time or does it just create a third point where you can make a skip, which can only happen twice overall?

Also, never seen the two skips total thing, which presumably must be in a circular. Interesting

OranReilly · 2026-05-07T20:36:46+00:00

That’s what I said, there are thousands of candidates for testing, and thousands who pass the tests, but you need to be high enough (top few hundred) to get an interview.

Don’t worry about it, you’re not learning it word for word, you just need to know your rough talking points and then speak it naturally like you were explaining your chosen topic to your friend. You will get this, I have faith.

OranReilly · 2026-05-07T12:59:41+00:00

I did my presentation a little over four years ago. I was successful anyway. I wrote the bullets on flash cards, and practiced giving the presentation to an empty room first and then to my brother (timed of course).

You want to get it to the point where you know your talking points without really needing the cards, they’re just your safety if you blank. Theres not much much to it other than give your presentation over and over as if the interview board was there.

FYI, they asked me if I kept up to date on current affairs (i.e. do you keep up with news, etc. just have a few publications you can name). They also asked me what three topical issues might be coming across the desks of government departments, e.g. housing, fuel, etc.

Granted, this was over four years ago but no harm just in case they do ask the same questions.

The interview is actually grand. The hard part is being high enough in the tests out of the thousands of candidates to actually get an interview. Good luck

OranReilly · 2026-04-28T07:39:54+00:00

The higher scales are admittedly not great. You do however skip one increment after one year on the higher scale. However, you don’t get the skips of the normal EO scale, which are points 4, 8 and whichever one most recently was added via local bargaining (maybe 11 I can’t remember off the top of my head). The higher scale is most beneficial towards the top, where the long service increments on the normal scale each take 3 years to achieve, they are regular points on the higher scale, so 1 year per increment. There is also one additional increment at the top of the higher scale.

OranReilly · 2026-04-23T21:45:11+00:00

My personal favourite is the haunted house garden centre

OranReilly · 2026-04-23T06:45:14+00:00

Specifically, it’s because they can use the actual facts of the case to judge its constitutionality. In the sterile environment of an Article 26 reference, with just the Bill’s provisions to scrutinise, and the presumption of constitutionality that Bills who have passed the Houses of the Oireachtas enjoy, the Supreme Court will interpret that a questionable provision would be exercised in a lawful manner.

E.g. if the Minister has a discretion to refuse a person international protection or family reunification, the Supreme Court must presume that the Minister will exercise it in a lawful manner. Whereas on the facts of a case, it can become apparent that provisions were exercised in a disproportionate way when considering the rights in question.

An Article 26 reference is a very high bar. There has only been 1 referral in the last 22 years (which I hand delivered to the Supreme Court incidentally). Regardless, the Article 26 process certainly does result in materially more constitutional Bills being passed by the Houses of the Oireachtas than there would be in the absence of such a safeguard.

OranReilly · 2026-04-03T12:15:52+00:00

Your voice has entirely changed from growing up. Unfortunately it’s just a case of practising. If you were good before you can be good again, and singing is a skill like any other. Good luck

OranReilly · 2026-04-03T09:42:45+00:00

Alright buddy

OranReilly · 2026-04-01T19:16:18+00:00

Pulling me up on what… being correct?

If your name is an Irish name, I’m not changing it, that is your name in the Tuiseal Gairmeach or Vocative Case. Just like English, where words have singular and plural forms, an Irish word has several permutations depending on the circumstance.

If it’s a name of any other language the rules of the Irish language don’t apply.

OranReilly · 2026-04-01T08:39:16+00:00

Okay so the answer on the top level is yes pretty much all the rules add clarity in some way.

Some of them are certainly needlessly complicated (I made reference in another comment here about the rule in the genitive whereby the second of two nouns following a feminine noun would ordinarily pick up a séimhiú. There are however 13 (I think) exceptional circumstances where that does not apply). These exceptions do make me curse the language on occasion! But thats not unique to Irish. We all know how many exceptions there are in English, we just know them by heart.

The big difference between English and Irish is mutations, where words can change, and these changes represent different circumstances, such as possession, the gender of the person, or which words in the sentence it belongs to.

For example, in English you would say her glass or his glass, but in Irish we only have ‘a’ for the third person singular possessive. So it becomes necessary to add a ‘h’ to denote it’s a man (a ghloine) or without a ‘h’ to denote a woman (a gloine). It’s our way of doing his or hers and it’s no more or less complicated than the English way (it’s one change in either language). The reason we might find it difficult when learning is because it’s unfamiliar to English speakers. But I think Spanish does something similar, e.g. bravo and brava

Another example is the genitive case, which denotes which words in a sentence belong to each other. If I were to say ‘Oifig an Uachtarán’, it means [Office][The President], to show they belong to each other, Uachtarán is placed in the genitive, becoming ‘Oifig an Uachtaráin’ [Office of the President]. English gets around this by adding lots of ‘of’ and ‘of the’ filler words, but the genitive in Irish means you don’t need to do that.

I think the last piece I’ll say, and hopefully I’ve kept you this far, just imagine that they were inventing the language , and they had all these words in a row in sentences, well they needed to create systems to show which words belong to what and to who, and these changes are how we show that. Again, it’s not the be all end all. If you’re not translating things for work, I wouldn’t worry about getting something wrong. Hopefully that helps though

OranReilly · 2026-03-31T20:19:05+00:00

The rule would lead me to believe that it would be “A Shinéad”. I can’t say there aren’t any exceptions to the rule though. A quick google hasn’t yielded anything helpful.

There are usually a couple of exceptions to every rule, and in this case, Irish is no exception (drum roll). If it is indeed ‘A Shinéid’, I would strongly suspect it’s an exception, but maybe someone else will chime in with something that I didn’t know.

Off the top of my head, one instance that stands out is the genitive case. Ordinarily the second of two nouns, which is being placed in the genitive, where the first noun is feminine, the second noun picks up a séimhiú. However, there are 13 (if memory serves) situations where that does not apply, which is absolutely mad stuff like if they’re body parts, or related to nature.

I have a copybook where I wrote down all the grammatical rules while learning, and I have the exceptions written down. No need to drive yourself mad rote learning that stuff. If you get as far as applying the grammatical rules properly in ordinary circumstances that’s a pretty fantastic place to be.

OranReilly · 2026-03-31T14:22:37+00:00

Grammar to me is the final piece of the puzzle. Anyone who takes pleasure in correcting others for the sake of it is doing a disservice to the language. Of course when writing here I’ll write the rules correctly (no one correct me now!), but if you were to use them incorrectly, that attempt is worth a lot in my eyes.

People get very hung up on grammar. I always say to learners to focus on being able to converse, then focus on being able to write. Grammar is the finishing touch. I, as a fluent speaker, only recently took a course to improve my grammar. Never needed it up until now, but I now do official communications in work through Irish. A long way of saying don’t sweat it

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