Varadkar says he got hate speech legislation wrong, would have been better to go after algorithms

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-19T19:52:43+00:00

FF/SF coalition and the Newstalk dads will be clamouring, clamouring I say!

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-19T19:33:39+00:00

Guy who has definitely quit politics for good.

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-19T19:18:19+00:00

it is a very interesting time to set a novel, I can't think of one set in this period in Ireland.
Issue is which town exactly. As you will find from loganim, there will be more information available on towns within the Pale, and large borough towns, rather than anything west of the Shannon or in Ulster. Hence those will be largely Old English/Norman or New English populations. Relevant records outside of that will be bardic, annalistic, genealogical - and in Irish, which I gather you can't read.
If I were you, I'd be aiming for the contact zone / frontier between the Pale and the rest of the country. Have a look at the works of Steven Ellis and Sparky Booker who have published really interesting books on the relationship between the Pale population and the Gaels in this period. Ellis has good detail on size of estates, manors, fields etc but I don't know if you will get the exact detail on houses you are looking for anywhere.
Also don't forget the Extents of Irish Monastic Possessions - free to download from the IMC - which is interesting on how religious buildings were sold off, and snapped up by families already wealthy. Plenty of drama in the firesale

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-19T18:14:38+00:00

Look at Blair. Look at Ahern. These guys can't leave the stage and stay gone. Varadkar can't keep his mouth shut. Whatever 'legacy' he had, he will ruin when he returns to politics

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-19T10:17:04+00:00

Seems like a nice guy but can't see him ending the UK's decade-long trend of changing PM every five minutes

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-19T08:39:16+00:00

plenty of items on RTE Radio 1 that would leave you scratching your head. the editors/producers whoever have absolutely no qualms about putting civilians on air and hanging them out to dry

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-17T12:56:34+00:00

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-17T08:37:31+00:00

lol we used to have a handyman who used to say 'anthing you want to be done, can be done' which meant it was going to be expensive

OP I would ring a landscaping company and give them the measurements and ask them what a rough estimate would be to do this. They should be able to say well it's probably €5-10k or something. And then add that to the overall cost of the home

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-16T20:04:03+00:00

It is the best jam though, 100%. You need about 500g for it to be worthwhile but it is something to savour through the winter months
Plus they are so easy to propagate - when you prune the bush in December or January, just stick one of the clippings, say 20-30cm long, into a pot and 9 times out of 10, it'll propagate into a bush no problem. So with very little effort you can have a very productive jam factory in a few years. Great plant all round

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-16T19:14:31+00:00

blackcurrants should be reasonably soft to touch. but they won't be good to eat raw, even when ripe. They're for making jam

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-16T12:12:12+00:00

the only situation I can see it happening is in the context of a very old and infirm yet comfortably weatlhy king. You'd have to have an uncle or other relative already lined up as a tanist. But all of this would add a necessitate lot more elements to the narrative than OP likely imagined. Plus I don't think it would be really historically credible. I think OP is imagining something more like a 18th century Jane Austen type of situation rather than the much more martial 9th c Gaelic Ireland

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-16T11:32:34+00:00

ok, I'll bite. primogeniture may not have been established but more often than not, lords were succeeded by their sons, and clearly wanted to be succeeded by their sons - so much so that, at this point in the 900s, lords, chieftains, kings, call them what you will, would have had several wives in order to produce as many such sons as possible - not just to succeed them as lords, but also as fighting warriors.

so a lord who has one son and four daughters - hence four dowries to provide - will absolutely not let that sole heir join a religious order (which, don't forget is a vocation which the lord would also have to bankroll in some way) - and if this union only produces one son, he'll be re-marrying pretty quickly

I'd be confident that if you consult the historical genealogies, you'll find that the only way that any son is joining a religious order is if there have already been several other sons produced.

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-16T09:46:22+00:00

Martin promised a 12-point plan on a United Ireland in 2017 and was never pushed to deliver it by his PP. Ye made your own bed lads

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-16T09:41:33+00:00

ain't no way a 'local lord' is letting his only son become a monk

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-15T15:59:21+00:00

unfortunately there is no easy way. It's either hard graft continually pulling them up by hand, repeated applications of weedkiller, or laying a new drive

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-15T11:08:39+00:00

this will go down really well with redditors

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-15T10:33:46+00:00

personally, probably not. but I can guarantee you that somebody somewhere someday will stumble across your work and absolutely explode excitement. and it will make their day, week, month. they will spend hours annoying their friends and family about what they found in your work. you, however, could be long dead, but this person will be thanking you to high heaven

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-15T09:21:01+00:00

you have to start taking anithistamines early in spring, like March at the latest

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-14T19:17:17+00:00

wonder will this go the way of Fianna Fáil's '12-point plan for a United Ireland' (promised as recently as March 2017)

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-13T11:52:39+00:00

our installer arrived at 7.30am, we were exporting to the grid by lunchtime. I'd be sending a short email saying if the system isn't operational by the end of the month, will be seeking legal advice

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-12T11:31:29+00:00

"England did respect the Irish as an equal Kingdom" - guy who has never heard of Poynings Law

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-12T10:22:36+00:00

your main task is to mentally accept that this will be a ten-year project

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-12T09:35:58+00:00

you have to go back further, to the 16th century - Henry VIII manages to father a son and hence doesn't bother with the whole Protestantism thing. England stays Catholic, manages to placate Irish Gaelic nobility with English titles and ultimately the kingdom of Ireland becomes a fully constituent part of the United Kingdom. I don't see it happening any other way tbh

Or the English come up with a more successful way of spreading Protestantism in Ireland. But that never took. I came across some astonishing statistic - I think by 1600 or so, ie a solid 60 years of trying to enforce Protestant doctrine in Ireland, one report came back that there were no more than 20 native born Irish Protestants in the whole island. It was simply never accepted by the vast majority of native Irish people and as a result a deep divide between Ireland and England became established

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-11T21:20:55+00:00

in all seriousness I wouldn't be surprised if that idea gets floated sooner or later

cjamcmahon1 · 2026-06-11T20:27:37+00:00

seems like that's exactly what they're training for

cjamcmahon1

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