Are you rejoicing in Kellie Harrington’s victory at the Olympic Games? I’ll bet you are. She’s a truly gifted boxer and the fact that she was representing Ireland was a light in which we all bathed and yeehoed. Did you enjoy watching the fight? If you’re from the twenty-six counties, I’m sure you did. If you’re from the miserable six – forget it. No pictures, no coverage, no Kellie.
It’s the hope that kills you in the end. In my innocence I figured that the BBC, which covers any number of events, would see the importance of Kellie’s bout and cover it. Nah – the Beeb Olympic coverage goes to bed at 10.00 pm. So I clicked my way to Channel 162, where the south sends out its Olympics coverage. Oh dear. A blank screen, apart from a notice telling me the fucking obvious: you cannot receive this programme in your area.
So for one more time, let me point out a few facts. The UK signed a contract or made arrangements to have the entire UK covered with its Olympics programmes. RTÉ signed a contract or made arrangements to have the entire…twenty-six counties covered.
Could RTÉ, as the national broadcaster, have included the North in its remit? Of course it could. If the Windsor Framework made it possible for the North to trade in the UK and in the EU/South, surely it would have been possible to come to an arrangement whereby the North was included in Olympic coverage from RTÉ?
The decision they made was tight-fisted and partitionist. Let the Nordies make do with the BBC – sure they cover all sorts of stuff. And if a unique double-gold-medal event was not available to thousands of Northern fans, well tough titty.
What’s that, Micheál? Your Shared Island does wonderful things to bring the people of the North and South together? I’m sure it does. Except when it doesn’t.
Shared Island my arse.
Well said Jude!
The greatest boxers I can remember ended up ruined in body and brain. Mohammed Ali, Sugar Ray
Robinson, Joe Louis, for example. Boxing is brutal and brutish, as are far too many of the non-fighters
who cheer them on.
Back about 1956 there was a wrecked trawler in Howth Harbour. I had coils of rope which had marine
life attached. My good friend Pat Cody made a cut and dragged a single length which with his brother
Noel and myself dragged along the West Pier, into the tram station and between the raails a mile up hill.
Pat constructed a full size boxing ring in his back garden. Somehow he had managed to get two pairs
of training gloves, weighing, I think 16 )z. We staged fights of a duration abolished about a century
and a half earlier. I was a game fighter, but hardly in the Sugar Ray class. Opinions may differ regarding possible brain damage, but for years I had frequent nosebleeds, I worked behind a desk in
Irish Shipping in Aston Quay. One day a tattooed mariner who had sailed the seven seas, got a
nosebleed, and was near panic. I was immediately called for to comfort him. I took him to a cold
tap and showed him how to deal with it.
In the early 1970s the nosebleed became frequent and one of my nostrils was cauterised. The result
is stentorian snoring , whose repercussions I will leave to your imagination
I am old-fashioned enough to deplore fisticuffs for the fairer sex.
Very good jude free Palestine
I think women boxing is horrible. (But don’t tell them I said that…..)
Any thoughts on the fact that Kellie Harrington was almost “cancelled” by the woke Southern elite, for sharing a comment on an asylum seeker who committed rape and murder, Jude?
People should not be cancelled purely because of their political or social views. Not everybody thinks the same, what kind of world would that be?