well, im about a thousand kilometers from a copy of todays irish times, so the internet version will continue to suffice, here is some randomness:

radio review
on wednesday, rté radio 1 provided a rare chance to hear the latecomers, as much an exploration of sound as it was a straightforward documentary. it was produced by glenn gould, who is more famous on this side of the atlantic as a pianist, but was well-known at home in canada as a television and radio producer.
the 1969 documentary looked at the changing way of life in newfoundland, and the voices, some of them distinctly irish, battled at times to be heard above the crashing waves that gould mixed under the tales of hard work, duty and zeal. the self-sufficient lifestyle was dying out, and younger people wanted more than, as one woman said, “months on end of fog and rain and playing bridge every night”.
one man commented that the young people went off to university and came back “with a ba – that’s the two first letters of the alphabet and they got ’em backwards”. at times the voices were layered on top of each other so that only snatches of words could be heard, sounding like a greek chorus marking and regretting the passing of a harsh but less complicated style of island living

a letter to the editor
madam, – against all odds, we survived the y2k bug. we also managed to survive the euro changeover. thankfully, we survived penalty points. we will survive the smoking ban. – yours, etc.,
lloyd callan, lucan, co dublin.

post-war, journalists ask themselves hard questions
the us television networks, which fled baghdad, presented a far cleaner, technological vision of the conflict. most disheartening of all, some of the “embedded” journalists who arrived in baghdad with us forces lost all semblance of detachment and began to play soldier.
i’ll never forget the nbc correspondent whom i encountered on the “highway of death” in daura, south baghdad, on april 10th. the place was littered with the bodies of dozens of civilians, killed because they had the misfortune to drive into the sights of a us tank gunner.
“we fought our way up here,” the us television reporter told me. “we parked our armour here and we had to fire on oncoming traffic, because they could have been suicide bombers.”

on april 8th, us forces killed three journalists in baghdad: tariq ayoub of al-jazeera, felled by a us rocket on the roof of the network’s baghdad office, and cameramen taras protsyuk and jose couso, killed when a us tank fired a shell at the palestine hotel. a spanish judge last month accepted a lawsuit accusing three soldiers from the 3rd infantry division of committing a war crime when they killed jose couso.
“the us government apologised to reuters [taras protsyuk’s employer\], but they destroyed our office and killed my colleague and they never apologised,” abdallah complained. “when a western white man gets hit, there’s an apology, but when a third world muslim gets hit, no apology. if anyone can explain this any other way than racism, i’d like to hear it.”
the attack on the palestine hotel haunts all of us who covered the war, all the more so because the us government refused to make its inquiry public and has never offered a credible explanation. france 3 television was on the same floor as reuters, and their cameraman rushed to the news agency office after the explosion. his footage of protsyuk lying face down in a pool of blood, of four wounded journalists wailing and screaming, was never broadcast.
when the lights came back on after the video was shown at the panos institute colloquium, no one spoke for several minutes. many in the audience were weeping. france 3’s correspondent caroline sinz said she believed the attack was staged to divert attention from what happened elsewhere in baghdad as the us seized the capital. “they scared the journalists; it was a warning,” she said.

if there is one paramount lesson, for me it is the necessity to maintain a moral distance from both sides in war. ironically, the worst of both sides have come together in post-war baghdad, where a former high-ranking employee of the ministry of information now works for fox news.
(lara marlowe reported from baghdad on the iraq war for the irish times.)

the follow up to tuesdays main story
the kings island youth and community centre is a case in point. kings island is where many of the players involved in the city’s publicised violence reside. both eric leamy and jonathan edwards died there.
last tuesday, just hours before mcdowell announced his €2 million anti-crime package, the centre’s heating system gave up the ghost. the centre’s chairman paddy mason says he needs €3,000 to replace the boiler. the centre has less than €1,200 in the bank. its only source of revenue comes from renting the hall. it receives no public funding. without an injection of money it will be forced to close. around 30 local children will lose their crèche and more than 100 teenagers from kings island will have no youth club.
at limerick youth services, director catherine kelly tells a similar story. but she has high hopes for limerick. she believes the development of the last 20 years has lifted the entire city. limerick may still have serious problems, she says, but the bleak days of the 1980s, when unemployment in areas like moyross reached 80 per cent, are gone forever.
her organisation is a registered charity. it has 73 staff and a budget of around €3.5 million a year. it sounds impressive but when she speaks of places like st mary’s park you fear for limerick. the youth services has sufficient funding and personnel to run youth projects for just 20 children two nights a week, in an area with over 4,000 homes. in o’malley park there are 601 homes, but the youth club there reaches just 25 young people. in moyross it runs four intervention programmes for around 120 children aged 10 to 16 years old. but there are seven other housing estates in the area that are not serviced at all.
“it costs up to €200,000 to keep someone in jail for a year. we could run a very good project for up to 60 with that kind of money,” kelly says.
one community activist says he doubts if the events of the last year will do anything to focus the government’s minds on limerick.
“little kids on the streets here, four or five, can tell you there’s so and so gone up the road in the car, they’re on this or that side of the feud. it’s getting to the stage in some areas where lads are not turning on the radio in the morning to get the sports results, they’re turning it on to see if anybody has been shot.”
few would believe we’ve heard the last of such news bulletins.

all articles are copyright of the irish times. hope they dont mind.