1 week Ago
The Ireland team ahead of a fixture against Wales earlier this year Serious questions must be raised about the FAI’s and the Dublin District Schoolboys/Schoolgirls League’s (DDSL) commitment to girls’ soccer in Ireland, with over 400 girls locked out of a league for the 2024/25 season. The Metropolitan Girls’ League (MGL), which two years ago was the largest grassroots girls league in Ireland, collapsed in August after the majority of clubs moved to the DDSL. At least nine clubs remained loyal to the MGL, but their loyalty has left 27 girls teams without a league to play in.
After weeks of discussions between the FAI and the DDSL, the FAI wrote on Friday to the affected clubs to inform them it had “exhausted every avenue” with the DDSL and proposed an alternative league mixing age groups together, that can only be described as nonsense. Players, parents and volunteers across the clubs are left bewildered that the DDSL is refusing to accept the teams on a technicality and that the FAI is powerless to intervene. While our national women’s team goes from strength to strength, it seems unbelievable that clubs where players such as Isibeal Atkinson began are left without girls football.
Everyone knows the importance of keeping girls involved in sport, both for physical and mental health. Without an immediate solution, unfortunately many of these girls will give up football now and likely never return to the sport. Vanessa Hetherington, Rush Athletic FC, Dublin Recently the FAI had to apologise to its Latvian colleagues over what appeared to be a Google translation of their players’ names.
Red faces and all of that. Welcome to the world that our beautiful Irish language inhabits daily. A political football in the northern part of our island, a perceived nuisance in the southern plains.
Limerick County Council is the latest to make a mess of the translation of place names inherited from the English. Ashleigh Woods morphed into Adhmaid Ashleigh. You either get that one or don’t.
Not to worry, most of official Ireland couldn’t give a toss either. This all stems back to obtaining our independence a century ago. We could have gone back to the beautiful descriptive names of our towns and villages.
The name Ballina, for example, is anglicised gibberish. Béal an Átha says what’s on the tin, “mouth of the long river”. Seems it’s póg mo thóin to our noble tongue agus dhá mhéar san spéir don teanga.
John Cuffe, An Mí I’ve often wonder how people who see themselves in Crimeline CCTV footage shoplifting feel. I imagine much the same way some of the “concerned citizens” caught on camera felt when they viewed the RTÉ Investigates Inside the Protests documentary on Thursday night. The programme should be a wake-up call for anyone who doesn’t think we have a problem with racism.
What a sad commentary on our ostensibly welcoming nation – protesters screaming “get them out” and hurling the foulest of abuse at people already hurt and broken by whatever hell they’ve escaped from; buildings earmarked for asylum-seekers set alight; workers just trying to do their jobs subjected to vile intimidation; and self-appointed guardians of the white race believing they had the right to tell a camera man not to film their “peaceful” demonstration. We urgently need a new, hard-hitting anti-racism message to be hammered home in all primary and second-level schools. It won’t be in time to change the minds of some of the charmers we saw and heard on Thursday night, but it might help to prevent another generation of Irish people from being brainwashed by nutjobs posing as patriots.
John Fitzgerald, Callan, Co Kilkenny According to the recent CSO census, 259,467 people work from home in Ireland and a greater 750,000 work from home once a week. There are so many positives from these figures and I hope Amazon takes note. For the employer, it improves staff retention, reduces office leasing costs and potentially allows a lower salary offer.
It supports local businesses that supply a wide range of coffee, croissants and paninis for those quick dashes for grub. It provides free additional dog-walking opportunities, being at home for the boiler repair man and never missing a parcel delivery. Twenty years ago, the word hybrid transformed the world of golf and the same word has now transformed our work-life balance.
Seamus Joyce, Richmond, London Yet again another report with many recommendations, this time after the tragic death of Aoife Johnston. I wonder who follows up on these recommendations? There are so many issues and unnecessary deaths that happen when people are under care within our hospitals. I don’t know how parents deal with the death of a child in such circumstances.
We go around and around in circles. Like everything in this small country, we just never learn. It is very sad and frustrating.
Paul Doran, Clondalkin, Dublin 22 Having signed an agreement with Israel to share an energy resource adjoining them in the Mediterranean Sea in 2022, the Lebanese government emphasised that this did not “normalise” relations and Lebanon remained in a state of war with Israel. Now conflict is again breaking out between the parties, but before people rush to blame Israel for any ensuing horror, it is surely time to accept that Israel is fighting a multifaceted war for its own existence. That Irish people choose to sympathise with likes of Hamas and Hezbollah gives other actors the confidence to use the Lebanese people as cannon fodder, as with the victims in Gaza.
A shameful chapter in Irish history is being written and that is not to deny the terrible loss of life in Gaza, sacrificed for similar distant idealism, not a free homeland. Eugene Tannam, Firhouse, Dublin 24 Join the Irish Independent WhatsApp channel Stay up to date with all the latest news.
