Speedie's Blog
My Writings (I hope!) reflect my Guiding Principles: -'Enjoy Life to the Utmost but not at other people's expense'-'Think Global, Act Local'-'Variety is the Spice of Life'-'Use Technology & Wisdom to Make the World A Better Place for All God's Creatures'-'Do Not Accept Injustice No Matter Where You Find It'-'Laughter is the Best Medicine'
American Universities are becoming once again the conscience of their nation
Super Mario takes part in a St. Patrick's Day Parade in Connemara!
Remembering Mom & Dad on Mother’s Day.
When my dad Paddy Smith and my mom Bridget Agnew got engaged, they had this photo taken as a memento to a very special time in their lives. Dad was 21 years old, Mom was 19 years old,
Mom was born in Monaghan, my Dad in Offaly. They both met in Dublin at a dance club on Parnell Square not far from Drumcondra where my mom’s family had a grocery shop beside Croke Park. My dad was a bus conductor with Córas Iompair Éireann (CIÉ).
Throughout their lives, they like so many of their era strived to be good people with good values, taught their children to respect others, to love God, to practice a strong Christian (though not servile) faith and to work hard in order to earn an honest wage but to always realise that money was not everything and there were more important things in life.
Dad exemplified these values. Likewise with Mom who was for much of her early adult life one of a rare breed, a business woman in an overwhelmingly male-dominated retail sector.
But the Ireland they were born into and grew up in was a different country than today. It was poor, patriarchal, socially repressive in many ways, its economy rural centric characterised by small subsistence family farming with our biggest export being our young people. Both my parents endured difficult teenage years and came from families that suffered for awhile as a consequence of years of revolutionary struggle and being on the losing side at the end of the Irish Civil War.
But it was not all doom and gloom in this Irish society. For it possessed a strong local community ethos; crime was almost non-existent; most products could be recycled, repaired and reused; raw materials were sourced locally; children immersed themselves in Nature almost daily; and young people regularly went to sports matches, played music, danced, fell in love and got married; and many families took annual holidays or enjoyed weekend excursions to seaside resorts.
I consider myself so fortunate as a child to have had wonderful family summer holidays enjoying the amusements, beaches and candy floss of the seaside tourist towns of Bundoran, Bangor and Tramore; experiencing exciting working holidays with the 'country' cousins in Carrickmacross and Cloghan amongst the pastures, hayfields and bogs; picnics in the countryside; helping on my dad's garden allotment and working daily behind the counter in the family shop. My parents always allowed me to earn my own pocket money and to spend it on DC, Marvel and Thunderbirds/Stingray comics (I was always a big science fiction fan!), Action Men and Airfix aeroplane models.
Whilst physical (corporeal) punishment was all too commonly practiced by adults against children in families and in schools in those days, I cannot ever remember being slapped or beaten by Mom or Dad for misbehaving even though I was a strong-willed often argumentative child not afraid to express opinions that were contrary to those of my parents.
On Mother’s Day, I pay homage to my mom for being a feisty inspirational woman who overcame the most severe difficulties as a young teenage girl to successfully run a small business and raise a family; to my maternal grandmother Mary Ward who as the only daughter in her family spent much of early adult years feeding, clothing and supporting her 7 brothers many of whom were often ‘on the run’ as IRA volunteers during the War of Independence and the Civil War; and to my maternal great-grandmother Eliza Eccles who spent over 2 years in Armagh Prison for resisting Anglo-Irish landlord oppression during the Land Wars.
I am proud that these women in my family’s lineage kept alive the feminist ideals of a Celtic Pagan and early Christian Ireland where women often held prominent leadership roles exemplified by the fact that our country is the only country in the world (the island of St. Lucia does not count as it was named by invaders not the indigenous peoples!) called after a female.
Beir bua!
A beautiful 19th century Drystone Wall restored
Research is presently going on to find out its origins. But it is felt that it was constructed as early as the late 19th century if not before.
The Tuatha volunteers are presently actively working
with the parks department of Galway City Council in developing and implementing
what they feel is an exciting innovative programme of initiatives that will
bring a whole new array of features to Terryland Forest Park over the next year
which will enhance its importance as an example of the temperate rainforests
that once covered Ireland before the colonial period, as a native wildlife
sanctuary, an outdoor classroom, a repository of rural heritage, a major force
within the city in tackling the Climate Crisis, and in the provision of artistic
walking trails and cycling routes.
Next year we want to be fully prepared in helping the people of Galway celebrate the twenty fifth anniversary of a park that was born out of a wonderfully proactive collaboration between Galway Corporation (now Galway City Council) and the wider community. When it came into existence it was Ireland’s largest urban native woodland and was officially known as the ‘Lungs of the City’. Its founders drawn from the local government, community, state, educational, scientific and artistic sectors were in reality visionary pioneering advocates in developing within an urban environment a response to what they recognised as a looming climate and biodiversity crises. It is only now in the last few years that the public are realising the huge significance of what was happening in Galway city in the year 2000.
Early Virtual Reality - the 1-Racer Nascar from 1999.
Well done Helen Caird for a wonderfully inspiring "Nature in Art" exhibition
Everyone involved in the Tuatha volunteers of Terryland Forest Park wishes the very best to our very own Helen Caird, our artist in residence, for her exhibition entitled "Roots, Vessels and Gold" which was launched last Friday in the Oughterard Courthouse and will be open to the public until next Sunday. Well worth a visit!
Citizens of the World Unite & Celebrate the Beauty of "Difference".
Helen Caird – An Inspirational Artistic Champion of the Natural World
Connecting a 21st century urban forest to the primeval forests of ancient Ireland.
2004-2023: My son Dáire's 19 year journey in Education.
Christmas in Terryland Forest Park- the Agony and the Ecstasy
Christmas with the Smiths.
As with so many others, our festive season is all about family. Very ordinary but all the more extraordinaire and special because of that very simple thing.
Nollaig Shona agus Athbhliain faoi mhaise daoibh.
Songs & Poems for Peace at Vigil for Palestine, Galway
The BEO project - Connecting Rural Communities to their past.
Upstairs, Downstairs – the Inside Story of an Irish ‘Big House’
Helping parents to become aware of Cyberbullying and what to include in Internet Safety guidelines for themselves and their children.
Celtic Origins of Halloween
There is a popular misconception though that Halloween is a modern American invention. Not so. Though our American cousins have to be congratulated for making this very special festival a fantastic children-centric occasion nevertheless, as with so many other things that have brought great happiness and joy to humanity for millennia, its roots lay firmly in the culture of the Irish Celts!
(Photo shows my son Dáire & 'friend' that was taken many years ago)
Yet in the modern repackaging of this ancient pagan festival, many of the fine traditions that were once such an integral part of the festivities have disappeared. For instance our Celtic custom of placing human skulls with candles at entrances to domestic dwellings in order to ward off evil spirits has been replaced by lights in hollowed-out pumpkins! Likewise the visits of children dressed up in ghoulish and macabre fancy dress going door-to-door looking for gifts of sweets and fruits is a poor substitute for the former visits of the ghosts of our ancestors who used to drop in once a year on October 31st for a nice meal with their living relatives (we would prepare a place for them at the dinner table).
It was said too that live captives were placed in wicker cages above huge bonfires and burnt alive (as portrayed in the classic British 1970s cult film “The Wicker Man”). But such horror stories were originally spun by those nasty Romans when they were at war with the Celts. So it was probably nothing more than malicious enemy propaganda. After all, what do you take us Celts for? Barbarians?!!
As with so many other annual family festivals, Halloween has become so commercialised by 'Americanised' popular culture that its true origins and religious aspects have long since being forgotten.
So here is the true story of 'Féile na Marbh' (Festival of the Dead'):
Christianisation of 'Samhain'
Yet modern-day Americans were not the first people to re-brand the festival. In the middle ages the Catholic Church created the Christian festival of 'All Hallows Eve' or 'All Souls Day' when people were asked to remember and pray for their dead family members.
This event was superimposed onto the ancient pagan Celtic festival of 'Samhain' which marked the end of the summer season characterised by heat & light and the coming of the dark cold barren winter months.
Celtic Festivals
Typical of many agricultural societies, the Celts had four major annual festivals based on the cyclical differences experienced in the changing seasons of nature and their corresponding weather patterns. The other three were 'Imbolc' (spring) 'Bealtane' (summer), 'Lugnasa' (autumn). The latter was associated with harvest time.
Bon(e)Fires
Samhain was a time when food was hoarded as people prepared for the cold season when no plants grew. While many domestic animals such as cattle were brought indoors for the winter, others were slaughtered and most of their meat salted for storage whilst the remainder was cooked for the big feast. As with all Irish festivals, communal bonfires were lit as people gathered together at warm fires to socialise and to give thanks to the deities. Bones of the slaughtered animals were thrown into the fire as symbolic gifts to the gods, an action which give rise to the term ' bone fires' or 'bonfires'. Embers from this sacred fire were taken by local people to their households to light their own domestic fires.
Antecedents to the Pumpkin & 'Trick or Treat'
But Samhain was also a time when creatures from the supernatural world could enter into the world of mortals. 'Fairies' (Irish='Sidhe' as in ‘Banshee’/‘female fairy’) and the spirits of the dead would walk the earth. Many of these beings were benevolent and the spirits of dead ancestors; so families laid out extra food and set aside a table space for their ghostly visitors. This metaphorised into the custom of today's children dressing up as demons and witches & calling to the neighbours' houses to receive presents.
But there were spirits that came on the night of Samhain that were malevolent. Candles were placed in skulls at the entrance to dwellings as light was feared by these dark foreboding creatures. This protection against evil became transformed in modern times into the positioning of hollowed-out turnips and later pumpkins with carved out faces and internal candles at windows and doorways.
Centuries-old party games of trying to eat an apple lying in a basin of water ('bobbing') or dangling on a string tied to a ceiling ('snapping') are still popular festive past-times with Irish children.
Fortune Telling at Halloween
Central to the Irish Halloween is the eating of a fruit bread known as 'Barmbrack' from the Gaelic term 'Báirín Breac' (speckled or spotted top). It is still a popular festive food today.
Various symbolic pieces were placed in the dough before it was baked such as a ring, a pea and a stick. When an item was found in the slice when it was being eaten, it told of the future that awaited the recipient. For instance, the 'ring' signified marriage within a year; a 'stick' represented a bad or violent marriage; the 'coin', wealth and a 'pea', a long wait before marriage.
Irish Export Halloween to North America
The Irish emigrants of the nineteenth century introduced Halloween and its rituals to America. Within a few decades, the festival was transformed into the fun and games event of today.
Significant Irish Contributions to World Culture:
No. 7642- 'Dracula'
Considering our national passion of asking the dead to resurrect themselves & drop into the house for a late night meal & party, it should come as no surprise that the world's most well known vampire Count Dracula was the creation of an Irishman, the novelist Bram Stoker in 1887.
His inspiration though was Carmilla, a book about a lesbian vampire created naturally enough(!) by another well known Irish writer, Sheridan Le Fanu.
(Photos from Macnas Halloween youth parade in Ballinfoile, Galway City)
Today I was to be on the shores of the Dead Sea.
Internet Safety mentoring: From Bebo to TikTok.
In these early months of the current school year I have already provided, as part of my work at the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics of the University of Galway, Internet Safety sessions to parents, teachers and the young people of both primary and secondary schools in counties Galway, Clare and Dublin.
I have been
undertaking Cyberbullying Awareness presentations since 2005 and was probably
one of the first people in Ireland to do so.
(photo is of a leaflet from 2008 prepared by the primary school in Newport co. Mayo for a talk to parents on my birthday! The content reflects the era).
Since my student college days, I have been a strong advocate of the benefits that digital technologies can bring to people from all walks of life, having spent much of my working life teaching coding and upskilling people in the use of digital technologies. I started doing so in late 1981 soon after leaving university thanks to great inspirational visionary people such as Dr Jimmy Browne.
Immersing myself in web technologies really took off for me in mid 2004 when I became employed as the Outreach Officer of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at what was then NUI Galway. It was when the World Wide Web was for the first time becoming populated with user-generated content. It was exciting to be part of this!
In the early 2000s ‘blogging’ (personal websites) was the new craze; ‘online social media’ in the form of Bebo(2005), MySpace(2003) and Orkut(2004) was starting to appear for the first time; YouTube had just been invented (April 2005); online messaging and video telephony in the form of Skype (2003-4) was capturing people’s imagination; broadband was only being rolled out nationwide; the big bulky desktop computer was the main technology device in business, school and at home; and the smart touch phone in the form of the iPhone had yet to be invented(2007). ‘Email’ was king with many people of all ages acquiring their very first email addresses around this time.
Yet as a parent of both pre-teen and young teenage boys, I could see the dangers that computer gaming and web-based social interaction sites could and were bringing into our young people’s lives. Violence-based gaming, online aggressive pornography, misogyny, racism, cyberbullying, online stalking, and subsequent addiction and mental health issues for many users were a feature of the web even in those early days. People of all ages were suffering and yet there were few rules or guidelines available and nobody was talking about these new but growing problems.
So as a concerned parent and as someone working in a university web scientific institute (DERI), I decided, after securing the very supportive permission of my manager/directors, to put together my own content for delivering pioneering Internet Safety sessions to schools, universities, communities (neighbourhoods, asylum seekers, disability groups). But I always included in these talks (and still do) the benefits of new web technologies, giving a series of examples of exciting new developments especially those invented by young people, the need for stronger government legislation to protect those online including in punishing the very wealthy service providers, and highlighting the importance of good old fashioned benign parenting with the proviso that they make the effort to become aware and knowledgeable of their children’s activities on the web.
Eighteen years later, I am still providing such talks and workshops across Ireland. But sadly I have lost one important resource along the way. Over the years after having ‘the big chat’ with my sons when they were in their pre-teens or early teens and keeping lines of communications open, I learnt more from them that they ever did from me on the strengths, weaknesses, stories, pitfalls and issues associated with the latest social media and gaming sites popular for young people. I used the knowledge gained from them to make my own Internet Safety sessions more powerful, more meaningful, more current. Now that my sons are in their 20s and 30s I no longer have that family resource to call upon.
So I have to make extra effort to see the Web through the eyes of a child. For in the world of technology, change is constant and one has to keep one’s finger on what is popular today as it becomes history tomorrow.
The Fascinating History of Computing and Communications Technologies in Galway
On Tuesday night in the wonderful Portershed, I was guest speaker at the launch of the GIT (Galway IT) group, a gathering of tech enthusiasts who range from veteran developers to young passionate beginners. Thanks to the hard working Liam Krewer for seeing the need for such a club and doing something about it.
My presentation gave an overview of the proud heritage that Galway has in communications and computing from the establishment of the Marconi transatlantic radio station near Clifden in 1907 (the birth of the Global Village), onto the arrival of the world’s second largest computer manufacturing company to Mervue in 1971 (the birth of Ireland’s first ‘digital city’), to the opening of computer stores in 1980, to the establishment in 1983 of an interlinked network of computer labs in the city’s secondary schools (the birth of ‘cloud computing’ and ‘online social media’ in Ireland), and onto the setting of the West of Ireland’s first mobile computer classroom (2008).
For a deep dive into the fascinating history of such technologies, their Galway connections and much more besides, come along to the Computer and Communications Museum of Ireland, that is supported by the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, between 7pm and 9pm on Culture Night (this Friday Sept 22nd). Eircode H91 AEX4
“Shannon” the first ‘Push Button’ Phone for Irish homes
The museum recently took delivery of a classic telephone familiar to domestic and phone users in Ireland during the 1980s.
In 1982, the government’s department of Post & Telegraphs, launched the first push button telephone for the Irish domestic market. The “Shannon” phone came in four colours and was manufactured by Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications corporation based in Athlone.
Previously, domestic and business phones provided by the state telephony service were based on the 'rotary dial' and were primarily made by Northern Telecom (NT) in Galway city.
Getting a phone installed in one’s home in the 1970s or early 1980s was not easy- the state’s department responsible for the provision of telephones in 1982 had a waiting list of over 80,000 new subscribers which it was expected would not be cleared until the following year.
As well as the push button, the Shannon had features that would have been new to most Irish domestic telephone users at the time including a plug that could easily connect/disconnect the phone to/from a wall socket, and an electronic ‘tone’ ring rather than the ‘bell’ ring of the traditional rotary phone.
Interestingly the government also announced at the launch that they would be providing by January 1983 new style NT rotary phones that would have with a dial built into the handset.
The 'Shannon' telephone can be viewed any Saturday between 2pm and 4pm when the museum is open to the general public.