A SWEET EXCURSION

The other day our visitors from England treated Lady H and myself to a tour through three

counties to one of our favourite destinations The Chocolate Garden in county Wicklow 

We each felt very undecided in making a choice from the menu board, thus our selection seemed to take a good deal of time. Lady H chose for herself an Ice Cream Sundae, I went for a slice of chocolate Fudge Cake accompanied by a vanilla ice cream and the other two had slices of Carrot Cake and fresh cream. All with a mug of Hot Chocolate each.

Following on from a surfeit of chocolate Lady H and I became quite giddy, high would be another description anyway, we spotted this bijou cottage and wondered whether to down size.

As you can see it comes complete with all of the necessary domestic equipment and we would very much appreciate your thoughts ?

http://aheronsview.blogspot.ie/2014/05/chocolate-ice-cream.html

The Noble Toby & Garden Workers

Toby keeping watch .

Looking after my people

Is That Biscuits ?

Garden workers from the UK moving the logs

At play with Granny

Prevalent Attitudes

I do not call myself a Christian, a humanist is as close as I can get. 

Recently I have found my self feeling absolutely disgusted with the very shameful attitude of the settled community of the Rockville Drive residents in Carrickmines who opposed the emergency halting site; this towards their fellow citizens namely The Travellers.  

So I was glad to read the following on the RTE web site because it needed to be voiced. 

reference : http://www.rte.ie/news/2015/1021/736557-carrickmines-fire/
                  http://www.rte.ie/news/2015/1015/734924-carrickmines/

"A priest has criticised many settled people for failing to empathise with what he called their Traveller brothers and sisters following a fatal fire at a halting site.

Father Dermot Lane was speaking after the remains of five of the people who lost their lives in the fire in Carrickmines were brought to the Church of the Ascension of the Lord in Balally, Co Dublin this evening.

Fr Lane, who is the parish priest of Balally, not far from Carrickmines, urged everybody to become involved in a new consultation process embracing local authorities and the settled and Traveller communities.

He prayed that what he called the national tragedy which struck eleven days ago may become a turning point in the difficult tasks of healing, reconciliation and mutual trust that lie ahead.

Fr Lane greeted the Connors family and hundreds of other mourners at the church after five hearses bearing the coffins of Thomas and Sylvia Connors and their children Jim, Christy, and baby Mary arrived for their removal service.

Fr Lane said the grief of the Connors family is also the grief of Balally Parish because they were, and are, an important part of the local community.

Describing them as well-known and respected in the parish, he said they worshipped in its church where Thomas and Sylvia, conscientiously as parents, presented their five children for baptism over the past seven years. 

He recalled having the privilege of baptising Michael and Thomas Connors, the family's only survivors.

He said important lessons are to be learned from the national tragedy that claimed ten lives 11 days ago and which "has disturbed the consciences of us all".

Unaware of the resolution of the impasse over the local authority allocating the grieving families accommodation, which coincided with the church service, he urged that they be offered an appropriate place to live as soon as possible. 

He told the congregation: "We must learn, above all, to walk in the shoes of the other if we are to develop genuinely inclusive and pluralistic societies."

And he observed that many settled people had "failed to walk with empathy in the shoes of our brothers and sisters in the Traveller community".

Dismissing blame-games about the tragedy as unhelpful, Fr Lane urged everybody to move beyond mis-understanding, standard stereotypes and caricatures.

"If we are to move forward," he said, "all must be involved in a new consultation and a new conversation, and that means bringing together local authorities, local communities and the Traveller Communities."

Fr Lane prayed that the tragedy - which he repeated was national in character - may become a turning point in what he called "the difficult tasks of healing, reconciliation and mutual trust that lie ahead".

He said  the tragedy has raised serious questions about our priorities as a society, and searching questions about the responses or lack of responses by successive governments to a variety of reports going back 50 years, to the mid-1960s.

He said these questions touch on a number of very serious issues for all of us about the provision of adequate sites and housing for the Traveller community; about the persistent reality of social inequalities between the Traveller community and the settled community; and about deeply ingrained cultural prejudices.

In the meantime, he said, the Connors family must be allowed to grieve and to mourn the death of their loved ones.

The funeral Mass for the Connors will be celebrated in Balally at 11.30am tomorrow and they will be buried together on Friday in Wexford."

An article worth reading can be found here
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/apartheid-hasnt-gone-away-when-it-comes-to-travellers-34137234.html

The Inner Child

The small boy inside of myself always asks simple questions to the man on the outside.

He asked me yesterday "Why is the sky blue on a cloudless day ?”

I told him that I would find out and the best answer is :

"Sunlight reaches Earth's atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases and particles in the air. Blue light is scattered in all directions by the tiny molecules of air in Earth's atmosphere. Blue is scattered more than other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.”

That boy then told me that he knew why the black sky never falls down and he said it that it was nailed up  and I asked him how did he know that it was nailed up ?

He said he had seen thousands of bright shiny nail heads when he looked up at the black sky at night.

Nail headed sky

So what questions does your inner child ask of you ?

LATE SUMMER

Samhain means 'summers end' and is followed by the start of Winter. This year the festival of Samhain is on 7th November.   

The ancients knew a three season year, spring, summer and winter.

I have no idea who is to blame for introducing the idea of an autumn to Ireland.

The grass is still growing and this will continue until the daylight temperature drops to below 10 degrees Centigrade.

Today the temperature is slightly over 14 degrees which means that Heron will have get the mower out of the shed and tidy up the garden. He might also cut a few newly grown nettles for Mrs H’s promised veggie stew.

So it being bright and sunny I took a few photos for you to view.

Our road still green

Ripe Blackberries

The Fuchsia still in bloom

Dancing ladies :)

Yellow Rose

The old Red Rose

Small yellow bloom ?

Just like the plant above the label fell off

and I have no idea what they are called :)

EARTHQUAKE N.Z.

A 5.4-magnitude earthquake has shaken the area near Castlepoint, North Island, New Zealand, US Geological Survey has reported. The epicenter is about 155 kilometers from the country’s capital Wellington.
Conflicting reports by local sources put the magnitude at 5.8.
5.4 earthquake hits 150km from New Zealand's capital
Published time: 12 Oct, 2015 08:39
Edited time: 12 Oct, 2015 09:12


Reference:http://on.rt.com/6tmy

HORSE FAIR - BALLINASLOE

http://ballinasloeoctoberfair.com/events/equestrian-events/

The town of Ballinasloe in Co. Galway can expect about 100,000 visitors this week to it’s the annual horse fair. This event brings horses of all sizes and types from all over the country together with dealers & traders, musicians, singers with literally craic for all. 

.

"The Ballinasloe October Horse Fair is one of the oldest fairs in Ireland, at one stage renowned as the largest and greatest in all of Europe. While now predominantly associated with the horse, in its heyday the October Fair was an agricultural event of much greater significance, serving as a market for the sale of cattle and sheep by the farmers of the West to their counterparts in the East of Ireland. In the London Times of 1801 and 1804, the October Fair was referred to as the “Great Cattle Fair” of Ballinasloe. It is only since the early twentieth century that the fair has become exclusively associated with the horse.

Very little is known about the origins of the Ballinasloe October Fair, as there is little in terms of documentary evidence referring to its early development. In the past, fairs and markets were such a common feature of life in Ireland that contemporary observers perhaps felt little need to make special reference to them."

©Damian Mac Con Bladh

http://ballinasloeoctoberfair.com/history/history-of-the-fair/

An unscheduled event by a bareback rider was a quick shopping trip to Tesco so how do you do your shopping ?

http://imgur.com/XRH3sbO

Blatant Breach of Humanitarian Law

Kunduz outrage: Medicins Sans Frontieres has asked that concerned people demand an independent investigation into the bombing of Kunduz Hospital.

The US Air Force had the GPS co-ordinates of the hospital so there is really no excuse for what happened, regardless of who called for assistance. The US said the Afghanistan troops asked for help however, the pilots were American service personnel, who we must assume are highly trained.

This is not the first time that these specialist fliers have bombed their allies. An incident occurred in the First Iraqi War

when a group of British servicemen were wiped out by friendly fire from American aircraft. The US term is I believe 'collateral damage'.

On Saturday 3 October 2015 the MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, was repeatedly bombed by coalition forces.

"The US government has admitted that it was their airstrike that hit our hospital in Kunduz and killed 22 patients and MSF staff. Their description of the attack keeps changing – from collateral damage, to a tragic incident, to now attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghanistan government." – Christopher Stokes, General Director, Médecins Sans Frontières

Please join in and demand that a full and transparent investigation into the event be conducted.

To support this plea please view the link below

http://www.msf.org/kunduz-

Further to the above

• Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) have called for an independent fact-finding mission into a US airstrike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan that killed at least 22 people, AP said. MSF said its call would mark the first time such a fact-finding mission would be launched under the rules of the Geneva Conventions. The weekend strike“was not just an attack on our hospital, it was an attack on the Geneva Conventions,” the group’s international president, Joanne Liu, said on Wednesday, adding that “this cannot be tolerated.”

TTIP last chance to sign

The one-year deadline for signing the European Citizens' Initiative against TTIP & CETA is tomorrow. Dear Mel, Today, the European petition against the dangerous trade deals TTIP & CETA broke the 3 million mark, making it the largest ECI petition ever. [1] What a powerful message to send those hoping to push the deal through in secret. This enormous petition will be hand-delivered to the European Commission this Wednesday, leaving us with just one day to add as many signatures as possible. Mel, we can double our impact if each of us gets one friend to sign the petition by tomorrow evening. Can you share the petition with your friends and family on Facebook or Twitter?  Share  Tweet In the past year, politicians across Europe have been taken aback by the strength of people powered action against TTIP and CETA. Let’s keep them on their toes by making this huge petition even bigger. If you don’t use social media, there’s an email below that you can forward to friends and family. More power to you, Anne Marie and the Uplift team PS: If you haven't signed the petition, you can add your name here: https://uplift.ie/2015/ttip/european-citizens-initiative-stop-ttip/ PPS: Uplift is a member of the Europe wide STOP TTIP campaign: https://stop-ttip.org/supporting-organisations/  [1] http://www.globaljustice.org.uk/news/2015/oct/5/three-million-people-across-europe-call-ttip-be-scrapped and https://stop-ttip.org/about-the-eci-campaign/ Dear friends, I just signed a petition against a secret trade deal being worked out between the US and the EU. It’s called TTIP and it’s the biggest corporate grab ever to be agreed. TTIP would allow corporations sue governments if they make decisions which could harm their future profits. For Ireland, it means that our water could be privatised and GMO foods and fracking could be allowed. Our beef and agriculture sectors will be hit hard and workers rights put at risk. But millions of people across Europe are saying NO to TTIP. On Wednesday a petition will be hand-delivered to the European Commission. It has over 3 million signatures from people across Europe. We have one day left to add as many names as possible. Can you sign the petition too? Politicians are beginning to realise that public opposition to TTIP is growing and this petition is getting a lot of notice. Let’s make it as big as possible before Wednesday. Here’s the link: https://uplift.ie/2015/ttip/european-citizens-initiative-stop-ttip/ Thanks,

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