Making Friends on the Water
“People should make friends on the water,” said my 12 year old son during last week’s heatwave. I asked him why and he said “because no one can see your disability on the water and they treat you as they would treat you normally.” Wow! What perception. My son suffers with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy which…
How Little we Know (guest post from Gareth Orr)
It’s that time of year again. The leaves have returned to the trees, the flowers are blooming, the grass is growing (albeit slowly). All this can only mean one thing. Exam season is upon us once again! Even if you are not currently revising for exams yourself, no doubt you know someone who is. Across…
Can anything good come out of Down?
Can anything good come out of Down?! That’s what we might be wondering after they knocked Donegal out of the championship. But there was good news from another recent sporting event as Aaron Beggs from Bangor sacrificed a personal best to help a fellow runner in the Boston Marathon. Ajay Haridasse was less than 200m…
The Watershed
Sometimes on holidays we find ourselves in interesting places by accident. Last year we were in Austria and took a bit of a detour just to avoid a tunnel—not much scenery to be seen in a 13km tunnel! At the summit of a mountain pass we noticed, off to the side of the road, a…
Counted
On Saturday 18th April the National Archives made freely available over 700,000 individual household returns from the 1926 Census of Population—the first census conducted after the foundation of the Irish Free State. Within hours, four million hits had flooded the site. Across Ireland and the diaspora, people leaned into their screens, searching for grandparents, great-grandparents,…
The Moon is always round
There were “audible screams of delight” from NASA scientists onboard Artemis 2. One of the Astronauts, Victor Glover, had this to say: “As we are so far from Earth and look back at… the beauty of creation… In all of this emptiness — this thing we call the universe — you have this oasis, this…
It’s Friday—But Sunday’s Comin’
Easter is just past. An annual reminder that evil does not have the last word—even when it looks to have had it. Jesus Christ rose from the grave, conquering death and having paid the price for sin. But it is not simply a past event. It is a picture of now and a promise for…
No GAA In heaven?
“Imagine there’s no GAA in heaven? I’d have to come back down again!” Was Marty Morrissey joking when he said those words in a recent interview with the Irish Independent? He probably was, but I’m pretty sure he was serious when he said: “Butterflies appeared in the church during the funeral when my mum died,…
The Plague of Clocks
Last summer I read an excellent book called Margin, about creating margin in our lives so that we aren’t running ourselves into the ground. Space to rest, to wind down, to think, space for the unexpected. We have become fixated on time. Everything has to be fast—we time things to the second. We move from…
“We are all a mess at some level.”
Those disarmingly honest words came from the mouth of the clinical psychologist Dr Tony Bates in conversation with Tommy Tiernan. Bates, founder of Jigsaw, has spent years working with young people facing mental health challenges. His comment might sound stark at first—but I found it refreshingly real. I wonder how you reacted to it. Did…
Baggage Can Kill
90 seconds: the difference between life and death; salvation and catastrophe. In the unlikely event of an emergency evacuation of an airplane, the crew’s goal is to get every single passenger out of danger and onto the ground before one and a half minutes is up. The target is taken very seriously. Before a new…
From despair to hope
“I was like a stone lying deep in the mud.” (Patrick’s Confession, para 12) Perhaps you know a little bit of what Patrick was talking about? Do you ever feel trapped, stuck, like there’s no escape, maybe your stomach in knots. I felt a bit like that for about 8 years after my mum lost…
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Milford RPC 