"MAKE no mistake about it,” President Joe Biden said, looking into the camera. “Putin killed Navalny.” And then, as if afraid we hadn’t heard, he repeated it more slowly: “Putin. Killed. Navalny!”
DÚLRA doesn’t make many home visits, but he made an exception for Pat Rice. The octogenarian former school teacher/politician noted linguist was given bird feeders as a Christmas present by his son and wanted some advice on how best to put them up.
SOME people think fairies don’t exist – but Dúlra can confirm that they are alive and well on the Belfast Hills. And here’s the photographic proof.
As they say, I am one of those people who ‘Wears Many Hats’, especially gardening ones! I work as the Community Outreach Manager at local organics recycling company Natural World Products producers of peat-free New Leaf Compost. I have the good fortune of visiting and helping many local community groups and schools around Northern Ireland through our Compost In The Community initiatives. Amongst the various elements of my work, I help with many rewarding growing journeys, whether by donating compost, providing horticultural knowledge or offering practical gardening assistance. Whilst being a Community Outreach Manager is my main job, I’m a part-time horticulture student at SERC and a horticultural training facilitator for the RHS Campaign for School Gardening. I also deliver teacher training in NI for those wanting to develop school gardens as valuable growing spaces and as places for pupils' well-being. Outside of all my compost in the community work, I grow lots of food and keep a few messy but productive allotments! Have you heard about No-Dig Gardening? Now is No Dig November, a new ‘trend’ or gardening term that ‘does what it says on the tin’ No digging required!
IT’S a Halloween horror so terrifying that it is still spoken about today, centuries later. And this week, as the clocks went back and the season of ghouls and ghosts came upon us, Dúlra found himself on an isolated and windswept Black Mountain where a terrible crime had once been committed on an innocent family.
THE tree was as old as Dúlra. It must have been planted in the back garden around the same time as he was born in the front room of the newly built house.
THIS week's Dúlra comes with a couple of fantastic images – and a remarkable story to end with.
THERE’S a revolution coming – and it will transform our lives like the industrial revolution did to our ancestors. It will involve something so basic in our lives that we barely question it – food. And according to one expert, if we don’t embrace this change, we could all be doomed.
WHY are some birds more nervous than others? Some, like the thrushes Dúlra watched this week, seem to be absolutely terrified.
OF all the jobs that Dúlra has turned his hand to over the years, there was one money-spinner that beat all the rest hands down. In fact, not a single potential customer refused to put their hands in their pockets for what was on offer – and things were just as tight on families all those decades ago as they are today.
FUTURE generations of local people will thank Aaron Kelly every day – and that’s not something you can say about many people. The work the 25-year-old has done and continues to do on our mountains is nothing short of phenomenal. This week he was leading a class from Coláiste Feirste in planting native trees on the bald, windswept slopes of Black Mountain, trees that will take hundreds of years to fully mature. What a legacy to leave.
IT looks like a speck of dirt on Dúlra’s finger, right, but this is a living, breathing creature that’s just set off on what will be an exciting and possibly short life.
SOMETIMES when nature is pushed to the brink and the outlook appears bleak, something miraculous happens. Suddenly some imperceptible change of circumstances contrives to act in its favour. And it explodes back into life. That’s what seems to have happened to some of our birds of prey. Yes, Ireland has lost many, including all our glorious eagles, which we shot. In Belfast a few smaller species managed to cling on like shipwrecked survivors holding on to a life raft. Sparrowhawks that nested in the wooded crevices of our hills still occasionally went on raids in city gardens. And the kestrel would still hover above our motorway grass verges hunting for small mammals. But they too were under relentless pressure. Kestrels got all but wiped out when we poisoned our rodents. The tiny falcon disappeared from the city about a decade ago, another victim or people’s careless self-interest. But they didn’t vanish entirely, they just became reclusive and retreated to the hidden recesses of the hillsides. And on the quarry faces that still scar our mountains from Carnmoney to White Mountain, they bred. Last year, one even bred on an old forgotten quarry face just off the Antrim Road. Dúlra was able to sit in the car and watch the young leave the nest.
WHEN the old woman died and her family began to clear out the house, they never expected to find this: a dead swift snuggled neatly into a teacup in the bedroom. Bizarre certainly, but there was more – they were to find another dead bird in the same bedroom, this time inside a wardrobe. The big Victorian red-bricked house near Antrim is exactly the sort of place that swifts would be attracted to. If anyone would know what had happened, then Mark Smyth, swift expert beyond compare, would surely know. But even he was stumped this week. “I knew the lady who lived there for 40 years,” mark told Dúlra, “but she had dementia for a long time before she died and then her daughter found these two birds in one of her bedrooms. “We can only guess that the birds somehow found their way into the bedroom and flew around in a panic. One got into the wardrobe and couldn’t get out, while the other landed on the cup and couldn’t get back out.” The bird in the cup had been dead so long that it was mummified -– made up totally of feathers, the flesh long gone. When the bird was lifted out, it remained curved. It had obviously been there for many years. Swifts only touch land to breed, and that could be three years after they leave the nest as chicks. Touching down is riddled with danger as they’re so aerodynamic that they can’t get airborne from a standing start. One once came down in Dúlra’s garden when he was a lad and he had to fling it back into the air and it flew off unharmed.
WOULDN’T it be something if you could condense the essence of Ireland into a single object so small you could keep it with you to admire and take inspiration from? It’s hard to imagine if that would even be possible, but that was the challenge facing acclaimed West Belfast-based artist Farhad O’Neill. And it wasn’t as if he could choose his own materials. Because this was as unique and unusual a commission as he had ever been asked to undertake. The story began 40 years ago just after Jake Mac Siacais was released from prison. He was spending time down south and before returning he decided to take something as a reminder of that time and what had happened there. Dúlra might have bought a rock or even a snow globe, but Jake decided to pick up... a piece of turf! He brought it back to his Belfast home and there it sat, soon to be joined by another, and another. It took four decades, but he managed to get a piece of peat from every county in Ireland, and all at a time when something significant was happening in that county. “I didn’t quite know what I was going to do with them,” Jake said this week. But soon he thought: what if someone could make a single piece of art from all 32 pieces? And the perfect guy happened to have just recently opened a workshop in West Belfast’s Gaeltacht Quarter: Farhad O’Neill. Farhad returned to the city he loves after spending 17 years in Canada caring for his parents. Before that he had worked for years out of Conway Mill and his public art is scattered throughout West Belfast, including the bronze statue of Cú Chulainn at the Mill and stone sculptures at Aitnamona and Monagh Road. And so Jake asked Farhad if he would accept the challenge. This week Farhad unveiled the result of his toil: a beautiful black ‘statue’ that encases not just Irish mythology, but in some ways, through the turf, Ireland itself. “There are loads of stories in that piece, stories from every county,” Jake said as he unveiled the sculpture in his Gaeltacht Quarter office. “They were just small pieces of turf, but three of them were bigger than the others which I got from the places associated with the triple goddesses of Ireland – Banba, Fódhla and Ériu in Newgrange, Cruachán in Connacht and Emain Macha in Armagh. “The three sisters are one person, but they have different aspects. When she’s Ériu, she’s the Earth goddess, when she’s Fódhla, she’s the mother of the country and when she’s Banba, she’s the goddess of war. And Banba out of the three of them is particularly apt – she is able to shiftshape into different guises and her most famous representation is on Cú Chulainn’s shoulder as a raven on that statue at the GPO.” With those challenging criteria, Farhad set to work. He put the three ‘goddess’ pieces of turf to one side and ground the others into powder so they could be moulded into an ogham stone, a miniature version of those mysterious standing stones with messages in an ancient script which still dot our countryside. “I worked the three bigger pieces into three faces,” Farhad said. “The face of Ériu was more of a mother figure, Fódhla was the only sort of feminine piece, and Banba was more like Cú Chulainn.” He added: “It’s Gaelic, it’s also modernist and it’s cubist,” he said, referring to the early 20th century movement where objects are broken up and reassembled in abstract form.The ogham script on the side of the sculpture reads ‘Éigse’, which has various meanings, said Jake. “It means a learned assembly, which is the three goddesses. It also means wisdom and poetry.”