Gerard Fitzgibbon
-
männlich, 24,
15
- von Running from the gick, back in el stabbarino
- Profilaufrufe: 3.832
- Mitglied seit: March 2006
- Zuletzt aktiv: 7 Stunden her
- www.bebo.com/El_Blanco_Pele
- Ich über mich
- Yes, that was me on TV3 on Wednesday night.
For those of you disgusted by my performance and wish to ensure I never surface on national television again, download one of these forms and send them to the BCC. You have my full support.
http://www.bcc.ie/download_complaint...
- How much do I hate McIntyre this week?
- I won't lie, it's died down a bit. Of course that might have something to do with the fact that he left his hoodie at my apartment, and it's now being used as a cleaning instrument
- Rugby Rant
- Nope, no rant this week. How can you rant when Munster win the Heineken Cup, again? The karmic pool of rugby rage festering within me is as still as a lake in a dormant volcano.
Ooooooh
schließen Umfragen
schließen Blog
-
A rugby city writing history - Limerick Leader, November 20
A city and a culture had been bracing itself for an age, but from the moment the All Blacks stepped off the train at Colbert Station on Sunday we knew it was real. The thirty years since Christy Cantillon and Tony Ward wrote their verses of history had flown by. The mystique of the All Blacks had returned to Limerick. To be honest, it had never really left.
Under the East Stand of Thomond Park, where the path rises up toward the turnstiles, four men with mini billboards stuck to their backs holler at the top of their lungs.
“Ref talk. Get your ref talk radios. Come on, €10. Hear it as it happens. Ref talk. A recession busting €10. I’m practically giving them away.” It’s more than two hours before kick-off, but even now there’s just no escaping it - the sights and sounds of a rugby odyssey.
Red and black jerseys sit in every restaurant and squeeze out of every pub. Cars are abandoned as far back as O’Connell Street. A snowy terrier in a tiny Munster jersey trots ahead of his owner, heading away from the ground. “He’s all decked out, isn’t he?” she asks. Turn that pup around madam, we need all the support we can get.
“It’s going to be uphill, but we expected to lose in ‘78 so maybe its no harm that we expect to lose now,” says Kay Waters from Corbally as she passes the Treaty Stone.
A hot dog trolley is wheeled into view across from Thomond Villas, and Jason Casey parks up, opens up his little umbrella and lays out the mustard. He lost his job recently, and is chancing his arm at this carry on to try and get a bit of money for santa. “George Hook and all them are taking a defeatist attitude. You can’t be thinking that way, you have to back them to win. Limerick rugby fans are the best in the country, because they don’t just chase Munster around. They support the clubs too.”
When the roofs part up ahead, the topaz hue of Thomond Park snatches the night sky. Mike, Miriam and Mark Wells from Farranshone watch the crowds pass through Hassett’s Cross. They don’t have tickets either - they're just here for the atmosphere, to catch these little moments of history as they happen. “With all the bad news Limerick gets, it’s great for the city. But I don’t think they have a chance. Ivan Yates said he’d give anyone 12 to 1 on Munster to win. A bookie doesn’t doesn’t just throw those odds around,” says Mike.
But four minutes before half-time Tony Hodges, from Geraldine in New Zealand, is worried. Callum Feely from Timaru and Phil Doyle from Wellington aren’t looking much better. “Ye look rattled lads!” comes the shout from behind. Seconds later, Barry Murphy touches down in the corner and Munster take a 16-10 lead in at half time. “I knew I was worried for a reason.”
The three boys are part of the New Zealand minority in The Dugout, the pub under the East Stand for the great unwashed who came to Thomond Park without tickets. The match isn’t giving them too much contentment at the moment, but it’s a rare negative the touring kiwis have found in Limerick.
“This place is unbelievable,” says Callum. “We were drinking in Flannery’s earlier, when someone told us that there were actually four Flannery’s pubs in Limerick. When we heard that, we just had to go to the other three.”
Come the second half, Munster’s performance is impressing them as much as the free baskets of chicken wings and cocktail sausages. Tony’s face becomes a barometer of fear, peaking at what he describes as “80 per cent worry” for the All Blacks before Joe Rokocoko steals in for his winning try, and bottoms out at 15 per cent as Munster push for a desperate, last minute counter.
“What a game of rugby. What a game,” gasps Phil, as New Zealand flags are tossed up and down around the bar. “The Aussies wouldn’t give us that tough a go in the Bledisloe Cup.”
Afterward, the crowds poured out of the ground and melted back into yellow ni0 Kommentare 382 Tage
-
Some Mother's Son Part 2 - Richard 'Happy' Kelly. Limerick Leader, November 13
There was a way to him, the boy they called Happy. Everyone says it. He had these wild eyes and this disarming smile and he would take them everywhere.
When he was eleven he tried to break up a fight on the street in O’Malley Park. One of the other boys ran into a house, picked up a hurley and sliced Happy’s head open. His skull almost shattered from the swelling, and the nerve damage gave him a stammer for the rest of his life. That day, the paramedics caked his head in bandages but the cascading blood still turned his face a sickly red. But under it all, the first thing his mother saw was his smile.
That smile was with him every time he was marched in and out of the Children’s Court. It was there every other Sunday at Colbert Station, when he would beat back his tears, hug his grandmother goodbye and step back on the train up to Trinity House Youth Detention Centre. His smile was his shield.
Trouble, crime, smiles, love. These were the pieces of Richard Kelly. Even now, the boy who disappeared is everywhere. He is everywhere and he is nowhere.
--------------
Dusk. There’s a phone ringing but she won’t answer. Mary Kelly doesn’t trust phones anymore. For 18 months, that phone has tried to break her. One call would give her belief - some sighting or lead, some glimmer of hope that he’d be found - and the next call would knock it all away. Then it would start over. It was a brutal cycle and it had to end. Her brother Turlough deals with the phones now, and he swore that the only call that would ever reach her would be the one that brought her son home. And now her phone is ringing. But she won’t answer it. She can’t.
----------------
Richard was diagnosed with the learning disorder ADHD when he was nine. Was that the start of it? Maybe. It rubbed away his self-control and it made it impossible to teach him. He could learn just fine, but he had to learn on his terms.
When he was at Southill Junior School, he’d sit up with his mother on a Thursday night and drill his spellings, taking them in in short bursts, remembering each one with ease. Then he’d go into class on Friday morning and get three out of 20. His thoughts would freeze up in front of a test page. He’d get frustrated and confused, and that would breed mischief and mischief would breed trouble.
-------------
Still here, still ringing. She knows the name flashing up on screen, at least. It’s Tom O’Connor, the sergeant at Roxboro who’s been leading the investigation into Happy’s disappearance. Tom has been a pillar of straight-talking comfort and determination for months now. He’s ringing for a reason, she knows that much.
She took a call like this before, when Hap was 16. The voice on the other end told her he had gone through the windscreen of a crashed a car in Newport. She’ll never forget him in that hospital bed - tattooed with gashes with all these tubes coming out of him. A stranger brought her that news. She knows Tom. She wants him to tell her something else, something better.
-------------
He was expelled from John the Baptist school when he was in fifth class. They just couldn’t handle him. He was in St Kieran’s before, but he had to leave when he was diagnosed because they knew he needed specialised teaching. He couldn’t head back there. He was told to wait one year, and then he’d be old enough to go to St Enda’s Secondary School. The teaching he needed would be there for him.
So he waited. He walked the streets. He sat into empty cars and messed around with the steering wheels, a simple treat he’d been enjoying since he was a two-year-old and his legs could barely reach the end of the driver’s seat. But now he was big enough to press the clutch and now he knew how to take off the handbrake. He picked up the knack of starting them without the keys, learning to stay away from the newer ones with immobilisers. He learned the thrill of braking late and steering hard i0 Kommentare 389 Tage
-
Some Mother's Son Part 1 - Jeffrey Hannan. Limerick Leader, November 4
She couldn’t stay there. She couldn’t keep looking out that window every morning, just to remember the last time she saw her son alive. She didn’t want to keep reliving that moment, when she almost beckoned him in at 2am. She didn’t want to keep tracing that same path in her head, the one that teased in all directions before bringing her back to the same question.
Why didn’t I call him?
In the end, she couldn’t keep thinking that she could have saved him. That night, as Jeffrey stood beside the bonfire that threw a glow over O’Malley Park, Geraldine Hannan buried the urge to protect her son.
It was trust, really. She trusted that no harm would come to him that night. She had to. Jeffrey had lived most of his young life in a shell, but recently it had started to consume him more and more. He had broken up with Grainne, the mother of his little girl, and had slid towards depression. His pain was rooted and heavy, because he wanted her. He wanted to find a maturity beyond his 19 years and build a home for little Nikita.
He wanted more than just a life on the margins in Southill, so he brought his girlfriend and their child to Manchester, where he had grown up. For five weeks they struggled, trying to weld their young minds to the pressure and responsibility of making a family. It didn’t work, and it hit him hard.
So he came home and painted his days with the same sadness. He hid in his room, with just his thoughts and his Playstation for company. He would creep downstairs in the evenings to push some food around his dinner plate. He might share one glance or one word before running back upstairs, back to his solitude. There were no more smirky giggles, no more trips to the shop for his mother’s tea bags or his neighbour’s fags. He was in his shell again.
But that night was different. He leapt down the stairs with a euro in his hand. The lads were going for a few cans, and they were a euro a pop. He asked his mother for two more.
She still remembers. It was twenty to twelve, and three taps on the front door broke the silence. Jeffrey stood there, his face stretched by as wide a smile as she could remember. He had met Jade, a girl he went out with before Grainne, and seeing her already seemed to lift him out of his fog. He asked his mother if he could stay out with her a while, maybe rob a couple of fags until the morning. She had no problem. He would be out, he would happy. He would be Jeffrey again.
“He seemed so happy. It was the first night he went out since he came back. I said ‘that’s great now, go on and get on with your life’. Last I saw him, I got up to use the bathroom, and I could hear his voice. I looked out, and I saw him talking to somebody there by the fire. I was going to call him in, but I left him. He was just happy for the first time in so long.”
--------
Sometimes, if his body beats his alarm clock, Alan Hannan will sit up in bed and think. There’s a routine to his days now - there has been since he went back to his job with the Southill House Outreach Initiative in January. He does miscellaneous stuff, painting houses for single mothers and such. It’s good work, the kind of work where a man has to look beyond himself for his community. That’s helped; it’s given him the space and order he needed to wade through the despair that choked his family last winter.
But the mornings still bring that same, clear thought of Jeffrey. With his back propped against his bedroom wall, the dawn sun sneaking past his curtains, he’ll find a way to deal with it. Sometimes he’ll just rub his head and go back to sleep. Sometimes the pain gnaws so much that he has to go down to Mount St Oliver at 6am just be near him.
“I never thought I’d outlive him. Never.”
His routine means everything to him. He treasures that order and precision, because he knows how fragile it is. He took his daily cycle for granted once, but not anymore. Not since th0 Kommentare 389 Tage
schließen Whiteboard
schließen Kommentare
-
Brian McMahon45 Wochen herhttp://www.bebo.com/Profile.jsp?Memb...
look it up check it out and nail your colors to the mast!!!!! -
Dee Collins54 Wochen hercan't wait to get my crystal
how cum I don't get free stuff !!!
-
54 Wochen her
Ailbhe Timmons
its the best sofa in the world -ever - ! not much news here - though we had to listen to the match via the web yesterday - bit heart breaking- so wen will u be over to us?
-
Caroline Murphy55 Wochen herHey ger
how are you
you were very good on TV the other night you are a class act
<3
x
x
x
x -
Aishling Walsh55 Wochen heryep 12 pubs of xmas is defo still on! ive taken the month of Dec off to organise it!! by the way there is NO CHANCE of you getting to ring the bell!! Ive never even gotten the bell for friggin sake!! we must start recruiting!! and make up loads of new rules for the newbies!! n i will have loads of time on my hands to make up rules!! town sat for the rugby??
-
55 Wochen her
Aishling Walsh
hey dude, well done last nite! total pro, you were born for TV, however Julie says you've a face for radio!!! she had to say something to cover up her proudness!! loads of tears in da fitz household last nite!! i do believe youre the most famous person i no!! you better not think youre too gud to get pissed with us now!! i'll sell you stories bout Julie if you want, cause i have loads!!
-
Dee Collins55 Wochen her
all excited bout your tv debut??!
-
Niamh Walsh59 Wochen herHey Gerard havent heard from you in a while how s things?
-
Brian McMahon62 Wochen her
Whats going down Gibbon are we putting out this Friday night... I ve bought a new Lepard skin tong for the Party!!
-
Fiona Maher62 Wochen herafter not really being sure wha i wanted to do 4 ages i went back 2 limerick 2 finish my beloved eng n history degree, place wasnt the same without my drunk antics! last yr thank god feelin the pressure slightly tho this FYP stuff sucks ass!
glad to hear its a dishonest living, i really dont believe in this whole upstanding citizen stuff paying taxes....whats that about!
dont worry bout the eloquent conversation i was drunk enuv 4 the both of us so it was undoubtedly a most eloquent coversation indeedy!!!!
so how're things? -
Sinead Mansell62 Wochen herWhat in God's name does blaxpolitation mean?? Ye journalists with ye're big words!! Soiree would be one word I would used to describe our little gathering on Friday evening. The Cork ladies have let me down badly and will not be making an appearance! Will you be around? Is Mr McMahon going to show his face in Limerick?
-
Maureen O'Driscoll69 Wochen herHey!! Not fair trying to drag me down to your level of unproductiveness!!
-
Brian McMahon69 Wochen her
When are you doing a three page spread on the life of a recovering alcoholic, former listowel player trying to get back to the top of his game after a serious of career treatening injuries... It could be a blockbuster film !!!
-
HelenB70 Wochen herHello, should u be writing that on my bebo if it's a secret though??they may find out!! best of luck with the plan anyways though-hope it goes well for ya!! other interesting happenings in Limerick no??!!! yeah to b honest i'm not so much a fan of facebook either!! harder to use and with a lot less colours i find!!Apart from that, i am good! i'm still in dublin, law exams al done now so back to college in Sept to do the masters i should have done 2 years ago but was too busy thinkin a much more interesting career was gonna find me instead!! very excited about being a student again mind!! may even spend my spare time looking for an apprenticeshop! r finding an equivalent to the lodge and spending all my spare time there whichever really!!!
-
Niamh Walsh70 Wochen her
Well shithead. How s things with you? Much to report on limerick these days?
-
Sinead Mansell70 Wochen her
Was just sick of driving in and out. And obviously to be closer to you. That goes without saying!!! You still in Ballycummin?? Not that I'm stalking you or anything but I'm only about 5 minutes from there.
I reckon C would be a fairly safe bet. Nothing much planned for it. Going out in town on Sunday night. Quiet enough other than that now I reckon! -
Sinead Mansell70 Wochen her
How's it going Ger?? Our seats were not crap!! I take offense to that now!!! No news in financial services. Things are quiet up the top of O' Connell Street as well!! Did you hear I've made the big move and I'm now in Dooradoyle??
-
Megan H70 Wochen herGerard...
Greetings from Canada. How have you been? Looks like playing a lot of Rugby. Well, good for you. Not much new news except i'm getting married next year. Yep Pat and I are tying the knot!!! Crazy stuff! Anyways keep in touch bud. I often think about our crazy Canadian shinnanigans... -
71 Wochen her
MaggieB
Hey Geraldine
I won't lie to you I live on bebo since working from homw. Was gone all day yesterday, have to avoid the townfolk somehow went getting some vaccines, surfing, shopping then hung out with a certain male gentleman friend
minutes, before you puked in my hair!!!
Cara Murphy 0 AntwortenGer - the fundamental things he enjoys...
Aisling Moore 0 Antwortenhey Ger baby, hows life after college goin 4u?? i writn 2u from the poolside in hyannis,cape cod. got beachfront accomodation-tiz pretty nice.lookn for jobs now. hows all wit u? wat u up 2??
Jennifer H 0 Antworten