COLM TOBIN: If the Lovely Girls were on the telly ‘summer’ must be over!

IT’S the ‘end of summer’ feeling. The Lovely Girls competition has just finished on the telly, the kids are preparing to go back to school and there’s a hint of autumn in the air.

This is especially true here on Dublin’s Northside with leaves all over the ground after Storm Betty.

The return to school will be welcomed in this house.

Bedtimes have drifted later and later over the summer period. We started out in June like a fully functioning Germanic auto factory – rigid, productive and disciplined – but these days we’re more like a commune of Ailihies hippies from 1973.

Kids are wandering around the place at all hours, I don’t know who owns half of them.

Almost everyone has developed dreadlocks and we’re all quietly relishing the return to normality in September.

Let’s be honest, though, the summer never quite happened, did it? We’re owed at least a month of fine weather, right?

Here’s lookin’ at you October!

Tables turn on the banks

THE last thing we expected this week was a bank run. It felt like 2008 all over again with lads rushing to their ATMs to take out other people’s money, only this time it was the punters trying to rob the banks and not the other way around.

There was a time when you’d need at least a second-hand digger to do the job, but these days all you need is a technical glitch, it seems.

When rumours began circulating last week that you could get €1,000 in free money out of your Bank of Ireland account, you had chancers all over the country emerging into the streets like rodents onto Ballyrisode beach, trying their luck to grab some filthy lucre.

As became apparent fairly quickly, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and if AIB is backing brave, Bank of Ireland is definitely not about to start backing ‘dumb as all hell’. The punters were warned they’d have to pay it all back or their credit rating would go the way of the English rugby team.

Still, it’s not a good look for Bank of Ireland, and in general, our pillar banks are absolute laggards when it comes to tech and customer service.

I do all my personal banking with a German online bank these days – the technology is far better, the fees are far more straightforward and I get travel insurance thrown into the mix too. I voted with my feet in the end.

There is certainly an important place for our domestic banks, and I still lean on them heavily for business purposes, but they are all going to have to seriously start putting the customer ahead of the shareholder.

This latest outage and furore was merely a symptom of a deeper malaise. These institutions are meant to be for us, remember, not there to simply satisfy shareholders with more eye-watering dividends.

With our mortgage rates far higher than our European neighbours and our savings rates far lower, it seems we are always only offered the worst of all worlds when it comes to banking.

The Irish banks will find out sooner rather than later that, despite all the muppets queueing for free money, most Irish consumers are far too savvy and financially literate to put up with these standards for much longer.

They need to up their game considerably or they will soon go the way of the Lovely Girls competition.

Dark side of the Moon

I FELT a bit of what the Germans call nostalgie when I saw the news report of the Russian first space mission in 47 years smashing into the surface of the Moon.

Nostalgie is a term that emerged in the 1990s to describe a sense of longing and nostalgia for the era before the collapse of the Communist Bloc. I know the war is a disgrace, and that Putin is a langer of the highest order, but I feel for all the great Russian cosmonauts and scientists who have spearheaded their space work in years gone by. This new international embarrassment, their latest display of incompetence, feels somehow sad to me.

Showing that there is no time for dawdling in the space race – no sooner had the Russian trip to the dark side of the Moon failed, than India’s had begun. And this week they became one of just four nations to make a soft landing on the lunar surface, the other three being the US, Russia and China.

Let’s hope they can now find some water and develop a base there so we become the fifth nation to land. I presume we’ll send up a shuttle with a flat-pack Irish pub.

The Indians might be Brian Blessed’s only chance of getting there now. He appeared on Newsnight last week and told of how he has been undergoing space training for years with the Russians, and is now a fully-certified cosmonaut.

‘My biggest love in life is space’, he roared during an interview with presenter Kirsty Wark. ‘I’ve done bloody everything. I’ve been to the North Pole, I’ve been to the Lost World. I’ve been to these places, for Christ’s sake, and I want to get up,’ he said, pledging to become the oldest man in space. It seems the Loudest Man On Earth title isn’t enough.

Fair play to Hannah

IN my column last week I erroneously said that Hannah Tyrell had given birth seven weeks prior to the All-Ireland final when it was, in fact, her wife who had given birth to their baby. That was a bit clumsy and presumptuous, on my part. I can see how these sorts of media portrayals can often help create unrealistic expectations for new mothers, though, so hands up on that one.

Although having said all that, I know that when I was a birth partner, I wouldn’t have stood much chance of playing and  winning in an All-Ireland seven weeks after the event so my admiration for Ms Tyrell’s achievements still stands.