COLM TOBIN: I’m hugging my little ones a little tighter this week after horror in French town

THIS week I am in southeastern France in Annecy, where the great and good of European animation meet by the lakeside every year to chew the fat, do deals, and – let’s call a spade a spade here – come together in glorious surroundings to watch cartoons. 

I made the journey from the south of France by car at the weekend after dropping the family at Carcassonne airport, our 10 days away over and lots of happy memories in the bank.  

I hated leaving my small family at the airport to fly back to Dublin. It feels like a microcosmic representation of separations to come, perhaps – at some point, I’ll have to let my little ones off into the big bad world and there are times as a Dad where I don’t feel I’ll be equipped for it. 

It’s amazing how much being a parent makes you finally realise the sort of worries and sacrifices your own parents had to endure for you. Life is funny that way. 

This time, I was entrusting my wife and little beauties into the capable care of the Ryanair pilots, statistically a safer journey than the five-hour drive I was about to embark on across the French highways, but I hated doing it nonetheless.  One out of five stars – would not recommend. Of course, Annecy has made international headlines for very different reasons this last week. 

The little alpine town where Lake Annecy feeds into the Thiou river was rocked when a man with a knife entered a playground and randomly attacked toddlers, critically injuring four. 

In a not-so-different universe, we would have chosen to holiday in Annecy the week before the animation festival. How terrifying the world can be sometimes. Maybe that was playing on my mind as I hugged my kids before they happily trotted towards the security gates. 

The park where the playground sits is a postcard of European beauty and civilisation as I look across it now, just days after the attack. 

Life goes on almost as a rebuke to the evil that tried to insert itself here – families are gathered to swim in the lake, and cyclists of all ages and abilities fly by, doing tours of the wonderful lakeside bike routes. 

Much will be made of the man’s Syrian background no doubt, and the fact that he is a refugee, especially by a growing right-wing in France. 

But of course, there is nothing to suggest this is anything but a tragedy which further division will not fix. For the rest of this week, hundreds of attendees, including a big Irish contingent, will gather for a famous festival which celebrates animation for all audiences but which has a very special place for young children. How we make entertaining, educational, and inspiring work for them is a core concern of our industry. 

This week business will be done in a quieter way, with the atrocity here still fresh in our minds, but with a renewed sense of purpose. 

All ready to lance the boil

IN the States, things seem to be building to something truly terrifying on a political level, or the country is finally lancing the boil that is Donald Trump. 

This week, the Republican frontrunner in the next election became the first former president to be indicted on felony charges for mishandling classified documents. 

There is talk of nuclear codes sitting on a shelf in the shower and high-level security information scattered around Mar-a-Lago like takeaway menus. 

Don’t forget that this is an entirely separate matter to the other case against him, alleging his lawyer paid former porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about an alleged affair. 

I dunno, neither of these things sounds very presidential to me. It’s almost like voting in a former reality show star with a murky business past, a big orange head, and notions of being a ‘strong man’  leader was a really, really bad idea. But it could happen again. 

The real worry here is the slow creeping erosion of democratic norms in the most powerful country in the world, where the public and the media seem split into two mutually exclusive political silos, where truth and facts are things of the past that you might see in a Jimmy Stewart movie. 

Let’s hope for all our sakes that this is just a blip in political history, and we’ll look back on it as a period where social media made all of us go a bit ga-ga. 

I fear there are even more disruptive times ahead. 

Recalling joy of Teddy RIP

I WAS so saddened, as I’m sure everyone in Cork was, to hear about the untimely passing of Teddy McCarthy. Sometimes I’m disturbed by the way we elevate our GAA stars in this country, and it can be an overwhelming experience for some. 

It seemed that this was the case for Teddy, who left us all too soon. 

We couldn’t help deifying the man when we were small back in the ‘90s. 

A dual star in that amazing All-Ireland double-winning year of 1990, there was a way Teddy could compete in the air, the pure athleticism of it, that was god-like to us youngsters. 

Indeed, most of us spent the summer of 1990 trying to jump and field the ball like Teddy, hoping, and praying, that we could one day leap as high as him. 

I hope he had some realisation of the joy he brought to so many of us. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.