The new Garda recruitment campaign opened the other day and I’ve been reading the small print with interest. The slogan is ‘It’s a Job Worth Doing’, which is fine, but it has me looking out at the nettles at the bottom of the garden with a pang of worry. That’s a job worth doing too, but am I doing it?

Anyway, maybe it was the mild depression after the Munster final, or the pressure of my day job, but I looked at the campaign in some detail this year. The age limit for the guards is now 50, so if I act fast I could just about squeeze in under the wire like Indiana Jones on the hunt for a decent pension. Better still, The Garda Band is open to new members and applicants with musical experience are being actively encouraged. I have to say that my ears perked up when I read this. As frequenters to De Barras in the late 90s can testify, I can hold down a few chords on the guitar and if the next Garda band outing needs some Black Sabbath riffs, then that would be very much ‘a job worth doing’.

The only catch is you have to do the Garda training first. That’s 36 weeks in Templemore learning your spellings, doing speed checks on the back roads of Tipperary, hauling eejits out of bushes at closing time, all before you can so much as glance at the glory of the annual musical outing at The Rose Of Tralee.

My strategy for the interview would be to go in confidently with a list of demands. I’ll happily join your band of merry men and women, I’ll say, but I expect to move up the ranks quickly. You see, I’ve spent years quietly training and developing professional crimebusting expertise by watching copious amounts of true crime documentaries on Netflix. I don’t want to be wasting my time (or yours) up trees, saving cats, or stamping passport applications in some freezing Garda station in the back end of Buttevant. I expect a fast track to detective inspector grade, a posting in the Criminal Assets Bureau, a gun, a nice car and, ideally, a key role at the heart of bringing down an international drugs cartel. And did I mention I can play Stairway To Heaven?

Celebrating Sir David

I’ll be honest, I started seeing David Attenborough’s name everywhere last week and got very nervous that the great man had popped his clogs. He hadn’t. He turned one hundred on Friday, and they marked it with a do at the Royal Albert Hall called ‘100 Years on Planet Earth’, with messages from Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench, King Charles and Prince William getting up to say, ‘You have given us belief that positive change is still possible.’

Strong words from someone in the British royal family. The spiritual leader of England, Paddington Bear, also sent his best wishes.

And there was Sir David in the front row, looking quietly pleased and taking it all in.

What gives the whole thing its bittersweet edge is that the same week, Labour got an unmerciful pasting in the UK local elections which is still playing out for Starmer this week. Reform made huge gains, as did the Greens. Labour and the Conservatives are now shadows of their former selves.

One corner of British life was celebrating a man who’d spent a century making the case for the planet while many were voting against the very values he stood for.

We shouldn’t be so smug. Two by-elections are on the way in the coming weeks, in Galway West and Dublin Central, and Gerry The Monk Hutch is already sucking up a lot of the oxygen in the coverage.   

Manna row drones on

Down on the Marina in Cork city, the future has arrived, apparently. It’s loud, low and carries a burrito. Manna, the Irish drone delivery firm, has been operating out of the Marina Market (via heaven) since February, lifting food orders from independent restaurants and dropping them into people’s back gardens within minutes.

Locals have responded with a petition and two hundred-odd complaints to the Irish Aviation Authority. Cork City Council has now issued an enforcement letter, and Manna has until Friday to make its case.

A survey by Cllr Peter Horgan found 89% of respondents opposed the service, with peak disturbance landing between 5pm and 8pm. Manna’s defence rests on a Trinity study finding the aircraft are quieter than typical street traffic, although the people of Ballintemple appear unconvinced.

I remember a drone appearing over our house at one stage during COVID and the feeling of intrusion it caused. I called the guards and they said there were reports it was someone from the council ‘doing a survey’. Or some creep with a camera. Or the Russians. Either way, it stopped fairly lively once a few of us complained.

People won’t mind intrusion, if these drones are transporting life saving medicine, or blood, maybe even food to those that really need it. As with all new technologies, the rubber meets the road fairly quickly when real life humans get involved.

For the most part, we don’t want camera-equipped robot birds hovering over our gardens while we sunbathe. But there’s no doubt this amazing technology will play some part in future.

It might be a while yet, however, before we can get our flat whites flown out to Ardfield from Clon.