I was born in Galway to a Cork woman and a Clare man (who met in Waterford), and we collectively emigrated to North Mayo before my twelfth birthday. I’ve previously established my fundamental lack of sporting fan credentials despite a feeling I would like to be a true believer. If asexual can be a word, then perhaps I’m just asporting.

It was therefore to no one’s greater surprise than my own that I found myself a couple of Sundays ago charging the car in a petrol station in Banbridge glued to the live broadcast of the Mayo-Kerry All-Ireland Senior Football Final from Croke Park.

Even though I hadn’t seen the 75 years of the curse as my burden to carry, I must admit to feeling a growing sense of camaraderie with the folks from my adoptive county in recent years as the team and county seemed starved of a well-deserved win.

Including the 2016 replay, the county played 9 final games in the past 20 years, so have suffered difficult odds in the modern era. With this year’s historic win Mayo now have four wins out of fifteen appearances.

The only competitive match I’ve attended in Croke Park was the 1993 Mayo–Cork football semi-final – not that far into the 2^nd half of the curse period. I was gifted a ticket to accompany a young Crossmolina friend and his buddy safely to and from Connolly train station. The match ended with a 20-point loss for Mayo. At least my mother’s people were happy.

Sunday 26^th July was an altogether different affair where even Sisyphus eventually got the boulder up the hill. At the final whistle, I was left with a massive sense of joy, surprise and relief as Mayo overcame the odds. The release of joy from and for Mayo people has been truly uplifting, even catching a little bit of it from my own friends and acquaintances who know I’m “from” Mayo.

The star performance by Kobe McDonald (among others) caught my attention, as he is a young man whose home club is Deel Rovers in Crossmolina.

My summer job for a few years in the mid-80s was to work in an electrical retailer in Ballina. Robert Marsh was the owner and subsequently a great friend and mentor, and was heavily involved in Deel Rovers for many years as evidenced by the obituary the club included in their newsletter after his untimely death during the Covid lockdown in 2020.

He was also instrumental in my only performance on a GAA pitch (at Deel Rovers) in mid-1986.

The idea was a fundraiser and Guinness World Record attempt at the longest continuous game of Gaelic football (for a total of 75 hours). Amazingly, a quick Google surfaced this kickback TikTok video with a little cameo of Robert and a number of other faces that bring back warm memories from forty years ago (nothing is forgotten on the Internet: I’m pretty sure it was one of the Connor brothers in the video that came to that 1993 semi-final with me and Robert’s son Rodney.).

@irishdailytimesWorld Record attempt by Crossmolina GAA, Mayo #fyp #crossmolina #mayo #stephenrochford #jimtynan #gaelicfootball #gaa #irelandtiktok #irishdailytimes #foryou

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With sub-zero footballing skills, I was called in to make up the numbers in the wee hours of the morning and to hang around later for the closing celebrations when Brendan Shine played in the rain on the back of a covered articulated lorry. Great excitement indeed.

The World Record attempt was long forgotten in my memory until that recent Mayo win, but likely an example of the many community and fundraising events that take place year-in, year-out to improve facilities and the standard of play throughout Ireland.

Maybe in hindsight, I can take heart in having a little bit more Mayo in me than I give myself credit for.

Sending the best to those in Crossmolina, Ballina and further afield.

Maigh Eo Abú

I’ve previously explored Ireland’s census records through tracing the Emperors of Knockafurtig in North Cork (here and here). It’s a “small” surname in my family tree that proves relatively easy to track.

Up to this year the only Irish censuses widely available were those from 1901 and 1911. The ten-year cycle was interrupted by the Irish War of Independence and subsequent Civil War, delaying a subsequent census for 15 years until Sunday April 18^th, 1926.

In the meantime the world had seen the First World War, the Spanish Flu epidemic, the Russian Revolution, and closer to home the 1916 Rising and the formation of the Irish Free state: an action-packed 15-year period.

The commitment to those people participating in a census is that the individual survey data will not be made publicly available for a century. The aggregated data is used to plan public services and other civic needs, and now a century later the general public get to see these Irish households as at 1926, for the first time.

This data is searchable here on the National Archives.

There are ten Emperors in the immediate area now versus sixteen in the 1911 census.

The first household on the list is that of my great-grandmother’s first cousin Patrick and his wife Hannah (age 60). Sadly Hannah’s death is recorded later that year on 5^th December 1926 and we can be certain that none of the people on this list are still alive today: a reminder that there is a story behind every line on this page, and that each of our existences will be condensed into such a summary in years to come, keeping little of the nuanced richness we experience in life.

The next household of my great-grand uncle John Emperor and his wife (also Hannah) together with four children and Patrick Ellis, a visitor on the night.

The “Form B” associated with these household entries gives a sense of the immediate neighbourhood. The Boys and Girls national school was run by my maternal grandmother’s father John Duggan and his wife Bridget (Form 16). We can see Patrick and John Emperor’s households (Form 17 & 20) and that of my paternal great-grandmother Margaret Riordan’s (nee Emperor, sister of John) (Form 18). She had lost my great-grandfather William in October 1922, so appears as Head of Household on this occasion.

This is a snippet of the family tree showing Margaret Emperor and her siblings Hannah, Catherine and John.

My maternal grandmother’s father and mother who run the local two-room primary school are still here with two of their children Charles and Nora (also a teacher in the school). My grandmother Ellen is missing, possibly off in Limerick training to be a teacher when she later takes over from her parents and teaches alongside Nora. I tried searching for a 20-22 year-old Ellen or Eileen Duggan in the census but didn’t find any good matches anywhere in Ireland so wonder if she was out of the country, perhaps visiting other siblings who have emigrated to the US.

My maternal grandfather William lives closeby, working on his mother’s farm alongside his brother Daniel and sister Hannah. There were 14 children overall. At least two died in infancy. Quite a number of the family are already in the United States at this stage. William will head there for a short stay in a few years before returning to court and marry my grandmother.

There were no remarkable discoveries in this short foray into the 1926 data other than a stark reminder of the passage of time, those people who were no longer around since the 1911 survey: those that had died, those that had emigrated. The constant stream of arrivals and departures being a fact of life.

Secondly I’m struck by this act of the fledgling Irish State getting on with its own census to allow it to begin to plan for the future of the people under its care.

Why not dive in and discover for yourself?

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a blog post. I spent the first half of 2025 working on a thesis, and while grinding through it I kept a long list of blog topics I was excited to return to once it was done. Somehow that enthusiasm waned as I wound down over the summer.

In my psychotherapy practice I’ve penned a few posts on different topics (often ADHD-related), but I made the mistake of submitting my early drafts to ChatGPT, which regularly turned them into cleaner prose. Later I found that if I gave some thought to the main themes and ideas I wanted to get across, an LLM could produce a “good enough” (if not “really good”) attempt in less than a minute. That serves the purpose when a simple message needs to be shared — and it takes the joy out of writing for the sake of it. Maybe it’s like naturally occurring versus industrial diamonds: one embodies randomness, flaws and tectonic pressure; the other is perhaps a little too perfect. Both get the job done where a super-hard substance is needed, and the latter at a fraction of the cost of the former. (A little Googling answered the question that arose at this point, via an AI overview drawing on Encyclopaedia Britannica: no, industrial diamonds are not used for engagement rings — they are too flawed, poorly coloured, irregularly shaped or opaque to appeal as gemstones, and are reserved instead for heavy-duty manufacturing and cutting tools.)

[Note: the graphic in this article is AI-generated but the words are all mine. I’ll use AI to find typos and inconsistencies on the other side.]

The recent Gen-AI revolution

This time four years ago I was preparing to give up a full-time career in Enterprise IT. Artificial Intelligence, in the form of Machine Learning, was already a regular feature of Enterprise IT discussions at that point, largely focussed on predictive or propensity modelling: how likely are these people, with those products, to buy another product or to stop using this one?

So far, so boring.

Then, in November 2022, OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world, making a capable Large Language Model (LLM) widely accessible for free and driving the most rapid ascent to 100 million users ever seen. Interest in the topic “Generative AI” quite literally exploded out of nowhere in the aftermath of that launch, as the Google Trends chart below shows.

Google Trends Topic “Generative AI” Explore - Google Trends

Had I fully retired from IT, I would still have been aware from the mainstream press that AI (the shorthand by which most folks mean Generative AI, or GenAI) was making massive waves across a variety of industries.

In practice I continued to do sporadic assignments with the innovation unit of a Life Assurance company — and, unsurprisingly, innovation right now has become fused with all things AI.

In spring 2023 we started to play with OpenAI’s API access to their models, preferring the Azure-hosted instances for greater control over data privacy and residency. These models were amazing yet primitive. As we began using them to extract structured data from scanned documents or perform basic reasoning against medical or industry knowledge, they surprised us at times with their capability — and at other times with how they “missed” simple things.

The concepts we would come to know with more familiarity — evals, guardrails and the other controls needed to deal with the probabilistic nature of LLM responses — had not yet been formalised as they now have. We had to wait for innovations that would come later, such as tool invocation, and for a while a joke everyone understood was that LLMs were bad at sums and at counting the number of Rs in the word strawberry. They were also somewhat likely to tell fibs, in the form of hallucinations.

We figured out a number of basic patterns in those early days (three years ago) that have served us well ever since. The LLMs, however, have evolved to the point where those early GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models feel more like machine code or assembly language, with the current state-of-the-art deeper-thinking models resembling a full-fledged 4GL by comparison.

The progress here has been faster than any other technical advance in the forty-or-so years I worked in Enterprise IT. For most of that time we were used to a significant new version or cycle of capability every three years. In Generative AI it has been more like every three to six months — either a significant uplift in model capability, or new layers and frameworks that make harnessing that capability easier for mere (enterprise) mortals.

Hail Claude

One thing that felt certain in 2023 was that OpenAI had stolen a march on everyone. It seemed ironic that Google employees had authored the Transformer paper (the “T” in GPT) that made all of this possible, that OpenAI had leaped significantly ahead, and that Microsoft had sewn up scaled hosting through its exclusive partnership and co-ownership — and that was it, end of story.

It felt like other offerings were going to be like search engines that aren’t Google: interesting, but not great. And just when it looked like that was that, along came DeepSeek, Google Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude (among a growing cast of players). OpenAI’s competitive moat, it turns out, is not quite what it appeared only some months ago.

On top of the models themselves there has been significant innovation in the harnesses that sit around them: code and frameworks that build on the primitive capability of a single prompt, chaining prompts together or orchestrating them as an “agent” to solve more complex problems.

The routine automation of coding tasks is an area of massive LLM usage and investment, with lots of success stories and some salutary tales.

Most of my hands-on work with Python and LLMs slowed down a couple of years ago (and of course, if we were starting now, we’d have far more support from the LLM coding tools to build more rapidly, and perhaps with more finesse). I got what I needed from a small number of prompting patterns.

So, reading the press around Claude Code and then Claude Cowork, I wondered whether all the hype was justified. Two recent experiments gave me my answer.

Resident Survey

I live in a large housing estate of around 400 dwellings. As part of the board of management we run surveys from time to time and take action based on the feedback. It is also useful to compare scores for different elements of the service with previous surveys.

One of the tasks I personally undertake is to post the SurveyMonkey survey, analyse the results and produce an update in varying detail for the board and the residents. This also involves classifying feedback and comments into themes.

I’ve done it a couple of times manually, and while it is time-consuming, it’s work I easily tune into — a comfortable rabbit hole with some flow to it.

Having cancelled my OpenAI monthly subscription and replaced it with Claude, I was looking for something useful to test Cowork on. The survey closed on Friday night. When I got home from the gym on Saturday morning, I opened Cowork, pointed it at last year’s folder — the survey responses, my manually written Word docs, the PowerPoint report — and at this year’s survey, and asked it to do something similar for this year.

I ran off for a shower and came back fifteen minutes later.

Claude Cowork had read and assimilated last year’s data and my analysis, parsed and analysed this year’s results, and produced a decent comparative analysis and assessment.

It had written a fifteen-slide deck, a board summary paper and a residents’ newsletter. I didn’t use them all as-is, but it did a fit-for-purpose job in minutes. This was not heart surgery, but it was impressive nonetheless.

Separately, I had it classify individual resident queries and issues into buckets, and it did a good job of editing spreadsheets and adding new columns with that information.

This type of Cowork “harness” is a game changer: no longer uploading files and content into a web browser, but having it work locally — often seamlessly generating hidden Python scripts and background tasks that do the data analysis and parsing.

It gave me serious food for thought about the leap between the early 2023 LLM capabilities and the evolution of those same capabilities beneath a clever harness.

World Cup fever

Six of us in our house decided to run a World Cup scoring competition.

Two of our number were remote and trust was low, so there was an insistence that the draw (eight teams each) be hand-picked out of a bag rather than randomly generated by computer.

My daughter dutifully hand-wrote all 48 team names, cut up the paper, and the teams were drawn.

I then took photos of each person’s cluster of team names and uploaded them to Claude. These were mine (I don’t like to moan, but I felt I got a raw deal — something quickly proven in the odds analysis).

I then asked Claude to give a sense of the odds of each person’s group of teams winning the World Cup. It generated a React page with some interactive capabilities.

Confirming my lousy odds, based on FIFA rankings

Tara ended up with both Spain and Argentina, so she is playing against herself in tonight’s final! This led to a family row as to whether we had committed €10 or €5 each to the pot. There are still some things AI can’t solve… fortunately.

As each day of the competition proceeded, I’d go back into the same chat and type “Update”, generating a fresh leaderboard through the knockout rounds.

We asked Claude to spice things up by tracking knockout-round points alongside overall points (I tanked on both!).

And it was easy to ask for the latest odds of each family member winning.

All-in-all a simple, tailored tracker for our family World Cup experience for virtually no effort.

What does all of this mean for life and work?

One of the novels I read on a recent holiday was Ken Follett’s The Armour of Light, set in a fictional English town in the late 1700s. The book weaves in the story of the Luddites: weavers and other artisans, displaced by machinery, who raided factories to destroy the equipment taking their jobs. They were opposed, naturally, by the business owners who could now produce more product, more cheaply — and, in effect, by the end customers who benefited from the cheaper goods.

It felt very relevant to our times, and to talk of an AI “jobpocalypse”: the idea that mass global unemployment may result from AI job displacement. I can’t see the general public easily getting inside faceless data centres to destroy the LLMs where they operate, but unrest is not hard to imagine. Curiously, and atypically, the displacement looks set to impact white-collar workers, who have been somewhat immune to the industrial automation advances of the 20th and 21st centuries so far.

For me, the jury is still out. I read an article by Andrew Ng this morning suggesting that AI-partnered humans are likely to be more effective, better paid, and living more fulfilling working lives. That feels like a good outcome to me — and one that tracks well with my experience of new technology arriving from the 80s onwards.

However, while that may be true at a macro level, across the workforce as a whole, pain is experienced at an individual level — and this is going to be a period of intense change and learning, demanding an appetite for adopting new skills and letting go of old ones.

In the meantime, I need to redouble my writing efforts and ignore the gnawing feeling that Claude or ChatGPT could churn out something more compelling in a fraction of the time. But where is the soul in that? AI will no doubt challenge some of the ways we find meaning.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. This older dog is hoping to learn a few new ones each week for some time to come — and to keep writing the naturally occurring kind of prose: flawed, shaped under pressure, and all mine.

A Curious Beginning

When I was growing up, my dad used the spare bedroom as his office — a place overflowing with papers, bills, and business magazines. I often rifled through the piles, fascinated by this mysterious adult world.

Among the payslips from AIB, one deduction caught my eye: Superannuation.

“Dad, what’s Superannuation?” I asked, aged fourteen.
He explained it was money taken from his salary each month to fund a pension — income he’d receive when he stopped working. The idea that you could save now and get it back later intrigued me.

Not long after, my father retired on ill-health grounds in his forties. His pension became our family’s financial lifeline, and after his passing in 2019, my mother continues to receive a portion of it. I didn’t realise then how deeply that word, superannuation, would thread through my own life.

My First Encounter with the Pension World

A few years later, I landed a trainee programmer job at Irish Life — a stroke of luck that launched me into the financial world. At 17 (and a half — important for pensions, apparently), I learned that contributing 6% of my salary could one day entitle me to as much as two-thirds of my final pay as a pension.

It all felt distant — like a long version of the Marshmallow Test — but my father’s experience made it real enough to take seriously.

Working at a life insurance company, I began to glimpse how the system worked. The Pensions Act of 1990 changed everything: employees could no longer simply cash out their contributions when leaving a job. Instead, their pension rights had to be preserved and protected from inflation — a small but vital shift that made pensions more portable and secure.

After six years, I moved on, leaving behind a small Defined Benefit (DB) entitlement — a scheme where your employer promises a set income for life. My next role introduced me to Defined Contribution (DC) pensions — where what you get depends on investment performance.

The difference between the two couldn’t be starker: one offers certainty; the other, possibility.

💬 “Defined Benefit pensions were wonderfully simple for employees — but dangerously expensive for employers.”

The Golden Promise — and Its Decline

For employees, DB pensions were beautifully straightforward: work long enough, and you’d receive a guaranteed income for life.

For employers, though, they became a financial burden. As people lived longer and accounting rules required pension liabilities to appear on company balance sheets, many schemes became unsustainable.

The result? DB schemes were gradually closed or frozen, replaced by DC plans that shifted the risk to the saver. Today, only a small and shrinking number of public servants still enjoy true defined-benefit protection.

The Gift (and Curse) of Longevity

When I joined Irish Life in 1988, a man reaching 65 could expect to live another 13 years. Today, that figure is closer to 19 years.

That’s six extra years of payments that most pension schemes weren’t designed to cover — like booking a €5,000 holiday only to discover it now costs €7,500, and you’re not sure when you’ll return.

Longer lives are, of course, a gift. But they stretch pension systems to breaking point. No one in the 1950s foresaw the leaps in healthcare and living standards that would push life expectancy this high. Each extra year of life adds enormous cost — both to the state and to individuals funding their own retirements.

Ireland’s Modern Dilemma

Ireland faces a twin challenge: an ageing population and a housing crisis.

Younger people are spending more of their income on rent or mortgages, leaving less room for long-term saving. Yet the state needs those same workers to save, as the ratio of retirees to workers continues to shrink.

The over-65 population has grown 23% since 2019 and is expected to double by 2050. Meanwhile, only two-thirds of workers aged 20–69 have any supplementary pension, and among those in their early twenties, it’s just 27%.

To tackle those with no supplementary pension saving, the government plans to introduce My Future Fund in 2026, an auto-enrolment pension scheme where workers without an existing plan are automatically signed up, with employers and the state contributing too.

It’s a long-overdue reform — but not without flaws.

My Future Fund: Progress with Caveats

Under My Future Fund, every worker’s contribution is topped up by 25%, regardless of income level.

That’s great for lower-rate taxpayers, but it’s a step back for higher earners who currently receive 40% tax relief. The scheme also lacks flexibility:

• No option to vary contributions as life circumstances change (make up for time off, maternity leave etc)

• No Additional Voluntary Contributions (AVCs)

On the plus side, it opens pension saving to thousands of workers who never had access before. And the annual management fee is capped at 0.1%, far below the average 0.8% charged by private providers.

This may pressure the wider market to reduce costs in a no-frills product, but its “one-size-fits-all” model could limit long-term appeal for those seeking more flexible solutions who are prepared to pay more for it.

Colm Fagan, a leading campaigner in this space, and former president of the Society of Actuaries in Ireland, has fought hard to paint this as a lost opportunity and proposed a novel award-winning framework that would have seen a level of smoothing and management of the retirement payout phase after the saving phase.

Saving for the Long Haul

Pension saving is an act of delayed gratification. You give up a little today to gain a lot later. But for many, it’s hard to visualise. Saying “save €500 a month for 40 years” doesn’t sound the same as “this will buy you €20,000 a year for life.”

Defined Benefit pensions expressed retirement income in simple, relatable terms — a percentage of final salary. Defined Contribution schemes, by contrast, demand that we think in terms of capital and drawdown rates. That’s a harder mental leap, and one reason pension participation remains stubbornly low.

💡 “Superannuation isn’t just about money — it’s about preparing for life beyond paid work.”

The Snowball Effect

Data from the Central Bank of Ireland shows that most household wealth still sits in housing and deposits, with only a modest share in pensions or equities.

Deposits are “safe” but barely outpace inflation. Long-term investment in diversified funds and equities carries more risk — but also far greater growth potential.

The key ingredient is time.
If you invest €100,000 for 30 years:

• At 1% annual growth, it becomes €134,000

• At 5% annual growth, it becomes €432,000

That’s the magic of compounding — and the reward for patience.

Closing Reflections

Superannuation, that strange word from my father’s payslip, has come to mean more than just retirement saving. It’s about foresight, self-reliance, and trust in a system that must evolve as we do.

The state pension, around €15,000 per year, will likely become harder for the state to sustain as the ratio of retirees to workers increases. Private and occupational pensions will play an ever-larger role in keeping Ireland’s retirees secure.

If you haven’t reviewed your pension recently, seek qualified advice. Ask what options you have, what fees you’re paying, and whether your money is working as hard as you are.

We can’t predict the future — but we can plan for it.
Superannuation is, ultimately, a promise to your future self.
And that’s a promise worth keeping.

The term superannuation has fallen out of common use in Ireland but remains the default in Australia.

Back at the end of 2022, I wrote about our household journey towards becoming an all-electric home as we installed solar panels, replaced our gas-fired central heating system with an air-to-water heat pump, retired the gas hob for induction and went all-in on electric cars.

The data nerd in me was looking ahead a couple of years wondering how this would all work out and what might the qualitative and quantitative outcomes look like. It’s hard making a decision without being sure in advance what you’re going to get, and whether it will be a good or bad idea in the rear-view mirror.

This article is the one I would like to have read back in 2021 when we were planning our changes: a real-life case study on how all of this pans out in practice in terms of cost and electricity consumption.

Our house is 240 m2, and hosts 5 grownups*, 3 cars (2 electric as per this article) and since our refurbishment is consistently cosy most of the time.

Big Picture

Our annual household electricity usage for 2019 was roughly 6000 kWh (or units). Alongside that we used c. 16000 kWh of gas for central heating and domestic hot water.

In late 2019 we were paying a flat rate of just over 19 cents per electricity unit (including VAT) and 6.3 cents per unit of gas. This was pre-Covid, pre-Ukraine war and ignores the fixed daily standing charges that apply to gas and electricity supply.

In mid-2022, our gas-fired central heating system was replaced by a Kronoterm Adapt air-to-water heat pump system, and we have been running two electric vehicles (the first from early 2020, and second from March 2022). The EV and heat pump usage data is taken from the Wallbox charger and Kronoterm Cloud platforms respectively, the balance of electricity usage is deemed “other”, which should be broadly equivalent to our previous household usage (with the exception of a move from a gas hob to electric induction hob).

Our total domestic electricity usage in 2024 was in the region of 16000 kWh, with a similar number in 2023 (albeit with a roughly 20% less EV usage year-to-year).

The solar panels installed in late 2021 met roughly 12% of the power demand during 2024 vs 17% in 2023.

In simple terms our much improved heating (and domestic hot water) setup, costs about as much again to run as our previous annual electricity bill (any maybe 25% more than the previous gas solution but with greater comfort levels). Two cars doing a combined average of 27,000 km requiring an average of 4400 kWh per year (16.3 kWh/100km) ignoring public charging on relatively rare long journeys.

So, we are using a lot more electricity than we did in the past, but have eliminated our direct use of natural gas for heating and cooking, and of fossil fuels to run cars. It all appears on a single bill.

Electricity prices, Smart Meters and Nudges

For many years, our electricity meter was a standard 24-hour model which did not differentiate or record the time of day when units were drawn from the grid. At some point during Covid (all a bit hazy), our meter was replaced by a smart meter, which sends usage data back wirelessly at intervals.

The state’s approach to rolling out these meters was to make no immediate change to the customer’s tariff, leaving it a customer choice to switch from an old-style 24-hour (or day-night tariff for those with day/night meters) to a smart meter plan. Once the switch takes place the consumer must stick with a smart plan with any future provider, it is a one-way decision.

A smart plan is typically one which charges different tariffs for Day (8am - 5pm, 7– 11pm Night (11pm – 8am) and Peak (5-7pm) hours. In addition, a number of suppliers add a period of very low pricing often marketed as a EV-charging plan (attracting a higher per-day fixed standing charge). Bord Gais’s (BGE) EV plan operates 2-5am, ESB 2-4am and Energia 2-6am, so it is worth shopping around when you understand your needs.

The table below shows the unit pricing that was effective in the final bill we received in each of those calendar years. It can be a little difficult to compare unit prices over time as we became more committed to changing supplier each year (receiving deeper discounts as a result) and the government dropped the VAT rate from 13.5 to 9% in 2022.

One thing to note is that the pre-discount rates quoted above for both 2023 and 2024 are based on a weighted average of our actual usage across different time of day rates. The adoption of a smart plan created incentives to use electricity where possible in the cheapest tariff period.

One of the annoying decisions, at least in the early days of the smart meter installation, was that ESB networks and your electricity supplier would not release your smart meter data unless you moved to a smart plan. Therefore as a consumer you had no data to decide whether you might benefit or suffer from that choice.

Happily, the smart meter itself keeps a running cumulative total of units consumed in each of the Day/Night/Peak periods and also a running total of units exported to the grid if you are a solar producer. You can find out how to read these for yourself here. That allowed this data nerd to capture the running totals at the end of each month since January 2022 and decide that there might be a benefit in shifting to a smart plan.

We switched to a Day/Night/Peak smart plan in September 2023 and then to a Day/Night/Peak/EV plan in September 2024. The discounted rates (ex-VAT) for our household over these 2 years are outlined below.

A general note of caution: a smart plan will make most sense if you have devices that are heavy users of electricity where you can control when they draw their electricity. They penalise day and peak time usage vs an old 24-hour flat rate plan.

We have acted on the behavioural nudges offered by this smart rate to make the following shifts:

· Our two electric cars have 38kWh and 77kWh batteries respectively (total 115kWh). When we had a flat rate plan it made sense to charge them during the day when solar was at its peak so that we used any solar produced first, followed by the grid. In 2021, a 20kWh daytime top-up charge at flat rates would have cost c. €3, in 2023 at daytime rates €6.90, while charging after 11pm would have reduced that to €4.50. However in 2024, charging the car between 2 and 5 am on our EV plan cost €1.20. Setting our charger to activate only between 2 and 5am reduces the cost of a charge significantly. Most home chargers max out at 7.2kWh so can deliver a maximum of 21.6kWh over that 3 hour period: if you need a bigger charge then it happens over multiple nights, or using more expensive units at other times of the day.

· As you read in the introduction, an air-to-water heat pump is a relatively high electricity user. During winter, when the air temperature is at its lowest, it consumes more heavily, and will draw more power during the nighttime temperature dip. It is also used to heat domestic hot water, and every two weeks runs a more intense heating cycle to kill any bacteria in the domestic hot water tank. All of these cycles are controllable with configurable schedules so we changed the legionnaire cycle to start at 2am, and the domestic hot water never to heat up during 5-7pm, or between 9pm and 2am, increasing the likelihood of a top-up domestic water heating cycle to also start at 2am. The heatpump is operational all day and kicks in as needed to maintain a steady temperature but these tweaks skew the percentage of its operation that happen during lower cost hours.

· Our dishwasher has a 3-hour timer delay setting. Popping this on after 8pm ensures the dishwasher cycle happens in the night rate period after 11pm. On the rare occasions that we are not in bed at 11pm, popping it on then will delay it until the EV rate kicks in at 2am. Yes: it may be called the EV rate but it applies to any electricity used during that time period.

· Our tumble dryer has a button that allows a configurable delay but behaviourally we are a little more reluctant to delay that late in to the night and tend to be interacting more with the machine during the day, and also conscious of the elevated risk of fire (although this is possibly an issue for dishwashers also? Some reader may enlighten me in the comments).

· We did a bit of an energy audit in 2022 and replaced any remaining old lightbulbs with energy saving bulbs, got rid of older less efficient devices, such as ageing TV set-top boxes. We also make sure to set holiday mode on the heating system when away for a period to avoid heating domestic hot water when we don’t need it.

Are all of these nudges working you might ask? You can see from the graph below how our time of day electricity usage has changed. The heat pump was only in place from September 2022 so would had a full year impact only in 2023 and 2024. We moved to our first smart plan in September 2023 so the full year impact of all EV charging taking place at night is visible in 2024. In addition, the tweaks to skew elective heatpump activity into the nighttime period were made in autumn 2024. We will see the full year impact in 2025’s numbers.

Our usage pattern since the EV rate kicked in from mid-September to end December 2024 looks as follows:

The night-time proportion remains roughly 60% but the effective rate per unit over the whole night period (19.28c Night, 6.24c EV inc VAT) is 10.5c per unit. The all-in 2024 effective rate of 16.4c per unit in the earlier table has benefited significantly from the impact of the Q4 arrival of the EV rate in its weighted pricing. The full-year impact for 2025 should also be significant even considering an additional annual standing charge of €100 attracted by the EV tariff.

Reducing our effective nightly rate by 8.5c per kWh by maximising draw during the EV tariff will deliver a full-year saving of c. €700 against a non-EV night rate tariff. And responding to this financial nudge also means that we are using less power during the peak period reducing the pressure on the national grid, and using electricity which might otherwise go to waste at night.

The solar story

As outlined in the earlier article, in November 2021, we installed 12 x 375w solar panels (8 south facing, 4 east facing) with a maximum theoretical production capacity of 4.5kWh.

The production across the three calendar years (after the negligible tail end 2021 production) was a decent 11745 kWh, for an annual average of 3915 kWh.

Not every kWh produced by solar panels gets used: in most domestic installations anything not used goes back to the grid for use by someone else (or into battery storage for those who decide to install a home battery unit). In February 2022, the long-awaited Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) or Clean Energy Guarantee (CEG) payment was introduced, where each electricity supplier offers its own competitive price for each unit provided to the grid by domestic producers.

You can see above that in January, November and December when production is modest due to hours of darkness and position of the sun, then over 80% of solar production is used locally, whereas in April through September it is more like 60% utilisation (of significantly higher production).

In the three years 2022 – 2024, we received almost €950 in CEG payments for roughly 4300kWh returned to the grid. The CEG payment during that time was 18.5c per unit with Bord Gais Energy and 24c per unit with SSE Airtricity (based on our annual supplier switch to maximise discounts). The 2024 payment netted almost 14% off the electricity bill (a c. €3200 bill versus a gross €3700 bill). So the solar investment provided roughly 12% of the energy we used, and the CEG offset a further 14% off the cost of our energy usage from the grid.

That equates this year to a saving of roughly €450 through avoided grid usage, and roughly €500 in CEG (total return €950). The CEG income is notionally taxable: the Revenue’s updated tax guidance for this income is here. The tax-free allowance was increased to €400 and according to the Revenue document there “.. is no requirement on individuals to include the exempt profits in an income tax return (Form 11 or Form 12).”

The cost of the solar installation in late 2021 was c. €6,000 (after €1,500 grant), so we are on target for a ~6 year payback based on the increase in electricity unit prices since the unit was installed.

I mentioned earlier that once we moved to a smart tariff, we made the behavioural change to charge the car overnight rather than trying to use solar to charge the car during the day. Unlike the market-leading Zappi charger, our Wallbox car charger as installed does not support charging with solar only, so we have decided to avoid a risk of drawing more expensive grid electricity during the day leading to a reduced utilisation rate for our solar production, and a greater return to the grid. As we have been earning 18.5 – 24 cents per kWh for our CEG, while paying 7 cents for overnight EV charging, it is a no-brainer.

The larger gap between production and usage graphs for 2024 shows the impact of this change in behaviour through data.

Finally, it’s worth noting that on advice from our installer we did not install a battery when we installed our solar panels, especially when we already had 115kWH of batteries sitting in our cars on the driveway. Some people with a home battery system charge them using the cheap EV rate overnight and topup with unused solar energy during the day. We have been happy with our decision to avoid the additional capital expense of home battery, installation space and concerns about battery replacement in due course and to take the CEG income instead. It would be interesting to see an analysis from a battery user.

Air-to-Water Heat pump: a very expensive kettle

It is funny to reflect that our ability to live in a comfortable ambient temperature, in this age of AI and technological sophistication, is still reliant on being able to boil water efficiently. Let’s face it, even Chernobyl was just a very high-risk water boiler. An air-to-water, or air-source heat pump (ASHP) is a fancy kettle that works something like a fridge in reverse using a chemical reaction in a heat exchanger unit to extract heat from the air outside. They could have started with a very large kettle element and a massive tank of hot water (that is what the old hot water tank immersion was) but that would be very expensive to run.

The benchmark for performance in the heating/cooling world is the Coefficient of Performance (COP), which according to Wikipedia is “is a ratio of useful heating or cooling provided to work (energy) required”, or in this case how much output heat do you get for your input electricity. An old immersion element (the big kettle) has a COP of 1, a good heat pump might have a COP of 3.5 – 5 – so every unit of electricity is generating on average perhaps 4 times the heat output. Which means, less energy cost for the same amount of heat. The datasheet for our system shows a COP of between 2 and 5.6 in different test scenarios (cynically, as useful as, and not unlike how EV manufacturers publish the WLTP mileage range expected from a full charge).

Those two paragraphs are very interesting in theory but the BIG unknown in practice before you install your heat pump is what’s it going to cost, how much electricity will it burn? Will it heat my house without burning a hole in my pocket. There are a myriad of inspiring and nightmare stories online.

Cue a monthly usage graph from the Kronoterm Cloud system:

This graph shows our system’s electricity usage for every month from commissioning in September 2022 through to mid-January 2025.

The gray line plots the external temperature changes over that time: there’s a thermometer exposed under one eave of the house that captures that temperature, and helps the system decide how hard it needs to work to maintain the indoor temperature against the competing one outside.

The orange element of each bar is the energy spent in that month heating domestic hot water. It’s relatively consistent month-to-month, tailing off during holidays (when we pause it), or some of the younger “three-showers-a-day” adults are away for a while. Since autumn 2024, we have tweaked the heating schedule to make it more likely that it will start this more energy-intensive cycle during the 2am EV rate. I did experiment with a draconian cycle where it would only operate during those hours, but that ended up with a sweaty son coming home to a cold shower after training when his other sibling used all the hot water to wash the dishes (or her hair?) after dinner. It’s not all high-brow statistics, there are some real stories of human suffering behind this article. We average 3-4 kWh per day for domestic hot water needs, roughly 1000kWh for the year.

The purple element is the once-a-fortnight legionella heating cycle which superheats the water to say 70 degrees (rather than the usual 60). Since autumn 2024, that will always start at 2am. Roughly 140kWh for the year (26 cycles of 5-6kWh). It is a necessary evil and an indirect domestic hot water cost.

The green element relates to running the pumps that circulate hot water through the underfloor heating system (all of downstairs) and the radiators upstairs. Roughly 300kWH in 2024.

And last but not least, the big kahuna, the destroyer of electricity bills, the red element is where the ASHP is on and actively heating water. It is highly correlated to the external temperature with significant inter-day variations. Check out December 18^th in the graph below, the outdoor temperature was an unseasonably balmy 14 degrees at some point and we burnt 19kWh on heating through that 24 hour period, the following day temperatures dropped to between 5 and 7 degrees and the burn doubled to 38kWh. As the temperatures hovered near freezing on January 9^th, the consumption was almost 60kWh.

So the coldest months of the year (December or January) are consuming roughly 900-1000kWh for heating per month (equivalent to a full year’s domestic hot water costs), and the “warmest” months (a relatively elusive concept in Ireland) as little as 40-50 kWh per month.

Next is a similar graph showing the daily usage for December 2024, and the equivalent below it for June 2024 (including holiday mode for the first week) to give a sense of time-of-year consumption differences.

And a weekly view for the latter half of 2024 which gives a good contrast between summer and winter operation:

The system has lots of configurable dashboards and this is the hour-by-hour view of operation shows one of Dad’s perfect days, where the hot water tank temperature drops below the minimum 50 degrees in the early hours of the morning, and the re-heating cycle kicks in at 2 – 5 am. Also see the inactivity between the hours of 5 and 7pm (peak rate) where for now we switch the system off and rely on ambient temperature from the underfloor slab: I’ve no idea if stopping activity for those two hours is counter-productive and creates a subsequent heating demand that is more costly than letting it run continuously but comfort has been good throughout the winter months and it feels like we are doing our bit for our pockets and national grid at peak demand. An important consideration if the whole nation were to run heat pumps, charge their cars without considering the time-of-day impact.

We target an internal temperature of 19.5 degrees in each of the 3 heating zones. It generally gets to and stays higher than that.

The combination of underfloor heating downstairs and the heat pump were significantly more expensive to retrofit than simply replacing the existing gas boiler, but comfort levels in terms of a year-round reliable temperature are excellent, and no comparison to the mixed experience of past winters (warm when the gas boiler was on, freezing shortly after it wasn’t). The biggest change is that of coming back in on a cold night to a noticeable difference in temperature, or being shocked at the outside temperature when walking out of the house in a t-shirt.

We stuck with radiators on the upper floor of our house, replacing some with larger sizes due to the lower temperature water produced by a heat pump – these are no longer units you would burn your hand on. The temperature sensor upstairs was in hindsight poorly positioned: the old one for the gas system was in a corner of the master bedroom, the new one is in the upstairs landing which benefits from constant radiated heat from the underfloor heating downstairs. Heating upstairs rarely kicks in so if bedroom doors are closed those rooms can be chilly relative to the rest of the house. Also the towel rail radiator in our bathrooms never come on now: so we might have considered replacing them with some electric towel rails timed to come on for a while every day to dry damp towels more quickly. In hindsight as I write those last two lines I may just need to simply schedule the upstairs zone to activate for a short period independent of that sensor.

First world problems in the overall scheme of things.

EV

There’s not a lot more to say about our EV experience. The majority of the time both cars do short local commutes around Wicklow and Dublin.

As outlined in the introduction the two cars do a combined average of 27,000 km per annum requiring an average of 4400 kWh per year (16.3 kWh/100km) ignoring public charging on relatively rare long journeys.

We now rely mainly on top-up charges of up to 21kWh during the low cost EV tariff period from 2-5am. That is enough to power 130km of travel on average for about €1.40 (or €1 per 100km). The SEAI estimate the equivalent cost for petrol and diesel cars to be €10.18 and €8.73 respectively. So perhaps a conservative €2,000 per annum fuel saving on our modest mileage which is more than 50% of the entire electricity bill for our house (heating, EV and other).

Never having to go to a petrol station (other than on long journeys) is a definite convenience, and yes the opposite is true on long journeys where there is more hassle around planning charging along the way, though improvements in infrastructure is reducing that burden.

We were relatively early adopters of EVs and it has worked out well for us.

That said, my Hyundai Ioniq had a complete battery replacement under a recall scheme (after 2 years) which had no impact other than a couple of days inconvenience, and will probably add to the longevity of the battery. My wife’s Ioniq5 had a failed ICCU (the piece that converts the AC from a home charge to DC) and was away for over a month to get fixed due to parts shortages, which appears to be a very common problem for Hyundai/Kia/Genesis in particular.

Our Wallbox charger is on its third iteration, the original replaced twice free of charge by the installer, once for a crack in the casing (when I bumped into it clumsily), and another when a cable came loose internally and burnt it out after the installer replaced the default 5m cable with a 10m one to reach the newer EV whose charging port was on the opposite side to our first.

It’s curious how prices are starting to drop now that the government funding schemes are starting to come to an end, and unfortunately schemes such as the half price tolls have also finished up. Also interesting to see the bloodbath in second-hand EV pricing cause by Tesla’s price cuts. Fortunately, we are in no rush to upgrade or trade-in at this point.

Where does all the Other go?

Our Bord Gais energy bill reminds me monthly that we are now a significant consumer of electricity relative to their average consumer. Our old pre-EV, pre-heat pump number of c. 500kWh per month was a little bit above the average customer which would appear to make sense for 5 adults in a 240 sq/m home.

It would be remiss not to ask about our original electricity usage. If you really want to go down the rabbit hole you can do an energy audit of all your electricity usage. Here is an excerpt from ours, showing the largest items and a smattering of smaller ones to give a sense of relative consumption. These represented the majority of our “other” usage at the time.

Most devices have online factsheets that give you their power usage in watts for normal and standby usage.

What was interesting is that something as innocuous as the kitchen kettle represented over 10% of our “other” usage. We replaced that with an outrageously expensive Quooker tap (€1500-€2500) which provides always-on hot water for 88 kWh a year. Given that the kettle would run normally in daytime and peak hours there’s a roughly €150 p.a. electricity saving. There is no comparison for convenience, but I railed against the idea of paying that for a “tap”, so don’t tell my wife there might a long-term economic return on this investment. It is also very “grid positive” as all those kettles being boiled across the nation during breaks in big TV moments (half-time matches, evening news) creates one of the largest spikes on our national grid. I’m almost reluctant to suggest that in a spark of bizarre, politically unpalatable alternative thinking, that a grant-aided Quooker might make a material contribution to reducing the spikes that drive our annual winter demand crises.

Later, I noticed an old front door bell transformer built into our fuse box (which was warm to the touch: never a good sign) and long defunct as the ringer had died years earlier, was burning 175 kWh per year for no benefit, other than a cosier fuse box. Removed.

Or, when replacing our clapped out washing machine that the new energy rated one uses 300 kWH less p.a. than the old one (say €90 p.a. saving). When choosing whether to buy a more expensive vs cheaper replacements it surprised me that the power consumption difference could often make the better, more expensive model better value over an extended period.

And it is also an eye-opener to look at LED downlighters/bulbs, now roughly 5 watts each. When we moved into our house in 2006 these were all typically 50 watt bulbs. Had we not replaced them, they would alone represent an additional 1800kWh per year, 3 times the long-offending kettle, and easily another €500 on the annual bill. If you haven’t already addressed your old light fittings, it might be worth a look.

The Electrifying End

Hopefully you have found this nitty-gritty sharing of our experiences somewhat useful and, ahem, electrifying. It is a detailed but amateur perspective, so no doubt there will be mistakes and ill-informed assumptions that I’d welcome called out in the comments.

From a financial perspective, solar panels are a no-brainer. They should be on every building with a compatible roof, maybe even mandatory for new builds unless we discover a more sustainable way of generating electricity that negates the environmental costs of manufacturing solar panels and supporting equipment.

EVs are probably cost-neutral between the elevated initial cost, offset by the cheaper fuel. I expect prices will continue to fall and make even more sense, and battery efficiency improve to support longer ranges on a single charge. Whether something else (like hydrogen fuel cells) wins long-term it is hard to tell.

I think sadly, the capital outlay for heat pump infrastructure is still too expensive relative to more traditional heating systems – so needs further grant aid or engineering innovation to make it a mass-market solution, for older housing stock at least.

I also wonder if our experience would be as positive if we hadn’t taken the expensive step of installing underfloor heating as part of a planned refurbishment, which works well with a continuous lower-temperature feed? It would have felt like a serious kick in the teeth to have invested the premium compared to a gas boiler replacement and then been underwhelmed by the comfort level of low-temperature radiators. I guess avoiding that outcome is where the SEAI heat loss assessment process and a design from a professional installer comes in.

Finally, I am not looking forward to the capital outlay required to revamp that heat pump at some future stage in our retirement years. Hopefully technology innovation will have found a better approach to the water boiling problem, maybe, fingers-crossed, a nuclear fusion solution after all these years of waiting? If we can figure out quantum computers and GenAI, surely we’ll find an increasingly sustainable solution to boiling water.

We can now light our homes for 5-10% of the energy needed twenty years ago. That is a great example of human ingenuity and progress, and a reminder that the vast majority of us on this planet have more comfortable lives than the most well-off people alive a century ago.

From an environmental perspective, or a philosophical one, an all-electric home feels neat and clean, and can leverage all future improvements that happen in electricity generation.

A potential downside at the micro-level is that we are of course totally exposed during a power cut, with no ability to heat, cook, or charge our cars if they are close to empty, and no stash of jerry cans full of petrol will get us through Armageddon if it arrives. For now, though I’m optimistic enough that I don’t see us going down the off-grid, backup generator, survivalist road any time soon.

On balance, a family happy with our journey down Electric Avenue. Thanks for reading this far.

And p.s. Yes, I probably do need to get out more, yes, it is a little bit of a fixation, and yes it probably could answer the question “how do you say you are neuro-diverse, without saying you are neuro-diverse”?

It was forty years ago that we spent our first winter together in secondary school along the banks of the River Moy. A storm had blown the corrugated roof off an old building and we used the sheets to sled down the hill of the neighbouring field towards the Bishop’s house. It was the best fun ever with our hands cold and raw with winter snow.

One hundred boys separated into four classes by the vagaries of the alphabet: 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D. To that end I was lumped in with the end of the alphabet in 1D: home to, among others, the Molloys, the Quinns, the Ryans and the Winters. Our pre-fab contained the school’s art room so we observed the comings and goings of the wider variety of prospective artists from other years while becoming acclimatised to our first year.

The alphabetical apartheid meant that I didn’t get to know the Allens, the Butlers, the Brennans or the Duffys for some time. In fact, it would only be later, in more niche Leaving Cert subjects like Physics that the alphabet would be fully mixed in class once more: the Breslins, Friels, Ryans and Walshs learning together about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Newton’s Laws and Schrodinger’s Cat.

Boring as it sounds, it was a great place to learn. We had magnificent teachers with a passion for their subjects: delivering on the mandatory elements of the curriculum but also sharing on a bit of their love the material. Leaning into poetry – walking in the footsteps of Patrick Kavanagh, understanding the significance of the discovery of calculus, of biological processes, of the giants of physics and chemistry, the relevance of our history.

Sport played a big part in the life of the school, though not particularly in mine. The holy grail of beating the big rivals Summerhill or Nathy’s or Jarlath’s to a championship was always the ambition.

Like the rest of Ireland in the early 80s, the school was in a state of transition. Built on the Bishop’s lands in 1906 it had been a prominent priest-run boarding school and the last of the boarding population joined shortly after we did, leading to dwindling numbers of boarders as the years progressed. Their school life looked much more exciting to a day pupil like me: breakfast, lunch and dinner on tap, a place to sleep and a deeper knowledge of the bowels of the old building than anyone else. The priests and religious life continued to play a big part in the life of the school with daily morning prayers and a number of priests teaching a range of subjects alongside lay teachers. Those priests were like the boarding equivalent of their fellow teachers and lived onsite.

The boarders had a number of concessions: one of which was to run a ‘tuck shop’ where they could buy sweets, crisps and other goodies to ease their time in captivity. It was run by the boarders using the schools funds and had the curious and perennial problem of being loss-making due to some shrinkage. Eventually after many warnings the school closed the boarder’s shop. In a daring move that Thatcher would have been proud of, I moved into public-private enterprise asking the new principal in my fourth year if it would be possible to re-open the shop myself on a profit-sharing basis with the school. With all credit to Father Sean, he jumped on board and the tuck shop re-opened under new management. In a nod towards alphabetical integration my good friend John Allen and I manned the shop together for the remainder of our two years in school: enjoying the regular social banter of serving classmates and the occasional frenzied raid when a small group would plan a relatively good-humoured attack on the dark basement shop knocking out our light and attempting to grab something of value. We adapted with some novel lighting solutions and moved on – the shop was one of the highlights of my time there.

It came time to leave the school and Ballina for the sights of Dublin and I lost contact with every member of that class of one hundred boys for over twenty-five years. A Facebook group started ten years ago reconnected many of us and our first in-person reunion was held in the old college building in the closing days of 2023. Sadly, but inevitably, four of our number have passed away over the decades, three of those from the tail end of the alphabet all those years ago in 1D but I can still see us all careering down the hill in the rare snowfall of January 1984 unknowingly embarking on our personal journey from A to Z.

The recent spate of sporting coverage delivered by the Euros (UEFA European Football Championships) and the Paris Olympics, not to mention the climax of the GAA Championships led to a massive increase in the frequency of times I was asked whether I had ‘watched any of the footie’, ‘caught the athletics’ or ‘seen the match’.

I have spent most of my life relatively oblivious to sports, having an interest and an aptitude that are well matched, meaning I rarely have more than a half clue what is going on in the world of sport, and lack any redeeming qualities when it comes to hand-eye or most other types of coordination.

Our house must have been a bit of anomaly. My father played a little golf, but only enough to support a social drinking habit and I can’t really remember anytime we went to a sporting event or watched sport on TV as a family, other than perhaps the famous Dennis Taylor – Steve Davis 1985 World Snooker Championship “black ball” final, when we are all glued to the edge our seats.

Gaelic roots

Theoretically, my father should have brought a strong interest in Gaelic games to our family. His mother was from West Cork and idolized Christy Ring, the famed Cork hurler. She liked nothing better in my memory than listening to a fast-moving match on the radio, with crisp narration delivered by Micheál O’Hehir. On the other side of his family, there was also keen GAA interest in my grandfather’s family in Galbally. Co. Limerick, where my father’s uncle had a lifelong relationship with the GAA and was President of Limerick GAA and a member of the central council for over thirty years (something I only gained a passing awareness of after he died). The only story that resonates from my father’s time as a schoolboy in Clonmel was of the Christian Brother catching he and his schoolmates playing soccer on the playing fields and chastising them for playing cluiche Sasanach (English games). It was a story he told often enough that when my cousins or I remember him to each other there is often a fond short-hand repetition of the “cluiche Sasanach” refrain.

On my mother’s side I don’t remember much discussion of sport but I clearly remember the GAA All-star posters and player pictures plastered on the walls of the couple of local pubs in Rockchapel when we visited during the early 1980s and a clear sense of the rivalry with near neighbours Kerry, and the regular trips to Dublin of the Cork branch of the family for any hint of a clash in Croke Park.

Given his fairly lackadaisical engagement with Gaelic games it is to his credit that my father brought me in to Eyre Square in Galway to celebrate the homecoming of the victorious Galway hurling team in September 1980. This win against Limerick came after a fifty-seven year wait for silverware and was followed in Croke Park by a rousing speech from Captain Joe Connolly, and a rendition of The West’s Awake by Joe McDonagh. The excitement was no less palpable, perhaps even more so, in Eyre Square the following Monday night, as my Dad lifted me up to join the team briefly on the stage (the open sidewall of a covered articulated lorry). I certainly have a sense now as I write of the excitement and pride we had in that team after the win, as they visited schools throughout the county in the days after.

That was a long wait for Galway, now equaled and significantly exceeded by my neighbouring adoptive county Mayo with a 73-year wait for an All-Ireland win since 1951, with the longest unbroken sequence of losing finals (eleven) in the history of the competition. My heart goes out to the county ever time we almost make it.

At last count I’ve been to one match in Croke Park (perhaps two on the same day), probably ten concerts and as many corporate meetings/events. Time to redress the balance perhaps.

Cluiche Sasanach

My uncle Seán was the sporting standout of my immediate family. He played soccer (football to all but the Gaelic cohort) competitively in college and in the top-flight of the League of Ireland and spent many summers in the US coaching in soccer camps around New England. As a secondary school teacher, and later principal, he continued to coach football teams and enthusiastically advocate for sports of all sorts.

I must have been eight or nine years old when he gave me a small book on soccer coaching skills with black-and-white photographs of drills and skills, which led to momentary interest. Our next door neighbours at the time had four daughters, one of whom Jill, a few years older than me, was a gifted player so there was nothing better than spending the evening outside kicking a ball and trying to get by her into goal.

My mother must have thought that some unexpected sporting interest had ignited in me around that time when I announced I’d like to go to soccer training arranged on the green of a housing estate across from our school on Friday evenings. Like all good mothers she proceeded to buy me the boots, the socks, the shorts and a jersey, and I proceeded to go for two, maybe three weeks. She still laments those purchases: “I bought him all the gear! How many times did he wear them? Twice!”.

Not even the occasional purchase of Shoot, Roy of the Rovers or Match magazine could ignite the passion. I have vague memories of the 1978 Argentinian world cup and probably did collect some football stickers, though I’m not sure I made a concrete connection between the collection of the stickers and an interest in the games which would have been broadcast on our one and only television channel at the time.

That half-interest continued for years afterwards. I was surrounded by lads in school who passionately followed an English FA team: Liverpool, Man United, Leeds or Arsenal, at the time more than now, often starring some home-grown talent like Dave O’Leary, Ronnie Whelan, Kevin Moran and others.

I showed a bit more interest in the world cup in Mexico 1986, but the 1988 European Championships caught the whole country by storm as Ireland made its first significant showing in an international tournament in years. A Ray Houghton goal led to a 1-0 win against England, a rare and beautiful triumph given the wide range and severity of rivalries between our two nations over the years.

That piqued the interest for what became a fanatical period for the whole nation of following the national team into Italia’90, the unforgettable World Cup, where Ireland felt for a moment that it could win more than Eurovisions, that we could go to the home of the beautiful game and play to win. The atmosphere in Dublin where I was working at that stage was unbelievable, the frenzied happiness everywhere, hugging, kissing, jumping on cars and running up and down streets with sheer joy was a fantastic occasion to live through. It was one of a number of events that appeared to cement the idea that the bleak Ireland of the mid-1980s with high unemployment and other social and political crises, was heading for brighter times.

Our large employer paused the working day early in the afternoon for the Ireland-Romania match on the 25^th June 1990, hosting it on a large screen in the staff restaurant and supplying drinks and snacks to the hundreds of viewing staff. An unbelievable experience that transcended sport and cemented a life-long love for Jack Charlton among those who lived through it.

My wife’s family are inveterate Liverpool fans and while she is the rock around which our sons congregate to watch Liverpool matches on TV while I potter away at the keyboard, I happily have led the charge on the semi-frequent day trips to Anfield starting with Jamie Carraher’s testimonial, a range of Premier League fixtures, an FA cup derby with Everton, and an FA cup semi-final in Wembley among others. I share everyone’s excitement in the moment and join the thrill of the crowd, the joy of winning and the disappointment of losing. I just don’t have that aching attachment of the true fan who knows every player movement, the impact of the outcome of another team’s match on Liverpool’s standing. I have however learned more than a lesson or two from Jurgen Klopp: his great leadership, kindness and humanity – he is truly missed and no doubt Arne Slot will work hard to fill his shoes (or fashion his own more likely).

I volunteered for a while with our local football club, agreeing to “tie shoelaces” on a Saturday morning to get my middle son an early start in the club. Fortunately, I got found out fairly quickly and turned my IT skills to developing a registration and payments system for the club instead. Ending up on the board brought me into the world of the FAI, and off to Sligo at one stage to help with our pitch for the Club of the Year award and the related ceremony as part of the FAI AGM. Talk about impostor syndrome: ‘remind me about the offside rule again!?’.

I held FAI season tickets for a few years including the night at the Aviva when Darren Randolph lobbed a long ball over the heads of the players towards Shane Long who put it in the back of the German net on 8^th October 2015. It was a great night to be there with the two boys (then 9 and 13) having to remind them that this was a rare moment in Irish football and that they should savour it, coming early in their career as fans, these unexpected wins over recent World Cup winners don’t come along very often. And also a chance to regale them with stories of Italia’90 and what it meant to our country.

So somehow I’d like to think, for my mother’s sake at least, that the investment in those boots, shorts, socks and jersey, while not well-worn, did pay a dividend in the long run.

Golf

My father always had a set of (left-handed) golf clubs in a blue golf bag and was a member for a while in Athenry and Enniscrone. He was also a fan of pitch-and-putt. Alongside the cluiche Sasanach quip, my father’s all too regular claim to have scored (infeasibly?) multiple holes-in-one on storied golf courses are among his tall stories that we remember fondly.

I, on the other hand, literally struggled with enough hand-eye coordination to make contact with the ball off the tee on first swing. Part lack-of-confidence, part lack-of-coordination perhaps. At one stage, the startup I worked for started a social golf society, with the organiser John Brennan being a scratch golfer. He was passionate about the game and worked hard to get me to the point where I would make contact with the ball and get it into the air, or even rolling along the ground, most of the time. Carefully selecting a course with few obstacles and neglecting to count more than ten shots on any hole made for an enjoyable morning out.

In that same year Aer Lingus ran a frequent flyer competition for a trip to the 1999 Ryder Cup in Boston. Basically the more times you flew, the more competition entries you received. I was a much more frequent flyer than golfer and duly received a letter telling me I’d made it through to the next round of this competition, with an invite to lunch in the K Club where the final winners would be decided.

To be honest, I thought the actual chance of winning the trip was slim-to-none, but a nice lunch in very fancy surroundings ensued. It was explained that there were twenty-four finalists and that six would be chosen to go on the trip. Fair enough: a one-in-four chance. I still didn’t expect it to work out. A fairly novel approach was taken to whittling down the field: after the aforementioned fancy lunch, a gold-painted golf ball with each finalist’s name was pitched by Christy O’Connor Jnr from just outside a putting green. The people represented by the six closest balls would be going to Boston. As you could probably tell from the start of this story after a little suspense I was one of the lucky six.

It was the trip-of-a-lifetime: business class flights to/from Boston, six nights hotel stay, 3 days of golfing, 3 days of corporate entertainment at the Brookline Ryder Cup venue. Dinner out every night either as a group with a mix of Aer Lingus executives, or attending an official event of Tourism Ireland or the Ryder Cup tour. Very fancy, very lucky.

Coming back to the three days golf however. I let the organisers know I wasn’t really a golfer. The type of thing that most twenty-handicappers say to be polite. Of course, I meant it literally: they reassured me that they would organise clubs for me on the other side, I duly bought new golf shoes and other accessories (channelling my mother’s experience with the football gear) and headed off to the US.

First day golfing: beautiful country club somewhere in New England. First hole, majestic: teebox perched over what can only be described as a gaping chasm, reminiscent of those beautiful Chinese valleys over the Yangste river. A great challenge for your typical novice golfer, for this non-golfer only recently able to connect with a ball consistently and roll it along a flat surface? Disaster! Our hosts for the week: an Irish-American Corkonian golf tour operator and his American business partner, immediately saw that I was going to need help and happily whisked me past the chasm so I could take my shots across terra-firma. A little humiliating. Day 2, I caddied. Day 3 I went shopping in Boston.

The Ryder Cup of course was a great event with the corporate hospitality allowing for forays out onto the course mixed with periods of watching the live TV coverage from the hospitality tent. This was the event that culminated in a tight US win and the controversy of excited fans running over the line of the Olazabal’s yet-to-be-taken putt.

A great event to have experienced in such pampered conditions. Other than as a prize winner I would not see its like again. It did not however encourage me to develop my game any further, and I suspect it will be my only golf trophy!

Swimming

I wrote on an earlier occasion that I was the less-than-obedient child, refusing to get in the water for my first (and therefore last) swimming lesson, and telling the dancing teacher I knew better at my first (and again, therefore last) Irish dancing lesson. I guess both missteps cut off any chance at a future Aqua-Riverdance project.

After the trip to Des Moines in 1992, I signed up for public swimming lessons in Rathmines pool. The world being a complete blur without my glasses didn’t make for the best learning conditions so that didn’t stick. A friend tried again in a local pool in 1993 to little avail.

It was years later in 2016 that I reasoned that each of the children had learned to swim and swim well that I sussed out whether my daughter’s swimming teacher would do some lessons with me. Eventually taking to it like a slightly ill-coordinated duck-to-water, I was now, in my forties, able to hit the swimming pool like everybody else. Forget stamina over multiple lengths, and I’m not a great fan of swimming in the sea:  in fact I very reluctantly hop in a couple of times a year with my hands getting icy cold in advance of warming up, but I do get in!

Rugby, Cricket and other sports I vaguely understand

It’s often quoted that football is a game for gentlemen played by thugs, and rugby is a game for thugs played by gentlemen. It’s a catchy saying, I’m not sure how true it is.

Like all the other sports I’ve mentioned I don’t have the compulsion to watch any sport at any time, but once I get locked onto watching a particular game I’m hooked for the duration. Rugby is no exception albeit I only have a vague idea what is going on at any time. This lack of understanding is only eclipsed by my complete ignorance of cricket and American football.

I do know that when play is progressing towards the end line of your opponent, it is good news, that the play embodies the phrase “two steps forward, one step back” (or if you are unlucky, the other way around) and that it’s thrilling to watch someone steal over the line and “touchdown” in what would have been the “end zone” in American football.

My wife has solid-gold Rugby people in her extended family. I could and should know better.

On reflection

I’m finishing this off on a bus from Holyhead to Anfield, Liverpool for the Liverpool-Brentford clash on 25^th August 2024. We’ve been up since 4am, taking the 8am ferry and will make it back to Dublin port some twenty-four hours after arriving. It will be a long day, the centre of which will be ninety minutes of action in a precious venue where our hearts will soar with the playing of Gerry and The Pacemakers’ You’ll Never Walk Alone over the stadium PA system, echoed by tens of thousands of home fans. Like everyone else wearing the red of Liverpool today I’ll rise and fall with the crowd with every near miss and rejoice in every goal.

I think I share that with most lovers of sport. Next week however I won’t have a clue what the next fixtures are unless my wife or sons remind me, I’ll lose track of the league standings and my mind will drift in and out of this and other sports throughout the season. I am not hooked. I am that person who can partake and not become a sportaholic. Blessing or curse? I’m not sure.

I am spared the painful ups and downs suffered by my friends who are constant and enduring fans, who have felt the heartache of their teams travails over many seasons, who know every coming and going in those teams as if they were members of their own families, for whom the sharpness of defeat is as deep and bitter as the heights of joy in a win. And let us not get started on the emotional overwhelm of winning a long-sought trophy, like Liverpool’s 2021 Premier League win, or their Champions League win of 2019. No doubt what I hope long-suffering Mayo fans will experience after that long drought of so many years is eventually quenched.

I feel great pride when my country plays on an international stage, even more so when we prevail and win some or all of what is to be won on the day in question: our rowers, our boxers, our runners in the Olympics, our Rugby team in the Six Nations or World Cups, our footballers, even as part of a short streak, beating Germany in a Euro-qualifier on a dark, crisp October evening.

Sport is good for the soul, and as I write this, perhaps I find there is a little part of me that needs and wants it in equal measure after all, even if I stare blankly next time you ask if I’ve “seen the game?”.

p.s. today’s fulltime score : a 2-0 win to Liverpool

I had started to write this follow-up post in early January 2024 but as mentioned in the last post it felt more appropriate to write the more personal post about my late uncle and my adventures on the land and return to this more technical examination afterwards. Strangely that led to months of writer’s block while all of that gestated. The people referenced below were all born and lived on, or emigrated from the land mentioned in that previous post. Onwards …

A simple search for Ryans in the 1901 census of Ireland returns 30980 entries. The 1911 census shows 30593. The filter can be narrowed by location but there’s a lot of work required to figure out conclusively who is related to whom: Ryan is a very common surname in Ireland and makes it difficult to form conclusions without deeper research.

Considering my Emperor ancestors however and the 1901 Census of Ireland has only 25 people with this surname (27 in 1911). Narrowing this to County Cork and the field narrows to 17, all of whom live in the townland Cummeryconnell South and all of whom were relatives of my grandfather’s mother, Margaret Emperor.

Barry Griffin’s site does a great job of mapping the surname frequency for the 1901 and 1911 censuses to the map of Ireland. It doesn’t get much more sparsely spread than Emperor in 1901.

In the 1901 census, my eldest living Emperor ancestor, Patrick P aged 70 (born c. 1831) is living with his wife Hannah, and their fifteen-year old grand-daughter Mary is with them on the night of the census, Sunday 31 March 1901. Patrick is my great-great-grandfather. His father Patrick (my great-great-great-grandfather) dies in 1889, aged 95 years putting his year of birth c. 1796, the earliest relative on any side of my family I can find documentary evidence for.

Stop for a second to consider that I (and all the rest of us) have 32 great-great-great-grandparents so the latter Patrick has contributed perhaps only ~3% of my genetic code, but I like to think that it is apt to be writing of him now almost 250 years after his birth thanks to the thin paper trail put in place by a perhaps unwelcome colonial British regime establishing civil records in 1864. Also it boggles to think that there are up to 25+ surnames (increasing exponentially with each prior generation) that have equal claim on contributing to who I am, each under-represented in memory by the local cultural bias of carrying forward only paternal surnames.

We can see from the House and Building Return linked to this sheet that Patrick P is the “landholder” of the land on which he is living and that other lands nearby are held by John Emperor, his brother. The linkages are reconstructed by finding birth, marriage and death certificates which name the parents and other witnesses and matching them together.

Living just down the road (entry 1) in the same census area are my great grandparents William Riordan and his wife Margaret Emperor (Patrick’s daughter).

It’s also worth noting entry number 10 “Cummeryconnell National School” is marked as uninhabited. This is the two-room school also known as Knockanbane National School (it is still there, the building now owned by my cousin), established in 1886/7, that my grandmother’s parents (the Duggans at entry 9) and later my grandmother and her sister would teach in together (more on that in an upcoming section). The Duggans are already teaching in the school during this census and my grandmother won’t be born until 1905 and later appears as “Eily Duggan” in the 1911 census. In the late 1930s she will marry William, the fourth son of William and Margaret in number 1 above.

A vertical cross-section from my grandfather back through the Emperor line is below.

This headstone from the local graveyard in Rockchapel (posted on Ancestry.com by a distant cousin I have not met in person), marks the burial place of another great-great grandfather Daniel O’Riordan and my great-grandfather William and his wife Margaret Emperor. Headstones are, literally, a rock-solid way of cementing the lineage in the absence of a paper trail, with the multiple generations on one headstone very typical in inter-generational sharing of family burial plots.

The Family Farm

The life and death of the Emperors in Knockafurtig centre around the farmland and dwellings marked #21 / #22 in the 1901 census.

Griffith’s Valuation was the first fullscale valuation of property in Ireland. In was overseen by Richard Griffith and published between 1847 and 1864.

In the Love on the Land post I included links to the Griffith’s Valuation maps that cover the Knockafurtig farmland where the Emperors in the 1901 and 1911 census all lived.

Knockenbane School

I mentioned earlier that my great-grandparents taught in the Knockanebane national school close by the family farm. My grandmother and her sister subsequently taught there and my mother began school life as a 3-year old hiding quietly under my grandmother’s school desk if an inspector were to arrive to check up on proceedings. She has shared memories of my grandfather arriving on a bicycle outside the school and whistling for her to come out and accompany him home.

A lucky Google search for “Knockafurtig” turned up a treasure trove of essays collected from primary school students as part of a national effort to preserve local folklore. This particular Schools Collection of essays was requisitioned from national primary schools in 1938-1939  and it was amazing to find my grandmother’s school featured in a collection from November 1937 to December 1938.

The page written in Irish says “Co. Cork, Bar(ony) Duhallow, Par(ish): Clontfert (Meelin) School: Knockanbane, Meelin, Newmarket, Principal: Eileen, Mrs O’Riordan, 11/1937 – 12/1938”.

The essays are written by local children (presumably aged 8-12, so born 1925-1930) who interview older people in the locality, so gathering first-hand knowledge going back to 1860 – 1900.

My mother often tells stories of ghosts or spirits that frequented the area and even now as an entirely rational adult would speak of scary times when inexplicable spooky things happened. This spooky story was collected by Hannah Sullivan from the sixty-year-old Katie Murphy.

Until the Commissioners for National Education (National Education Board) were established in 1831, there was no formal schooling for the common Irish people and at one point it was forbidden for the local Irish to have a formal education, so there were hedge schools improvised by the locals to educate the population in advance of the opening of National Schools, like my great-grandparents in the late 1880s onwards. This story tells of how the school teachers were funded and how they would stay with local families in rotation.

This story explains that Knockanbane (Cnocán Bán) means the little white hill because of the white flowers that grow there in the summer, this one explains that Knockafurtig (my family land) means “the hill of the bog” before it was turned into farmland and how every individual field had a name such as fine meadow, four-corner meadow, etc. There is a field called Contar and according to the story it is so named due to the death of a poor person in the corner of the field during the famine of Black (18)47.

There are stories of home-made toys, local poets, traditional cures, fairy forts , a collection of proverbs and many more topics.

Here there is a story about a fairy fort on the Emperor’s farm at Knockafurtig recounted by the 65-year-old Patrick Curtin just down the road in Rockhill.

This story mentions that many people have emigrated to America and there are only 3 people over seventy years old in the Knockafurtig townland: John Emperor, Pat Emperor, and Mrs. James Curtin. The former two likely being my grandfather’s uncles on whose land he ultimately started life and family with my grandmother at the time these stories were written. His first son, my late uncle Finbarr, arrived in line with the start of the second world war in September 1939. The story was provided by the 46 year old Daniel Curtin, likely the father of Johnny (Daniels) Curtin, later a good friend and neighbour to my uncle and his family.

This one tells of the local English absentee landlord William Leader who owned the lands (shown as rented out in Griffith’s Valuation, until they were purchased in the Land Purchase Act of 1891). It outlines the practices of giving a tithe (one-tenth) of the produce of the land to the landlord. It also tells how Daniel O’Connell (The Liberator) put an end to that practice by “in the town of Kanturk, well over a century ago, he put sheaves of oats, wheat and barley into a coffin and buried it. This was called '' The burying of the tithes.''” No doubt the implication was clear.

“I have heard older people tell of the collecting of those rents which were carried out not far from here but not in the Leader's property. On the day the agent would be expected doors would be barricaded and police and soldiers should us a '' battering ram'' to gain admission. At this particular time the farmers refused to pay rent and many a bloody battle was fought.
Other landlords about this district here in Meenkeragh were the Alsworths who came to Ireland with Cromwell's soldiers and got the best of the land belonging to the Irish gentry about Newmarket. They lived in what is known as the Newmarket Court. This now belongs to a Religious Community. The last of the Aldworth family left about twelve years ago and went to England.”

Who among these children or the older contributors could have envisaged these stories being read 80-plus years later on the Internet? Or that in researching this I would find a live and insightful link to the work of my grandmother who has been dead for almost forty years, or her schoolroom full of eager late-1930s children.

1926 Census

Currently the 1901 and 1911 censuses are the only complete censuses we have to work from. While census taking began in Ireland c. 1820, few remnants of the pre-1901 censuses survive. The 1921 census did not happen due to the War of Independence and subsequent Civil War in Ireland. It was not taken until 1926 and will be released to researchers (and hopefully the general public) on its 100^th anniversary: 18 April 2026.

It will be interesting to see how the townlands of Cummery Connell (Rockhill, Knockafurtig, Knockanbane) fared over those fifteen years, through the First World War, Irish War of Independence  and Civil War.

For now I’ve probably got as far as an armchair genealogist can get without digging further. Perhaps this will inspire you to dig deep into your family background using easily accessible records.

Until next time.

My mother’s eldest brother, Finbarr (or Finn), passed away a little over a year ago. His first anniversary was last week. As the oldest son he took over the running of the family dairy farm outside the village of Rockchapel in north Cork from my grandfather, as his son subsequently did from him.

As a child in the early 1970s we would visit the house where he lived with my grandparents and managed the farm with my grandfather. We lived in the large housing estate in the Renmore suburb of Galway so it was a great novelty to stay on the farm and grow a sense of belonging with the place that my mother had grown up with her three brothers.

The old farmhouse was a substantial two story house at the end of a long tree-lined avenue (or passage as it was called locally). The trees to the left of the passage were mainly mature pine trees perhaps thirty or forty feet deep, and equally tall, which created a shaded area of woodland covered in amber pine needles and pine cones. That was a place of mystery and discovery for this four-year old, often coming across great treasures like old gramophone players, brittle 78 records or even a large ‘square’ USA biscuit box with some items of excitement inside.

We’d pull up in our car at the front door after a long journey from Galway: in those days navigating through every small town, village and back road up through the mountains to get to the house. There was always great excitement as my granny, grandad or Finbarr would appear at the front door to greet us: we had arrived.

Inside that front door to the right was the good sitting room with all manner of fancy stuff – I don’t remember ever spending time in that room other than to nose around old photographs of my grandparents and maybe peek in cupboards. To the left was the main living space dominated by a Stanley range, my grandfathers chair with it’s back to the window where he’d sit reading the Cork Examiner and the dining table where we would share all of our meals with an old dresser in the corner holding plates and an ancient looking radio. If there was a television in that room I don’t remember ever seeing it on.

Dinner was different in granny’s house. Always a big meal in the middle of the day (in those early days my uncle would have been up at 6am to milk the cows, then drive to the creamery to deliver the morning (and previous evening’s) milk, before getting home to do chores before lunch. It seems like there were large roasts with lashings of meat every day, with a pot full of potatoes boiled in their jackets and a mountain of carrots, turnips or cabbage, and pints of gravy with onions. And it seemed like there was a dessert every day – I’m not sure if that’s just because we were there but I don’t think so. During the summer when hay was being cut for silage there would be neighbours or day labourers to be fed with pounds of “square tin” corned beef and ham sandwiches, or salads, and large tanks of tea carted down the fields to where they were working. This was high calorie work.

Going farming

As a young boy the real business on arrival started at the back door where I’d seek out a pair of wellies (wellington boots) to head up through the farm gate to (or likely with) my uncle.

I loved spending time with him on the farm. It is probably fair to say that I had more questions-per-minute for him than the average child: ‘what does this do?’, ‘why does this work this way?’, ‘what’s that old house doing?’, ‘why is that old car there?’, ‘could we make a new tractor out of those parts?’.

He also had a great love for all the cows, calves, horses, dogs, chickens and assorted animals who had a home on the farm and shared with me the feeding and tending rituals for them, teaching me how to “drive” the cattle up from the lower fields to bring them in for milking.

He brought me with him patiently over every part of the farm, telling me the history of where everything came from. The sheds where he milked the cows in my early years had been the house of my grandad’s uncle (one of the Emperors): “they lived here?” I would ask, kicking at pats of cow dung with my wellies. Another stone cottage house further down the land belonged to another one of the Emperor brothers. I wondered at the story and people behind these abandoned houses. He told me how that land was given to my grandfather when they died as they had no sons of their own, and that was ultimately how the new house got built and the rest of the old houses got used as the base of the farm.

There were also more modern buildings constructed on the land: one large barn to store hay / silage and another which became the more sustainable milking parlour with direct access to shove the cow manure into the slurry pit behind it and for the installation of more modern semi-automated milking equipment as time passed and methods rapidly modernised as my uncle took over full-time from my grandfather.

I’d have great intentions of getting up in the morning to “help” with the milking but had a better track record of getting up in time to travel with Finn to the creamery. That held the promise of (the completely unsafe and uninsurable practice of) being allowed to travel in the trailer with the milk churns with the wind blowing through my hair, or sitting up front in an old Ford Cortina asking another thousand questions. Arriving at the creamery you’d join a queue of similar cars with trailers of churns and the occasional farmer with a donkey and cart with a few old churns for the long wait to deliver the milk. I am reminded of it now any time I queue at a McDonalds drive-through waiting for the cars ahead to finish. The “creamery man” was a jolly red-faced man called Paddy with a navy housecoat who would have a chat with Finbarr and have a warm welcome for Gertie’s son (me). He’d put a hose into each churn like a hoover and suck all the milk into a stainless steel vat, weigh it, test it and once happy, release that day’s load into the overall holding tank. It was interesting for a city boy to come face-to-face with where the milk for my cornflakes actually came from.

Having made your way around the queue Finn would stop at Mary Foley’s shop. Finbarr assured me that the Foleys were cousins of ours (on the Emperor’s side as it turns out) and he would again proudly present me to Mary as Gertie’s son. Mary had a deep and thick Cork accent and I’d take great joy in cheekily mimicking her accent back to her when she’d greet me “Hello Barry Ryan”, she’d get a “Hello May-ree Fole-eee” back in return to Finbarr’s amusement or embarrassment I’m not sure which. Whichever it was, these trips were cherished memories and the highlights of any visit to the farm.

Misdemeanours and misadventure

While I enjoyed every trip to the farm, the regular occupants were not always blessed by my presence. Almost every visit had some drama which highlighted my magnetic attraction for trouble.

On an early visit when my grandad was still alive (so I was 7 or younger) he found me walking gingerly along the back wall of the slurry pit. The slurry pit as anyone with a farm connection will know was a large open enclosure of cow poo nine feet deep and probably sixty feet long by forty feet wide. Basically if you fell in you were literally in deep doo-doo, probably succumbing from the fumes if not drowning in it and sadly still a significant cause of farm deaths, particularly among children. I can still remember my grandfather shouting at me to “get down you little hoor (or maybe it was blackguard)”. I was blissfully unaware of any risk but when they explained later the danger I was in it did sink in a little.

Generally most equipment on the farm was second-hand and prone to issues that I was expert at discovering once I arrived. On my earliest visits there was a blue Fordson tractor which I loved. Riding on tractors, sitting on Finn’s knee or standing beside him hanging on to the mudguard as he drove over the fields was the best of times.

Later on he got a new (second-hand) white tractor with a cabin enclosed on three sides. I think it was similar to the David Brown one below.

It had no working ignition so there were a few bare wires you could touch together to start the tractor. I managed to kick these off the metal frame of the tractor burning out the ignition. That however happened a day or two after Finn left me in the cabin of tractor as he was attaching some dangerous piece of farm equipment and I decided to experiment with the lever that raised and lowered said equipment. Needless to say almost burying him beneath it in a near-death experience for him caused me to get banished from his company for about ten minutes. If you haven’t got the impression as yet, an infinitely kind man with an ocean of patience for his annoying (and actually dangerous, and danger-seeking) nephew.

The piece-de-resistance came one night when I popped into the upstairs bathroom to brush my teeth before going to bed. I popped in the stopper* and turned on the water but nothing came out. Non-plussed I ran off to hop into bed with my sister (we shared a double bed that was toe-to-head with my grandparents in a long bedroom that went from back to front of the house directly over the off-limits living room. As an aside that bedroom was a treasure trove of boxes underneath our bed and in the wardrobe beside it. Old schoolbooks, copybooks and other materials from my grandmothers relatively recent retirement from teaching. She was a bit of a hoarder: I’m fairly sure there were ration books from the ‘emergency’ (Ireland’s name for the second world war) in one of the boxes. Returning to my story: after a good nights sleep I woke up to find the house in some serious alarm. The house’s water supply came from a well on the property that was turned off at night to avoid the pump burning out. It had been turned back on when they went to milk the cows the following morning, leading to the bathroom sink filling up and flooding the house from the top down while my uncle and his wife worked hard and I slept soundly oblivious to the water pouring down the stairs. I can’t honestly say whether it was normally my habit to put the stopper in when brushing my teeth or why I did so that evening but needless to say I cemented my reputation as a source of trouble (even if accidental) that morning.

Perhaps Finn had a soft spot for me as he was known to be full of “character” in his own day. I loved the story my mother told of him getting into trouble in school one day. The exasperated teacher decreed  “I want to see your parents here tomorrow”. No problem he said, and true to his word he brought in the best photograph he could find of his parents to the teacher the next day. Genius! Or in the genes perhaps!

Something about Mary

Finbarr married Mary in 1975. I find it hard to surface any memory without Mary living in the old house with my grandparents but I also remember the morning of their wedding with Finn and his brothers all dressed up in morning suits looking a million dollars and later on the reception in a nearby hotel. The local priest was taking his time making a speech before dinner and I can see the scene clearly in my mind’s eye as I turned my head over my left shoulder and shouted politely if he could hurry up as I was hungry: that drew a laugh from the assembled wedding party and probably ushered in the soup and bread rolls so it was win-win in many ways.

Mary was and remains as kind and gentle as Finbarr and I remember her singing happily when working in the kitchen to feed us all, or helping out on the farm, maybe only the flooding incident causing her to tip over into being fit to kill me while my mother, who somehow thought it reasonable under normal circumstances to call me the anti-Christ (I kid you not!), defended me to the hilt.

Not too long after their marriage came their first children Joseph and then Elaine, so soon the farm and the farmhouse became their place – not the imagined exclusive domain of this little boy on each visit.

It was both sad and heartwarming to hear Joseph speak of Finbarr on the morning of his funeral, describing his Dad’s love of the land, his own memories of walking the farm with him and the priceless trips to the creamery (and probably Mary Foley’s shop). It really reminded me of his kindness over those many years and the impact of being warmly included in the family on a piece of land that has supported some element of the family for at least two hundred years.

 Griffith’s Valuation was a survey of all land in Ireland that was conducted 1847 – 1864. The survey of Cork was completed in 1851 and there was only one Emperor listed there living on this same piece of land (Patrick my great-great-great grandfather in plot 2a), at the time renting from the absentee landlord William Leader, and later presumably acquired by the family as part of the Land Acts of the late 1890s.

This is land that has been loved by and supported our families for a long time, and where the people living there have loved each other and their kin for just as long. Fortunately that love continues to be shared there as it hopefully will for many generations to come. Thanks to Finn, Mary and the extended family for sharing that love with me over the years as I share these memories now in tribute to a fantastic and loving uncle. A man of few words but many kind actions. Love on, as much as, of the Land.

p.s. I haven’t written anything here for a while. I started a more technical article on this piece of land and Griffith’s Valuation back in January but maybe I had to get some thoughts on Finbarr down before that was ready to share

Imagine having woken up one morning in 1985 to several new product announcements: high-speed Internet connectivity, the World Wide Web, flatscreen TVs, portable computers and while we are at it: the iPhone. In reality these innovations arrived over a period of twenty years, or more, and the success of some were interdependent on the evolution of the others. But, imagine the sense of impact had all of those innovations arrived rapidly in time, one after the other. Or if we’d moved straight from vinyl to streaming, skipping audio cassettes and compact discs in the meantime.

We didn’t, but that is exactly what the GenAI announcements from OpenAI, Google and others have felt like to me this year. As in the case of those aforementioned consumer technology advances the seeds may have been sown over many years but all of a sudden this crop has become ripe and ready for harvest.

Back in September when I wrote AI: Awe Inspiring or Anxiety Inducing, I made a number of observations, a particularly prescient one being that “problems are getting solved almost as quickly as they arise” and “the pace of change is incredible”.

Addressing some of my observations at the time:

• I mentioned that “it’s all about text”: that the Large Language Model (LLM) offerings were primarily focussed on a text in/text out model. In their early November DevDay, OpenAI launched GPT-4V (V for Vision) which allows the submission and analysis of images. OpenAI have subsequently incorporated their image generation model DALL-E 3 into ChatGPT.

• On December 6^th, Google launched Gemini, their latest and greatest LLM in three flavours: Ultra, Pro and Nano (for mobile phones). These are touted as the first true “multi-modal” LLMS, supporting audio, video, images and text with ease. The broad capabilities of Ultra, the most compelling version are captured in this video which showcase it as intuitive and creative in a way we have not seen before. However Ultra is not available for public use until perhaps the second quarter of next year and the press coverage suggests all is not as rosy as the video suggests. What is clear though is that someone in Google marketing thought it sensible to preview the potential functionality in an upcoming release, still under test: perhaps to neutralize some of the positive press being received by its GPT4 Turbo cousin over at OpenAI.

• I mentioned the limitations of the maximum number of tokens (words*) accepted by the model with Anthropic’s Claude2 besting OpenAI at the date with a 100k model. Also on DevDay, OpenAI launched GPT4 Turbo with a 128k context size. On a recent trip to the heart of the action in California we met a vendor who were promoting a custom LLM with a 1 billion token context size (the mind boggles and I have not personally tested that model but Moore’s Law has been left in the shade if the growth in the size of mainstream supported context size from 4k to 128k+ in 2023 is anything to go by)

• I suggested using JSON to meet the challenge of grafting the LLM input/output onto existing systems. Sure enough OpenAI are now supporting a new JSON mode that ensures well-formed JSON will be returned in a prompt response, reducing the anxiety and effort around needing to parse and possibly correct returned data.

To underline the extent to which GenAI has captured the imagination of the world, Sam Altman’s short yet bizarre time in exile from his position of CEO of OpenAI won significant headlines in consumer media alongside many more significant and existential crises. It certainly felt like Lenin’s aphorism above was more than appropriate here. It underlines how front-and-centre GenAI has become in the zeitgeist.

There is an air of mystery surrounding the companies behind the leading models: have they cracked the code of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the power to do automated thinking, reasoning and acting at an unprecedented scale while keeping it a secret from the general public, or are they muddling along trying to tweak the impressive though at times flawed work done to date?

The EU has published the EU AI Act, defining risk levels for various activities undertaken with or supported by AI. In turn Joe Biden has issued an Executive Order on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence”

In the day job a few colleagues and I have been trying to enhance a mainstream Financial Services customer service process with GenAI. Consider a hypothetical mortgage application process with some human intervention (it wasn’t that but something analogous):

At fifty-thousand feet there is great promise, but in the trenches, like the Daleks above, there is potential to be thwarted at every turn

Mega-prompting (or maybe not)

We started out with some orchestration code written in Python that pulled contract information from the administration system, case data from CRM, interacted with a Document AI solution to recognise form-based and free-form text (no! GPT 4V was not fit for this purpose as yet in our view). From this with we built a mega-prompt to the basic pattern filled with all sorts of cunning cleverness and tips and tricks to extract the desired outcome:

You are a XX case handler

These are the steps you will carry out

1.

2.

3.

…

N.

On these documents delimited by !!!!

Delimiters followed by name-value pair documents including case data, contract data, document/form data.

Clear instructions to output name-value pairs for each of the business conditions/outcomes to be determined

The process steps in our prompt (without the name/value pair inputs representing case, contract and document data) were over 200 lines long and occasionally to be fair a bit confusing even for the humans in the loop of this stage of the project.

What we were seeking was an answer to each of 24 questions that would convince us that the prompt was correctly interpreting the input data and instructions and evaluating them correctly. “Right” answers for all of these would allow us to avoid traditional coding.

To that end we built a test harness to run through almost thirty different scenarios and to run each test case through GPT4 multiple times to assess the results (and the stability of those results). We even used GPT to create pandas code to compare test outputs against expected results (which it did very well).

What we found was a pattern where “easy” logic (is there a value present for X and Y) passed every time, things like date difference calculations gave a variety of answers oscillating either side of the correct one and some slightly more complex multi-level logic was correct maybe two-thirds of the time. So there was a sense in which the model “could” do it, but not consistently.

We probably spent a few elapsed weeks tuning the prompt, changing it in one place to improve one result, while another area that had been working well then started misbehaving. There was a sense of whack-a-mole to the activity which was very frustrating.

Then we decided to hand-code some of the areas where the prompt was behaving badly: pre-calculating the difference between dates and passing those in which improved our test pass rate, yet still the sense of “it works most, but not all the time”, persisted. This remained true even when recently re-testing on GPT4 Turbo.

The analogy I eventually arrived at was: you are dealing with a really smart kid, they have a great depth and breadth of knowledge. Given adult tasks they’ll perform well much of the time, but you can’t let them loose to run the store – they need constant supervision.

One Friday we had a useful call with a company in another industry doing similar exploration. They confirmed our discoveries and our doubts: it was a useful sanity check. With a heavy heart we re-wrote the logic and detailed business rules element in Python in a few days (much less time than we had spent nursing the prompt) and decided to use GPT4 for things that humans are good at but code is not. That was a good move! This returned us into the domain of deterministic computing: we try to do X and X happens and we were much happier humans.

GPT 0, regular old logic 1

Micro-prompting

We then used GPT for two specific tasks at which it excelled:

In the first we used a dedicated Document AI solution to perform full page transcription of incoming documents. We then provided GPT with the stream of text for each page with a page identifier, told it that this was a stream of documents with one or more pages, each of which could be one of the following (list for example only):

·         A European passport

·         A solicitors letter

·         A customer letter

·         A land registry document

·         Etc. etc

·         Or Other …

For each of these document types we specified the salient data we would like to retrieve e.g. for a passport the first and surname of the person, country of issue and the date of expiry

And that we’d like all of this data returned in well-formed JSON (this pre-dated JSON mode)

It did extremely well – correctly identifying the passport and other documents types from a jumble of text including a mix of irrelevant words picked up from distractions like watermarks: it clearly was able to use training data about passport formats together with the text itself to do a much better job than a human (or a hand-coded parser) would do when presented with that jumble.

We then used it for a different type of classification. By way of illustration only I’ll provide a sample prompt for classifying a list of financial services products:

You are a financial product classifier

1.  Given the name of a product you will produce a well formed JSON output depicting what it is.

2.  Product types are Savings | Investment | Loan | Mortgage | Stocks/Shares | Other

3.  Product categories are Asset | Liability

4.  This is sample JSON for two products:

{“products”: [

{“productname”: “1 year SureSaver fixed 2.4%”,

“producttype”: “Savings”,

“category”: “Asset”

},

{“productname”: “Home start”,

“producttype”: “Loan”,

“category”: “Liability”

}

        ]

        }

Produce output JSON for the product list between the !!!

!!!

An Post National Solidarity Bond Issue 14

PTSB Fixed Rate Mortgage

Microsoft

!!!

Pasting this into ChatGPT gives the following results:

{

  "products": [

    {

   "productname": "An Post National Solidarity Bond Issue 14",

      "producttype": "Savings",

      "category": "Asset"

    },

    {

      "productname": "PTSB Fixed Rate Mortgage",

      "producttype": "Mortgage",

      "category": "Liability"

    },

    {

      "productname": "Microsoft",

      "producttype": "Stocks/Shares",

      "category": "Asset"

    }

  ]

}

The subtlety here is that GPT was able to figure out that a National Solidarity Bond is a type of savings product, presumably because its training data included some of the product descriptions published by An Post, or a good guess? It could similarly be used to classify medical conditions or treatment codes leaning on the medical knowledge inherent in the model: something that would be extremely difficult to code for with traditional development.

In this case GPT 2: regular old logic 0.

The pattern of micro-prompting involved using GPT to perform a well-scoped, clearly defined task, in a short prompt with little ambiguity. And most importantly something that would be difficult to write a simple programme to do automatically. In the past this might have required the building and training of a domain-specific model at great cost. Now we can incorporate this functionality into our application for a few cents. Engaging with GPT in an integrated fashion within a real-life business application took patience and effort but was worth it. We couldn’t just throw a kitchen-sink prompt at it and hope for the best, but some rigour was rewarded.

What’s next?

In our case we got beyond the hype and got our business application using GPT into parallel testing alongside a real-life business process in mid-December. In this mode it will act as an assistant or co-pilot to the experts who have a high volume workload and it will improve response times to our end customers.

It would have been great if our first attempts with the “mega prompt” had paid off but it was too much too soon. Since we started working on this particular problem a number of advances in OpenAI’s model such as function calling have emerged and just the other day OpenAI published an update to its Prompt Engineering Guide which captures a wide variety of best practice. We will examine these early in 2024 as we expand our work to deal with more complex business processes and scenarios and build our skills around decomposing them for AI assistance. This is likely to become a new-world skill alongside prompt engineering: human intelligence decoding appropriate patterns with which to apply AI.

We notice now that there is a massive proliferation of LLM choices: HuggingFace, the go-to marketplace for open source models has 436,000+ models to choose from. Microsoft offers a range of models from OpenAI, Meta and others. Amazon Bedrock also offers a range of models from itself, Cohere, Anthropic, Meta and Stability AI among others. The future of this work likely includes a horses-for-courses approach to selecting an LLM for the job-in-hand.

Microsoft M365 and Github Copilots are gaining traction and interest, even if, like Gemini Ultra, the functionality beyond the promotional videos isn’t always as game-changing as suggested. Vendors like Snowflake are embedding LLM-calling capabilities into their core products and we expect that many vendors will follow suit even if it isn’t entirely clear how this will benefit their customers in the short run. It doesn’t pay not to have a story in this space right now – and this technology is not going away.

The fundamental question is whether incremental improvements on the Transformer model/pattern on which this generation of LLMs is based are going to lead the way to the promised land of AGI, or whether that require a few more decades of research and exploration?

Into 2024

The original document search / vector database solution pattern popularised in the early days of the GPT API launch has now been dubbed Retrieval Augmented Generation or RAG and this has become a straightforward use case to allow Q&A against a set of documents or an internal knowledge base. Google Trends shows a marked growth in interest in this pattern over the past year, particularly since the summer.  

My next prediction is that 2024 will see the emergence of a greater number of named LLM / GenAI usage patterns (like our own micro-prompts) which will make it easier for us all to understand the straightforward application of these technologies to enterprise computing and business problems. I’ll no doubt be back with further thoughts to share as that happens.

I was born in Calvary hospital in the Renmore suburb of Galway some time ago. Reading a Galway Advertiser article suggests that after twenty years providing that service “… The maternity service closed in 1973 because of staff difficulties and the expense of maintaining 24-hour cover.”.

It was very much open when my mother rushed me into the world with the help of some castor oil on the last day of the 1970/71 Irish tax year. For years I was reminded that my hastened arrival entitled my parents to an extra year’s tax allowance for their new son. Note to parents: I don’t recommend leading with the primary joy of your son’s arrival being an extra £40, even if that did support the purchase of a new television. Happily, my own son’s arrival on the same date thirty-five years later no longer coincided with the end of a tax year so he has been saved that ignominy. He remains the best birthday present I have and likely will ever receive.

The hospital was operated by the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary and I wonder at the marketing genius among them who decided that choosing the name Calvary, the reported site of the torture and crucifixion of their saviour, would be an inspiring name for a maternity hospital. I have first-hand exposure to, rather than experience of, the pain of childbirth, so perhaps this was what they were hinting at. Or perhaps they were alluding to the resurrection and sense of recovery a new mother might feel after three days and nights in the hospital. Either way; brave choice folks. The hospital went through a couple of name changes in the meantime: first Galvia, in a Galway meets Latvia naming style and more recently Bon Secours, which, meaning good help, is probably a safer choice in modern hospital naming that neither commits to guaranteed suffering (Calvary), the likelihood one would need for plead for mercy (Mater Misericordiae) or, indeed, a miracle (Our Lady of Lourdes).

I spent a smidgen over six years living a stone’s throw from that hospital, my last memory being my sixth birthday where I showed my friends my recently acquired chicken pox before we jetted off to the not-too-distant suburb of Oranmore.

A good friend of mine moved to a house in Renmore in recent years and on a visit earlier this year I was reminded of the compact layout of the neighbourhood, the close proximity to Galway City Centre and I was able to re-trace my steps to my first school, the afore-mentioned hospital and the short walk over the railway bridge past Ceannt Station into Eyre Square and the city beyond. It was amazing to re-cover the ground at adult height and legspan and realise how cosily connected all of these areas were, and of course, still are.

My friend’s house is the mirror image of the 3-bedroom semi that I grew up in, so it was a walk down memory lane to re-experience the rooms and layout and relive the kinesthetic memory of my early development. This was the house where the Cornflakes and Holy Water were consumed and where now other memories started to filter back ….

School Days

I was (and still am) the baby in our house so I revelled in being at home with my mother when my sister had already started school and have a vivid picture of being out in the back garden in pyjamas in my bare feet on a sunny morning as my mother hung the washing on the line realising that these one-on-one times together were shortly going to end. We lived at point A on the map and I can remember walking in June 1975 with my mother for the “first day” visit to Scoil Chaitriona (point C) and being relatively excited.

I also remember returning home from school one day to find to my utter disappointment that the children’s programme Wanderly Wagon on our only TV channel had been replaced by the state funeral of recently retired president Eamon DeValera. According to the internet this all took place on 2^nd September 1975 which was likely my second day of primary school so my four-year old self was probably wary that life was taking a turn for the worse.

I enjoyed the academic side of school but found myself in trouble one morning when another boy and I were caught throwing clumps of newly laid tarmacadam at each other in the yard (all in good fun). The young teacher tried to discipline me and I said I wanted to go home and bolted for the door, she tried to stop me and received a kick in the shin for her troubles and all two-foot six of me was duly lined up outside the principal’s office for a not-too-stern-talking to. The following morning lying beside my Dad in my parent’s bed he told me that the guards (police) had been in touch about the whole affair but weren’t going to press charges, this time. Second note to parents: don’t use the threat of criminal proceedings and incarceration to motivate good behaviour in a four-year old.

I was a keen learner and took to field exploration at an early age. Religious education was a core part of the curriculum and my teacher (not sure if it was the same one I kicked earlier) covered the story of Christ’s passion, crucifixion and death coming up to Easter (probably 1976). Those of you who know me are well acquainted with my deep intellect and attention to detail. Hold on a second!: I was born in Calvary, he died in Calvary, what a remarkable coincidence, and one that for some reason captured my imagination. It was Holy Thursday (the day before Good Friday) so rather than walking the 800 metres home alone after school, I took a detour around the corner to the hospital. Given that it was going to be Good Friday tomorrow they would likely have the crucifixes up and ready to go again and I wanted to see it first hand. Naturally what I saw (or didn’t see) around that corner was a massive disappointment: not a crucifix, repentant criminal or crown of thorns in sight. This was just the beginning of a long career of perhaps taking things a little too literally. I returned home a little later than usual to explain to my slightly worried mother what had delayed the return of her prodigy.

Developing Social Skills

Getting to know people, developing rapport and a skilful use of language are among my core talents. I started to develop these one day when I sat on the pillar of our gate engaging each passerby with an energetically offered expletive. I have to caution my international readers that this is not all as bad as it sounds. It was to the great entertainment of many, but one neighbourly soul decided to drop into my mother to tell her that her young son was greeting passersby with an unexpected invective and I was quickly called to account.

How did the informed mother of the 1970s deal with this reprobate? Where, I ask you, had this child heard this foul-mouthed language in the first place? Where indeed I ask you!

The summary judgement of the non-jury kangaroo court over which my mother presided was that I would have a large dollop of Colman’s Mustard placed on my tongue for this and every similar future outburst.

I write now as a seasoned fifty-something year old and in honour of Skinner, Pavlov and the pantheon of greats in the behavioural and operant conditioning field I must admit that I still curse like a trooper but will NEVER let that mustard pass my lips. Lesson three to parents: maybe ignore these things and they’ll go away!

It’s like Riding a Bike

This was the neighbourhood where I learned to ride a bicycle for the first time. I had a small bike with stabilisers on and vacillated between wanting them on and wanting them off, then on and then off again.

Mr. Cunningham up the road was, I think, a plumber and was unfortunate in having declared inadvertently at some point that he had the correct wrench to remove and, to his later chagrin, re-attach said stabilisers.

I guess this became a pattern: “Please can you take off my stabilisers Mr. Cunningham?”. I’d then amble about on the bike making a poor job of pedalling and come crawling back fifteen minutes later with a “Please can you put them back on Mr. Cunningham?”.

I’m guessing this must have gone on for a while and his patience was wearing thin. One Saturday morning, I arrived up to his house which was at the top of a hill called Whitethorn Drive. He removed the stabilisers, sat me on the saddle and pushed me at speed so that I accelerated down the hill and out onto Dun Na Mara drive at breakneck speed. Had a car being passing I was done for; as it was, I eventually found my reverse pedal brakes and screeched to a halt, exhilarated! I never looked back and perhaps it was a life lesson that sometimes you have to overcome fear and leap into the unknown, to Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway as Susan Jeffers puts it. I never looked back and Mr. Cunningham avoided a manslaughter charge. Win-Win!

And the memories kept coming

I have many other distinct memories of that house: the day my sister fell on the stairs and broke her arm when I was three. I was left with a neighbour when my mother brought to her hospital (the other one, not Calvary) and disappeared off across the nearby train tracks to find my Dad who was playing pitch-and-putt. Not happy! I knew I was in for the wooden spoon treatment and discovered for the first time that if you hide under the legs of a dresser facing the wall so you can’t see your parent, that does not mean that they cannot see and find you. In mathematical terms it’s not commutative, unfortunately.

There was a nice man, a gardener friend who came to do some work in our back garden and brought my sister and I a big bag of sweets in a brown bag marked MNC (a local shopping brand than pre-dated those like Spar).

There were spooky stories told one day in the utility room during an electricity outage which likely terrified me. That utility room held the gas cooker and the twin tub washing machine which kept the house going.

There was the day (aged three or so I guess) I decided I didn’t like that fact that my mom was giving my dad too much attention in the kitchen and I threw my Tom & Jerry Easter Egg mug onto the floor where it smashed in smithereens. I was sent to bed in tears banned from watching the Peggy Lee show on TV (or Peggy Leg as I called her) [It’s amazing the stuff you’d watch when you have one television and one television channel!]

There were visits from my Auntie Cathy who would travel from Dublin to see us and delighted in teaching me to read before I went to school and who is responsible for almost every photo of me and my sister that exists from that time including this one she entitled “The Mechanic”.

Huddling under my mother’s sweater during a torrential downpour at the local beach, Ballyloughan Strand, stunned by the feeling of cosiness while the heavens opened around me.

There were the neighbours, mostly girls as it turns out, that I hung out with before we disappeared to a new world, a few miles but a world away, after my sixth birthday. The Kennys all the way across the green, the Goodliffes and Fentons around the corner, the McGowans next door. Not to mention the Cunninghams and their enviable wrench collection … I wonder where they all are now ?

Thanks to my good friend M for giving me the chance to walk down memory lane on my recent pilgrimage to Calvary. It all seems like only yesterday.

I paste the Time magazine 100 AI cover image into my Word document draft of this blog post and the alternative text description “A magazine cover with a group of people. Description automatically generated” appears and catches my eye. This is image recognition and tagging that would have astounded us ten years ago now quietly operating, instantaneously, in the background as an almost throwaway feature of my word processor. I’ve noticed it before, but just in this moment I’ve really taken in it: the extent to which that type of human-emulating technology advance has quietly crept up on us.

The past year or so has been an interesting one in this regard. The release of ChatGPT into the public  domain on November 20, 2022 allowed millions of people to begin to interact with a store of vast knowledge combined with a style of artificial intelligence embodied in Large Language Models (LLMs) that few of us had experienced previously. It was hard not to be impressed with the tool’s ability to rapidly interpret a complex question and present plausible (and often correct) answers in the specified format, sometimes even working source code in a language of the prompter’s choosing, or narrative in the voice of Shakespeare or Jay-Z. The record breaking growth in user numbers was a testament to the curiosity raised by this technology.

Having worked in IT for many years and grown up in a generation where there was kudos in understanding how to copy files and directories around using the command line in advance of the arrival of graphical user interfaces, it is hard not to marvel at the ingenuity of the computer and data scientists behind this achievement. This level of natural language processing (NLP) is as they say ‘proper hard’.

The eternal philosopher

Philosophically it got me thinking about a few things:

Awe was the first word and feeling that came to mind. With any new technology there is a joining of the dots: “If this is possible, then could we do that?”. And my mind wondered back to times in history where our forebears will have experienced a similar feeling: be it the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, smelting of metals, manned flight and perhaps closer to this domain deciding on binary numbers as the foundation of modern computing and the invention of early logic gates such as vacuum tubes, transistors and the first silicon chips and integrated circuits. Like human DNA there is a long chain passed down over time to surface such innovations. The graphic illustrates Moore’s Law and the frequent doubling of transistors per unit area since the inception in the 1960s. That progression is deeply connected with the ability of LLMs to process massive volumes of data in a reasonable timeframe.

Secondly, it struck me how much each new generation takes for granted. If a technology has existed for long enough in your conscious memory it becomes commoditised; there is no awe at its existence, even though you may be heavily reliant on it. My mother remembers electricity arriving to her rural home after years of oil lamps and candles lighting dark winter nights, whereas I’ve known nothing but an electricity-enabled life. I remember getting my hands on my first home computer, the arrival of the World Wide Web and internet access to the mass market, the arrival of the mobile phone, the arrival of the touchscreen phone, the demise of video rental stores and the rise of streaming. We are raising a generation of kids that take these things for granted and therefore are cognitively primed to expect and perhaps invent experiences where these innovations are table stakes that can be built upon. It is easy to forget that during the second-world war, roomfuls of people worked to manually calculate maths tables to control bomb trajectories and other problems that have since become trivial. The existence of a tool such as Excel or Google Sheets which we see as a commodity now, could at that time have saved millions of man hours of labour and possibly shortened the war.

That led me to a consideration of the term Artificial Intelligence. Looking forward from 1900, rather than backwards from now, it would be easy to frame the electronic calculator, a computer doing automated billing or calculating thousand of premiums in a short period, or a relatively trivial missile guidance system capable of doing simple trigonometry in-flight, as Artificial Intelligence: that which emulates tasks otherwise the domain of the human brain, often much faster and with greater accuracy than the human counterpart. Of course we discounted this type of straightforward, if-then logic from AI once it became mainstream: those procedural, predictable coding tasks where we provide detailed instructions to do A, B, C with some conditions and in a particular order are taken for granted.

Even the use of the term Artificial Intelligence to describe data science and machine learning activity related to propensity models is starting to feel a bit overbaked at this point. Sure, computer algorithms are much more efficient than humans at ‘mining’ large volumes of data and applying statistical analysis techniques to the data to spot anomalies and patterns, but it feels in some way like a supercharged version of the electronic calculator. That said, while a recommender model that suggests the next book I should buy may not result in awe, an image recognition system that spots potential future breast cancer from a few pixels that no human being could possible perceive is certainly getting there.

There was a time in pre-history when a distant ancestor may have mused how in their own lifetime ‘things were much harder before we starting using wheels’ or ‘it was freezing before we figured out how to make our own fire’. What is hard to get one’s head around is that idea that the level of sophistication we are seeing now is likely just the first spark in the flame of what will develop in the future.

In 1950, Alan Turing wrote a paper introducing the Imitation Game, later known as the Turing Test, where he posed a thought experiment that imagined a computer programme so powerful that natural language interactions with it would be indistinguishable from interactions with another human being. The field of Artificial Intelligence study is said to have started in 1956, so the advances we are seeing now are built on the research of almost seventy years with notable advances in the last ten or so.

The early 2010s saw significant advances in the accuracy of image and character recognition and Google’s 2017 paper Attention is All You Need provided a number of breakthroughs that underpin the Transformer model on which all of the competing Large Language Models we hear about today are based. That includes OpenAI’s GPT used in ChatGPT (Transformer puts the T in GPT!), Google’s PaLM used in Bard, Meta’s LLaMa, Anthropic’s Claude and so on. What makes them exciting and novel is that, just as Turing envisaged, we can interact with these models using complex human language and they reply articulately with a capacity for nuance and finesse. At times it’s uncannily good.

As I’ve written elsewhere my early training was at the tail-end of mainframe computing dominance and I got in on the ground-floor of enterprise client/server computing at a time when I had the gift of time to dive in and explore. My schedule was less forgiving with the advent of web computing, single page applications and some more recent innovations. One of the benefits of this lifestage which I’ve been calling semi-retirement but in line with Charles Handy’s book The Empty Raincoat is really more of a portfolio career, is the return of the luxury of time and being able to indulge these interests. This has allowed me time to enjoy immersion and re-discovery.

Learnings

There are many interesting things happening in AI: if you are interesting in visual media then Midjourney is an amazing tool for producing amazing images from a simple prompt. My focus in recent months has been on how LLMs will fit into our world, and particularly enterprise computing in the near term. Most of that work has been with OpenAI’s models surfaced through the ChatGPT user interface or via an API integration.

Some of my observations are as follows:

1.       ChatGPT is a great co-pilot: most tasks are made easier with a quick prompt to ChatGPT to get started. If I’m going to write some Python code I can pass it a snippet or a short summary and it’ll give me an outline of the code I need. I wanted to use the ODATA API to retrieve data from Microsoft CRM and with a two line description of what I wanted it gave me the correct HTTP request, for the entities I named, together with the Python code to leverage the request package to test it. Even better as I made changes to the request to filter out certain data and had syntax errors I could paste it into GPT and ask it to correct the error which it did (and then provided a full explanation of the syntax specifics). I found this a really effective way to learn and improve productivity. I haven’t played with GitHub co-pilot or M365 co-pilot but I expect they’ll enhance productivity in similar ways. The nature of a co-pilot is of course that a human makes the final call on what to use and whether the response is appropriate.

2.       Problems are getting solved almost as fast as they arise: In May, I was writing a paper on the practicalities of leveraging LLMs in real-life scenarios. In one example we wanted to do transcript analysis on recordings of conversations, extracting themes and whether certain topics had been covered. I had an hour long transcript with about twenty thousand words. The maximum prompt length available via OpenAI at the time of writing was the 16k OpenAI GPT3 model (and this was 8k via Azure OpenAI) so I flagged this as a short-term constraint which made that job difficult to do effectively. Within days of writing that note, the 32k GPT4 model was promised and then Anthropic launched their 100k model. My concern became redundant before I had a chance to present the paper. Similarly EU data residency concerns I raised were addressed by the availability of the OpenAI models in Azure’s EU-hosted data centres.

3.       Models can be unpredictable: we conducted a test at one point asking ChatGPT 3.5 to compare two insurance products from their publicly available specifications. In this example it was conflating the terms and conditions from one product with the other. What was curious though was that repeatedly prompting with “that isn’t quite right – I think you have more information than that?” or “you’ve said X but you’ve now said Y which contradicts that?” often led to a response like “Sorry about that, the correct answer is Z”. At no time did I provide the correct answer but the repeated prompting caused the model to dig deeper somehow and eventually get there. I had numerous experiences like this with GPT 3.5 which led me to write in version of the May presentation that this tech was exciting but needed time to develop. GPT 4 became available mid-way through the draft and nailed the same questions providing detailed reasoning for the correct answers. A just-in-time solution once more.

4.       The pace of change is incredible: At the moment you can either make the time to read all of the announcements, experiments and advances or take the time to drill down into one thread and get to know the technology. The chances of producing a point in time picture to an audience and it being ‘correct’ and ‘complete’ when it is presented is slim. Things are evolving so quickly it is best to say ‘this is what was true in May, but by now things will likely have changed’. This is reminiscent of how rapidly the threat landscape was changing when I was active in the cybersecurity space when the “latest” sample breach chosen to showcase an issue was quickly superseded by another one.

5.       Integrating this technology into enterprise processes will take a new mindset, one that copes with greater uncertainty and variability. Traditional IT folks will be used to coding an algorithm that says “IF x THEN y”; working with LLMs is more art than science currently and creating a prompt that ensures a consistent response each time, every time, is hard. I’ve found the (currently free) DeepLearning.ai training particularly good – with this one giving a solid understanding of how to create more reliable prompts: ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers - DeepLearning.AI. Taking the analogy of grafting a bionic limb onto a human body some thought needs to be given to how to graft the nerve endings in the biological piece to the electro-mechanical piece. The traditional IT systems are more deterministic and electro-mechanical, the LLM-enabled AI component are more organic and probabilistic. In our testing we run the same prompts N times (as the results may vary between runs) and then compare results to expected results over multiple runs to gauge consistency. The all-powerful prompts are tuned over many iterations to remove ambiguity (an ironic negative side-effect of using natural language rather than prescriptive computer code). It can be a frustrating journey with the feeling that sometimes it would just be easier to code the rules. Seeing an LLM output a logically untrue clause like “because the sum assured €50,000 is greater than €200000” is enough to bring tears to the eyes of a seasoned developer. There is huge promise here but caution is advised: it is one thing to use this technology as a co-pilot to human activity, more checks and balances will be required to support lights off, unsupervised or limited supervision operation. New patterns will be developed to manage reliability.

6.       For now it’s all about text: the LLMs themselves are very complex and expensive to train, but the API is about a simple as it gets – the mainstream OpenAI API simply takes a chain of text messages from which a new response is created. Any of the smart tools out there that allow documents or other data to be uploaded for consideration by the LLM involves some intermediate smarts to translate and summarize those into text, and with that, text that fits within the 16k, 32k or whatever token limit is currently set on the model you are using. There is a lot of traditional IT work require to pull data, OCR documents or what have you before submitting a prompt. In turn the bionic arm-to-biological body link needs to codify the returned text into something that can prompt action in the traditional system.

7.       Models will change over time. While LLMs are relatively new to most of us we’ve seen the evolution from GPT 3, to 3.5 to 4 and those working with the API will be familiar with multiple date-stamped iterations of those models available over time. Old models gets retired, new models get introduced. If you have a business relying on those models you will need a decent test bed of prompts and expected results to ensure you don’t get blindsided by an overnight change in the model – whether an increase or reduction in accuracy or performance.

8.       Performance varies: my experience of invoking the models via the API (in Azure) is that unlike the ChatGPT UI, API response times can have occasional large response time variances ranging from seconds to minutes so large volume activity is better batched up or considered asynchronously rather than made part of an interactive customer flow. The variance hasn’t been enough to de-rail any of our experiments but is worth bearing in mind. One would assume that as infrastructure scales and demand levels that response times will also become more predictable.

9.       It’s cheap to try: while these models have cost hundreds of millions to train, the APIs can be used for fractions of a cent per token (a token equates typically to a word, or common word base) – though more capable models, or those capable of handling large prompts are more expensive. On release GPT4 was priced at 30X GPT 3.5, but as noted above was less prone to being plain stupid at times!

10.   P.s. Learn Python: it seems that due to it’s deep roots in data science Python is a great default language for lots of activity in this space. There are a wealth of samples and open source libraries such as Langchain that shorten development times in this space – it just makes life easier.

Outlook

The debate around the ethics and long-term impact of AI will run for many years. The predictions of doom and gloom are as numerous as those predicting a bright new world ahead for humanity. For every job that AI automates and makes redundant there will likely be new roles in prompt engineering, education and other fields to leverage the advances. However, it must be admitted that it was probably little consolation to blacksmiths to be told that motorcars would create an industry of mechanics, gas stations, car dealerships, rental companies, or in the near future to gas station owners that electric cars will generate other advantages. Nor I suspect did the be-muscled stone age hunter who was valued for their strength in the tribe appreciate their replacement by the cognitive strengths required to optimise settled agriculture and raising of domesticated animals for food.

I predict that we will look back on these current AI models and laugh at things like 16K token limits and random hallucinations, the same way we now view the limited capabilities of a 1980’s Commodore 64 or Spectrum 48. Given that these few pounds of carbon-based matter between our ears are capable of feats of memory, imagination and creativity with a fraction of the energetic investment of GPT models I suspect that there will at some point be a shift in technology similar to that experienced when leaping from vacuum tubes to integrated circuits and that the mainstream breakthrough that has been experienced over the past year will turbo-charge efforts in this space. Like the four-minute mile, when something that was once thought impossible becomes mainstream, progress is inevitable.

On balance for me these new foothills of the Artificial Intelligence dreamt of seventy years ago are awe-inspiring, for others anxiety inducing. Whatever the future may hold, I believe these innovations are here to stay. I’m optimistic that the balance will swing in the favour of enabling the human race to deliver a net positive.

There is lots to discover here and it is exciting to be involved once more in the ground floor of an emerging technology. There is plenty of slog required beyond the hype to leverage the technology beyond a smart co-pilot but early results are promising.

I’d love to hear in the comments from anyone who is on a similar journey, particularly those labouring in enterprise computing/insurance/financial services/healthcare and what your experience has been.

Read and watch more here on prompt engineering:

ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers - DeepLearning.AI

Best practices for prompt engineering with OpenAI API | OpenAI Help Center

GitHub - dair-ai/Prompt-Engineering-Guide: 🐙 Guides, papers, lecture, notebooks and resources for prompt engineering

Medium.com has a host of great writers on this and related topics including:

Prompt Engineering Guide. Principles, Techniques, and… | by Olivia Tanuwidjaja | Towards Data Science

Bruce Springsteen has just completed a three-night set in the RDS in Dublin on May 5^th, 7^th and 9^th. I was fortunate to get to see him rocking it out with the E Street band almost thirty years to the day I first saw him perform in the same venue. The seventy-three year old’s voice was amazing and he is in great physical shape with the odd hint that he won’t be around forever.

I wrote some time ago about lying on the bonnet of my father’s car in the sunshine, listening to the first beats of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA blasting out of the radio as he opened his first concert in Ireland at Slane Castle on June 1^st, 1985. It may have been the unusual combination of summer sunshine in the West of Ireland, the arrival of this music icon on our shores or the fact that the image itself is reminiscent of a Springsteen lyric, or something else, but the scene is etched in my memory.

That concert was his first and largest stadium gig in Europe with an estimated 100,000 people attending on the day, a day that made enough of a mark on him to feature in his 2016 memoir named after one of his greatest hits, Born to Run

June 1, 1985, Slane Castle, Dublin, Ireland, our first stadium show, ever. Precariously perched in a field fifty miles outside of Dublin were ninety-five thousand people. The largest crowd I’d ever seen. They completely filled a grassy bowl bounded by the Boyne River at our stage’s rear and Slane Castle, perched in front on a high green knoll, in the distance. The crowd closest to the stage, an immediate couple of thousand, were deeply into their Guinness and dangerously swaying from left to right. They were opening up gaping holes amongst themselves as audience members by the dozens fell to the muddy ground, vanishing for unbearable seconds ’til righted once again by their neighbors. Then, once standing, they’d slosh back the other way and the whole interminable, interminable, nerve-grinding exercise would be repeated again, ad infinitum. It was a sight way too hairy for my tender eyes. I thought somebody was going to get killed and it’d be my fault.

Born to Run (p. 334).

Springsteen had leaped onto my radar after the 1984 release of the Born in the USA album. The first single from that album was Dancing in the Dark, accompanied by a concert music video with a small role for a pre-Friends, pre-fame Courteney Cox. This was followed by the release of seven hit singles including the title track. So it’s no surprise that by time he arrived in Ireland in mid-1985 Bruce was hot property and the album on CD later became one of my regular plays.

Teenage years open up a phase which absorbs the hit music of the day so that it travels with you throughout your lifetime: what most people name as their key musical influences. Those initial influences appear in a narrow window, maybe from age thirteen to seventeen or eighteen; new music can make it’s way in later but rarely as deeply rooted as those early influences.

Given that my Bruce window opened up in the mid-80s I was largely oblivious to that which had come before. That gap was closed retrospectively when my schoolfriend John Allen arrived back from a summer working in the US in 1988 with a gift of the multi-CD offering Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band Live 1975-1985 covering off a significant portion of the back-catalogue; hits I’d missed out on their release prior to my teenage years including great songs like The River (clocking in at 11:42 including a great spoken introduction), Badlands, Born to Run, Thunder Road, and many more. I listened to those tunes time and time again over the years.

My first opportunity to see him live was at the RDS in Dublin on May 20^th, 1993. It was brilliant to see him in person (albeit without the E Street Band). I finished my final college exams in the same month and it very much marked the end of that phase of life and education and the start of a new one, so much so it is etched in my memory as vividly as the sun-drenched remote enjoyment of his debut at Slane eight years earlier. The intervening time had seen the release of the aforementioned Live 1975-1985 album,  Tunnel of Love, Human Touch and Lucky Town and the setlist from the night shows that he chose liberally from all of these albums in a three-hour-plus tour-de-force.

I didn’t stay close to much of his new material in the following years. This is probably a testament to the life stages that came next and the changes in how music is consumed but always enjoyed hearing his gravelly voice appearing on the radio for the Rising or his more recent contemplative material such as Letter to You.

Shortly after returning from a US family holiday in summer 2019 the release of the comedy-drama film Blinded by the Light (also the name of the first track on Bruce’s debut album Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. ) was a great reminder of early career Bruce and a reminder of how uplifting and energizing his music is (even when the lyrics cover darker material). It is based on the memoir of journalist Sarfraz Manzoor: Greetings from Bury Park and does a great job of blending a witty story line with great music.

During Covid I caught up with Bruce’s 2016 memoir Born to Run which offers an honest and eye-opening account of his life and times as a Rock and Roller spanning over fifty years at that point.

In the book he covers in detailed prose the themes of his many songs: his ambivalent relationship with his upbringing in blue collar Freehold, New Jersey; his relationship with his family, particularly his father; with friends; with cars, work and the American Dream, and of course with love and relationships.

He covers his part in many bands starting with The Castilles, on to Steel Mill and The Bruce Springsteen Band before marking himself out as the bandleader alongside but separate to the E Street Band.

I look back on this as being one of the smartest decisions of my young life. I’ve always believed the E Street Band’s continued existence—and it’s now been forty-plus years since its inception—is partially due to the fact that there was little to no role confusion amongst its members. Everyone knew their job, their boundaries, their blessings and limitations. My bandmates were not always happy with the decisions I made and may have been angered by some of them, but nobody debated my right to make them. Clarity ruled and allowed us to forge a bond based on the principle that we worked together, but it was my band. I crafted a benevolent dictatorship; creative input was welcomed within the structure I prepared but it was my name on the dotted line and on the records. Later, when trouble came knocking, it came my way. So the last word was going to be mine from here on in. Even then, problems arose, but we had in place a reasonably well-defined system to contextualize and deal with them.

Born to Run (pp. 149-150).

His relationship with his father which was fraught at times:

My experience with my father’s drinking had been enough. The terrifying, all-engulfing presence he became when he drank convinced me to never go there. He lost who he was. The goodness and kindness in his heart, of which there was plenty, were erased in a flood of self-pitying rage and a ferocity that turned our home into a minefield of fear and anxiety. You never knew when he was going to go off.

Born to Run (p. 179).

On performing:

Something that lets some sun in, that keeps you breathing, that lifts you in a way that can’t be explained, only experienced. It’s something to live for, and it was my lifeline to the rest of humanity in the days when those connections were tough for me to make. Can it be hard? . . . Yeah. Is everyone built for it physically and psychologically? . . . No. Are there nights you don’t want to go on? . . . Yep. But on those nights, there will come a moment when something happens, the band takes flight, a face lights up in the audience, someone, with their eyes closed, singing along to the words, the music you’ve written, and suddenly you’re bound together by the feeling of the things that matter to you most. Or . . . there may be some great-looking women in the crowd—that always works too!

Born to Run (pp. 186-187)

And perhaps surprisingly, or perhaps not, given his great success, he speaks of how depression has crippled him at various times in his career right up to the present day, how he has coped with that and how it has shaped him over that time. It is refreshing in its authenticity:

Youth and death have always been an intoxicating combination for the myth makers left amongst the living. And dangerous, even violent, self-loathing has long been an essential ingredient in the fires of transformation. When the “new self” burns to life, the twins of great control and recklessness are immutably linked. It’s what makes life interesting. The high tension between these two forces often makes a performer fascinating and fun to watch, but also a white-cross highway marker. Here, many who’ve come this way have burned out hard or died.

Born to Run (p. 214).

My experience with relationships and love to that point all told me I wasn’t built for it. I grew very uncomfortable, very fast, with domestic life. Worse, it uncovered a deep-seated anger in me I was ashamed of but also embraced. It was the silent, dormant volcano of the old man’s nightly kitchen vigil, the stillness covering a red misting rage. All of this sat nicely on top of a sea of fear and depression so vast I hadn’t begun to contemplate it, much less consider what I should do about it.

Born to Run (p. 272).

All I do know is as we age the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier . . . much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher. Maybe I’d cut myself loose one too many times, depended on my unfailing magic act once too often, drifted that little bit too far from the smoke and mirrors holding me together. Or . . . I just got old . . . old enough to know better. Whatever the reason, I’d found myself, once again, stranded in the middle of . . . “nowhere,” but this time the euphoria and delusions that kept me oiled and running had ground to a halt.

Born to Run (p. 306).

Long ago, the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness, and I’ve become an abuser of their once lifesaving powers. I relied on them to wrongly isolate myself, seal my alienation, cut me off from life, control others and contain my emotions to a damaging degree. Now the bill collector is knocking, and his payment’ll be in tears.

Born to Run (pp. 306-307).

In all psychological wars, it’s never over, there’s just this day, this time, and a hesitant belief in your own ability to change. It is not an arena where the unsure should go looking for absolutes and there are no permanent victories. It is about a living change, filled with the insecurities, the chaos, of our own personalities, and is always one step up, two steps back. The results of my work with Dr. Myers and my debt to him are at the heart of this book.

Born to Run (p. 312).

The blues don’t jump right on you. They come creeping. Shortly after my sixtieth I slipped into a depression like I hadn’t experienced since that dusty night in Texas thirty years earlier. It lasted for a year and a half and devastated me. When these moods hit me, usually few will notice—not Mr. Landau, no one I work with in the studio, not the band, never the audience, hopefully not the children—but Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track. During these periods I can be cruel: I run, I dissemble, I dodge, I weave, I disappear, I return, I rarely apologize, and all the while Patti holds down the fort as I’m trying to burn it down. She stops me. She gets me to the doctors and says, “This man needs a pill.”

Born to Run (p. 484)

There is also a picture of the Dad, the real man behind the myth, made whole through his relationship with Patti Scialfa:

I’d often breathe a sigh of relief and run back to my fortress of solitude, where as usual I felt at home, safe, until, like a bear in need of blood and meat, I’d wake from my hibernation and travel through the house for my drink from the cup of human love and companionship. But I always felt I needed to be able to shut it all off like a spigot. Patti saw all this and called me on it. For a long time I’d felt the greatest sin a family member could commit was interrupting me while I was working on a song. I felt music was fleeting and once you let it slip through your hands, it was gone. Through Patti, I learned that their requests came first and how to stop what I was doing and listen listen to them. I came to understand that music, a song, will always be there for me. But your children are here and gone. While I may never lay claim to the title “father of the year,” I worked hard to get straight with those who depended on my nearness to nurture and guide them. Patti made sure I had good strong relationships with our kids, free of much of the turmoil I experienced as a child.

…

I was crushed between sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four. Not a good record.

Born to Run (pp. 392-393).

Whether or not you are a fan of Springsteen’s music, or the man himself, the memoir gives insight into the human condition. It reminds us that there are few free rides, or win-win bargains with life, his great success and wealth does not eliminate the shadow side.

Building on my Covid reflection journey I had plenty of opportunity to listen to more podcasts and having read his memoir, Bruce popped up once again with his buddy Barack Obama, riffing together on life, liberty, music and the American dream in the podcast series “Renegades: Born in the USA”. Worth a listen if you have time for either or both of them. Nice to hear the friendship and mutual respect that developed between them during the production.

So given the late-stage immersion Springsteen’s music, memoir and with greater insight into the man it was great to see his May 2023 Dublin concert dates announced to close the loop on the thirty years that have passed in my life since I last saw him live in the same venue. Each of us had a unique relationship with our musical idols and their material, and somehow closing the loop on that thirty year spell makes me contemplate all that has occurred during that time period in my life also, grateful for the musical anchors that allow me to reconnect easily with moments in time gone by.

The energy of Bruce and the E Street band members is unabated, with Jake Clemons standing in for his late uncle Clarence and with a palpable sense that while this might not be the last tour, it is likely close to it. It is a near certainty that he will not be around on the thirtieth anniversary of this year’s concert and that my own odds for celebrating it in person are also relatively slim, or maybe just if I hit average life expectancy.

The solo acoustic I’ll See You in my Dreams closing out the setlist feels like thank you and goodbye from a man contemplating his existential reality, but for whom there is yet, No Surrender.

“We learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school”

The River, live: with that unmistakeable harmonica about a minute in:

“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true or is it something worse.”

Born to Run:

“Tramps like us, baby we were born to run”

A great rendition of Born to Run from The Killers & Springsteen in Madison Square Garden (last 5 minutes)

And a nice tribute to Prince:

It’s nice to have people in your life that have known you a long time, understand some of the road you’ve travelled and still see the spark that ignited the friendship years earlier. It offers a warm reminder of the simplicity of those early days: pre-kids, pre-mortgages, pre-careers, pre-almost everything.

Going back to Easter 1991 I was sitting at home alone in my basement flat one evening. I think it was Easter Saturday of that four-day holiday weekend when Bertie dropped in. I was reading the IBM Token Ring LAN Protocol guide. I couldn’t find an image of the cover on the Internet but I do remember it was a ring binder with a blue and white insert cover and basically it contained detailed descriptions of the “on the wire” data formats for token ring networking. I remember how hard he laughed seeing my reading material and wondering out loud what kind of a sad life I was pursuing.

At the time our employer had a large wiring closet that was part of the building core which contained all of the IBM printed materials that were distributed at intervals to large IBM mainframe sites.  There were operating system manuals for MVS, VM, CICS, programming languages and other IBM offerings. Then there were the IBM “Red books”, so named for the colour of the outside cover. The Red books provided practical implementation instructions for a host of different technical platforms and technologies. At the time I was into mainframe-LAN intercommunication and read and played a lot in the pre-TCP/IP days with an IBM SNA protocol called APPC (Advanced Program-to-Program Communication) also known by the catchy name LU 6.2. In these pre-Internet days it was possible to set a target of reading everything in the closet, of knowing, or at least reading, all the knowledge that existed.

That I considered it a good use of time to leaf through a networking protocol manual on a long weekend in order to meet my commitment of reading ‘all’ the available material probably says more about personality traits (and perhaps disorders) I had not yet consciously acknowledged.

In Information Technology, and other fields, it has become exponentially harder to read all of what exists on any topic. Those days disappeared pretty quickly with the advent of the internet, or even with earlier DVD distribution of content. This is balanced by the high quality of information and how-to sites like StackOverflow that make it easy to pick up sample code or configuration, and of course how there is an ease-of-access to play with complex computing environments through cloud computing providers.

Later that year, Bertie headed off to work in Des Moines, Iowa, the mid-west insurance capital of the US for a couple of years. I was duly delegated responsibility for minding Belinda in his absence and was rewarded with great, yet uncomplicated, female company and lots of social outings, ending up with two solid friendships instead of just one.

I made my first-ever trip to the US to visit Bertie in the summer of 1992 and got to see the highlights of his adopted home-away-from-home. Des Moines is the birthplace of the author Bill Bryson and the largest city in the state of Iowa. It looks like its population has almost doubled since that trip in 1992 when it had just over 300,000 people in the metropolitan area. The Principal Financial-owned 801 Grand is the tallest building in Iowa and a landmark visible from all around downtown which probably isn’t on too many tourist trails but is a decent mid-western city.

An Irish couple in Des Moines kindly loaned us a “Hardy Boys” minivan which we duly drove to Chicago to enjoy the festivities over the Fourth of July weekend. We stayed at the Blackstone Hotel on Michigan Avenue and sang U2 songs in Rattle and Hum style with locals on the street into the dying hours of Saturday the fourth, enjoyed the Taste of Chicago in Grant Park, the Shedd Aquarium, Mother’s Bar and took in the sights and sounds immortalised in one of my favourite movies, The Blues Brothers. Good times.

It's 106 miles to Chicago

We’ve got a full tank of gas, a half pack of cigarettes

It’s dark outside and we’re wearing sunglasses

Hit it!

Admittedly it was a significant upgrade from that previous Easter reading IBM computer manuals.

As synchronicity would have it I started on this post last week and then went to the movie Champions over the weekend with the family. The movie which stars Woody Harrelson, is set in, of all places, Des Moines and also features a trip to Winnipeg, a mid-western Canadian city that I visited for my day job quite a number of times in recent years which is not dissimilar to Des Moines in scale and features such as a downtown skywalk to protect one from the elements.

The movie does a nice job of mixing humour and poignant life circumstances in a package that worked for our gang.

This coming fall our eldest will spend a semester in Purdue University in Indiana transiting via Chicago O’Hare. If all goes to plan we’ll get to spend a long weekend with him in the Windy City and get a chance to re-trace the tourist trail and show him some of the sights I first experienced over thirty years ago. No computer manuals in sight.

I’m thankful for good friends, long-lasting relationships and the health and agency to enjoy life.

Till next time

This post has been a while in the making, and really for no good reason. I listened to the audiobook version of Bono’s Surrender, the autobiographical account of his journey and that of U2 back in November. It’s more than your average audiobook, including as it does musical out-takes from Bono, U2 and the music that inspired him and Bono’s surprisingly good impersonations of everyone from their erudite manager Paul McGuinness to Bill Clinton and back again.

I’ve been a U2 fan since my teenage years, starting to tune in around the radio release of Pride off the Unforgettable Fire album and entranced by their performances of Bad at both Live Aid and possibly more impactfully Self Aid, that self-help, jobs creation concert staged in Croke Park in May 1986. I remember sitting on my bed with an old guitar, with only three remaining strings, picking at them and wondering what it would take to recreate the Edge’s riff. Three new strings would have been a start.

The first U2 album I owned was the Joshua Tree and I played it to death. While I’d consider myself a fan, as the saying goes, there are fans and then there are fans. I’ve been to a handful of U2 concerts, didn’t buy Pop or Zooropa but find myself in a bit of a renaissance following my consumption of the new book. As he admits himself, Bono became a bit Marmite at one point, it was not cool in some quarters to like him or to admit to it. His book tells the story of a life well lived with a lot to show for it in the creative, material and philanthropic worlds. He is honest, the story is self-effacing and revealing in equal measure and the result, in my view, is an even more likeable Bono.

Keeping with the theme of musical autobiographies, shortly after the audiobook I read Paul Brady’s Crazy Dreams. Both are excellent, honest and open accounts of their respective journeys as musicians and as people; one Tyrone-born, steeped in traditional music evolving through a number of bands and musical genres; the other a Dubliner, defined but not contained by U2, the rock-and-roll foursome he joined as a teenage schoolgoer.

In his book, Paul Brady tells the story of an episode in October 1982 when he shared a TV show panel with Bono and the Edge on his way back from the funeral of traditional music legend Seamus Ennis. Something about the juxtaposition of the loss of this understated traditional music icon and Bono’s pomposity irritated Brady:

Now, arriving in from the funeral of one of Ireland’s musical giants, where I was surrounded by legend after legend in the traditional music world and with the tongue loosened by the pint, I found myself inclined to have a go. Bono was, even then, seriously alpha male and liked to talk. His conversation model was everything that the trad camp eschewed. It all seemed ridiculous and pompous to me at the time and every fibre in my slightly inebriated body was inclined to burst the bubble. I heard myself truculently demanding of them, what was this oul’ guff about an imaginary Lypton Village and what did they think they were doing out there anyway? I can’t quite remember what was said, but there seemed a slight faltering in Bono’s gallop, a chink in the armour. Honour was satisfied. All was right again with the world. The proper order of things had been restored.

…

But I knew what really happened that day. I regret it ever since. I was slightly drunk, short-sighted and my alpha-male ego was feeling aggressive; now I believe it precluded any development of a close relationship with a band and a man (Bono) I grew to admire and appreciate. No, I am not proud of being one of those at the time who were mistakenly convinced U2 would never happen.

Brady, Paul. Crazy Dreams (pp. 233-234). Merrion Press. Kindle Edition.

This is the same Paul Brady that Bono lists as having jammed alongside U2 at his wedding to Ali a couple of months earlier on August 31^st , 1982. My first thought was to write a post called ‘When Bono met Brady’ and somehow use Brady’s recollection as the hook for the story.

The truth is that both men have had fantastically successful creative careers in different musical genres. Bono & U2 likely have a bigger score on the monetary scoreboard but Paul Brady has been prolific as a recording artist in his own right and as a songwriter for artists such as Tina Turner. Notably Bob Dylan is quoted as a big fan on the cover of Brady’s book: high praise indeed for music afficionados.

This post is more about the procrastination I’ve experienced in preparing to write it: downloading the Kindle version of Surrender and speed reading it to pick out passages of interest and probably feeling that the hook of Bono vs Brady is less interesting and I’ve been drawn further into the U2 story and the music that accompanies it.

I think we are sometimes blinded by the end-state of famous and successful people; that there must have been some obvious signs or unique ingredient in the young person who later ends up achieving remarkable notoriety and success. It might look like that travelling backwards from here but I suspect it is rarely entirely obvious to the gangly teenager themselves before they break out into the world and invest hard work and experience luck in equal measure.

Bono’s story opens on the operating table at Christmas 2016 in Mount Sinai hospital, New York and quickly tracks back to his fun-filled if chaotic childhood on Cedarwood Road and the sad loss of his mother Iris when he was 14, the loss a theme in U2’s early work I Will Follow. He signs up with life-partner Ali the same week he joins U2 in Mount Temple Comprehensive School and she becomes the female guide to his life, the yin to his yang, or a path to his inner yin in the absence of Iris.

Looking back success came quickly, but viewed from the other side the hard work of building an audience from startup in 1976 to the release of the first album Boy in October 1980 must have felt like an eternity. Luck and chutzpah play a role in this story in equal measure from Bono blagging his way in to see the top London music journos, to a chance over the shoulder recommendation from a then lesser known Louis Walsh to stick with Paul McGuinness as the band’s manager, to the National Stadium ‘homecoming’ concert which was the catalyst to their signing by Island Records.

On the night of February 26, 1980, the entry price to the great hall was that you were breathing, even just a little. It soon became apparent that this was a free tickets a-go-go, and the venue filled up with all kinds of people. People with a vague interest in us, people with no interest in us, people who had never heard of us, people of no fixed abode who were looking to keep warm, and people whose only interest was to see us fail. All of which meant that the place was about half full when we hit the stage for our triumphant return. And if it was a pretty good show by our own erratic standards, for one man at least the gig was exceptional. That was the A&R man.

Bono, Surrender, p103

The book charts the band through that initial success through the Unforgettable Fire, the Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby and the albums, concerts and world events that followed them.

More interestingly it charts Bono’s own development as a person, in his marriage, the arrival of kids and balancing the banality of everyday life like school drop-offs with a life of privilege and celebrity. It comes with reminders that there are life realities such as ageing and the loss of loved ones and moments of deep personal uncertainty that cannot be avoided regardless of wealth and success. They just are.

The book is wall-to-wall with A-list celebrity encounters, not thrown around in a bragging manner: these are just the people you meet in your everyday life when you are successful at this chosen occupation. There are stories featuring Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Frank Sinatra, Luciano Pavarotti, Bill Clinton, Quincy Jones, the Dalai Lama and many more: you name it. I love the one where Mikhail Gorbachev turns up somewhat unexpectedly at Bono’s Dalkey family home holding a teddy bear on a Sunday afternoon.

I’d forgotten to tell Ali that Mikhail Gorbachev might drop by. In Dublin, along with some other earth movers, to receive the Freedom of the City, he’d shown some interest—politeness, I’d guessed—in some downtime with our family. “No need to arrange anything,” I’d said. “It’s open house on a Sunday.” Accompanying him was Nina Kostina, his translator; a good translator makes conversation between foreign tongues not just possible but somehow more enjoyable. After a while your brain has tricked you into thinking you speak each other’s languages. Or was that the whiskey? With everyone around the table, no question was off the table.

Bono, Surrender, p241

An interesting discussion ensues when Ali’s Belarussian godchild appears: she was a child impacted by the fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion; a reactor that was under the stewardship of Gorbachev’s then USSR. He admitted that the realisation that the USSR couldn’t maintain basic infrastructure like Chernobyl was a harbinger of the end of that collective.

The book proceeds beyond the wider U2 story to Bono’s work on global topics such as Drop The Debt, Project (Red) and others, showcasing with a level of humility how he has laboured to leverage his success and talent for the wider good. He acquits himself very well in my view.

As I mentioned earlier the book is a great read (or a great listen if you choose Audible as it features music, great impersonations of famous folks by Bono and other perks, not just the words read aloud).

When re-reading it recently I had the pleasure of chasing down some of the music and related events on Youtube including a great 1984 recording of Bad :

This is a nice cover of One by Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam fame at the Kennedy Center Honors for U2 in December 2022, which led me down the internet rabbit hole to Eddie talking about attending the Joshua Tree tour when he worked as a gas station attendant in 1987. It’s good to see how their respective careers have developed in the meantime.

The same rabbit hole led to this honest and open interview of Adam Clayton by Tommy Tiernan

It’s hard to read this book and not like Bono and U2 though I doubt the book is even better than the real thing. Give it a go.

I’ll overcome the procrastination and the urge for perfection and leave it here for today.

Thanks for reading.

Scrolling through Facebook posts one morning, I noticed an interview with the Irish artist Dermot Kennedy, mentioning that he was taken by the word sonder since his sister introduced him to it, some years before.

I like his older material like Outnumbered and was aware that his new album was called Sonder. For some reason I’d assumed that it was a ‘made up’ word like any good internet startup, something with echoes of fonder, yonder, wander or linked to the German word besonder (special), a word I was familiar with but whose meaning I must admit I had to refresh my memory of.

Realising that this must be a ‘real’ word I was straight on to Google:

Wiktionary quickly offered up sonder:

The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it.

What a cool title or concept for an album and what a striking idea: in many ways it’s obvious that every stranger we pass on the street has their own story, their own struggles, their own joys and coming accidentally across this word created its own moment of sonder in me. The power of the word is the enforced reflection in the moment that this phenomenon was worth encapsulating in a word of its own, in the spirit of weltanschauung or zeitgeist: a one-word poem, if such a thing is possible. Perhaps no surprise that a German word was one of the notes sonder played in my mind.

Drilling deeper it turns out that this word was coined in 2012 by John Koening, the creator of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows ‘a website and YouTube channel, that coins and defines neologisms for emotions that do not have a descriptive term’.  It is now available in book form.

Many of the words have been accompanied by a descriptive video, including this one for sonder, which captures it quite beautifully and in a way that causes neurons to pop even more brightly that my initial understanding:

There are many other witty and thought-provoking creations here like dead reckoning,  altschmerz and hanker sore.

John explains the motivation for his project here (I love the audience’s reaction to zielschmerz)

https://www.ted.com/talks/john_koenig_beautiful_new_words_to_describe_obscure_emotions

Maybe there should be a new word to describe a person who is sparked by a random album title, through the definition of a word, to its source, through the online project that bore it, to the TED talk describing how it was inspired and then deciding it’s worth a blog post to share the journey.  Have a go in the comments.

Check out Dermot Kennedy here:

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few months it will have been hard to miss the headlines extolling the virtues, or warning of the perils, of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. What is it? According to ChatGPT itself:

ChatGPT is an AI-powered language model developed by OpenAI. It's a state-of-the-art, deep learning-based natural language processing (NLP) model trained on a large corpus of text data to generate human-like responses to questions and prompts. ChatGPT is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture, and it has been trained to perform a wide range of NLP tasks, including text generation, translation, text classification, and question answering. The model can be used to build conversational AI applications, such as chatbots, and can provide human-like responses to users' queries and requests.

It is well worth having a play with this and its sister image creation tool DALL E-2. They are both great examples of how far computing has come in recent years.

ChatGPT sometimes delivers completely spurious results but is still impressively good at synthesising information and delivering in the prompted format, be that a few bullet points, an academic thesis or even a Shakesperean sonnet. Microsoft is a significant investor in OpenAI and has just launched the “new” Bing, an edition of its search engine integrated with ChatGPT. This is the first realistic threat to Google Search’s hegemony since it was launched and Google’s own Bard AI technology by comparison had an inauspicious early launch last week. While this short-term fail is embarrassing for Google, I’ve no doubt that this healthy competition will drive the field forward in the same way that attempts to produce the first fully sequenced human genome were accelerated by multiple competing parties driving towards the same result.

It may appear like these advances are happening overnight but the truth detailed in Stripe Press’ The Dream Machine and elsewhere, is that the field of AI was established in 1956, nearly seventy years ago. It has taken a while to get here as hardware capacity and software complexity caught up with a huge variety of experimental techniques to model and mimic the human brain.

Back to Basics

These impressive AI tools are based on a bedrock of research that took inspiration form the network of neurons in our human brains and the insight that tens of millions or billions or inter-neuronal connections likely formed the basis of memory, decision-making and ‘thinking’ as we understood it.

And like Google’s Bard and, getting beyond the hype, ChatGPT too, the human brain is prone to mis-firing at times, and producing outputs that misrepresent the inputs and being a victim to faulty logic. The fact that we humans don’t spew out a ream of written text after each interaction that makes explicit our interpretation and analysis probably shields us from the critique that our digital cousins are receiving currently. We’ve all had occasions where we’ve misread a situation or jumped to an incorrect conclusion that made us angry, sad or confused and later had it corrected; certainly more often than we’ve let everyone around us know.

The tech teams behind ChatGPT, Bard and countless other AI projects are working hard to improve the training and error correction. But what happens when things go wrong with the human brain or mind?

The Psyche

In Greek mythology, Psyche was the goddess of the soul and the word in common usage means the human soul, mind or spirit.

Job titles that begin with Psych- are likely to be those designed to help soothe ailments of the mind. In this post I consider three of these which are often confused with each other (and for good reason): Psychiatrists, Psychologists and Psychotherapists. They share a foundation which is a need to understand the operation of the human mind and to help their clients achieve better outcomes based on that understanding.

Psychiatrists

Psychiatrists are qualified medical doctors. That is the standout difference to the other two professions. They essentially have the same basic training as any other Medical Doctor (MD), but proceed to specialise further in the study of psychiatry, which according to Wikipedia is “the branch of medicine devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, study, and treatment of mental disorders.”

As they have a comprehensive training in anatomy, physiology and medicine, they are the only one of this trio who can legally prescribe medication to ameliorate symptoms. Clearly GPs can, and do, prescribe routine psycho-active medication like anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication, but like other specialist medical professionals, psychiatrists are typically called in to handle trickier cases.

There are many sub-specialities such as geriatric psychiatry which focusses on complications of the mind that are common in older people, and to confuse matters there are elements of psychiatry that borrow heavily form the work of psychologists, or from the ‘talk therapy’ of psychotherapy.

In the US this confusion is even more pronounced as a psychiatrist will typically have a level of mandatory training in psychotherapy providing them with an arsenal of cognitive, talk- or non-medication therapy alongside pharmaceuticals. So if the therapist in a movie is supplying pills they are likely a psychiatrist, and if not, a psychotherapist.

There are many double-blind trials to assess the effectiveness of prescription drugs and different therapeutic approaches and the client or patient should do their own research to assess the effectiveness and side-effects of any therapy they consider. In some cases a specific medication will have a very strong track record at ameliorating symptoms and in others alternatives like talk therapy, or a combination, can be equally or more effective.

Alongside psychiatrists who will have a nose for wider bio-medical pathology, psychologists and psychotherapists will also be alert to the possibility that a sudden onset of unusual mental symptoms may have a underlying physical cause such as encephalitis, an issue with glands, hormones or body chemistry or a tumour of some sort.

In popular culture Frasier Crane features on a long-list of fictional psychiatrists. He appears in both Cheers and Frasier, starting out life as a psychiatrist and then becomes a psychotherapist and talk show host, highlighting the blurring of the lines between psychiatry and psychotherapy.  Sigmund Freud is one of the most famous psychiatrists who went on to define the early field of psychoanalysis, which is a type of psychotherapy. Aaron Beck did foundational work in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), a leading approach to therapy anchored in psychological methods.  

Psychologists

Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behaviour. Unlike psychiatry which starts from the biological and anatomical, an undergraduate psychology qualification will look broadly at everything from cognition, behaviour, language, thought, feeling in a wide variety of settings from family to work, industry and academia. Much of the ground here is based on the observation of large populations and the creation of carefully calibrated questionnaires and reproducible experiments.

After undergraduate study, a psychologist can choose to specialise further in their preferred speciality. It could be for example in area of optimising performance e.g. sports psychology, educational psychology or occupational psychology.

Aptitude tests such as the Stanford-Binet test, ADD/ADHD assessments and similar instruments developed through careful testing and calibration on large groups of people are traditionally the work of psychologists.

What should be clear is that there is a vast range of work for psychologists outside of the mental wellbeing of specific individuals. Those that are deeply drawn to that area will tend to train further as Clinical Psychologists or in one or more modalities of psychotherapy.

A clinical psychologist will likely have training in a variety of ‘talk therapies’ and may favour those based on more formulaic approaches such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), using questionnaires and other instruments in which they have been trained, to support their work.

Psychotherapists

According to Wikipedia, “Psychotherapy (also psychological therapy, talk therapy, or talking therapy) is the use of psychological methods, particularly when based on regular personal interaction, to help a person change behavior, increase happiness, and overcome problems”

Psychotherapists come in all shapes and sizes and backgrounds. As outlined above, in the US, psychiatrists are mandated to train to a minimum standard in psychotherapeutic methods. Many psychologists who find they enjoy the human connection more than the scientific, data-driven side of psychology will choose to complete training as a psychotherapist.

There are many ways of delivering psychotherapy: to individuals and groups, many ‘modalities’ or flavours such as Gestalt, Jungian, Freudian, person-centred, psychodynamic, humanistic integrative. If we compare psychotherapy to music, then these modalities are simply the genres of jazz, punk, rock and pop; it’s all music, it’s all intended to entertain, but different formats will appeal to different people.

There are a great number of characters such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Carl Rogers, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Fritz Perls, Donald Winnicott (among many others) who loom large in the world of psychotherapy. Each come with their own models of the mind and human behavior, their own concept of what is going on inside the mind: the influence of parenting, childhood, trauma, attachment and other elements of development. Freud’s model of id, ego and superego is one of the most famous and frequently cited, and yet it is only a model: no one is suggesting that these three distinct components exist in the human mind, and yet they are helpful to model and deal with a client. Alfred Korzybski’s dictum The Map is not the Territory is a useful one to remember.

Mainstream psychotherapy in Ireland typically involves a one-hour session between client and therapist each week for a period of time. Counselling and psychotherapy have a certain amount of overlap, though the latter is typically about delving deeper, often over a longer period of time, while the former may be focussed on discussion of a particular short-term issue. The terms counsellor and (psycho-)therapist are often used inter-changeably and work is afoot in Ireland to more clearly differentiate the two and legislate for the qualifications needed to advertise services under either banner. The likelihood is that experienced counsellors and psychotherapists cover the same ground in similar ways.

The core of psychotherapy is in the depth of connection between the client and therapist, providing a safe space for the client to explore the depths of their own mind, thoughts and concerns in the presence of a therapist who offers a mix of trained observer, empathic and non-judgemental listener.  

Dr. Paul Weston from HBO’s In Treatment, is a psychologist turned psychotherapist who sees many patients over a number of seasons giving us to opportunity to see him as therapist, and as a client in therapy and supervision, offering an entertaining, yet realistic, perspective on the work of a psychotherapist.

The 3Ps

The ‘mind’ is a complex beast. The basic physical structure of the brain is in place at birth and goes through years of physical growth and change. Like ChatGPT and the AI-technology models, the individual’s brain development is massively impacted by the information and signals it receives through interaction with others, observing the world, reading, formal education and the emotional  and physical experiences the human being is faced with from its early life through childhood, adolescence and into adulthood.

Psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists are just three groups of people, with significant areas of skill overlap, dedicated to helping improve the human condition in respect of the operation of the mind.

In a clinical multi-disciplinary setting, a psychiatrist might focus on the matters that require their specific medical expertise, such as assessing and prescribing appropriate medication and ensuring that this does not lead to complications or toxicity, while the psychologist may focus on the specifics of behaviour, coping strategies etc, while a psychotherapist focuses on the one-on-one talk therapy.

Perhaps as AI models mature and computer and data scientists understand how to avoid erroneous results, this learning will in turn improve our understanding of the human mind, and improve our ability to reduce human mental suffering, regardless of scale.

This is an area of interest to me as I continue my studies in Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy and one I’ll return to write about again in the future.

Afterword:

As an aside I asked ChatGPT the question

what are and what the differences between a psychiatrist , a psychologist and a psychotherapist

and it replied (quite impressively!):

The first music I had regular access to was from the cassette tapes my Dad carried in his car. Country & Western greats like Glen Campbell blasting out Rhinestone Cowboy (there’s been a load of compromising on the road to my horizon), or the Slim Whitman version from the Red River Valley album and Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire or Boy named Sue. Alongside these were a small collection of LPs (33RPM vinyl) with Marty Robbins, Jim Reeves and of course Elvis.

We had this Sharp 3-in-1 stereo in the sitting room, balanced precariously on its two speakers. I’d lie between the speakers and listen to those tapes or the radio for hours at the weekend. After RTE opened a second television channel in 1978, they’d broadcast the BBC’s iconic Top of the Pops and it became essential viewing and a bridge to music for my generation. The new ‘pop’ radio station, RTE Radio 2, started in May 1979 ensured a regular feed of pop music including the Irish Top 30 with Larry Gogan on a Sunday afternoon.

The Late Seventies to 1980

Reviewing the Irish Top 30 charts from this time brings back lots of memories. One interesting observation is the high ratio of local artists with a traditional, big band or novelty track blended with international pop, rock and other genres. It was often 50:50 or more in favour of local acts: nothing like today.

Examples over the next few years would have included Gloria’s One Day at a Time, Lanigan’s Ball, TR Dallas Who Shot JR Ewing? and the Furey Brothers and Davey Arthurs Green Fields of France.

I have vague memories of seeing YMCA performed by the Village People on Top of the Pops and the Boomtown Rats playing out Rat Trap in their pyjamas and the charts are peppered with disco music tracks from the movies of John Travolta and Olivia-Newton John; sounds of Neil Rodgers Chic Le Freak and the Bee Gees. Boney M dominated the late 1978 charts with Mary’s Boy Child and added Rivers of Babylon/Brown Girl in the Ring in early 1979.

The norm at this point was to record songs from the radio onto compilation tapes, doing your best to time the recording to exclude the DJs voiceover or the fade into or out of another track. The weekly Top 30 show was the best time to capture that song you were waiting to hear all week so that you could listen to it on demand during the following week. Could we have imagined a future with Spotify?

Moving Hearts

My sister is a couple of years older than me and the only non-bootleg “pop” music in the house when we left Galway for Mayo in early 1983 belonged to her: ABBA Arrival, John Lennon’s Woman single (with Beautiful Boys B-side) and a friend’s going away gift of Michael Jackson’s Thriller (newly released in November 1982).

Thriller was the gift that kept giving: Billie Jean, Beat It, Wanna Be Starting Something, PYT and of course the title track.. the list goes on. We almost wore that album out playing it over and over again, dancing frenetically in our sitting room to the high-paced tracks and later mimicking the moves from the era-defining music videos.

My first record purchase was Ktels Chart Hits 83 compilation (a forerunner to the NOW! That’s What I Call Music formula) showcasing the hits of the previous year. Great tracks still popular on 80s  kickback radio include Toto’s Africa, Paul Young’s Wherever I Lay My Hat That’s my Home and Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart and shorter lived hits like Ryan Paris’ Dolce Vita or Gary Byrd’s The Crown. It’s easy to forget that these were the pre-CD days where skipping tracks required the gentle lifting of the stylus and attempting to place it just before the start of the next track you wanted to play. Cassette tape was another option, but LPs offered more rapid access to the music and the album cover format provided a better physical experience and real-estate for lyrics, photos and other details. Compared to today’s listening habits, it was normal to listen to every song on an album and become habituated to the order of the songs; so much so that your brain would expect to hear them in that particular order.

Music Television

Music video was an emerging medium. The MTV channel had launched in the US in 1981 and music videos began to feature more often in TV programming on this side of the water. MT-USA, a homegrown version of MTV, featured on local television between 1984 and 1987 with Vincent Hanley bringing us a steady diet of pop videos introduced against a familiar New York City backdrop: essential viewing for music enthusiasts in two-TV-channel land. Queen’s Radio GaGa and related video debuted as a single in early 1984 showcasing the shift from audio to audio-visual as a medium for enjoying music. Video killed the radio star indeed.

I started my first decent paying summer job and spent my spare time hanging around Hotshot Records in Ballina, buying singles and the odd album. That summer featured epics like Tina Turner’s What’s Love Got To Do With It, Prince’s Purple Rain (I never meant to cause you any pain), Laura Brannigan (Self-Control), Phil Collins Against All Odds, Frankie Goes to Hollywood Two Tribes.

Towards late summer I splashed out on a 3-in-1 stereo for my bedroom: a Sanyo G2005 like the one pictured below (though why the stylus is sitting on the platter without a record I don’t know!): nothing fancy but allowing for my own sounds in my own space.

Later that autumn my sister and I visited our Uncle Seán in Dublin over the Halloween break. He had an amazing record collection: everything from the Beatles, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Jackson Browne through to the latest Cyndi Lauper album. He set the standard for what a record collection looked like, at a time when your collection represented what you would choose to spend money on when you couldn’t have it all on demand. One of the first things he did after picking us up from the train was to collect the latest Jackson Browne LP from Golden Discs in Stillorgan and later on that weekend I splashed out on a Crown portable cassette player (a knock off Sony Walkman) (as I write this line I get a auditory flashback of listening to Howard Jones Like to Get to Know You Well on this walking around the schoolyard). It literally ate batteries so didn’t get used for very long.

The year closed out with a chart filled with songs we still hear in eighties playlists today: Jim Diamond’s I Should Have Known Better (than lie to one as beautiful as you!), Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Power of Love, Alison Moyet’s All Cried Out (You took a whole lot of loving for one hand full of nothing) and Invisible, Eurythmics Sexcrime 1984, Tina Turner’s beautiful What’s Love Got to Do With it? and Foreigner’s I Want to Know What Love Is. Clearly there was a lot of love in the air in 1984!

The icing on the cake however was the first super-band Band Aid, with Do They Know It’s Christmas: the original and the best of the genre, inspired by our own Bob Geldof and Ultravox’s Midge Ure, with a music video featuring the great and the good of pop music at the time: Paul Young, Phil Collins, Boy George, Bono ‘tonight thank God it’s them, instead of you’, Bananarama, Duran Duran, Howard Jones, Nik Kershaw and many more. We were glued to the video of all of the stars making their way into the London studio on a winter weekend and of course identifying or mimicing the singer for each segment when listening to it ad infinitum on the radio.

1985

During 1985, as detailed here, I moved from my summer hotel job to work in a local electrical shop. It sold everything from washing machines to video cameras and around that time built a dedicated Hifi room, selling both high-volume integrated 3-in-1 systems (or 4-in-1 as compact disc players came on stream) and a decent range of separates. The high-end separates were typically from Sony, Pioneer, Technics (the early SL1210 turntables) and occasionally a quirky brand like Marantz. In truth these were the high-end of the mid-market and we rarely saw anything that featured on the cover of the Hifi magazines: there was no volume market for these in our corner of the country.

Jarlath was the lead for Hifi sales and also had a great taste in music, distaining my “pop”, anything of the moment taste, but introducing me to Fleetwood Mac, Cat Stevens, Prefab Sprout, Jennifer Warnes ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ take on Leonard Cohen, among many others. A free Sony demo CD had a great James Taylor cover of ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ which I still love.

As detailed earlier, Bruce Springsteen made his first major concert appearance in Slane Castle early in June and later in the summer, a generational game-changing event took place on 13^th July 1985. Live Aid was a live concert broadcast spanning between Wembley Stadium in London and the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia inspired by the reaction to the Band Aid single of the previous winter. A who’s who of musical royalty turned up on the day: it was a Woodstock of sorts for our generation, delivered globally via television, rather than in a muddy field; there are few people watching who wouldn’t remember where they were during the broadcast. I was working in the TV shop that Saturday and we had it running on a large back projection TV.

A whole host of memorable performances from Queen (that Radio Gaga performance captured brilliantly in the Bohemian Rhapsody Biopic), U2, the transatlantic Concorde hop that allowed Phil Collins to perform in both locations. A quick review of the setlist brings so many great musical memories back to mind: Spandau Ballet with True, Nik Kershaw (the inspiration for many a dodgy mullet haircut) with Wouldn’t it be Good?, Phil Collins (UK and US performance) of In the Air Tonight (that amazing drum sequence and later atmospheric background to episodes of TV series Miami Vice),  U2 with Bad (and a massive sense of pride for this Irish band rocking in on that international stage), Dire Straits with Money for Nothing (from one of the first high-volume CD releases Brothers In Arms), Simple Minds Don’t You (Forget about me), The Cars Drive with a devasting video of starving kids in Africa, and many more amazing performances.

It’s taken ages to write the last few paragraphs as I got lost in watching the videos and reminiscing.  I would probably appreciate old stalwarts such as The Who, REO Speedwagon, Judas Priest, The Four Tops, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and others better now than I did at the time – and I had missed out on David Bowie’s earlier coming so would certainly have given him more airtime. The whole event serves as a bit of a musical time capsule for my teenage years and did an amazing job of bringing together recent arrivals, one hit wonders and the timeless like Dylan, McCartney in one iconic event.

1986

Music played an increasingly large part in our teenage lives, listening to DJ stars like Gerry Ryan, Dave Fanning and Marty Whelan on Radio 2 (soon to be 2FM). Music tie-ins to new movies became more important with Top Gun being a case in point with the music video for Berlin’s Take my Breath Away borrowing heavily from the movie footage.

Late in 1986 I invested in a Technics CD player (getting a good deal from my part-time job) and started to build a small CD collection.

When I met him in 2019, for the first time in thirty years, my old school friend John Allen (now living outside Boston) reminded me of a late night call we made to Marty Whelan on Radio 2, achieving great notoriety in our school by getting through by phone and getting a few minutes of airtime (for a half-baked campaign as I see below). I apparently was irritating enough to prompt a listener to write in to one of the national newspaper to air his views. John had kept a copy of the article: I’d forgotten the whole episode.

Ireland had a major unemployment issue during the 1980s leading to the staging of the Self Aid concert in Croke Park: an homage to the previous year’s LiveAid, but directed at getting employers to pledge jobs to reduce unemployment. It was more of a local affair in terms of the acts but featured some excellent and rousing performances from the great and the good of the Irish music scene: U2, Paul Brady, Van Morrison, Christy Moore, The Chieftains and many more. It may not have done much in itself to reduce unemployment but it was inspirational to see Ireland trying a different tack and maybe seeding a little more confidence in the emerging generation of workers as the economy began to improve.

1987/88

Given my relatively small budget, a small handful of CDs dominated my playlist over the last couple of years of secondary school.

The Joshua Tree, released in 1987, cemented my love of U2 and I listened to it on repeat, over and over while working on maths problems, from the opening bars of Where the Streets Have No Name to the closing of Mothers of the Disappeared. I especially loved Running to Stand Still and its lyrics:

You gotta cry without weeping, talk without speaking
Scream without raising your voice

Starting work in Dublin in 1988 it was thrilling to see U2’s Rattle and Hum movie premiered just around the corner from our office.

Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA was a purchase likely inspired by that warm summer’s day in 1985 with the title track blasting off and later hits like Dancing in the Dark and Glory Days: a great mix of rock and country. My aforementioned friend John spent the summer in the States in 1987 and returned with the triple CD Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band boxset which I still cherish, introducing me to the even richer back catalogue of The River, Nebraska and other great albums.

I picked up Paul Simon’s Graceland in winter 1986 and it still sounds great, hopping as it does between a range of genres: from You Can Call me Al and Graceland, to the African choir backed Diamonds On the Soles of Her Shoes and Under African Skies. I missed the earlier reign of Simon and Garfunkel but this was great listening first time around.

I bought Tracy Chapman’s eponymous debut album at the Virgin Megastore in Dublin on a trip in 1988 to do the aptitude tests that led to my first ‘real’ job. I’ve loved everything she’s done since but spent much of the next two years singing along to Fast Car and Talkin’ About a Revolution. There are few albums where I can sing along to almost every word.

Don't you know you better run, run, run, run, run, run
Run, run, run, run, run, run
Oh, I said you better run, run, run, run, run, run
Run, run, run, run, run, run          

Or the somewhat autobiographical lyrics of Fast Car

See, my old man's got a problem
He lives with the bottle, that's the way it is
He says his body's too old for working
His body's too young to look like his
My mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give

I didn’t pick up their album Raintown till much later, but I loved the sound of Deacon Blue and their debut single Dignity, and there are few tracks on Raintown or Where the World Knows Your Name that I don’t still love.

Aslan’s Crazy World and This Is would be similarly evocative of that time.

And the hits keep coming

Work took me out of the west of Ireland and music has continued to feature strongly over the years. The CD collection expanded rapidly with songs and albums to accompany events happy and sad, energy high and low.

Being in Dublin opened up easy access to a range of concerts over the years from An Emotional Fish in the SFX, Bryan Adams, Bob Dylan, Ed Sheeran, Elton John, Take That, Bruno Mars, Van Morrison, The Script, The Counting Crows, The Lumineers and The Hothouse Flowers in The Point/3Arena, Bruce Springsteen in the RDS, REM in Slane, David Gray in a few locations, Aslan, Deacon Blue, Dido, Jackson Browne and Gabrielle in the Olympia, Paul Brady and Chris DeBurgh in the Bord Gais, Elton John and Billy Joel in Croke Park, U2, Michael Jackson, Robbie Williams in Lansdowne Road, the brilliant Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott in St Anne’s Park .. the list goes on. And a shout out to smaller venues throughout Ireland bringing artists, on their second or third act, closer to home: like the Four of Us, Hothouse Flowers or Christy Dignam in an intimate venue like the Whale Theatre in Greystones or Purty Loft in Dun Laoghaire.

The early 90s Féile Trips to Tipp afforded the opportunity to see many great bands at the one time. Checking out the setlist for the 1990 gig: what a great selection of headliners: Meat Loaf, Big Country, Hothouse Flowers, The 4 of Us, Something Happens, Moving Hearts, The Stunning, Van Morrison, Deacon Blue, Christy Moore, Mary Black and more. Brilliant artists all in one place .. and my first ‘festival’. I went a couple of times, only once sharing a tent: slumming it was definitely not my style.

It's probably clear that there isn’t a genre that dominates my musical taste. I didn’t get bitten by the Mod or Punk bug, or become an aficionada of the Beatles or Hendrix or Pink Floyd but I love a sound that evokes an emotion whether an upbeat or a downbeat one.

The past decade or so, our listening at home has been dominated by the music our kids listen to: compilation albums from Now 70 – 100+, Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, a little bit of Khalid and a whole array of bands with random numbers and letters in their names, like pronounceability is a crime in naming modern bands. Staying in touch with the latest in music is a good way to stay alive and stay connected. And one of the kids has a penchant for retro eighties music so there is a connection there across the generations.

It’s strange to see how music formats have come and gone (8Track, cassette, vinyl, CD), the rise of digital music, streaming services and the surprising rebirth of vinyl. While streaming is massively convenient, in some ways the ceremony of handling and physical music media is something I miss.

I’m even being tempted to give some new (old) bands a listen and be open to something different, with an upcoming visit to a Death Cab for Cutie concert on the cards, thanks to a friend.

It would be great if you leave some of your own musical influences, stories and thoughts in the comments.

From here, I guess we’ve got to leave it to ABBA ..

My last post featured some food-related nostalgia. This time around I dig back further into the familial mists of time. At five years of age, considering the previous decade seems like too long a timespan to fathom; at fifty, suddenly, considering a century or two seems like a logical thing to do. I guess it’s a thing of ratios, right about now a century is more or less twice my lifespan, the same as a decade was when I was five: you gain perspective.

I grew up in the West of Ireland, in locations neither of my parents were from, and we moved a couple of times with my Dad’s job, so while I count Ballina, County Mayo, my last stop before ‘leaving home’ as where I’m ‘from’, there are very few roots there. My Dad’s family had a similar story: his Dad was a Garda (a policeman) and they moved from Clare to Longford before settling in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary.

It is not unusual as time ticks forward to start asking “Who am I?, How did I get here?, and Who are ‘my people’”? For this reason, Ancestry.com and its competitors are multi-billion dollar businesses and in Ireland, these sites, together with freely available resources from the National Archives offer a window into our immediate ancestors with amazing ease.

Unlike my own peripatetic journey my mother and her forbears are firmly rooted in an area of north-west County Cork farmland near the village of Rockchapel, that borders with Limerick to the immediate north and Kerry to the west.

We visited my grandfather’s farm many times when I was a child, though I had little sense of the geography or location, other than it was mountainous terrain with plenty of forests among the many dairy farms in the area. The nearby Meelin village is the highest village in Ireland, a claim it shares with Glencullen in Dublin.  It was all ‘Cork’ to me until I asked one of my early bosses, a proud Kerryman, exactly where he was from. His home town Abbeyfeale, where two of my close relations from Rockchapel were teachers, just to the top left of the map segment below, has one half in Kerry, the other in Limerick, neither to my chagrin in Cork.

And so, it was in this high altitude outcrop dangerously perched on the edge of the People’s Republic of Cork that my mother arrived into the world towards the end of the second World War. Her homeplace marked as Knockafutigh on Google maps is known as Knockafurtig in real life.

The Irish Genealogy site is a free resource from which historical census, church and other civil records can be found. My grandfather was William Riordan and my grandmother Ellen Duggan: both of whom can be rapidly found by using a broad date range.

I see my grandmother’s entry straight away and learn that she was born on 10th November 1905 and registered on 22nd January 1906, and that my great-grandmother was a Foley. The site will show birth certificates for people born over one hundred years ago with an extra year added after each New Year. From this we can see that her mother was Bridget Foley and her father’s profession is listed as school master. In fact, both parents were teachers in the local primary school and my granny and her sister would later teach in the same two-room school where my mother and likely hundreds in that remote townland would receive their initial, and in early years, often their only education, from its opening in 1886. The townland is listed as Knockanbawn and is a short walk towards Meelin along the road from Knockafurtig.

From this information we know that John Duggan and his wife Bridget had Ellen in 1905 so we can look for the family in the 1911 Census

There are 109 John Duggans listed in County Cork in the 1911 Census.  I could have narrowed down the search to heads of households that were teachers, or searched for my grandmother by age. Cummery Connell is marked on the map but was not a name familiar to me, Rowls on the other hand is an area closeby just beyond Knockanbawn.

Drilling down into that entry and I see my great-grandparents family spring into view. There’s my five year old grandmother listed as Eily, her eldest sister Hannah, who we knew as Auntie Babe, who left for New York with her husband shortly after this census and spent the rest of her life there and her sister Nora alongside whom she would later teach in their parents school

Just below you can click through to see the actual census form

It’s strange to see the ‘crown’ on the front of the census form, a reminder that at this point in history King George V, pre-independence, was the ruler in this part of the world.

On the form itself we see that both parents are schoolteachers and that all of the children are ‘scholars’. That family went on to produce 3 teachers, 2 nurses and a farmer, so clearly education was important

It’s strange to think that this form was filled in by my great-grandfather on 2nd April 1911 and to see his signature, to consider the hopes and dreams that lay ahead of my grandmother, and the reality that though she was almost eighty years old when she died, that she is long gone now. These are great artefacts to reach through time and understand how short human life is.

I repeat a similar search for my grandad and find that he tries to elude me by being listed as Willie

He also has a large family of siblings, many of whom end up in the US. He emigrates too in the late 1920s only returning to bring home his baby sister Maggie (Peg) who is consumed by TB and dies on arrival back in Cobh. We can tell from his birth certificate that his mother’s surname was Emperor (hence the title of this article). There are only a handful of Emperor’s in Ireland the 1911 census and they are virtually all living in this small area of North Cork. Most flee to the US in the meantime.

The census provides an age for each parent and from this it is possible to search for their birth certificates and for their ageing parents or siblings in the 1901 or 1911 censuses. What we can find with some research is that the Riordans, Duggans, Emperors and Foleys all lived and grew up within a five mile radius of each other. It’s likely that all of the children attended the Duggan’s primary school and all family members were known to each other across many generations. If I was looking for roots, I find deep ones here.

Ancestry.com has a nice ‘view’ called Thrulines to visualise this. These eight people are my great-great grandparents and while all but the Riordan and Duggan names are far from mind, all eight make the same impact on my DNA, all being almost two hundred years after their birth. They are matched of course on my father’s side by a further eight: sixteen people who, if they hadn’t mated with who they did, when they did, I would not be here.

In fact my grandmother was ‘seeing’ a local man who went to a dance while she was doing a ‘year of mourning’ for one of her deceased parents, so she dropped him for my grandfather, who as I outlined earlier had only returned to Cork from the US to bring home his dying sister. Without those two events, my mother and I would certainly not be here.

They were married in Limerick in July 1938. We see my grandad’s address listed at Knockafurtig, my grandmother’s as Knockanbane, and their marriage was witnessed by their siblings Michael and Delia, respectively.

We had a family reunion a couple of weeks ago and there are (at current count) almost 50 people born because those two people in that north Cork townland decided to set up home together.

That any of us are here at all is a result of a massive game of chance.

Moving back each generation doubles the number of people in the mix of my genetics. So rolling back the same distance from my great-great-grandparents to theirs implicates 500 or more unique individuals (and possibly as many surnames) in my genetic mix, each of which provides perhaps 0.2% of my DNA. Isn’t it amazing to think that some physical characteristic, way of thinking, expression or other ‘genetically’ inherited trait might tie back to an element of DNA formed in a specific individual anytime over the millenia. In truth, that pattern goes back to the dawn of homo sapiens and the generational doubling is exponential with just twenty generations back, to perhaps the year 1000, seeing roughly one million people contributing to my existence. Is it any wonder that everyone in Ireland is related?

Questions I’d like to ask

Unfortunately, other than for dedicated historians, when one gets to an age where it becomes important to ask big questions, the people with the answers are often gone.

If I could talk to my dead relatives around that area of North Cork some of the questions I’d like to ask include:

• What was it like living under English rule in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Was it oppressive or almost irrelevant in the toil of raising a family and staying alive?

• Did my great-grandparents have to teach a particular curriculum pre-independence and did they pepper it with native Irish learning?

• How did they experience the famine years? Were they better or worse off by being farmers? What were the hardships they lived through?

• What was it like for my grandad arriving in New York from that isolated area in the late 1920s? What was the boat trip like? Did he want to stay?

• What was it likely during the first and second world war for them?

I guess I’ll have to look to history books or word-of-mouth handed down to the currently vanishing generation to find out more.

Ancestry.com

The free resources available through the National Archives are fantastic. Genealogy research services like ancestry.co.uk, while expensive, take this to a whole new level and have a level of international reach.

They also make crowd-sourcing a full family tree very easy. Once I added a few member of my grandparents family Ancestry quickly matched this ‘signature’ to trees collated by other members of the extended family, rapidly creating a tree with hundreds of people with associated photographs and links to census and other records.

It also provides a way of searching lots of interesting databases:

This is the ship’s manifest for the SS Scythia which sailed from Cobh on 5th May 1929. My grandad appears in entry number 4.

This summary gives a full view of the data on the subsequent page of the ship’s manifest including evidence that he had US$ 300 in his possession. He is travelling to see his sister Mary at 264 Ditmars Avenue, Astoria, New York.

His sister Margaret makes the journey on the SS Carinthia on 27th May 1930. William returned to Cork with Margaret when she became ill with TB, dying shortly after returning. Perhaps he would never have returned to Ireland if it had not been to care for her.

AncestryDNA

I also took AncestryDNA and 23andMe DNA tests, both of which present details of relatives and their degree of relation to you.

That feature shows that there are over 8000 people on Ancestry DNA from my father’s side, of which 5 are relatives that share great-grandparents

And over 9000 on my mother’s side, of which 6 are relatives that share great-grand parents

And a handful which are shared between both which is not as surprise when I consider that my paternal grandmother came from West Cork and my paternal grandfather from Limerick, both firmly in Munster.

The DNA feature has allowed us to track down and connect with ‘long lost’ or just out-of-contact relatives on all sides of our families.

Obviously being DNA it could also surface unexpected familial contacts.

The 23andMe relatives map shows the locations in which DNA relatives are living. There is clearly a significant skew towards North America, due to a mix of emigration and perhaps the relative popularity of this type of testing.

Hopefully this quick tour will inspire you to look up some of your own relations or build a family tree and piece together a little of your wider family story.

If you signed up to my Substack only to learn more about going electric, then you are likely to be disappointed as this is about to get more eclectic that electric. I have lots of writing ideas, many of which are rooted in seventies and eighties nostalgia: like what I was listening to, wearing or even eating during my formative years, and whatever curious thoughts they prompt many years on. Food was on my mind today.

I’ve wondered about the evolution of food in Ireland since the seventies and eighties and to what extent it is a proxy for the improvement in our standard of living generally.

My memory from the early seventies is that biscuits were a rarity and if they did exist in the house it was something plain like a Marietta lathered in butter so that when you squeezed them together the butter emerged through the holes. Morning Coffee was the posh version of that story with a little more character and you could push the boat out for Nice or Polo if an extra dose of sugar and coconut was your fancy. And who doesn’t remember the TV ad for the McVities Fruit Shortcake ‘Where’d you nick ‘em? Nick ‘em? I bought ‘em!’ or Faker Baker trying to figure out how they got the figs into the Fig Rolls. At Christmas time though, things improved and the obligatory box of biscuits would arrive: maybe Jacob’s USA or Afternoon Tea, or a box of Crawford’s Rover. The family dynamic that followed would probably be grist to the mill of a number of behavioural psychology research projects: the giddy delight of eating the chocolate biscuits first, moving on to the pink wafers and Jammie Dodgers, maybe even a bourbon cream (fake chocolate!) and then those plain biscuits nestled somewhere in quality terms between Marietta and Polo – I mean really, why bother? And then the unloosing of the second layer of the box: hold on a minute, who ate all the chocolate biscuits and stuffed these dodgy plain ones in their place? Or the etiquette of whether it was OK to start on the second tier when only the less desirable biscuits were left on top?

Then it seems like things went all to hell in the mid-to-late eighties: Cadbury’s entered the scene with Shorties: tasty chocolate on a decent biscuit, chocolate versions of Polo, Kimberly, Mikado, the invention of the Hobnob and the diabetic-coma inducing sugar rush that was the Chocolate Hobnob. We are now literally spoiled for choice: who could have imagined back then that a 24 bar-multipack of Cadbury’s (Purple) Snacks would be a feasible option for dunking in a cup of your favourite? If David McWilliams is looking for a new economic index alongside the Big Mac index or his own Irish Pub index then surely the economic progress embodied in the evolution of the ‘average’ biscuit procured in the weekly shop would be a real option.

Orange Juice was another, now commodity, that came to mind. This beverage was not even imagined for daily consumption when I was scoffing the Marietta biscuits. No! Chilled orange juice through the seventies was an appetizer or a ‘starter’: something you could choose instead of consommé or melon on those rare special occasions where a meal at a restaurant became a possibility. The orange juice came in tin cans of concentrate (Squeez a popular brand even then) and was diluted with tap water to taste. My memory is that it shared, to my taste at least, many properties with paint stripper.

A sign of economic progress was the arrival of orange juice in our house. Special glasses were procured: a little larger than shot glasses, as orange juice was a commodity up there with 24-carat gold. We progressed from the Squeez can to a Tetrapak brick of pre-diluted concentrate and like the evolution of our biscuit consumption progressed somewhere along the economic growth curve to orange juice with ‘bits’, Tropicana from Florida and further to in-store freshly-squeezed OJ with a short shelf life. I’m still a little abhorred when any of that freshly squeezed orange juice goes out of date and needs to be thrown out. Do those ungrateful kids not appreciate how lucky they have it! ‘When I were a lad …’

Apropos the title of this post we ran out of milk one day and my mother left me home alone while she walked off to do the shopping (I’m guessing I was somewhere between three and five years of age:  a firing offence now but a relative norm back then). I decided to fend for myself for breakfast and was a bit miffed to find that there was no milk to pour on my cornflakes. I’m not stupid: even then I knew that water would be no substitute for milk, that the texture and mouthfeel wouldn’t be quite right. I remembered though that there was a bottle of holy water under the sink and reasoned (before the age of reason) that it might offer some quality that tap water did not. Even at many years of remove I can say that while my mushy breakfast may have been on an elevated spiritual plane, it didn’t offer anything more in the taste department than plain old tap water.

That wasn’t to be my last food related disappointment around this time. My mother had tried to talk me into swimming lessons: I baulked at the last minute. The next hurdle was Irish dancing lessons. I was reluctant and dubious. She promised me that if I went once she would give me a cup of Cocoa (which I was marketed as chocolate**). I pondered this and thought anything described as chocolate, of any sort, bearing in mind the poor state of biscuit offerings as shared above, had to be good.

I proceeded to attend my first and, spoiler alert, last, Irish dancing lesson. This is where I discovered my life-long difficulty with doing more than one physically coordinated activity at once. The teacher gave me instructions, I followed dutifully, she felt that I wasn’t quite following the same instructions that she was communicating and finally I told her to let me alone, I know what I’m doing. I’m not sure which of the two of us was happier that I wasn’t going to be returning. The cocoa was duly delivered and let me tell you now: I know chocolate, I’ve eaten a lot of chocolate and that sir, was no chocolate.

My mother obviously thought that the Pavlovian chocolate bribe as a behavioural aid was a good strategy as she later promised me one of the aforementioned Cadbury’s snack wafers when I signed up to eat a McDonnell’s “Curry kit” meal. This was basically a box with rice, spices, dried fruit and all of the ingredients needed to make the diluted concentrated orange version of an Indian Curry in Ireland in the early 70s. I really hope thinking back that the unrefrigerated box didn’t include the meat too. It was however a step up on the cocoa experience and combined with the Cadbury’s snack dessert was a winner all round.

I’m glad to report that my diet and palate have developed since those early experiences and think these few examples serve as a simple barometer of how much things have changed in our nation and how sophisticated our lives have become taking food as one simple dimension of living. We could look to music, entertainment, clothing and technology (Internet anyone?) in general for further cues towards the pace of change: perhaps I will on another day.

Perhaps you will share your own memories and stories in the comments?