A recent headline in The Irish Times, “Elvis Presley’s Irish roots proven by legal document”, left us all shook up. It said the King’s ancestor William Presley left Ireland for America in 1775 after being beaten up by some Wicklow toughs. The legal document arose from a subsequent case in Carlow Court of Assizes. As genealogist Sean J Murphy notes, it doesn’t prove Elvis should have worn green suede shoes, however. The claim that William Presley from Hacketstown, Co Carlow, was Elvis’s great-great-great-great-granddaddy lacks “persuasive documentary evidence”. Murphy blogs: “There are better sourced accounts of Elvis’s ancestry which trace his family to Germany.” Perhaps that’s where he is now.
■ Last month’s meeting of Comeragh council in Waterford heard a novel solution to the local litter problem. Michael J O’Ryan said disposable coffee cups should be banned, and the chip bag should be made green to blend in with the countryside. That way, when dumped, “they wouldn’t be so intrusive”. If councillor O’Ryan had been in Leinster House last Friday, his ideas would now be in the Programme for Government.
■ Kate O’Connell of Fine Gael complained in the Dail how unconcerned gangster Christy Kinahan looked, “lounging on a lilo in The Sunday Times at the weekend”. Cue high-fives among the ST’s design team, who placed him there.
■ The Social Democrats are to persist with having three co-leaders, having reversed their decision to elect one. The last political outfit not to have a solo leader was the Green party — and even it relented in 2001, electing Trevor Sargent.
The Soc Dems’ decision reinforces our hunch that it’s not a “proper” political party, just a handle for three like-minded left-wing TDs.
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However, they do promise a delegate conference later this year, at which a policy platform will be agreed.
■ The incestuous nature of the Seanad is laid bare in analysis by Adrian Kavanagh, a lecturer at Maynooth University. He calculates that 88% of the 43 successful candidates from the panels were either outgoing senators, former TDs or councillors. Not much new blood there. There are 11 former TDs in the new Seanad, representing a better than even success rate in the election for this group of “political rejects”.
■ Despite the housing crisis, some families turn down homes on spurious grounds. Limerick council says it has had accommodation refused for being too near a pizza restaurant, having no space for a trampoline, not being south facing, and not having permission to erect a satellite dish in a protected structure. Others were declined because of rust on radiators, the lack of an en suite bathroom, and “because the persons did not have time to light the open fire provided”.
■ “The Irish Times has run things in its print edition that appear to be independent journalism, but are in fact advertiser-sponsored content,” is the feisty opening sentence of a hard-hitting report in Dublin Inquirer.
Journalist Sam Tranum reveals that two recent puff pieces in the IT were labelled as “sponsored” on its website, but “to print readers, both advertisements were presented as articles”. Tranum claimed he had been told by an Irish Times executive that “native ads would be very, very clearly labelled and identified”.
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We think the Inquirer’s charge that the IT is “undermining the institution of journalism in Ireland” is over-wrought, but it’s certainly an embarrassing episode for the Old Lady of D’Olier Street.
■ The latest twist in the horror story that is the construction of Galway’s arthouse cinema will come at a council meeting tomorrow night. The taxpayer is already exposed to the tune of about €4m for the Picture Palace, which stands unfinished in the city’s Latin quarter on a site provided for free by the council in 2009.
The promoters, led by filmmaker Lelia Doolan, have been back several times looking for further support to finish the cinema, after private fundraising fell short.
“It’s been badly run,” says Michael Crowe, a local Fianna Fail councillor who has consistently opposed “throwing good money after bad”. The council sent in a project manager to assist last year, but there has been no change in the script, and now even more money is being sought from the public purse. Councillors are to discuss whether to withdraw their €232,000 tranche of funding, which would mean lights out for the three-screen cinema.
Even if it does get finished, Crowe says: “I have doubts whether the operators will be able to run it efficiently.” Quite a saga.
