Author 'From There To Here' (Irish rugby- amateur to pro); 'Crossing The Line', Willie Anderson's life story; 'Touching Distance', (Irl's great expectations)

Ireland
Munster's appt of Avan Lee as interim CEO is the third thing they've got right in 6 months: coaches Jimmy Duffy and Jared Payne and now an experienced, clued-in rugby head driving the bus. So much to be put right, but it's a start
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Brendan Fanning retweeted
This week's SSE Airtricity Moment of the Week is this cracker from Katie O'Reilly 😍 A different kind of energy in the Derby ⚡️
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Not long before Irish tourists are drawn to Parrot's Seville the way La Rochelle has bumped up their figures thanks to ROG
Top class assist from Troy Parrott to give Real Betis the lead against Getafe 😮‍💨 x.com/TGZ0037/status/2100643…
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Brendan Fanning retweeted
A federal judge caught the Trump regime lying to the Supreme Court. Yesterday. In writing. dworkinsubstack.com/p/warren…
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Brendan Fanning retweeted
And just like that, the most damning Epstein files completely VANISHED from the media. A sitting congressman, Ted Lieu, said on the record the Epstein files are being blocked because they show Trump raped and threatened to kill children. Lets make this viral again 👇
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Double take here to make sure it wasn’t AI. If there was a gold medal for quality candour then Seamus Flanagan would be adding it to his sack of All Irelands. It’s like an uncle telling his 14 year old nephew the whole Santa thing isn’t quite as it seemed ..but life will go on
Seamus Flanagan very open here on the majority of players are throwing the ball rather than hand passing, and why it’ll continue…
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Imagine having presence of mind to think about leaving the scene injury-free and with gold medal around yer neck, rather than bust a gut to win a race already won - Kate O’Connor explains why she didn't lose the plot in final 50m. What a star
Kate O’Connor needed to stay within 3s of Oosterwegel for European Gold and she did 🥇 Heptathlon National Record too ☘️ She continues to deliver on the biggest of all stages 👏 That reaction when it was confirmed 😭 Unbelievable 👏
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This deserves to travel at the speed and accuracy with which it was delivered. Top drawer!
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Seemingly the cake disappeared before the man who should have had first dibs got a crumb. Look no further than the hungry looking lad with his hand already on the table..
Our own Seán Moran has retired after 32 years as GAA Correspondent of @IrishTimesSport. GWA members and GAA President Jarlath Burns saluted his outstanding career before Mayo gave him the perfect send-off! A very happy retirement & happy birthday to an all-time great👏🎂
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Absolutely top drawer. To have the composure and skill to execute a circa 45m pass to a postage stamp, when his heart must have been beating out of his chest? Class
What an out ball from the imperious Jack Carney to stop a late pressure press
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Couldn't but be impressed by his contribution when it was clear his own race was run. Fronted up v well for post match chat on field. The saying "if you're not getting your head wet you're not one of the lads" doesn't always ring true. Well done
Congrats @AIDOXI The resilience you have shown has been rewarded today. Imagine having given up 2 years ago..you would have to sit on the couch with 50 years of regrets… look at you now..whether you kicked a ball today doesn’t matter a fuck.. You were there for every meeting, clarity session and training session. Your input will be appreciated by those who matter. You can do what you like now. Enjoy the celebrations.💪❤️❤️🥇
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The effortless hang-time for the goal v Monaghan must be one of the many boxes ticked for the Aussies. Kobe is exactly the type of X factor player Irish rugby needs to nail down
Eighteen years of age. Perhaps only one season in the Mayo jersey. (Move to @AFL shortly) On his arm, he wrote two words: "One Chance”
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Brendan Fanning retweeted
I’ll just leave this here, because as far as I’m aware, free speech might be hanging on by its fingertips, but hanging on it is, and we all reserve the right to chuckle. My thanks to Joe Nunnink for the clip. 🎥 TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZN811M1BU/
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SA v England game looks like it’s being filmed by some lad on his mobile phone, standing up in his seat a few rows back from the front
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Irl 20s being humiliated by an Argie team for whom offload/keeping ball alive is a first thought rather than an afterthought. This is Irish rugby in microcosm.
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Brendan Fanning retweeted
As Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche fired me for doing my job, then subjected me and my family to months of retaliation. My story is one of many reasons the Senate should not confirm Blanche again. Read and share my letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. lawyeroyer.com/p/my-letter-t…
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The leader of the free world. Mentally sound as a pound.
1/3 You may see clips of Trump’s self-evident dementia, but the full effect requires stamina. Here is NINE MINUTES of Trump talking about his fountains in a Cabinet meeting. Try to read it. I dare you. “D.C. and D.C. is looking beautiful. The fountains are almost all open. We had 28 of them, and we have one in particular, a very long lake, we call it. They're reflecting lake between the Lincoln Monument. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. You take a look at between Lincoln and Washington. You have the longest, like 2,400 feet long. That's longer than the tallest building in the world, if you set it on your side. And it's almost 200 feet wide. And for-- actually, it was built in 1922. And from 1920 to '21, it really never worked. It always leaked. And it was a problem about things. And hundreds of millions was spent. The Biden administration and the Obama administration spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get it to work, and they failed. And we'll be spending-- you'll give me a number. But I think it's very low numbers, like in the number that we originally talked about. Where we cleaned it, we fumigated it, that we had 10 major truck dumpsters of garbage taken out. Can you believe it? Friend of mine came in. Very substantial person from Germany. Want to see the Washington Monument. I wanted to see the Lincoln Memorial. He said, I look, but that horrible reflecting pond is disgusting. It's filthy dirty and disgusting. I said, really, I drove down. I said, secret shares was taken dry. And we went down. I said, that's terrible. And for the most part, it didn't work. I mean, they wouldn't even have water in there. But when they did, it was just dirty, filthy water that leaked out. And we got to work on it. And they were supposed to cost almost 400, think of it, 400 million dollars, because it's like putting the skin on a skyscraper. But bigger, much bigger, many skyscrapers, you could almost say, other than for the world. So I think of it, the world's tallest skyscraper is shorter than 2,400 feet. So we went to work. And over the years, I built hundreds of pools. I built them every time I built them. I always like to build the Olympic size swimming pools. And I was very aware of swimming pool, what goes into making a swimming pool. It's not as simple as people think. You never wanted to leak. You want a beautiful surface. I said, you know, I have an idea, Doug. We sat down. I said, let's take that long thing where we're going to fix it with concrete, which leaks, concrete, all sorts of other materials that all leak and don't look good. They're gray. And swimming pool, I have a swimming pool right up the road. I built it 22 years ago. It's perfect. I said, does it ever leak, though? It's good contractors. I actually called it a couple of the contractors, got some ideas from them. And I gave it to Doug and Doug's done an unbelievable job. And so they were going to spend maybe 400 million dollars. I don't know. You never know with cost overruns and everything. But it was going to take years to build three years, four years. And we'll have it done before July 4th substantially, before July 4th. If we didn't have such a bad weather the last four or five days, it could have been almost done. We have to-- you can't do this substance in the rain. And what they did is they cleaned it. They took out, as I said, more than 10 dumpsters of garbage. Shovels, it was disgusting. Well, every corner, every corner, had massive amounts of-- I guess that's the way the tide goes. But at massive amounts of garbage, we then steamed clean it. We then sandblasted it. And then we pebble blasted. That's a bigger version of sand. We made the surface as good as it can be. Now we're now covering it with the most beautiful blue. Very thick, you think of it as a very sophisticated form of rubber. No leaks, no problems. And it's beautiful. It's called American Flag Blue that was the color we chose.”
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Glad to be a part of this shoot-out in London next month..
Stories from across the game. The @ctshirts Rugby Book of the Year, in association with the Rugby Union Writers’ Club shortlist is here. Heart on my Sleeve, Andrew Porter (@bonnierbooks_uk) No Other Place, George North (@HarperCollinsUK) SO RUGBY, WHAT'S THAT?, @SquidgeRugby, illustrated by Ferry Gouw (Vroom) The Bish, David Bishop, with @gallagherbren58 (Y Lolfa) The Only Way I Know, Andy Farrell (@PenguinUKBooks) Touching Distance, @BrendanFanning (@Gill_Books) #CTSBA26 #ReadingForSport
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Brendan Fanning retweeted
Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
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Brendan Fanning retweeted
Replying to @ChrisMurphyCT
IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, NEITHER DOES YOUR ENEMY!
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