15 Jan

Speakeasy Toastmasters Mallow

A terrific start to 2004

The first meeting of 2004 began with a hugely entertaining speech from Dierdre Linehan entitled ‘A morning from hell’, which described how things can go badly wrong when you are trying to take care of two very small babies and a couple of mad toddlers. We heard about the enforced trip to the supermarket where the toddlers took off in separate directions (of course), the return home in time to save the pet rabbit from the claws of next door’s cat, whilst trying to feed bottles to the roaring, hiccupping, sweat faced, red faced babies. John Dillon evaluated Dierdre’s speech which was followed by a speech from John Murphy, entitled, intriguingly, ‘One mud pie too many saved the day’. When John was ten, he and his brothers were sent off with their father and uncle to cut up and move a massive, 80 ft tree that was blocking a local farmer’s gate. The huge crater that had been left behind by the roots, which themselves spanned 30 ft, was the obvious spot for the boys to play and create the mudpies which were then launched at the dad and uncle. This continued until poor uncle Mikey got one full in the face and the boys were left at home in disgrace at lunchtime – no more mudpies. But it might have been no more boys as it turned out because once the top 10 ft of tree had been cut away after lunch, the rest of the tree suddenly righted itself back into it’s original position within the boy’s ‘mudpie’ crater! Micheal Dineen evaluated this factual tall tale. Michael Cronin was required to respond to the (fictitious) award he had been presented with by Sean Corcoran i.e. the ‘Speakeasy Bachelor of the year’ award. He described his best efforts to avoid being eligible for the award again this year, but thanked the ladies who made it possible. The speech was evaluated by Fiona Herbert. In his speech this evening, Jeremiah Ronayne made a toast to the New Year and our resolutions. His advice was to set modest tasks and work towards goals one small step at a time. Noel O’ Connor evaluated Jeremiah’s speech. The final speech of the evening came from Pat Sexton who set the scene in 1986 and established himself as the banker trying to sell us, the bank’s customer’s, some very interesting and lucrative investment opportunities which included offshore accounts and non-resident accounts. We would of course clean up by avoiding DIRT payments! This speech was evaluated by Kieran Buckley.


Our next meeting is on Thursday, 22nd January and we will be delighted to welcome a very special guest to the club on that night…...Mr. Ted Corcoran who is the current International President of Toastmasters International will be visiting us and we would be delighted to see as many members and guests as possible on this occasion.

The meeting will start at 8:00 pm, as usual and we ask everyone to be at The Hibernian Hotel (Chapel Lane) at 7:50 pm.