Sunday, February 10, 2013

Fish don't climb trees

This week at Speakeasy, Rona Coghlan as Toastmaster and Anne O’Donovan as Topicsmaster joined President Jerry Mulcahy at the top table.

Rona had the pleasure of introducing two guest speakers, two transition year students whose youth belied the absorbing speeches they made. Honor O’Flynn made a wonderful speech on the importance of music. Honor ’s speech was indeed uplifting in the way she touched on so many different types of music from Bob Marley to Mozart and the great uses music has, from improving the mood on a personal level to fund raising for worthy causes. Anne Buckley evaluated Honor and strongly encouraged her to continue both her music and her public speaking. Jordan O’Callaghan made a very effective plea in his speech for people to devote their lives to doing what it is they love and therefore are good at. Fish don’t climb trees well,-so Einstein pointed out, -one of Jordan’s very convincing quotes. Kieran Butler evaluated Jordans’ speech and complimented him on a very impressive style of presentation and a great speech that made a strong impression on the audience.

Speakeasy’s James Kelleher gave a very illuminating speech on practical first aid, - explaining how to use what one has at hand to deal with unfortunate incidents such as having a knife slip and stick in your arm. Only James could get quite a bit of humour out of some quite traumatic sounding incidents!. James Bond comes to mind and his speech title was indeed“ First Aid Tips like the Movies”. He definitely created some memorable images as his evaluator Marie Lynes pointed out.
Mary Moynihan’s speech,-”Medicine for the Mind” was a thought provoking reflection on the delight of reading. Mary looked at reading and its benefits from childhood onwards and there is no doubt that the audience members were keen to get reading as a result of this lovely speech.
Finally Ronan Condon gave a delightful speech on thoughts that come to him as he looks at the Map of the World he has hanging on his wall. In essence the map is to him a memory map as it brings to mind places he has visited and places he would like to visit. It was a speech guaranteed to turn the mind to dreaming of far flung places.

Anne O’Donovan had a very successful evening as Topicsmaster. With topics as diverse as Operation Transformation to Drink driving, Anne drew a lot of response from the audience.
Marie Fitzpatrick was General Evaluator for the night and gave a comprehensive evaluation of the meeting as a whole as well having the difficult decision to make as to who to award ribbons to, for best speaker, best topics speaker and best evaluation. This is just the General Evaluators decision on the night and a personal choice of the General Evaluator whether they want to award these or not.

Pat Connolly did the duty of Grammarian and complimented good usage of the English language. His “word of the night” was Toast and he got many humorous uses of this throughout the evening.
David Roache kept a watchful eye on the time in his duty as timekeeper.
All were warmly welcomed to the meeting by guest greeters, Marie Lynes, Mary Moynihan and Ronan Condon.
Speakeasy Toastmasters meets every 2nd Thursday in the Hi-B. next meeting at 8pm Hibernian Mallow, Thursday 21st Feb. Non members are most welcome and are never asked to speak. Contact Jerry 0863752895,or Noel 0872427485.
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