Latest news with #Rolls-RoyceSilverWraith
Irish Examiner
01-08-2025
- Politics
- Irish Examiner
Letters to the Editor: Why I will not put my name forward for presidency
After a period of reflection, I have decided not to seek a nomination for the presidential election. My thanks to those who encouraged me to answer Ireland's call, not for any leadership skills, values, vision, pride in the jersey, etc, on my part but for the free digs when they're up for the Kerry football matches. The Government has all the executive powers, so I'd be spending my days hosting garden parties and walking the dogs. Micheál, Simon, Mary Lou, and the TDs would have all the fun jostling over housing, health, criminal, and global issues, while I'd be a powerless oddity with a peripheral role. I'd be bored to tears in the opulent 95-room mansion. I'd have servants and military aides-de camp fussing all over me and a vintage chauffeur-driven 1947 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith landaulette and Mercedes-Benz S-Class saloon to transport me to ceremonial events. I'd have to do very little for the outlandish €350,000 salary other than play solitaire or watch day time television. I'd feel uneasy about spending €50m to run the presidential office during the term — an amount which would build 250 family homes. I couldn't go for a drink or to a match without a posse of security personnel for company. OK, I'd get in free to the matches, but I'd probably have to throw in the muddy ball or shake hands with colossal rugby types, whose grip would crush my fingers. I'm far too busy and active to retire to the Áras. I'd be very lonesome in the big smoke, and I'd miss the good life in Kerry. No, like the late Garrett Fitzgerald, my temperament isn't suited to seven years of mundane and innate inactivity. Billy Ryle Tralee, Co Kerry Presidency: Nah, I'll stick to the fishing Having a choice is wonderful, but the opposite can be true too. Right now, I'm on the horns of a dilemma, stuck on the negative side of that equation: I do not know whether to run for the presidency or offer to sit in front of RTÉ's Liveline mic. One position requires dignity, magnetism, political maturity, and perception as well as a generally sunny disposition. Great charm and exceptional empathy are required too. The capacity to bite your lip is essential. The other requires the capacity to exploit and goad, all facilitated by well-disguised cynicism. One offers a life under the unforgiving public eye for the incumbent and their family. The other offers a hurler-on-the-ditch distance from the consequences of their shoot-from-the-hip blathering. One is very well rewarded financially, the other less so. One can be influential, the other is influential. One can be held to account — the other, again, less so. One is seen as a champion of the people — whatever that is today — and the other is derided as a first-class passenger on the perpetual gravy train. One is seen a conduit to vent our spleen the other can too often be an object of that spleen. One is free to pronounce on any subject no matter how bizarre the views offered are. The other is — well, sometimes anyway — constrained by government policies. One is shackled, the other celebrated. To quote a man who once faced a similar dilemma: On mature refection, I think I'll stick to the fishing, or what's left of it in 2025. A pity, as I would have liked a well-made tweed suit. Jack Power Inniscarra, Cork Praise for Higgins Our President, Michael D Higgins ,is to be congratulated on reminding his fellow European presidents of their moral duty to do their upmost to end the genocide being conducted at Gaza by Israel before the eyes of the world. J Anthony Gaughan President Irish PEN Blackrock, Co Dublin Cork losing Lucey As a Corkconian, are we to keep Wellington, Marlborough, etc, emphasise Victoria, and then ditch Bishop Lucey, homegrown and an original thinker and worker for the less privileged of his era? Hugh Lee Kilcoole, Wicklow Obscuring body parts on internet The modern technology which can prevent airport passengers' own private body parts from being seen by members of airport security is something that should, obviously, be welcomed by everyone. But, I think, this same helpful technology — with its ability to obscure parts of the human body — could also be put to great good use everywhere on the internet to prevent illicit images of the human body from being observed by mistake by underage individuals who could then, as a sad consequence, become disturbed by them? Such safety measures that are presently designed to keep the travelling public's modesty intact at many airports could also, I feel, in the near future potentially make the internet of the 21st century a much more safer place for many people to happily grow and develop their talents and their abilities in? Along, too, with less hidden dangers for them to worry about? Hopefully, this should be the happy outcome — most especially for the young and the vulnerable? Sean O'Brien Kilrush, Co Clare
The Star
24-04-2025
- Automotive
- The Star
At a little known Rolls-Royce museum in US, volunteers dote over iconic cars
Mike Fowler had been faintly aware that a museum of Rolls-Royce and Bentley vehicles existed near his boyhood home in the suburbs of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but the car enthusiast didn't expect the experience he got when he started volunteering there. Fowler had oil on his hands within a half-hour of his first volunteer session at the Rolls-Royce and Bentley Museum. More than a year later, he keeps a list on his phone with notes about cars in the collection to help him get them started properly or disconnect their batteries. Fowler is part of a group of about 50 volunteers who gather twice a month at the museum to help out, including cleaning, maintaining and driving the fleet of customized iconic vehicles, many designed to be driven by a chauffeur. For many volunteers, it's an opportunity to experience a life few people can afford. "You take it out on the road and you are transported to a different time, a different mentality,' said Fowler, a 28-year-old Camp Hill resident. Mike Fowler drives a 1946 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith from the The Rolls-Royce Foundation's collection in Mechanicsburg, Pa., Saturday, April 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) Newcomers are first paired with a more experienced volunteer for about a year and must pass the museum's driving school. They start with the most modern vehicles, which have automatic transmissions. "We're very protective of the collection. We're its caretakers, and we take it very seriously. So you can't just come in off the street and start driving,' said Sarah Holibaugh, the museum's head librarian and archivist. "But it should be that way.' The 29 antique and collectible Rolls-Royce and Bentley automobiles that date as far back as the late 1920s are the central attraction of the largely overlooked and seldom visited museum, which is easy to miss among the surrounding miles of farm fields and stretch of nondescript industrial buildings just outside Mechanicsburg. Mike Fowler drives a 1946 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith at The Rolls-Royce Foundation in Mechanicsburg, Pa., Saturday, April 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) The museum, owned by the Rolls-Royce Foundation, includes a showroom, maintenance area and a third room being converted into a library and reading room. "I often wonder if the homes around here know the foundation exists,' Fowler said. "Or if they always just wonder, 'Why do we see these vintage Rolls-Royce and Bentleys roaming around from time to time?'" The museum has its roots in nearby Harrisburg, where Rolls-Royce put an owners' club in the 1960s, located between large dealerships in New York and Washington. After Hurricane Agnes devasted that location in 1972, a businessman donated the Mechanicsburg property for a new facility. The 6,000-person owners' club, with members in 26 countries and a headquarters in the same complex, is a separate entity but works closely with the museum. Shown are various vehicles in the garage at The Rolls-Royce Foundation in Mechanicsburg, Pa., Saturday, April 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) Though admission is just US$5, the museum launched in 2004 gets only about 1,000 visitors a year. It typically draws members of car clubs, groups of seniors and students on school field trips, with visits that have to be scheduled in advance. It also has rented out its cars for films and similar uses. The museum's 1961 Rolls-Royce Phantom V was in last year's Timothée Chalamet biopic about Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown , and a 1959 Silver Cloud I from the collection appeared in Season 4 of the series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel . Volunteers also help preserve and digitize the museum's archive of ownership and service records for North America, which span from 1907 until 2004, shortly after Rolls-Royce and Bentley were acquired by BMW and Volkswagen, respectively. Records for cars made for the European market are available through the Rolls-Royce Enthusiasts' Club in the United Kingdom. Volunteers gather at The Rolls-Royce Foundation in Mechanicsburg, Pa., Saturday, April 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) The North American records, which are available for a fee and produce the foundation's biggest revenue stream, have helped prove cars outside of their collection were once owned by famed director Alfred Hitchcock, actor Zsa Zsa Gabor and hockey great Wayne Gretzky. Foundation records have also debunked claims about purported prior ownership, including a Rolls-Royce vehicle thought to have been owned by country singer Hank Williams Jr. "We were able to absolutely prove that it was not owned by him,' recalled volunteer Randy Churchill, a Boiling Springs man now retired from a marketing career. "They just thought they had a million-dollar gold mine on their hands.' Vehicles in the museum's collection range in value from about US$30,000 to about US$120,000. A whiskey delivery truck appraised at US$320,000 has been donated and will soon be on display. Many of the cars Rolls-Royce has built are still on the road and used models can be surprisingly cheap. But maintaining an older Rolls, with its customized features and expensive parts, can be pricey, noted volunteer Ron Deguffroy, a retired psychologist from Chambersburg. "The most expensive Rolls-Royce you will buy," he said, "is a cheap one.' – AP
