An Apology

Sometimes in life you are just flat out wrong. Yesterday I wrote a piece which I got lambasted for. A couple of lines in particular which I won’t repeat but which you’ll have seen. I lay in bed this morning at 4am and realised I was wrong. Im fairly used to polarising people and can live with that but the amount of people telling me nicely that I had stepped out of line made me see the error of my ways. Its not great being told you should suffer pain, choke or just drown with concrete blocks around my legs. I was also compared to Max Clifford, the people who murdered 800 babies and Hitler. Now you get pretty extreme reactions online but it was the sheer volume of rational people telling me I was wrong that makes see the error in my ways. I should have been smart enough not to write those 2 lines myself but the fact is I did and it took others to highlight my error. I was wrong and I apologise.

The Thought Process

When most media apologise it is a cursory couple of lines. I wanted to go a bit further and explain the thought process. When I write I try to be funny. It clearly isn’t funny and it winds people up. I’d stick by my views of kids jumping off insane buildings like this one and jumping off a restaurant below is just not cool. What happens when one of them impales themselves onto the railings? I was walking by IFSC last week when a group of 30 kids came past me wearing wetsuits and one of them spat on the floor in front of me and said”what you going to do about it” (insert joke here about me deserving it). He couldn’t have been older than 10. Obviously writing about the city I should have raised the issue for debate and not called the kids what I did. I hear people using those words all the time and my mistake is writing them down. I should have known better than to encourage it.

Sacking Myself

Rightly or wrongly this blog has for a while been associated with myself. As we’ve grown to a team of 5 though and seek to increase that further over the coming months that is no longer a good thing. It was fine when it was a small personal blog where if things went wrong it was all on my back. We now have 400,000 monthly visitors though and a team. With that comes responsability. That is why I’m sacking myself from all opinion pieces. I’m only going to focus on what got us here in the first place which was recipes and food reviews about actual food. We’ll continue to hire proper writers. Experienced writers. People who don’t offend people and make an arse out of themselves like I have done. I’ve taken things as far as I can and as I was often reminded last night I should stick at what I’m good at. I will.

Nobody runs Lovin Dublin bar me in terms of making decisions so this is all on my back and I decided to come clean and apologise. I’m sure that won’t be enough for some but sometimes in life you are just wrong. There isn’t much more I can do than that right now.

I’ll leave you with a gorgeous little video of the kids having fun in brighter times…