Lest we forget - January 2015 article

Michael Fennely recorded amongst the missing
of Ypres on the Menin Gate Memorial  

As we continue to remember the 100^th anniversary of the Great War, which started in 1914 and ended in 1918, it is easy to overlook the contribution of the tens of thousands of young Irish men who served in the British and other allied armies during this traumatic era of European history.

It is estimated that around 200,000 Irish born soldiers fought in the war. Around 30,000 died fighting in the British army and a further 20,000 died fighting in the Australian, United States, New Zealand and Canadian armies. At the outbreak of the war, it is said that most Irish people, regardless of political affiliation, supported the war and both nationalist and unionists backed the British war effort.

John Redmond MP, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party pledged his support to the Allied cause in return for the government’s support for Home Rule. Within the first 12 months of the war, 80,000 Irish men enlisted, half from Ulster and half from the south.

Michael, William and James Fennelly were typical of young Irish men who enlisted at the start of the war. Perhaps driven by a combination of idealism, adventure and poverty (a strong incentive for men from poor backgrounds was that their family back home would receive their army pay), the brothers would have believed that they were defending Ireland’s interests when they signed up at Birr garrison in 1914. The three young brothers were from the rural village of Kilminchey near the Midland town of Maryborough (now Portlaoise) and volunteered to join the Prince of Wales’s Leinster Regiment at the outbreak of war. Before leaving Maryborough, the last thing the three brothers did together was have a drink in Shelly’s pub opposite the town courthouse.   

William fought at Gallipoli, the horrors of which are well documented and made memorable in Eric Bogle’s song The Band Played Waltzing Matilda. James and William survived the war, William joined the merchant navy and eventually took work on the canal barges carrying the black stuff between Dublin and Tullamore. James became a cobbler in Bull Street, Portlaoise.

The Menin Gate Memorial, Belgium

But on 12 May 1915 their brother Michael was killed in action at Frezenberg, his regiment violently bombarded in their trenches as they were choking to death in the most horrific circumstances due to the German use of poisonous chlorine gas in the Second Battle of Ypres. His name is listed in a roll of soldiers from the Leinster Regiment entitled to the Victory Medal and / or British War Medal and next to his name are just two words – ‘presumed dead’. The name of Private Michael Fennelly, 2^nd Leinster regiment is also inscribed on the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing at Ypres, Belgium. Michael was my grandfather’s cousin.

Less than a year after Private Michael Fennelly’s death, news began to reach the Irish regiments in France and Belgium that Patrick Pearse had issued the Proclamation of the Irish Republic on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin and that whilst they were fighting and dying in the trenches, other men in British uniforms were shooting fellow Irish men and women back home. The Germans were quick to reinforce the message with placards raised opposite the Irish trenches reading “Irishmen! Heavy uproar in Ireland. English guns are firing at your wives and children!”

Irish soldiers were undeterred and the commitment of battalions like the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and the Leinster regiments were vital in capturing heavily fortified German positions - sacrificing their lives to bring about the end of the war.

Sadly though, for most of these brave soldiers returning home to Ireland, they were not given a hero’s welcome by any apart from their wives and mothers. Many were even treated with hostility. According to Irish author Dr Elaine Byrne:

“The Irishmen who fought in the first world war were officially forgotten in post-independence Ireland. The end of the war coincided with a changed political climate. Redmond’s call at Woodenbridge was rewarded with just six seats from 105 for the Irish party at the 1918 election. Home Rule was dead. The militant nationalism expressed by Eamon de Valera’s Sinn Fein was in the ascendancy. All had changed, changed utterly.”

The few war memorials that were allowed in Ireland were hidden away and it was not until 1988 that the Irish National War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge on the outskirts of Dublin was officially opened. First world war history was not taught in Irish schools and history books were silent about the 50,000 Irish men who died, like young Michael Fennelly, in the mud, blood, shrapnel and chlorine gas of the trenches of northern Europe.

Perhaps it is high time for all of us with Irish heritage, regardless of faith, flag, politics or historical perspective, to remember the young Irishmen who fought bravely in the Great War, especially the 50 thousand who lost their lives. Also the thousands of Irish women who worked as nurses or made dressings and munitions across Ireland for the war effort. What better tribute than the words and melancholic tune of that other classic ballad by Eric Bogle, made famous by The Fureys and Davey Arthur, The Green Fields of France:   

Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?

Did they sound the death march as they lowered you down?

Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?

And did the pipes play The Flowers of the Forest?    

The story of Father Larry of Manhattan

In August this year my wife and I and our three teenaged children travelled to Ireland to visit her mother, Catherine Dwyer (aka Kitty), in a rural area near Moate on the border of counties Offaly and Westmeath. We then travelled north, accompanied by Granny to a holiday cottage at Moville in Donegal.

As a keen researcher of the family tree, whenever we visit Ireland I take every opportunity to update information from Kitty about her family roots in the area. Irish genealogy is well known for being difficult for a number of reasons, so the oral history approach which involves recording stories and looking at old photographs and documents such as Mass Cards is therefore very important.

Where Ireland has gaps when it comes to census records and the like, the Irish people generally make up for in terms of the rich oral history tradition. Everyone has a story to tell given some gentle encouragement and an appreciative audience. I once wrote to a parish priest in County Laois, researching my mother’s ancestors and asked the slightly unusual question (based on a family myth I might add), “are there any tales of Ireland’s tallest woman once living in your parish?” To which he responded in his return letter, “I haven’t come across that particular one, though most of my parishioners should be able to tell you a tall story”.

One evening this summer, as Kitty and I sat quite literally rummaging through her archive of chocolate boxes and biscuit tins containing old photographs and assorted memorabilia, we came across the Mass Card of a priest named Lawrence D. Flanagan whom, Kitty recalled, was a cousin of her mother from Moate. The Mass Card indicated that the Very Reverend Lawrence D Flanagan was born on 19 June 1882, he professed on 17 October 1901, was ordained on 17 March 1907 and died on 3 April 1966. His order was Carmelite.

Kitty recalled various facts and anecdotes about Lawrence Flanagan such as that his family owned a saw mill in Moate and that Lawrence went to New York as a young priest and worked in America for most of his life. She recalled Father Flanagan once visiting her family on their farm at Lurgan near Moate, probably in 1939. Kitty was a child and her fleeting memory has movie-like imagery to it and instantly conjures up a picture of this intriguing man striding through the Irish countryside towards Lurgan:

“I remember him coming to visit us one day in about 1939. He was walking along the Balycumber Road from Moate and then he turned along the Bog Road and through the fields to our house at Lurgan. I remember that we ran and told our mother that Father Flanagan was on his way along the lane so she was able to quickly clean around the house and get out the best china cups. Father Flanagan was a very tall man and I remember his lace-up boots were extremely well polished. He stayed for tea with my mother and I remember him blessing us all and blessing our home before he left”.

The most intriguing piece of information which Kitty told me was a snippet of a story relating to the Irish War for Independence. She told me that one night Father Flanagan received a knock on his priory door in New York to discover it was a fugitive seeking shelter, none-other than the infamous insurrectionist Eamon De Valera, the leader at that time of Ireland’s struggle for independence from Britain who had escaped from Lincoln prison in February 1919 and travelled secretly to the United States.

Within a few days we drove up to our holiday cottage at Moville, a long car journey which took us through Northern Ireland, driving through towns and places which in my mind are sadly associated with ‘the troubles’, Enniskillen, Omagh, Sion Mills, Strabane and finally through the city of Derry before driving back into the Republic and out along the coastal road that runs along Lough Foyle. As a family we had never visited ‘the north’ before and our teenaged Brummie-born children were struck by the oddness of passing through areas of Ireland where bright and pristine Union Jacks and red hand of Ulster flags hang from every lamp post. Foreboding rather than welcoming. 

My own mind came back constantly to the story of De Valera knocking on the door of the Carmelite priory in Manhattan in 1919, seeking refuge in America at a time when Ireland was on the verge of its ultimate push for independence. An event in family history linked in some small way to the greater narrative of Irish history.

It would have been both amiss and totally out-of-character for me not to have dived straight into some devoted online research into the background to this event on my return home to Birmingham. What I discovered was that De Valera’s midnight knock was not a random act of desperation, on the run in a foreign city, but that his personal link with Lawrence Flanagan went back to their school days at Blackrock College in Dublin in the late 1890s. I also discovered much more about the full extent of the support of the New York Carmelites for Ireland’s struggle for independence between 1916 and 1922 – a story not widely known on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Don’t miss the next instalment of the story of Father Larry and the New York Carmelites in the next edition of The Harp.

The Story of Larry Flanagan

Lawrence D Flanagan was the cousin my wife's grandmother. He was a Carmelite priest born in Moate, Ireland in 1882.

As a young man Lawrence Flanagan attended Blackrock College in Dublin where one of his fellow students was Eamon De Valera, the future president of Ireland.

In 1908 Flanagan, now a trained priest, went to live and work in New York. 11 years later his former college friend, De Valera, now a rebel for the cause of Irish independence, turned up in New York having escaped from Lincoln Jail.

This is the story of how the Carmelite order in New York gave shelter to De Valera and other Irish rebels and helped to gain American support for the cause of Irish independence which was achieved in 1922.

Read my research at this link:  

http://en.calameo.com/read/0006754673dfd3e34d3d0

Remembering rural life in north Kerry in the 1930s

A north Kerry landscape (near Tralee). Photo Pete Millington

 

Thank you to Michael Keane who has contacted us with some wonderful short descriptive articles written by his father and his aunt in the 1930s. Michael wrote:

 

“I am a Coventry-born man of Irish heritage and have an interest in some of the things you have been writing about. I would like to send you over a couple of things written by my dad and aunt, from the 1930s, covering some aspects of rural life in north Kerry. They came to light a little while ago in old school books and they may be something your readership might enjoy.”

 

In the last edition we published a short cinema review which Michael’s father, also named Michael Keane, wrote in one of his school books in the late 1930s. The other two articles which Michael sent are descriptions of rural life in county Kerry.

 

One of the articles, titled A Farmer’s Life, begins:

 

“As Ireland is altogether an agricultural country, the farmer is the principal man in the country. All the land of the nation is very fertile having a great depth of earth based with limestone rock. One of the best crops raised are cattle and this is mainly due to the limestone as it gives great bone to the animals. Irish horses are world famous as most of the horses for export are usually grazing in the ‘golden vale’.

 

During the past four or five years wheat is grown in a very large scale and this is also very, very profitable.

 

A farmer’s life is very healthy as he has always the pure air of the country, which the city man can never enjoy. In the morning he is out very early, his one work summer and winter is to milk the cows and he has to keep the houses clean.

 

Spring is the hardest season of the year for the farmer, he has to plough the land and harrow it and so have it ready to plant the potato crop, the wheat and corn crops.”

 

The second article, Summer (and we don’t know which was authored by the brother or the sister), has very similar themes. Here the author describes the end of summertime in north Kerry:

 

“At this time also the cornfields are a rich green colour just before beginning to ear.  All the young animals are out in the fields grazing during the summer months and running about enjoying themselves under the sun. 

 

Farmers are very busy during this time as the crops, which were sown in spring, must be harvested now. They also cut the turf and save it and when it is dry, draw it home. In July they cut the hay in the meadows until they have the last cut and saved. Then they draw it home and store it in the barn.

 

There is new time from April to October so as to give a chance to those working in shops, in the towns and cities of going to the watering places in the evenings.  Towards the end of summer most people enjoy themselves at the seaside swimming or boating. Others occupy their time by playing games such as hurling, footballing, golfing, but every person has his own pastime.”

 

Whilst both of these articles, written by young Irish people in the late 30s, emphasise the strong agricultural work ethic of the nation’s farmers, there is also a sense of pride and an optimistic celebration of Ireland’s pastoral values with an observation in the final paragraph about the blossoming of new leisure pastimes for working class people across the country.

 

Written two decades after Ireland’s independence in 1922, I wonder if the commentary of Ireland’s newest generation of young people reflected the wider idyllic being promoted by Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, during the 30s and 40s? In a radio address in 1943, on the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the Gaelic League, de Valera reminded the Irish nation:

 

“The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.”  

 

Thank you once again to Michael Keane for sharing the three articles.

A visit to a north Kerry cinema in 1938 to watch an historic Irish movie

Thank you to Michael Keane who has contacted us with some wonderful short descriptive articles written by his father and his aunt in the 1930s. Michael wrote:

“I am a Coventry-born man of Irish heritage and have an interest in some of the things you have been writing about. I would like to send you over a couple of things written by my dad and aunt, from the 1930s, covering some aspects of rural life in north Kerry. They came to light a little a while ago in old school books and they may be something your readership might enjoy.

“I personally think the cinema one is very interesting due to the film it mentions which I have looked up. I think they are interesting ‘period pieces’ of their time, which could even kick-start some other similar pieces from your readers.”

Here is the first of the three articles Michael has sent in, this one written by his father, also named Michael Keane, in the 1930s. The piece is in fact a review of a film called The Dawn:

Visit to a Cinema

Hearing that the Killarney made film “The Dawn” was to be shown at the Picturedrome, Tralee, I decided not to miss the opportunity of seeing the world famed picture.  Accompanied by a few friends, I journeyed from Causeway in the bus to Tralee.  Knowing that there would be a rush for seats we made our way to the Picturedrome half an hour before the picture commenced. Even then the crowds were streaming in from all directions. 

A jostling crowd was gathered round the paying office, but after some time we managed to get our tickets. Then we proceeded to the balcony which was already half full.  The crowd, especially those in the pit, made a deafening din as they argued, sang and whistled.  A terrific cheer heralded the dimming of the lights and in a moment they went out.

Then, to the accompaniment of another cheer, the screens were drawn aside and advertisements shown.  Items of interest preceded a very enjoyable comic.  Next the cast of the ‘Dawn’ was shown and the picture began.  The fight for Irish independence against odds of British military by some local patriots was the main theme of the film.  The stark realism of war was intermingled with the best of comedy to make the film most presentable.

The actors were as good as Hollywood’s best and acted their parts with the greatest taste and intelligence. The picture finished amid wild applause and the spectators crowded out of their seats discussing the merits of the picture.

By Michael Keane 

Incredibly, a Google search for The Dawn provides a link to the first part of the film on a website called Dailymotion at this link:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x17pm9a_ireland-s-first-sound-feature-film-the-dawn-aka-dawn-over-ireland-1938pt1of2_shortfilms

The film was made by Hibernia Films in 1938 and was a Thomas G Cooper production, assisted by Dr D.A. Moriarty with actors Brian O’Sullivan, Eileen Davis, Tom Cooper, Donal O’Cahil, Jerry O’Mahony, Bill Murphy, Marian O’Connell and James Sleese. It is described as the first talking movie ever made in Ireland and is set in the Irish War of Independence in 1919. The longer title of the film was Dawn Over Ireland.

Elsewhere on the internet there is a fascinating discussion of the film by Tadgh O’Sullivan, who is credited on the opening credits of the film for its sound recording.  This can be viewed on You Tube at this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5We8LM2yP6M      

The You Tube review includes a closer look at an action scene in which men from the IRA ambush a unit of Black and Tans. At the end of this review, which itself looks quite dated and may have been from a television documentary, Tadgh O’Sullivan says that he is the only surviving member of the production team.   

The other two articles that Michael Keane sent to us are titled The Farmer and Summer which together paint both an evocative and informative picture of Irish rural life in the 1930s. So please read the next edition of The Harp as we continue our trip down memory lane in the north of county Kerry.    

Thank you once again to Michael Keane for sharing the three articles.

Readers are invited to join our Facebook page and visit our blog:

Visit the blog at

http://harp-gathering.blogspot.co.uk/

Join our Facebook group at

http://www.facebook.com/groups/420135884725856/ 

Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at

recollections.contact@yahoo.co.uk 

Harp article June 2014

We don’t have to search for too long, either on the internet or in our local book shops, to find biographies and autobiographies of famous Irish people and those of Irish heritage who have made their fame and fortune largely outside of Ireland. Terry Wogan, George Best, Louis Walsh, Dave Allen, Graham Norton, Daniel Day-Lewis – actually the list runs into hundreds and covers professional backgrounds from sport to comedy, and from music to literature.

But the stories of ordinary individuals or those whose contributions have been in areas like community, business, health, teaching and politics tend to be far less frequently told. A book by Anne Holohan, Working Lives - The Irish In Britain published in 1995 set out to fill this gap, with 39 interviews with Irish people who had emigrated to Britain largely from the 1950s onwards and worked here most of their lives.

A common experience of Holohan’s interviewees, especially the older generation, was that of the emigrant arriving in Britain with a few bob in their pocket then working hard to raise families, build communities and carve out careers. The wide range of voices in her book include vagrant, politician, labourer, prisoner, footballer, community worker, academic, bra consultant, AIDS counsellor, snooker player, traveller, journalist, executive and nurse. An illuminating, insightful and sensitive portrait of the Irish diaspora in Britain.

The book has a strong London bias but of local interest to the West Midlands Working Lives has interviews with Clare Short, at that time Labour MP for Ladywood and with the late Father Joe Taffe, priest and community activist in Birmingham. Both inspirational individuals who demonstrated in their different ways a characteristically Irish commitment to social justice and community service.

A more obscure publication was People Like Us – The Irish Community In Birmingham written by George Makin, with photographs by Phil Lea, published by Birmingham City Council in 1997. This is a booklet which was distributed alongside an exhibition of photographs housed on Floor Six of Birmingham Central Library as part of a record of contemporary Birmingham.

In his introduction George Makin recalls his own childhood in Birmingham and his sense of Irish identity being formed partly by family holidays to his mother’s farm in Roscommon:

“The Ireland I first saw as a child was almost in a museum as I got back on the boat to Holyhead and on to Birmingham.”

He also recalls the “shattering effect” of the 1974 pub bombings on the whole of Birmingham and “no more so than on the Irish community”:

“It is sometimes forgotten that young people from Irish families also died and suffered injuries that night. On top of this loss the Irish community, who came to see Birmingham as their home, found themselves excluded and under suspicion. The community withdrew on itself and for many years adopted a low profile. Now that is changing as a new second generation emerges who didn’t experience the bombings or the fear that came with the suspicion that followed it”.

The interviews in People Like Us reflect the sense that the Irish community in Birmingham in all of its diverse forms, were finally feeling more confident to speak openly about their identity as both Irish people and as Brummies, two and a half decades after the horrific events of 21 November 1974.

Incidentally, between the publication of Working Lives in 1995 and People Like Us in 1997, Birmingham’s St Patrick’s Day Parade which had not taken place since 1974 had been re-instated in 1996. We might also note here that a driving force behind the campaign to re-instate the parade and subsequent festival was the aforementioned Father Taffe. In any case, the re-instatement of the parade was also perhaps symbolic of the new era, which also coincided with the peace process in the north of Ireland and Good Friday agreement of 1998.

Having said all this, People Like Us was a fascinating, if limited snapshot of the Irish community in Birmingham in the late 1990s, including interviews with Paul Murphy, Gearoid Mac An Mhaoir and Denise Ni Loinsigh, Brenda Fleming, Caroline Kerlin, Desmond Bromley, Maggie Roche, Rory Murray, Dennis Hennessy, Deirdre Dunne and Tony Gorman.

There have been other significant works of local and oral history since, including Carl Chinn’s Making Our Mark and Gudrun Limbrick’s A Great Day: Celebrating St. Patrick's Day in Birmingham.

But my suspicion is, there are many more unheard tales still to be told.         

Readers are invited to join our Facebook page and visit our blog:

Visit the blog at

http://harp-gathering.blogspot.co.uk/

Join our Facebook group at

http://www.facebook.com/groups/420135884725856/

Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at recollections.contact@yahoo.co.uk

Stuck in the Sparkbrook twilight zone with those Culchie blues again

What do you think Irishness means to people in the West Midlands? Tell us your story in The Harp.

Article by Pete Millington May 2014

In 1967 a research study was carried out in Birmingham as part of a five year project called The Survey of Race Relations in Britain. The study in Birmingham was led by Professor John Rex and Robert Moore who were social theorists. The Survey as a whole was concerned with the implications for British society of “the presence of Commonwealth immigrants”. The study in Birmingham was focussed on Sparkbrook having been identified as “a decaying area in a city which except for post-war London has attracted a greater number of migrants than any other in England”.

In particular, the study looked at the experiences of four main sections of the Sparkbrook community, these were English born people, Irish immigrants, people from the West Indies and people from Pakistan. Of the major immigrant groups in Sparkbrook in 1967, the Irish were described as the largest and longest established, although not as a fixed population. By this, the researchers meant that for Irish immigrants, Sparkbrook was a reception area – a place where Irish people arriving in Birmingham lived in temporary lodgings before moving further out into the suburbs. Sparkbrook was also a popular lodging-place for single Irish people. 

The researchers describe how some of the earlier Irish immigrants that they surveyed had become “completely anglicized. Such a man, for example, is Mr. F. He came from Dublin with his parents in 1934 and he and his father both served in the British Army in the Second World War. He married an English girl and now has a son at the Grammar school who, he hopes, will go to university”.

From the outset of the study, Sparkbrook is referred to as a ‘twilight zone’, a curious description of the area that I have heard repeated in common language between Brummies over many years and often wondered about its meaning and origin. Was it a term coined by racists to describe an area of high immigrant population or an area of perceived alien faiths and cultures? Does it refer to a real or perceived local crime rate perhaps? Or even to the chaotic car driving and pedestrian behaviour one might encounter in a built up shopping area like Stratford Road?     

In actual fact, at least according to this study of 1967, the term twilight zone in this context was coined by social theorists to describe areas of housing which, in the word of the authors “have not yet reached the night of slumdom and are aptly called twilight zones, a term which has come to be applied not only to a certain type of housing but to a type of tenure, multi-occupation, which prevails within areas of immigrant settlement”.

The authors continue: “The inhabitants of these twilight zones are not there by choice. They are the newcomers to the city who have been forced to find accommodation by a society which denies them the opportunities of the market or the shelter of the welfare state. Where neither mortgages nor council housing are available to them the immigrant finds shelter with the middlemen who while they may exploit the situation are filling a yawning gap left by the system. These landlords play an indispensable role; they are the safety net under the safety net of the welfare state.”

The study further divides the Irish community into three main sub-groups: (1) the Dubliners; (2) the countrymen, known as ‘Culchies’ to the Dubliners’ and (3) the tinkers, or ‘travelling people’ as they call themselves. The Irish interviewees in the study identified their own fourth small sub-group, described as people who lived by petty thieving and off casual earnings and sharp practices.

In this 1967 study, Sparkbrook and neighbouring Sparkhill were identified as primarily ‘Culchie’ settlements, neighbourhoods where country people predominated. But wherever their place of origin, most Irish people living in Sparkbrook in the late 1960s expressed a wish to move out of their present accommodation. Many identifying areas such as Hall Green, Acocks Green, Sheldon, Shirley and Moseley as the places they would like to move to. The most frequent reason for wanting to move was to enjoy a better environment. Interestingly, a large percentage of Irish immigrants in the survey did not intend to return to Ireland, in the words of the authors:

 “We may say that most Irishmen suffering the hardships of life in Sparkbrook hope for a better future for their children in England. Before they or their children finally become anglicized they must succeed financially and rehouse themselves. In the meanwhile, their aspirations remain confused, as they live balanced between an Irish society in an English urban setting and a totally English society.”

I am certain that many people reading this article will recognise their own conflicts, dilemmas and choices, past and present, in this social balancing act (or that of your parents or grand-parents). Where did your family find themselves after they emerged from the twilight zone, proverbial or otherwise? Has the balance of diaspora come to rest? Do write and let us know.

The study is called ‘Race Community and Conflict – A Study of Sparkbrook’ by John Rex and Robert Moore. Published by Oxford University Press 1967.

Readers are invited to join our Facebook page and visit our blog:

Visit the blog at

http://harp-gathering.blogspot.co.uk/

Join our Facebook group at

http://www.facebook.com/groups/420135884725856/

Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at recollections.contact@yahoo.co.uk