Blarney Toastmasters is going from strength to strength with fourteen new members to date. As a result, our meetings have become very lively and we have extended to four speeches each meeting in order to accommodate our new members, who are going great guns in both speeches and meeting roles.
Tonight we saw four excellent speeches starting with a very confident and well presented Icebreaker from Daniel Forde entitled "Its All in the Head", evaluated by Jerome O'Donovan. This was followed by Kathleen O'Mahony, with a confessed fear of speaking, who showed us that she has completely conquered that fear with her stage 7 speech from the CC manual entitled "When us you ring, we sweetly sing" - a brief history of St Anne's Shandon. She was evaluated by Anita Lenihan. Kathleen was awarded best speaker on the night.
For our third speaker it was a special occasion. Sinead Huskisson gave us a wonderful final speech in the Competent Communicator Manual to earn her CC award, entitled "Anything is possible". Her evaluator, Maria Gillen, won the best evaluator award.
Our final speaker was Daniel Mullane who is embarking on his Advanced Communicator pathway, with a speech from the Humorously Speaking Manual no 1 entitled "The Greatest Conspiracy in the World", where he debunked the Santa mystery and proposed a new "myth". His evaluator was Victor Sullivan.
In the chair for the first time was Neil O'Brien who conducted the meeting with aplomb, Ted Mellamphy conducting Table Topics and Sharon O'Neill taking the role of General Evaluator. Other roles were all taken by some of our new members: Timekeeper, Anita Murphy; Ah-Counter Trish O'Leary; and Grammarian, Anne Marie Logue; all of whom conducted their roles excellently.
This writer is looking forward to a really exciting and enjoyable second half of the Toastmasters year.