One of the things that makes Ireland different from the rest of the western world is that we don't have post codes. In 2005 the Government announced that Ireland would have a post code system by 2008. That's when the debate started.
The first thing to emerge is that we can't agree on a system. We can't, for starters, agree that we need a system.
For example, An Post doesn't want a post code system. They claim that there is no need for a code as their address scanning technology does the job just as well and that a new system would be very costly to implement.
But many of the people who argue for a national system say that the words 'post code' shouldn't be used in the first place. This is because the postal service accounts for only a small number of the people who need to know precisely where they are going.
There's the private delivery services. There is the emergency services who regularly report getting lost in rural areas when confusion over addresses arise. There's the problem of bad writing. There's the problem of people making mistakes with 'Road', 'Avenue', 'Close', etc.
There are people who feel that the adoption of a coding system would eat into local identity of townlands, counties and so on.
However, one of the things that there is broad agreement on is that a code should relate directly to the planet. This is increasingly important with the growing popularity of GPS satnav systems and the likes of Google Maps on the internet.
Even at the moment you can use Google Earth to determine your position on the planet and then tell all your delivery services.
For example, I'm writing this column at a desk in our offices in Santry. In latitude and longitude terms the location of this desk is 53 23 32.14 -06 14 55.93. If you get Google maps on your browser and type this in, it will show you where my desk is to an accuracy of about a metre. It's pretty amazing.
It would also show any delivery service exactly where to bring my goods. In fact, many people ring our bell looking for a doctor who can be found about 30 meters up the way. If they had Google maps to hand and the right set of numbers it would save them time and save our bell.
But it's probably asking too much that everybody remember their earth co-ordinates. So we're back to the need for a simple universal system for describing locations.
What is actually required is a system similar to how the internet is organised. Although, like all computer systems, the internet is based on numbers it appears in the real world based on human-friendly names. Therefore, instead of a 12 digit number, our web name is www.dublinpeople.com. It's very easy to remember.
So why not operate Ireland's location codes in a similar way? Simply have a national system where people can register their location under a name. I could be niallgormley88, for example, and anyone who wanted to find me could enter that in a computer and my location would pop-up on screen. I'd be more than just a number.
The latest news is the the new minister Eamon Ryan has shelved the post code idea. It's not exactly clear why. In the meantime, we are going to have to do what we have always done and ask people for directions. And maybe that's not so bad after all.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Ignoring the real segregation in Dublin
The row over school places rumbles on. It's turned into something of a row on racism, an issue sure to trigger middle-class angst.
The problem, as I talked about here last week, is that catholic schools in parts of the Dublin region are full and the schools have taken to giving preference to catholic children.
In some areas this has left some immigrant children stranded without school places. The children, we are given to believe, are mainly of black African ethnicity who are protestants and non-Christians I presume.
So with the spectre of racism hanging in the air, my argument that churches have a perfect right to run their own schools seems to support, in the end, the segregation of children by race. This terrible vista is held up in order to argue for a tightening of the grip of the State on schools.
I smell a lot of something here and it's not roses. In fact, it's stuff you can put on roses to make them grow bigger.
Although race is held up as a terrible division in human society, in fact it's only a minor problem. Race never poses, and has never posed, any problems for any society without one small poisonous ingredient.
Poverty.
So look around this fair city. We already have segregation. If you open your eyes this winter you will see children perished with the cold and undernourished heading to school. You'll see record numbers in the grind schools.
You can read the reports and the league tables. The school you go to largely determines your prospects. There are areas in this town where more of our young people end up in prison than end up in university. I've spoken to social workers and truancy officers and guards and they will tell through gritted teeth that they would be confident enough to go into a bookie and bet on which four-year-old will end up doing smack or doing time.
Our city is segregated by housing estate, by school, by pub, by church, by street.
And all of this, all of it, predates the arrival of blacks, or Poles, or anyone else.
So when our chattering classes get their knickers in a twist over black children ending up in schools of their own and the need for integration - what they mean is that they are worried that the black children will end up in schools with the white underclass that we have already given up on. And if you lie down with dogs...
These are not simple problems. Every parent is duty bound to do the best for their children. Increasingly parents will seek to keep their children out of mediocre performing schools where there are discipline problems, or overcrowding, or bad teachers, or whatever. They are trying to do the best for their kids.
But when we all do this we leave some children behind. And this usually happens on a poverty fault line. If the poor happen to be immigrants then that's where the fault line will show up but race is not the fundamental problem.
The answer lies where it always has lain. In the 1916 Proclamation read out by Padraig Pearse on the steps of the GPO we promised to "cherish all the children of the nation equally". We've made progress but really it's a promise we never kept.
If we treated every Dublin child the way we should, we wouldn't have to worry about what race they are.
The problem, as I talked about here last week, is that catholic schools in parts of the Dublin region are full and the schools have taken to giving preference to catholic children.
In some areas this has left some immigrant children stranded without school places. The children, we are given to believe, are mainly of black African ethnicity who are protestants and non-Christians I presume.
So with the spectre of racism hanging in the air, my argument that churches have a perfect right to run their own schools seems to support, in the end, the segregation of children by race. This terrible vista is held up in order to argue for a tightening of the grip of the State on schools.
I smell a lot of something here and it's not roses. In fact, it's stuff you can put on roses to make them grow bigger.
Although race is held up as a terrible division in human society, in fact it's only a minor problem. Race never poses, and has never posed, any problems for any society without one small poisonous ingredient.
Poverty.
So look around this fair city. We already have segregation. If you open your eyes this winter you will see children perished with the cold and undernourished heading to school. You'll see record numbers in the grind schools.
You can read the reports and the league tables. The school you go to largely determines your prospects. There are areas in this town where more of our young people end up in prison than end up in university. I've spoken to social workers and truancy officers and guards and they will tell through gritted teeth that they would be confident enough to go into a bookie and bet on which four-year-old will end up doing smack or doing time.
Our city is segregated by housing estate, by school, by pub, by church, by street.
And all of this, all of it, predates the arrival of blacks, or Poles, or anyone else.
So when our chattering classes get their knickers in a twist over black children ending up in schools of their own and the need for integration - what they mean is that they are worried that the black children will end up in schools with the white underclass that we have already given up on. And if you lie down with dogs...
These are not simple problems. Every parent is duty bound to do the best for their children. Increasingly parents will seek to keep their children out of mediocre performing schools where there are discipline problems, or overcrowding, or bad teachers, or whatever. They are trying to do the best for their kids.
But when we all do this we leave some children behind. And this usually happens on a poverty fault line. If the poor happen to be immigrants then that's where the fault line will show up but race is not the fundamental problem.
The answer lies where it always has lain. In the 1916 Proclamation read out by Padraig Pearse on the steps of the GPO we promised to "cherish all the children of the nation equally". We've made progress but really it's a promise we never kept.
If we treated every Dublin child the way we should, we wouldn't have to worry about what race they are.
Hands off church schools
It's a funny old town. The schools in the suburbs and satellite towns are packed to the rafters and the schools in the centre are emptying.
Children have been left without school places and the usual suspect, the Catholic Church, has been getting the lion's share of the blame.
Catholic schools have this policy, you see, of favouring catholic children. All around Ireland catholic churches accommodate kids from all religions and none. But in the new areas where houses were built without any thought for the needs of the people who were to live in them, there aren't enough places in catholic schools so they, the catholic schools, give priority to catholic children.
This has greatly offended the great 'liberal' movement of Ireland who think it is the Catholic Church's job to provide an education for everyone. What these secular warriors want is for the church to be ostracised and control of their schools taken away from them. They point out that the state provides 95 per cent of the funding for these schools.
There is nothing liberal whatsoever about this attitude. What will happen if these so-called liberals get their way, is that the state will have the sole right to provide schooling to children in this state. That's zero freedom and zero choice.
The argument about state funding is particularly obnoxious. Catholic parents pay taxes too. As do Church of Ireland parents and Muslim parents. They are entitled to school their children as they see fit.
The State hasn't covered itself in glory on these matters. Local authorities gave planning permission for all these houses. The law is there that developers can be charged fees to support local infrastructure including, presumably, schools. In addition the State is taking a huge dollop out of every house purchase in stamp duty.
So why hasn't the State used some of this money to provide schools? That's the real question. In some cases you could argue that the kids would be better off at home anyway, rather that stuck in a classroom with up to forty other children while a teacher struggles just to maintain sanity.
There is a issue of choice for parents in areas where there is just one catholic school but the way to resolve this isn't to take choice away from everyone. If our 'liberals' are that concerned, why don't they open their own schools.
...and hands off the gaelscoileanna
If English was banned in this country, children here would still speak it for generations to come. The English language permeates every nook and cranny of Irish life. And very useful it is too, as the world's business and cultural second language.
In some gaelscoils the school authorities have a policy of not teaching English for the first two years. This 'total immersion' policy allows children to better absorb the Irish language. But now Minister Mary Hanafin has banned the practice in a typically high-handed state intervention into local school affairs.
The gaelscoileanna movement, which is fighting the good fight against monoculturalism, has taken this as a kick in the teeth, which it is.
The gaelscoileanna has a breathtaking ambition, which is to make Ireland bi-lingual. They should be allowed to get on with it.
Children have been left without school places and the usual suspect, the Catholic Church, has been getting the lion's share of the blame.
Catholic schools have this policy, you see, of favouring catholic children. All around Ireland catholic churches accommodate kids from all religions and none. But in the new areas where houses were built without any thought for the needs of the people who were to live in them, there aren't enough places in catholic schools so they, the catholic schools, give priority to catholic children.
This has greatly offended the great 'liberal' movement of Ireland who think it is the Catholic Church's job to provide an education for everyone. What these secular warriors want is for the church to be ostracised and control of their schools taken away from them. They point out that the state provides 95 per cent of the funding for these schools.
There is nothing liberal whatsoever about this attitude. What will happen if these so-called liberals get their way, is that the state will have the sole right to provide schooling to children in this state. That's zero freedom and zero choice.
The argument about state funding is particularly obnoxious. Catholic parents pay taxes too. As do Church of Ireland parents and Muslim parents. They are entitled to school their children as they see fit.
The State hasn't covered itself in glory on these matters. Local authorities gave planning permission for all these houses. The law is there that developers can be charged fees to support local infrastructure including, presumably, schools. In addition the State is taking a huge dollop out of every house purchase in stamp duty.
So why hasn't the State used some of this money to provide schools? That's the real question. In some cases you could argue that the kids would be better off at home anyway, rather that stuck in a classroom with up to forty other children while a teacher struggles just to maintain sanity.
There is a issue of choice for parents in areas where there is just one catholic school but the way to resolve this isn't to take choice away from everyone. If our 'liberals' are that concerned, why don't they open their own schools.
...and hands off the gaelscoileanna
If English was banned in this country, children here would still speak it for generations to come. The English language permeates every nook and cranny of Irish life. And very useful it is too, as the world's business and cultural second language.
In some gaelscoils the school authorities have a policy of not teaching English for the first two years. This 'total immersion' policy allows children to better absorb the Irish language. But now Minister Mary Hanafin has banned the practice in a typically high-handed state intervention into local school affairs.
The gaelscoileanna movement, which is fighting the good fight against monoculturalism, has taken this as a kick in the teeth, which it is.
The gaelscoileanna has a breathtaking ambition, which is to make Ireland bi-lingual. They should be allowed to get on with it.
New runway to create runaway pollution
Some time ago I produced a diagram in this very column showing how a second runway at Dublin Airport need not send any extra airplanes over Portmarnock.
Some scoffed, some threw their eyes to heaven (and their papers in the bin). Others just pitied me.
And yet, lo and behold, in granting permission for the second runway, right up there in condition number three of the decision is precisely the scheme I outlined. Damn, it good to be right an odd time!
As I also suspected, An Bord Pleanala allowed the runway despite all the objections and opposition, including the opinion of their own planning inspector. The economic arguments, or should I say conventional economic arguments, were always going to be the deciding factor.
But when we get our runway, we'll be getting a host of problems along with it, as the Portmarnock protest group UPROAR very ably pointed out.
Perhaps the biggest problem on the horizon for the airport is the problem of global warming and the growing alarm at the emissions of aircraft. Despite some very impressive new efficiencies in aircraft design, the overall emissions of the airline industry continues to rise with the huge growth in budget airlines.
Airplanes might well be the first target of carbon taxes.
In the future cars will run on renewables generated electricity and hydrogen. That won't work for aircraft. The enormous thrust required to get airplanes off the ground needs jet engines. And jet engines need to burn fuel.
Although many people do not realise this jet engines basically burn a diesel fuel called Jet A. These fuels could be replaced with bio-fuels. While jet engines would still be polluting at least they would be carbon neutral. The Irish government should insist that aircraft using Dublin Airport start burning blended fuels so as to offset any increase in traffic generated by the new runway.
In the longer term, we are going to have to consider seriously building a fixed link to Britain. According to some analyses the Dublin-London air corridor is now the second busiest in the world. And yet Dublin and London are only 300 miles apart, just around the range the the new high speed trains are designed to compete with aircraft. It has to start somewhere. It is unimaginable that in 50 to 100 years from now that Ireland won't have a fixed link to Britain so we should make a start now.
One final point. In recent weeks we have had the Aer Lingus Shannon debacle. We have also had widespread media reports on the dire state of Heathrow where a private company has more interest in providing space for shops than for passengers. The conclusion is this: under no circumstances should the privatisation of Dublin Airport be contemplated. It's just too important to the city and the country to ever fall into private hands. If there has to be competition then so be it, with an airport at Baldonnel or further out. But there must be always some democratic control of our main airport.
Some scoffed, some threw their eyes to heaven (and their papers in the bin). Others just pitied me.
And yet, lo and behold, in granting permission for the second runway, right up there in condition number three of the decision is precisely the scheme I outlined. Damn, it good to be right an odd time!
As I also suspected, An Bord Pleanala allowed the runway despite all the objections and opposition, including the opinion of their own planning inspector. The economic arguments, or should I say conventional economic arguments, were always going to be the deciding factor.
But when we get our runway, we'll be getting a host of problems along with it, as the Portmarnock protest group UPROAR very ably pointed out.
Perhaps the biggest problem on the horizon for the airport is the problem of global warming and the growing alarm at the emissions of aircraft. Despite some very impressive new efficiencies in aircraft design, the overall emissions of the airline industry continues to rise with the huge growth in budget airlines.
Airplanes might well be the first target of carbon taxes.
In the future cars will run on renewables generated electricity and hydrogen. That won't work for aircraft. The enormous thrust required to get airplanes off the ground needs jet engines. And jet engines need to burn fuel.
Although many people do not realise this jet engines basically burn a diesel fuel called Jet A. These fuels could be replaced with bio-fuels. While jet engines would still be polluting at least they would be carbon neutral. The Irish government should insist that aircraft using Dublin Airport start burning blended fuels so as to offset any increase in traffic generated by the new runway.
In the longer term, we are going to have to consider seriously building a fixed link to Britain. According to some analyses the Dublin-London air corridor is now the second busiest in the world. And yet Dublin and London are only 300 miles apart, just around the range the the new high speed trains are designed to compete with aircraft. It has to start somewhere. It is unimaginable that in 50 to 100 years from now that Ireland won't have a fixed link to Britain so we should make a start now.
One final point. In recent weeks we have had the Aer Lingus Shannon debacle. We have also had widespread media reports on the dire state of Heathrow where a private company has more interest in providing space for shops than for passengers. The conclusion is this: under no circumstances should the privatisation of Dublin Airport be contemplated. It's just too important to the city and the country to ever fall into private hands. If there has to be competition then so be it, with an airport at Baldonnel or further out. But there must be always some democratic control of our main airport.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Saving the VB show
So Aer Lingus decide to do the capitalist thing and maximise profits. No wonder there. But why not go the whole hog. If the object is to maximise the use of assets in the pursuit of profit why not sell the airline entirely and invest the money in the arms trade?
There's far more money to be made there. Cluster bombs and land mines have a huge mark-up, I hear.Free market ideology has finally triumphed when the profit motive overwhelms entirly common sense.
But I'm not here to talk about Aer Lingus. I want to talk about the Vincent Browne Show on RTE Radio One. Its demise has been announced. In a similar way to Aer Lingus it has been decided to make better use of the resources that the show uses. So its getting the chop.It's not clear yet what it will be replaced with but current affairs probably won't get a look in. Another music programme is on its way, I suspect.
The VB Show was down to 20,000 listeners. This I seriously doubt. I mean that I doubt that 20,000 people have ever sat down to listen to the show. The nature of radio is that people listen while they are doing something else like driving or ironing clothes.
The 20,000 figure means that this was the average listenership. The number of people listening in was a multiple of this. I know this because I was a listener to the show and I don't think I would ever have listened to it more than two nights in the week. Not because I was trying to avoid it but because I was doing some thing else that didn't allow for listening to the wireless. The occasional listenership was propably near 100,000. Take your pick.
The point is that if you were stuck for something to listen to and you didn't want to listen to the other stations playing music, there it was. A bit of a public servic, if you will.
The question really is why RTE want to pull the plug on a show that has 20,000-100,000 listeners when they have options. One would be to put the show on the internet. Although this is still an underdeveloped medium it is gaining fast and many people now have computers in their kitchen because they want to keep an eye on what the kids are accing on the internet.
A few years ago in the US satelitte radio was unheard of. Now millions of people have bought sets and actually pay a subscription to listen to it. RTE could try something like this.
Another possibility is splitting the waves. RTE Radio One broadcasts on three separate frequencies in Ireland, FM, MW and LW.
Us current affairs types are not all that annoyed about the quality of signal - we would have settled for MW and LW.
Surely, given the options, RTE could have come up with some alternative. If any gig was attracting 20,000 people to a stadium every night it wouldn't be abandoned.
There's far more money to be made there. Cluster bombs and land mines have a huge mark-up, I hear.Free market ideology has finally triumphed when the profit motive overwhelms entirly common sense.
But I'm not here to talk about Aer Lingus. I want to talk about the Vincent Browne Show on RTE Radio One. Its demise has been announced. In a similar way to Aer Lingus it has been decided to make better use of the resources that the show uses. So its getting the chop.It's not clear yet what it will be replaced with but current affairs probably won't get a look in. Another music programme is on its way, I suspect.
The VB Show was down to 20,000 listeners. This I seriously doubt. I mean that I doubt that 20,000 people have ever sat down to listen to the show. The nature of radio is that people listen while they are doing something else like driving or ironing clothes.
The 20,000 figure means that this was the average listenership. The number of people listening in was a multiple of this. I know this because I was a listener to the show and I don't think I would ever have listened to it more than two nights in the week. Not because I was trying to avoid it but because I was doing some thing else that didn't allow for listening to the wireless. The occasional listenership was propably near 100,000. Take your pick.
The point is that if you were stuck for something to listen to and you didn't want to listen to the other stations playing music, there it was. A bit of a public servic, if you will.
The question really is why RTE want to pull the plug on a show that has 20,000-100,000 listeners when they have options. One would be to put the show on the internet. Although this is still an underdeveloped medium it is gaining fast and many people now have computers in their kitchen because they want to keep an eye on what the kids are accing on the internet.
A few years ago in the US satelitte radio was unheard of. Now millions of people have bought sets and actually pay a subscription to listen to it. RTE could try something like this.
Another possibility is splitting the waves. RTE Radio One broadcasts on three separate frequencies in Ireland, FM, MW and LW.
Us current affairs types are not all that annoyed about the quality of signal - we would have settled for MW and LW.
Surely, given the options, RTE could have come up with some alternative. If any gig was attracting 20,000 people to a stadium every night it wouldn't be abandoned.
Building the metro out of gold?
So the Metro North is going to cost us over e5 billion. Yes, that's 5,000,000,000 euro.If you laid all those euros side by side it would go around the world twice. Or something. Anyway, it's an incredible amount of money.Even at a quick glance it is very difficult to see how this kind of figure can be justified. Especially in a building downturn.It's not quite clear how exactly how much of Metro North is going to be in tunnel but if it is from town to north of the airport it is going to be in the region of 12km out of a total of 17km, which will indeed make it expensive. The whole thing, overground and underground, will cost some e294m per km.By comparison, the Metro Sur underground extension in Madrid which opened in 2003 worked out at e45m per km. That's quite a difference.It's such a difference that when the Rail Procurment Agency (RPA) came up with their original estimates there was a huge kerfuffle, Madrid was mentioned in dispatches and they were asked to think again.What they thought about is unknown because, like the proverbial bad uncle, price has never been mentioned again. The new figures were only found out when the Irish Times received some documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The prices were blacked out but not enough for the intrepid Frank McDonald who held them up to the light and discovered all the noughts.The RPA say that they will not release figures because they are commercially sensitive. This is completely at odds with the idea that we should live in an open society. Why aren't the figures published? Why not insist that large contracts like this are put to public tender and open them up to public scrutiny?The history of the world shows that when secrecy is involved people get things wrong. The contact with NTR was not released to the public when the second bridge was commissioned on the same grounds of commercial confidenciality. The public did very, very poorly indeed out of that contract. We are suffering every day, in fact.The danger here is that these huge estimates will undermine the case for the Metro, forgetting that this is a lifetime project of national importance because it links Dublin Airport to the city centre.There's one thing I still can't understand. Why are we talking about Metro? Why aren't we talking about DART? I don't see why we need a new intermediate technology between Luas and DART.I think it has something to do with the metro's lower floor which may be used when it's on the street. If that is so then it doesn't apply to Metro North which will be completely segregated.Whatever the problems they should be sorted out ASAP. The northside has had the sticky end of the stick when it comes to public transport. Whatever the cost Metro North has to get moving soon.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
The O'Reilly verdict was wrong
My gut instinct is that Joe O'Reilly murdered Rachel O'Reilly. That's the real problem with the verdict of the trial because I had the same feeling before the trial started.
Ever since the murder in October 2004 the newspapers, especially the tabloid newspapers, have run stories replete with the thinly concealed belief the Joe O'Reilly was the murderer. There must be grave suspicions that much of the information was passed to the press from within the gardai partly to pressurise Joe O'Reilly during the investigation.
The pivotal evidence in the trial was the mobile phone evidence which placed O'Reilly in the vicinity of his home at the time of the murder and proof that his relationship with Rachel had broken down.
And that's it. No proof whatsoever linking him with the crime scene. No witness or forensic evidence at all.
It's not good enough, you know. My guess is that the prosecution authorities took a chance even going to trial, given the flimsiness of the case. And I honestly don't believe there was enough evidence given in the courtroom to have proven 'beyond reasonable doubt' that he committed the murder.
In fact, it is questionable whether it was possible, given the pre-trial publicity, if a fair trial could have been organised in Ireland at all. If a jury is supposed to be representative of the general population then they would have absorbed a huge amount of information, innuendo and rumour about the case. Ok, so the judge warned them to only consider what they heard in court but it would not be humanly possible to forget or ignore what they had already heard.
The jury didn't come to a quick decision. We don't know what went on in the jury room but outside among the general public, at least to the section I talked to, two things were apparent. Firstly, that most people felt that Joe O'Reilly was guilty and secondly, people were unsure what way the jury would go.
Let's hope that justice was done. But let's acknowledge that a fair trial consists of a jury considering only what they have heard in court. I don't think that's what happened in the O'Reilly case and the verdict should have reflected the evidence.
Control freak opportunism
Regular readers will know that I am disgusted with the creeping authoritarianism of this state. In the wake of the O'Reilly verdict the government slyly lost no time in announcing its intention to bring mobile phones under its control. The idea was to capitalise on sympathy for Rachel O'Reilly to further extend the tentacles of state control.
Never mind that the mobile phone records of Joe O'Reilly and Robert Houlihan had been used to good effect without compulsory registration.
This government despises open systems. Without doubt they would like to abolish cash and open roads as well. In this brave new Ireland we're all potential criminals unless our records say different.
Ever since the murder in October 2004 the newspapers, especially the tabloid newspapers, have run stories replete with the thinly concealed belief the Joe O'Reilly was the murderer. There must be grave suspicions that much of the information was passed to the press from within the gardai partly to pressurise Joe O'Reilly during the investigation.
The pivotal evidence in the trial was the mobile phone evidence which placed O'Reilly in the vicinity of his home at the time of the murder and proof that his relationship with Rachel had broken down.
And that's it. No proof whatsoever linking him with the crime scene. No witness or forensic evidence at all.
It's not good enough, you know. My guess is that the prosecution authorities took a chance even going to trial, given the flimsiness of the case. And I honestly don't believe there was enough evidence given in the courtroom to have proven 'beyond reasonable doubt' that he committed the murder.
In fact, it is questionable whether it was possible, given the pre-trial publicity, if a fair trial could have been organised in Ireland at all. If a jury is supposed to be representative of the general population then they would have absorbed a huge amount of information, innuendo and rumour about the case. Ok, so the judge warned them to only consider what they heard in court but it would not be humanly possible to forget or ignore what they had already heard.
The jury didn't come to a quick decision. We don't know what went on in the jury room but outside among the general public, at least to the section I talked to, two things were apparent. Firstly, that most people felt that Joe O'Reilly was guilty and secondly, people were unsure what way the jury would go.
Let's hope that justice was done. But let's acknowledge that a fair trial consists of a jury considering only what they have heard in court. I don't think that's what happened in the O'Reilly case and the verdict should have reflected the evidence.
Control freak opportunism
Regular readers will know that I am disgusted with the creeping authoritarianism of this state. In the wake of the O'Reilly verdict the government slyly lost no time in announcing its intention to bring mobile phones under its control. The idea was to capitalise on sympathy for Rachel O'Reilly to further extend the tentacles of state control.
Never mind that the mobile phone records of Joe O'Reilly and Robert Houlihan had been used to good effect without compulsory registration.
This government despises open systems. Without doubt they would like to abolish cash and open roads as well. In this brave new Ireland we're all potential criminals unless our records say different.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
The beautiful craziness of Steorn
There is a Dublin company at the moment that is the talk of the planet. Based on the northside just a couple of miles from this newspaper's HQ, a company called Steorn is making a claim that, if true, would completely change the world as we know it.
Steorn have developed a technology called Orbo which promises free energy. If Orbo works then everything we think we know about energy or matter is wrong. Orbo, as its name kind of implies, would turn everything upside down.
The technology is based on an array of magnets aligned in a circle and when the machine starts moving it never stops. It keeps on going without an further energy input.
You can imagine that if this was a credible claim the electrical industry would be upset. The car industry would be very interested. And the oil industry would stop drilling. That none of this has happened tells you that the balance of global opinion thinks that Orbo is not going to work.
And I've got to tell you that I don't think it's going to work either. The technology is pretty much a perpetual motion machine. Plenty of people have filed patent claims for perpetual motion machines over the last few centuries and all of them have been found wanting.
The reason is that perpetual motion machines violate the principle of the conservation of energy. This states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. As energy and matter are interchangeable it might be easier to point out that what this really means is that you cannot create something out of nothing.
The idea that you can't create something out of nothing has a sound intellectual and experimental basis. People who do believe this are really entering the domains of religion or magic.
So the response of the scientific community to Steorn's Orbo technology has been scathing and savage. Steorn itself didn't help the situation when a demonstration in London failed a couple of weeks back. The company says it will work next time, in a few weeks or months.
You have got to admire them for self-belief. I hope that this will change the Irish world. Throughout history times of plenty have coincided with bursts of creativity. The great scholars and artists were sponsored by the rich which allowed them to create great buildings, great works of art and great ideas.
We've had nearly 20 years of unprecedented economic growth unparalleled in the world at this time. Is it not about time that our society started to push the boat out and come up with some ideas?
Steorn's idea might not work. But you have to admire their sheer self-confidence and affrontery to the norm. Here's an Irish company who are thumbing their noses at the established order.
Remember that no idea is ever wasted. Every idea begets another idea. No child has ever wasted their time playing with toys. It's how we learn and come up with new ideas.
We are very good in Ireland at importing ideas and even improving them. But we also have a very rich history of coming up new concepts.
Better a mad idea than no idea at all. Thank you, Steorn.
Steorn have developed a technology called Orbo which promises free energy. If Orbo works then everything we think we know about energy or matter is wrong. Orbo, as its name kind of implies, would turn everything upside down.
The technology is based on an array of magnets aligned in a circle and when the machine starts moving it never stops. It keeps on going without an further energy input.
You can imagine that if this was a credible claim the electrical industry would be upset. The car industry would be very interested. And the oil industry would stop drilling. That none of this has happened tells you that the balance of global opinion thinks that Orbo is not going to work.
And I've got to tell you that I don't think it's going to work either. The technology is pretty much a perpetual motion machine. Plenty of people have filed patent claims for perpetual motion machines over the last few centuries and all of them have been found wanting.
The reason is that perpetual motion machines violate the principle of the conservation of energy. This states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. As energy and matter are interchangeable it might be easier to point out that what this really means is that you cannot create something out of nothing.
The idea that you can't create something out of nothing has a sound intellectual and experimental basis. People who do believe this are really entering the domains of religion or magic.
So the response of the scientific community to Steorn's Orbo technology has been scathing and savage. Steorn itself didn't help the situation when a demonstration in London failed a couple of weeks back. The company says it will work next time, in a few weeks or months.
You have got to admire them for self-belief. I hope that this will change the Irish world. Throughout history times of plenty have coincided with bursts of creativity. The great scholars and artists were sponsored by the rich which allowed them to create great buildings, great works of art and great ideas.
We've had nearly 20 years of unprecedented economic growth unparalleled in the world at this time. Is it not about time that our society started to push the boat out and come up with some ideas?
Steorn's idea might not work. But you have to admire their sheer self-confidence and affrontery to the norm. Here's an Irish company who are thumbing their noses at the established order.
Remember that no idea is ever wasted. Every idea begets another idea. No child has ever wasted their time playing with toys. It's how we learn and come up with new ideas.
We are very good in Ireland at importing ideas and even improving them. But we also have a very rich history of coming up new concepts.
Better a mad idea than no idea at all. Thank you, Steorn.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Give buses an even break
Posh people don't take the bus. And utility workers don't dig up railway tracks.
That, pretty much, sums up the relative value of buses and trams.
That is why we spent e700 on the Luas and why we throw a few million here and there to create quality bus corridors. Does it make sense?
Many people have wondered, and I'm one of them, what's so great about having metal instead of rubber wheels. Can it really justify all the cash spent? The passenger numbers seem to say that it does.
According to the recent survey, when the passengers were asked what they liked about the Luas, they cited the reliability of the service, both in terms of the thing actually showing up and accurate journey times. Buses, you see, can't do that sort of thing.
Except that the QBCs prove that buses can work. When the Stillorgan QBC opened the number of passengers more than doubled and the experience has been similar with many of the other QBCs. However the performance has been slipping because the buses get slowed down in town or by road works or by normal congestion.
The Luas has never has to cope with this. The Luas routes are never blocked and the trams have exclusive road space. Most stretches of QBC end at traffic lights where cars can enter and block the bus lane.
When the tram system was being built the first thing that was done was to move all the utilities out from under the track. That, in itself, cost millions but it guarantees that the tracks will never have to be dug up.
Furthermore, the Luas had bridges built, underpasses dug and whole streets set aside for its exclusive use. When all that is considered it would be damn disappointing if the Luas had not proven popular.
The question to be asked is: why can't all this infrastructure be provided for the bus system? The Northside, for example, had been promised a Luas line that never materialised. While QBCs have been provided across the northside there has been no roadspace cleared like that of the Luas, there are no overpasses or underpasses and the road space allocated has been fought over inch by inch and is subject to the vagaries of road digging. Indeed, outrageously,x buses have been banned from the Dublin Port Tunnel which caused Northsiders so much grief over the years of its construction.
So why is this? Go back to the first line to find out.
I'm not opposed to the Luas. Indeed I'm all in favour of extending it throughout the city. But the fact remains that the great majority of passengers in Dublin are carried on buses and, given our urban sprawl, this is likely to remain the case.
Yet we have no plans what-so-ever to change the way that bus transport operates in Dublin. The QBCs should have given us a taste but the ambition for buses must get much greater. For example, isn't there a strong case for building a shallow north-south tunnel that would allow five to ten bus routes to cross the city in a number of minutes?
It would cost a few hundred million but if we are serious about extending quality public transport right around this city it the kind of bus infrastructure that is necessary. It worked for the Luas.
That, pretty much, sums up the relative value of buses and trams.
That is why we spent e700 on the Luas and why we throw a few million here and there to create quality bus corridors. Does it make sense?
Many people have wondered, and I'm one of them, what's so great about having metal instead of rubber wheels. Can it really justify all the cash spent? The passenger numbers seem to say that it does.
According to the recent survey, when the passengers were asked what they liked about the Luas, they cited the reliability of the service, both in terms of the thing actually showing up and accurate journey times. Buses, you see, can't do that sort of thing.
Except that the QBCs prove that buses can work. When the Stillorgan QBC opened the number of passengers more than doubled and the experience has been similar with many of the other QBCs. However the performance has been slipping because the buses get slowed down in town or by road works or by normal congestion.
The Luas has never has to cope with this. The Luas routes are never blocked and the trams have exclusive road space. Most stretches of QBC end at traffic lights where cars can enter and block the bus lane.
When the tram system was being built the first thing that was done was to move all the utilities out from under the track. That, in itself, cost millions but it guarantees that the tracks will never have to be dug up.
Furthermore, the Luas had bridges built, underpasses dug and whole streets set aside for its exclusive use. When all that is considered it would be damn disappointing if the Luas had not proven popular.
The question to be asked is: why can't all this infrastructure be provided for the bus system? The Northside, for example, had been promised a Luas line that never materialised. While QBCs have been provided across the northside there has been no roadspace cleared like that of the Luas, there are no overpasses or underpasses and the road space allocated has been fought over inch by inch and is subject to the vagaries of road digging. Indeed, outrageously,x buses have been banned from the Dublin Port Tunnel which caused Northsiders so much grief over the years of its construction.
So why is this? Go back to the first line to find out.
I'm not opposed to the Luas. Indeed I'm all in favour of extending it throughout the city. But the fact remains that the great majority of passengers in Dublin are carried on buses and, given our urban sprawl, this is likely to remain the case.
Yet we have no plans what-so-ever to change the way that bus transport operates in Dublin. The QBCs should have given us a taste but the ambition for buses must get much greater. For example, isn't there a strong case for building a shallow north-south tunnel that would allow five to ten bus routes to cross the city in a number of minutes?
It would cost a few hundred million but if we are serious about extending quality public transport right around this city it the kind of bus infrastructure that is necessary. It worked for the Luas.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Is there any point in the war on drugs?
There is never going to be any ideal outcome to any drugs policy. If you legalise drugs more people will have access to them. If you criminalise drugs you send it underground with all that involves.
I come from the legalisation side of the argument. But I'm open-minded. Were I to hear any sensible argument for making drugs illegal I would change my mind.
The huge drugs haul off the Cork coast must make the 'criminalisers' sit down and have a serious think. We have imprisoned hundred and thousands of people for drug trafficking. We are going to build more prisons. We have people killing each other on the streets. We have all sorts of draconian legislation to stop the trade.
I wonder if the people who advocate criminalisation have any realistic goal in mind. Do they actually believe that state power can stop the trade in drugs?
The policy has been a total failure. Both here and across the world. At any given point, of course, you could argue that the reason for failure is that the state hasn't allocated enough resources, hasn't been tough enough.
So let's say that here in Ireland we double the number of gardai to around 25,000. Let's say we double the number of prisoners to around 6,000. Let's say that we set aside habeas Corpus and we bring in internment. Let's say we do all that.
Does anyone believe, in their heart of hearts, that the trade in illegal drugs will stop? I know it won't but I wonder if, deep down, our politicians and senior gardai believe it.
I wonder too if the 'criminalisers' aren't psychopaths to some extent.
A psychopath is a person who has no insight into, or care for, the consequences of their actions. The people who advocate making drugs illegal are motivated, one hopes, by the desire to save people from the disaster of drug addiction. After that single humanitarian impulse all morality can, it seems, be set aside.
I'm talking about the increasing tendency of the 'criminalisers' to blame everyone else for the negative impact of drug trafficking.
Cocaine users are blamed for young people in this city killing each other and for the drugs gangs we have. But the fact is that is is entirely foreseeable that a ban on drugs would have these consequences.
The ban makes drugs more valuable. The more the ban is enforced, the more valuable the drug becomes. Criminalisation involves the transfer of enormous wealth to organised crime.
In underclass areas it also transfers power and influence to these people. It undermines civil society.
The ban destabilises the countries from where the drugs come. In Afghanistan and Colombia, primary sources for heroin and cocaine, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or turned into refugees in the wars for the drugs fields.
At home, whole generations from some communities are thrown into conflict with the state even as others die from drug addiction. They die anyway even though the whole point of the ban is to save them.
And yet, through all the human misery that they have created, the 'criminalisers' trudge grimly on, calling for more prisons, more detention time, more drugs tests, more powers for the police, more ships and boats, more controls on travel. More, more, more.
The point of all this is to stop the supply of illegal drugs. It has completely failed.
I come from the legalisation side of the argument. But I'm open-minded. Were I to hear any sensible argument for making drugs illegal I would change my mind.
The huge drugs haul off the Cork coast must make the 'criminalisers' sit down and have a serious think. We have imprisoned hundred and thousands of people for drug trafficking. We are going to build more prisons. We have people killing each other on the streets. We have all sorts of draconian legislation to stop the trade.
I wonder if the people who advocate criminalisation have any realistic goal in mind. Do they actually believe that state power can stop the trade in drugs?
The policy has been a total failure. Both here and across the world. At any given point, of course, you could argue that the reason for failure is that the state hasn't allocated enough resources, hasn't been tough enough.
So let's say that here in Ireland we double the number of gardai to around 25,000. Let's say we double the number of prisoners to around 6,000. Let's say that we set aside habeas Corpus and we bring in internment. Let's say we do all that.
Does anyone believe, in their heart of hearts, that the trade in illegal drugs will stop? I know it won't but I wonder if, deep down, our politicians and senior gardai believe it.
I wonder too if the 'criminalisers' aren't psychopaths to some extent.
A psychopath is a person who has no insight into, or care for, the consequences of their actions. The people who advocate making drugs illegal are motivated, one hopes, by the desire to save people from the disaster of drug addiction. After that single humanitarian impulse all morality can, it seems, be set aside.
I'm talking about the increasing tendency of the 'criminalisers' to blame everyone else for the negative impact of drug trafficking.
Cocaine users are blamed for young people in this city killing each other and for the drugs gangs we have. But the fact is that is is entirely foreseeable that a ban on drugs would have these consequences.
The ban makes drugs more valuable. The more the ban is enforced, the more valuable the drug becomes. Criminalisation involves the transfer of enormous wealth to organised crime.
In underclass areas it also transfers power and influence to these people. It undermines civil society.
The ban destabilises the countries from where the drugs come. In Afghanistan and Colombia, primary sources for heroin and cocaine, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or turned into refugees in the wars for the drugs fields.
At home, whole generations from some communities are thrown into conflict with the state even as others die from drug addiction. They die anyway even though the whole point of the ban is to save them.
And yet, through all the human misery that they have created, the 'criminalisers' trudge grimly on, calling for more prisons, more detention time, more drugs tests, more powers for the police, more ships and boats, more controls on travel. More, more, more.
The point of all this is to stop the supply of illegal drugs. It has completely failed.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
The mayor of where?
The Green Party has secured the idea of an elected mayor for Dublin before 2011 as part of the coalition with Fianna Fail. The idea is that we will have a strongman who will knock heads and get Dublin working as a unit.
It's a complete reversal of Green ideology which tends to favour consensus rather than strong men. The party itself didn't have a leader until 2001. But to be fair, the idea is to invigorate and empower local democracy. And so we will have, like New York and London, a directly elected mayor with executive powers.
The big problem is that there is no clue as to what the new mayor will be mayor of. The present mayor is elected by Dublin City Council and the problem is that Dublin City Council is nothing of the sort.
The present Dublin City Council covers around only half the population of County Dublin and leaves out huge swathes of the city itself such as Dún Laoghaire, Dundrum, Tallaght, Clondalkin, Lucan and Blanchardstown. If we are to have a Dublin City mayor, the whole city is going to have to be included or there is little point to the exercise.
This means serious local government reform in Dublin. The last major reorganisation in the city created the new counties of Fingal, South Dublin and Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown. Their existence has not set the world alight and they command little local loyalty or identity.
The Programme for Government says nothing about all this but we know that the Green Party favours more local councils to go with the new stronger mayor. However, the last reorganisation was a major task in terms of legislation and logistics. We can't wait for that, we can't afford it and it's not necessary.
The new mayor should cover the whole of County Dublin and should be accountable to a new Dublin Assembly. District councils should be set up across Dublin to serve local areas. The present four local authorities should remain as municipal entities to provide services at an economic cost to the new assembly and the district councils. The number of representatives to these bodies should be small, perhaps 10 for local councils and 20-30 for the Assembly. There might be a case for growing a Dublin Assembly to a Greater Dublin Assembly to include very near urban areas such as Bray and Leixlip.
The people of Dublin would then have workable local government that would serve them on a citywide and local basis.
Finally, there used to be a class of character you would meet on the barstools of Ireland back in the 1980s who would declare that the solution to Ireland's problems was a dictatorship. The dictator would use force to implement the policies the guy on the bar stool agreed with. It was simple and cosy.
Some Green TDs cited the bould 'Red Ken' in London as an example of what a progressive strong mayor could achieve. This is slightly daft as there's no knowing what make of politician the electorate might favour. George Bush, Vladimir Putin, Robert Mugabe and even Adolf Hitler were elected too, you know.
It's a complete reversal of Green ideology which tends to favour consensus rather than strong men. The party itself didn't have a leader until 2001. But to be fair, the idea is to invigorate and empower local democracy. And so we will have, like New York and London, a directly elected mayor with executive powers.
The big problem is that there is no clue as to what the new mayor will be mayor of. The present mayor is elected by Dublin City Council and the problem is that Dublin City Council is nothing of the sort.
The present Dublin City Council covers around only half the population of County Dublin and leaves out huge swathes of the city itself such as Dún Laoghaire, Dundrum, Tallaght, Clondalkin, Lucan and Blanchardstown. If we are to have a Dublin City mayor, the whole city is going to have to be included or there is little point to the exercise.
This means serious local government reform in Dublin. The last major reorganisation in the city created the new counties of Fingal, South Dublin and Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown. Their existence has not set the world alight and they command little local loyalty or identity.
The Programme for Government says nothing about all this but we know that the Green Party favours more local councils to go with the new stronger mayor. However, the last reorganisation was a major task in terms of legislation and logistics. We can't wait for that, we can't afford it and it's not necessary.
The new mayor should cover the whole of County Dublin and should be accountable to a new Dublin Assembly. District councils should be set up across Dublin to serve local areas. The present four local authorities should remain as municipal entities to provide services at an economic cost to the new assembly and the district councils. The number of representatives to these bodies should be small, perhaps 10 for local councils and 20-30 for the Assembly. There might be a case for growing a Dublin Assembly to a Greater Dublin Assembly to include very near urban areas such as Bray and Leixlip.
The people of Dublin would then have workable local government that would serve them on a citywide and local basis.
Finally, there used to be a class of character you would meet on the barstools of Ireland back in the 1980s who would declare that the solution to Ireland's problems was a dictatorship. The dictator would use force to implement the policies the guy on the bar stool agreed with. It was simple and cosy.
Some Green TDs cited the bould 'Red Ken' in London as an example of what a progressive strong mayor could achieve. This is slightly daft as there's no knowing what make of politician the electorate might favour. George Bush, Vladimir Putin, Robert Mugabe and even Adolf Hitler were elected too, you know.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Labour should be green with envy
I’m sick to the teeth of all those letters to the papers accusing the Greens of a sell-out. These people seem to prefer protest to power.
Here's an admission. I actually voted for the Greens and I'm glad they went into Government.
Over the next five years John Gormley (no relation of mine) and Eamonn Ryan will have the power to do a load of small things that can make a very considerable difference to the environment in Ireland.
For example, the Greens will be able to extend the Greener Homes scheme which allows people to put renewable energy solutions into their homes. This scheme has been a real winner because it encourages people to invest their own money into reducing their long-term bills and reducing pollution for everyone into the bargain.
John Gormley, the new Environment Minister, will be able to get to work on the minutiae. He will be able to consider, for example, whether wood pellet stoves are really the way we want to go. He can extend the grants, he can make them bigger, he can make up new ones.
The Labour Party, on the other hand, emerges from the election with their honour intact. For the next five years they can't be blamed for anything.
Take, for example, the RAPID programme. This programme has the power to completely change the life experiences for the people living in Ireland's poorest areas. It's a brilliant scheme which brings all the local agencies from the local authorities to the gardai to the politicians together to solve the problems of tens of thousands of men, women and children living on the very margins of our society.
But in the coalition of the PDs and Fianna Fail, the RAPID scheme has been woefully under-resourced. Is that a surprise? After all, as Michael McDowell said, it is the small party's tail that wags the big Fianna Fail dog. And the PDs don't really 'do' poor people.
But Labour does. That's what it says on the tin. Labour, over the last 10 years, could have had themselves in Government but they chose purity instead. And now Labour can't be blamed for the failings in the RAPID programme. Isn't that useful?
Fianna Fail have won the votes of Labour's natural constituency - the working classes and the lower middle classes. Fianna Fail delivered lower personal taxes, agreements with the unions and expanding employment. They were Fianna Fail successes - Labour delivered nothing.
What of Fianna Fail's failures? They didn't sort out the health service, solve the crime problems or provide affordable homes.
But you know what? Neither did Labour. Every Fianna Fail failure is Labour's failure too because for the last 10 years the Irish Labour Party has contributed absolutely nothing to Ireland. They did this because they apparently wanted to punish Fianna Fail. You could burst into tears right now with the sheer stupidity of it all.
Here's another admission. When I had done voting Green, I transferred my vote to Labour. I was sort of hoping that some sanity would prevail and that Labour would think more about getting its policies enacted rather than what the Irish Times letter writers would say.
That said, the party I voted for is in Government and I feel all the better for it.
Here's an admission. I actually voted for the Greens and I'm glad they went into Government.
Over the next five years John Gormley (no relation of mine) and Eamonn Ryan will have the power to do a load of small things that can make a very considerable difference to the environment in Ireland.
For example, the Greens will be able to extend the Greener Homes scheme which allows people to put renewable energy solutions into their homes. This scheme has been a real winner because it encourages people to invest their own money into reducing their long-term bills and reducing pollution for everyone into the bargain.
John Gormley, the new Environment Minister, will be able to get to work on the minutiae. He will be able to consider, for example, whether wood pellet stoves are really the way we want to go. He can extend the grants, he can make them bigger, he can make up new ones.
The Labour Party, on the other hand, emerges from the election with their honour intact. For the next five years they can't be blamed for anything.
Take, for example, the RAPID programme. This programme has the power to completely change the life experiences for the people living in Ireland's poorest areas. It's a brilliant scheme which brings all the local agencies from the local authorities to the gardai to the politicians together to solve the problems of tens of thousands of men, women and children living on the very margins of our society.
But in the coalition of the PDs and Fianna Fail, the RAPID scheme has been woefully under-resourced. Is that a surprise? After all, as Michael McDowell said, it is the small party's tail that wags the big Fianna Fail dog. And the PDs don't really 'do' poor people.
But Labour does. That's what it says on the tin. Labour, over the last 10 years, could have had themselves in Government but they chose purity instead. And now Labour can't be blamed for the failings in the RAPID programme. Isn't that useful?
Fianna Fail have won the votes of Labour's natural constituency - the working classes and the lower middle classes. Fianna Fail delivered lower personal taxes, agreements with the unions and expanding employment. They were Fianna Fail successes - Labour delivered nothing.
What of Fianna Fail's failures? They didn't sort out the health service, solve the crime problems or provide affordable homes.
But you know what? Neither did Labour. Every Fianna Fail failure is Labour's failure too because for the last 10 years the Irish Labour Party has contributed absolutely nothing to Ireland. They did this because they apparently wanted to punish Fianna Fail. You could burst into tears right now with the sheer stupidity of it all.
Here's another admission. When I had done voting Green, I transferred my vote to Labour. I was sort of hoping that some sanity would prevail and that Labour would think more about getting its policies enacted rather than what the Irish Times letter writers would say.
That said, the party I voted for is in Government and I feel all the better for it.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Getting into bed with Ikea
I'm dying to see the shuttle bus from the new IKEA to the centre of Ballymun. Will it have a roof rack for the flat packs? Will Ballymuners be able to bring the tables and lockers onto the bus?
The An Bord Pleanala decision to grant permission to IKEA in Ballymun runs to over 5,000 words and includes 30 conditions.
In my opinion, the arrival of IKEA is a victory for the market over common sense. Building a ring road around Dublin and then slapping up shopping malls around it was always going to lead to traffic chaos. And on every other section of the M50 that's exactly what you get.
The conditions attached to the planning permission for IKEA are a desperate attempt to stave off the dreaded gridlock. It can't open until 11am in the morning. It can't close until late at night. The upgrade of the M50 must be finished. The junction must be reconstructed in a myriad of different ways to stop cars queuing on the M50.
There's even a plan to ensure that customers won't bring their cars at all. The planners have insisted that IKEA have electronic shopping and home delivery in place. This is so the working classes will be able to arrive by bus and have their order delivered. The middle classes can leave their Dalkey tractors parked at home while they shop online.
Some chance!
There is now a widespread acceptance that this form of development is bad news. It leaves the population chronically dependent on cars, encourages urban sprawl and damages town centres. The Government knows this too and that's why they limited the size of superstores.
But IKEA was too attractive a proposition to resist. The authorities feared losing out on jobs to Newry, so the cap on the size of stores was lifted. And now it will be open season for the multinationals who can stack-em-up, sell-em-cheap and live on very small margins.
One thing that confuses me is the idea of the 500 new jobs that IKEA will create. Is it possible that the people of Dublin will be so motivated by IKEA to spend enough to employ an extra 500 people in the furniture trade? Is it not possible that some of these jobs will replace those in other furniture outlets that won't be able to take the heat?
The upside is that these jobs will be in the Ballymun area. I've no doubt that the local agencies already have plans to train up local people for these jobs. Local people working locally is a very sound environmental and social policy.
But every time someone employed from Ballymun gets a job in the new IKEA store increases the risks for the area in the event of something going wrong. Decision makers need to spread the risk across the Northside rather than confine it to a specific area.
I think An Bord Pleanala has made a bad decision. The planners don’t believe it will set a precedent and feel that if their conditions are met the outcome will be positive.
I note that the Green Party specifically objected to the IKEA plan – not to the store but to its scale. Now that they have influence in Government, it will be interesting to see how similar planning applications are dealt with in the future.
The An Bord Pleanala decision to grant permission to IKEA in Ballymun runs to over 5,000 words and includes 30 conditions.
In my opinion, the arrival of IKEA is a victory for the market over common sense. Building a ring road around Dublin and then slapping up shopping malls around it was always going to lead to traffic chaos. And on every other section of the M50 that's exactly what you get.
The conditions attached to the planning permission for IKEA are a desperate attempt to stave off the dreaded gridlock. It can't open until 11am in the morning. It can't close until late at night. The upgrade of the M50 must be finished. The junction must be reconstructed in a myriad of different ways to stop cars queuing on the M50.
There's even a plan to ensure that customers won't bring their cars at all. The planners have insisted that IKEA have electronic shopping and home delivery in place. This is so the working classes will be able to arrive by bus and have their order delivered. The middle classes can leave their Dalkey tractors parked at home while they shop online.
Some chance!
There is now a widespread acceptance that this form of development is bad news. It leaves the population chronically dependent on cars, encourages urban sprawl and damages town centres. The Government knows this too and that's why they limited the size of superstores.
But IKEA was too attractive a proposition to resist. The authorities feared losing out on jobs to Newry, so the cap on the size of stores was lifted. And now it will be open season for the multinationals who can stack-em-up, sell-em-cheap and live on very small margins.
One thing that confuses me is the idea of the 500 new jobs that IKEA will create. Is it possible that the people of Dublin will be so motivated by IKEA to spend enough to employ an extra 500 people in the furniture trade? Is it not possible that some of these jobs will replace those in other furniture outlets that won't be able to take the heat?
The upside is that these jobs will be in the Ballymun area. I've no doubt that the local agencies already have plans to train up local people for these jobs. Local people working locally is a very sound environmental and social policy.
But every time someone employed from Ballymun gets a job in the new IKEA store increases the risks for the area in the event of something going wrong. Decision makers need to spread the risk across the Northside rather than confine it to a specific area.
I think An Bord Pleanala has made a bad decision. The planners don’t believe it will set a precedent and feel that if their conditions are met the outcome will be positive.
I note that the Green Party specifically objected to the IKEA plan – not to the store but to its scale. Now that they have influence in Government, it will be interesting to see how similar planning applications are dealt with in the future.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
We're nicking their water!
It is the duty of this column to bring you news of impending rows. The big row that is now brewing is over the plan to take water from the Shannon system and to pump it to Dublin.
This mightn't seem like a big deal to you now but it's going to be right up there with the Tara and Corrib gas schmozzles. It's going to be a major headache for any future Fianna Fail/Green coalition because it presses all the wrong buttons. The lobsided development between east and west, the costs of headlong economic growth, the scarcity of resources, the need to charge for water...all long-term time bombs.
The problem is that Dublin needs water and there's no more to be had locally. Over the past twenty years our water masters have fought the good fight. Demand and supply of water in Dublin has been on a knife edge. The two major water plants at Ballymore Eustace and Leixlip have been expanded to their limit. A massive pipe replacement program has reduced leakage from 40% to 30%. Without water meters (and what a row that will be!) there is a practical limit to any more gains from fixing pipes.
To put some figures on it, at the moment (2005) Dublin's peak demand is 558 Megalitres per day. We can sustainably supply 509 megalitres per day. Do the maths and it comes out negative. We are adding splishes and sploshes from various sources to stave off disaster but basically we have a big problem.
The bottom line is that we need water and there are only two viable ways to get it. One is to suck it out of the Irish Sea. Despite the fact that we nearly destroy everything we eat with prodigious quantities of salt, not even the Irish can drink salt water. We would need to build a big desalination plant and distill the water. It would be an environmental nightmare and, given that water never stops falling here, would make Ireland the laughing stock of the world.
The other option is to take water from Ireland's biggest river system, the Shannon. This means running a pipe from Lough Ree to Dublin. It's a simple, viable, cost-effective solution.
But the damn natives are restless. Already environmental jihadists from Lanesborough at the top of the lake, to Athlone at the bottom and headquartered around Ballymahon in the middle have declared it their life's mission that the Dubs will not drink one drop of Shannon water.
The lake and the river are a major source of employment in the area and much of the plans for the future revolve around tourism. The fear is that the plan will lead to a significant drop in the levels of the lake in the summer. Dublin City Council denies this, citing a study showing that water levels won't be affected.
The locals don't believe it and I'm not sure I do either. It seems obvious that the biggest demand for water will occur just when river levels at at their lowest. And what will happen in 15 or twenty years time when Dublin outgrows this capacity?
Let the battle commence.
This mightn't seem like a big deal to you now but it's going to be right up there with the Tara and Corrib gas schmozzles. It's going to be a major headache for any future Fianna Fail/Green coalition because it presses all the wrong buttons. The lobsided development between east and west, the costs of headlong economic growth, the scarcity of resources, the need to charge for water...all long-term time bombs.
The problem is that Dublin needs water and there's no more to be had locally. Over the past twenty years our water masters have fought the good fight. Demand and supply of water in Dublin has been on a knife edge. The two major water plants at Ballymore Eustace and Leixlip have been expanded to their limit. A massive pipe replacement program has reduced leakage from 40% to 30%. Without water meters (and what a row that will be!) there is a practical limit to any more gains from fixing pipes.
To put some figures on it, at the moment (2005) Dublin's peak demand is 558 Megalitres per day. We can sustainably supply 509 megalitres per day. Do the maths and it comes out negative. We are adding splishes and sploshes from various sources to stave off disaster but basically we have a big problem.
The bottom line is that we need water and there are only two viable ways to get it. One is to suck it out of the Irish Sea. Despite the fact that we nearly destroy everything we eat with prodigious quantities of salt, not even the Irish can drink salt water. We would need to build a big desalination plant and distill the water. It would be an environmental nightmare and, given that water never stops falling here, would make Ireland the laughing stock of the world.
The other option is to take water from Ireland's biggest river system, the Shannon. This means running a pipe from Lough Ree to Dublin. It's a simple, viable, cost-effective solution.
But the damn natives are restless. Already environmental jihadists from Lanesborough at the top of the lake, to Athlone at the bottom and headquartered around Ballymahon in the middle have declared it their life's mission that the Dubs will not drink one drop of Shannon water.
The lake and the river are a major source of employment in the area and much of the plans for the future revolve around tourism. The fear is that the plan will lead to a significant drop in the levels of the lake in the summer. Dublin City Council denies this, citing a study showing that water levels won't be affected.
The locals don't believe it and I'm not sure I do either. It seems obvious that the biggest demand for water will occur just when river levels at at their lowest. And what will happen in 15 or twenty years time when Dublin outgrows this capacity?
Let the battle commence.
Dublin: The city of Ozymandians
I am not given to quoting poetry. Don't know much about it, really. But sometimes a great poet captures an observation and it can't be improved upon. This poem is 'Ozymandias' by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Have a read...
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Quite. I mention this because the latest census release now shows that the average Dublin City household comprises of exactly 2.5 people. This is down from 3.0 in 1990 and 4.0 in 1960.
So we're not living together as much as we did and for lots of reasons. We're getting divorced. We're rearing children in single-parent families. We have more widows and widowers. Our children are fewer and more mobile.
Also, we have been accumulating assets at a fiercesome rate. The Irish penchant for buying house has never abated.
One of the things that surprised me from the released of the stats is that fewer grown-up 'children' are living at home. The number of people in their 20s and 30s living at home in Ireland has fallen nearly 10 per cent between 2002 and 2006. This at a time when house price inflation was said to be confining children to their native homes forever.
We have been making money and we have been turning it into assets via cheap mortgages. For sure, many have been left behind but a huge number of us are empire building.
At the same time the traditional family is under pressure. It's going out of fashion. Fewer than one in five households in Dublin City are now made up of the traditional family of husband, wife and children. Cohabiting is on the increase but one just a third of them have children. Of the trad families with children, two kids is the most popular number.
So we have been getting ourselves rich over the past fifteen years. We been cutting deals and talking house prices over dinner. We have had less time for kids or each other.
The question is: what are we going to do with the goodies? What will become of these assets? We think we are so hard headed, building up our stash in bricks.
But the fact is that most of us will never sell these gaffs. We won't asset strip them and head off on the journey of a lifetime. We'll give them to the kids.
We'll build it all up and then we will return to the dust without ever seeing the cash. This is sort of reassuring - we're not doing it for the money after all.
Like Ozymandias our little empires will wither and dissapate with us. There are, however, two possible negative outcomes we should ponder. Firstly, the next generation might be spoiled by the free assets we will leave them. And secondly, we seem to be much better at building houses than households.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Quite. I mention this because the latest census release now shows that the average Dublin City household comprises of exactly 2.5 people. This is down from 3.0 in 1990 and 4.0 in 1960.
So we're not living together as much as we did and for lots of reasons. We're getting divorced. We're rearing children in single-parent families. We have more widows and widowers. Our children are fewer and more mobile.
Also, we have been accumulating assets at a fiercesome rate. The Irish penchant for buying house has never abated.
One of the things that surprised me from the released of the stats is that fewer grown-up 'children' are living at home. The number of people in their 20s and 30s living at home in Ireland has fallen nearly 10 per cent between 2002 and 2006. This at a time when house price inflation was said to be confining children to their native homes forever.
We have been making money and we have been turning it into assets via cheap mortgages. For sure, many have been left behind but a huge number of us are empire building.
At the same time the traditional family is under pressure. It's going out of fashion. Fewer than one in five households in Dublin City are now made up of the traditional family of husband, wife and children. Cohabiting is on the increase but one just a third of them have children. Of the trad families with children, two kids is the most popular number.
So we have been getting ourselves rich over the past fifteen years. We been cutting deals and talking house prices over dinner. We have had less time for kids or each other.
The question is: what are we going to do with the goodies? What will become of these assets? We think we are so hard headed, building up our stash in bricks.
But the fact is that most of us will never sell these gaffs. We won't asset strip them and head off on the journey of a lifetime. We'll give them to the kids.
We'll build it all up and then we will return to the dust without ever seeing the cash. This is sort of reassuring - we're not doing it for the money after all.
Like Ozymandias our little empires will wither and dissapate with us. There are, however, two possible negative outcomes we should ponder. Firstly, the next generation might be spoiled by the free assets we will leave them. And secondly, we seem to be much better at building houses than households.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Pre-nupts: hedging your bets
At the time of the divorce referendum, the death of marriage was predicted by those opposed to divorce. Even those in favour had to admit that the institution was wobbling, and that the introduction of divorce wouldn't help.
And right enough, many more marriages are ending in failure. The number of divorced couples nearly doubled between the censuses of 2002 and 2006. Many more have been separated and others are not getting married at all.
However, the development missed by all sides in the divorce wars has been the demand that marriage be extended to various other parts of the population. Getting married, if not staying married, is still very popular.
Marriage is a two-sided pact. The practical end is a legal contract which commits the contractees to all sorts of financial and property commitments. The other end is the ideal of a universal institution designed to elevate the idea of partnership and secure the rearing of children.
The two new claims for marriage come from the live-in couples and the gay community. They mainly want the legal end of things as many of both groups are left high and dry when a relationship ends or a partner dies. The answer to this has been civil partnerships and there is widespread support for this across society as a measure of justice.
So for some people we have had to address the risk of not getting married. And now, it seems, we have to address the risk for those who actually do want to get married.
Last month an expert legal group recommended to the Government that pre-nuptial agreements be recognised by the state.
Many on the traditional side of the house will feel that pre-nuptial agreements are another attack on the institution of marriage. They're probably right. We're getting to the stage where everyone will be able to design their own marriages.
That sounds fair enough but it is the end of marriage as a universally recognised institution. What is the point if everyone can make up their own?
At the moment pre-nupts have no legal status. And even if the Government make the recommended change, they still won't have legal force. It will simply allow the courts to use the pre-nupts as a guide when divvying up the spoils of marriage.
I think I'm with the conservatives on this one. A pre-nuptial agreement is just hedging your bets. It is avoiding commitment.
I have argued before that marriage of itself can't guarantee anything and we know this from the break-ups, violence, cheating, etc. But many people in our society do have a deep respect for marriage and believe that it can help to make relationships last. Those people want to enter into an institution that is respected and durable.
Pre-nuptial agreements make a joke of the whole thing. It is the outworking of our feckless and shallow consumer society where people want to know the price of everything without seeing the value of anything.
If a man and a woman want to enter into a legal contract to share their lives with an agreement on how to split the goodies when it all goes wrong...then that's grand.
But don't call it marriage.
And right enough, many more marriages are ending in failure. The number of divorced couples nearly doubled between the censuses of 2002 and 2006. Many more have been separated and others are not getting married at all.
However, the development missed by all sides in the divorce wars has been the demand that marriage be extended to various other parts of the population. Getting married, if not staying married, is still very popular.
Marriage is a two-sided pact. The practical end is a legal contract which commits the contractees to all sorts of financial and property commitments. The other end is the ideal of a universal institution designed to elevate the idea of partnership and secure the rearing of children.
The two new claims for marriage come from the live-in couples and the gay community. They mainly want the legal end of things as many of both groups are left high and dry when a relationship ends or a partner dies. The answer to this has been civil partnerships and there is widespread support for this across society as a measure of justice.
So for some people we have had to address the risk of not getting married. And now, it seems, we have to address the risk for those who actually do want to get married.
Last month an expert legal group recommended to the Government that pre-nuptial agreements be recognised by the state.
Many on the traditional side of the house will feel that pre-nuptial agreements are another attack on the institution of marriage. They're probably right. We're getting to the stage where everyone will be able to design their own marriages.
That sounds fair enough but it is the end of marriage as a universally recognised institution. What is the point if everyone can make up their own?
At the moment pre-nupts have no legal status. And even if the Government make the recommended change, they still won't have legal force. It will simply allow the courts to use the pre-nupts as a guide when divvying up the spoils of marriage.
I think I'm with the conservatives on this one. A pre-nuptial agreement is just hedging your bets. It is avoiding commitment.
I have argued before that marriage of itself can't guarantee anything and we know this from the break-ups, violence, cheating, etc. But many people in our society do have a deep respect for marriage and believe that it can help to make relationships last. Those people want to enter into an institution that is respected and durable.
Pre-nuptial agreements make a joke of the whole thing. It is the outworking of our feckless and shallow consumer society where people want to know the price of everything without seeing the value of anything.
If a man and a woman want to enter into a legal contract to share their lives with an agreement on how to split the goodies when it all goes wrong...then that's grand.
But don't call it marriage.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
By the time you read this there will be the usual whingeing in the media about our slow election count. But the fact is that we have the best electoral system in the world.
The count is not a trivial affair. Unlike other systems it explains how people voted, who they transferred to and most importantly, whatever their preference, their vote is never wasted unless they want it to be.
The political parties don't like it because it lets power slip from their grasp. In some other electoral systems voters are faced with just one candidate from each party. In others the parties draw up a list so that the voters don't directly choose their MPs. In Ireland each candidate is directly accountable to their constituents. They can always be replaced by those voters, even by someone else from the same party.
The calls to speed up the count should be paid no heed. Why speed up the count? So that the news machine can move on to other stories?
The slow feed of the count in Ireland does a huge service to the public as it helps explain the political system here in a way that draws out the soundbites.
The commentary from politicians is far more candid and revealing in the two day count after the election than in the four week campaign before it. They have nothing to gain from spinning the news.
That said I would be far happier about using gadgetry to speed up the count a wee bit than any relapse to electronic voting and the millions that was wasted on it.
In Scotland they have introduced our STV system for their local authority elections. Scandalised by the idea that their count might last more than a day they brought in counting machines and automatic readers. Then the fun started. They had to make a plea that voters refrain from folding their votes so that the counting staff wouldn't have to unfold them. Some voters took this to be an assault on the secrecy of the ballot in that they would have to walk around the polling station with an open ballot paper.
Then, of course, is the problem of handwriting which I've covered in this column before. No two people in the world writes their numbers in the same way. It like fingerprinting.
The machines were programmed to spit out any ballot which might be inconclusive. And so it did. So each one of these has to be checked by sight.
It all ended up that they might as well have had an entirely manual count.
And I note that the new govener of Florida has ordered that their infamous electronic punching machines be replaced by good old fashioned pen and paper. So hopefully the Irish election count will be with us for some years to come.
But the whole debate about the voting system misses out on the main democratic failing of our system and in really in the rest of the democratic. That is: we don't elect our government. We only elect a parliament.
Right now I'll bet that neither of the coalitions have a majority and the parties are jostling and jockying for position.
I think this is wrong. Cabinet seats should be apportioned according to the wishes of the people. That would be real democracy.
The count is not a trivial affair. Unlike other systems it explains how people voted, who they transferred to and most importantly, whatever their preference, their vote is never wasted unless they want it to be.
The political parties don't like it because it lets power slip from their grasp. In some other electoral systems voters are faced with just one candidate from each party. In others the parties draw up a list so that the voters don't directly choose their MPs. In Ireland each candidate is directly accountable to their constituents. They can always be replaced by those voters, even by someone else from the same party.
The calls to speed up the count should be paid no heed. Why speed up the count? So that the news machine can move on to other stories?
The slow feed of the count in Ireland does a huge service to the public as it helps explain the political system here in a way that draws out the soundbites.
The commentary from politicians is far more candid and revealing in the two day count after the election than in the four week campaign before it. They have nothing to gain from spinning the news.
That said I would be far happier about using gadgetry to speed up the count a wee bit than any relapse to electronic voting and the millions that was wasted on it.
In Scotland they have introduced our STV system for their local authority elections. Scandalised by the idea that their count might last more than a day they brought in counting machines and automatic readers. Then the fun started. They had to make a plea that voters refrain from folding their votes so that the counting staff wouldn't have to unfold them. Some voters took this to be an assault on the secrecy of the ballot in that they would have to walk around the polling station with an open ballot paper.
Then, of course, is the problem of handwriting which I've covered in this column before. No two people in the world writes their numbers in the same way. It like fingerprinting.
The machines were programmed to spit out any ballot which might be inconclusive. And so it did. So each one of these has to be checked by sight.
It all ended up that they might as well have had an entirely manual count.
And I note that the new govener of Florida has ordered that their infamous electronic punching machines be replaced by good old fashioned pen and paper. So hopefully the Irish election count will be with us for some years to come.
But the whole debate about the voting system misses out on the main democratic failing of our system and in really in the rest of the democratic. That is: we don't elect our government. We only elect a parliament.
Right now I'll bet that neither of the coalitions have a majority and the parties are jostling and jockying for position.
I think this is wrong. Cabinet seats should be apportioned according to the wishes of the people. That would be real democracy.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
I have nobody to vote for
I would like to vote for some who is opposed to the smoking ban. And opposed to random breath testing. And opposed to the ban on cannabis and other drugs.
I would like to vote for someone who shares my opposition to compulsory safety laws like the seatbelt law or the helmet law, and the precedents that these set.
I would like to vote for someone who opposes the wholesale extension of the power of the state that is going on all over the western world, whether it is on grounds of security, the so-called 'war-on-terror' or the tabloid inspired over-reaction to crime.
What I want is a philosophy where people are allowed to take their own risks. It's called freedom.
But there is no candidate standing in this election, anywhere in the state, who is prepared to fight the growth of state power.
Now you may say that the big issues are the state of the health service, education, pensions or the economy, stupid.
Well they are indeed big issues. But I don't honestly believe that either coalition alternative is not going to make a lot of difference on these issues.
Look at the situation that will exist over the five years of the next government. Ninety-five percent of the laws of 2007 will still be in place. A huge swathe of laws and policies are determined by the EU. Most of our economic and social policies are determined by the partnership talks.
And if all that weren't true, the ideological ground in dispute has narrowed to almost nothing. All over Europe the concept of right and left is almost redundant as political parties compete to occupy the middle ground.
There's a great website online called politicalcompass.org and the purpose of this site is to determine your position on the political compass. It not only measures right and left but also the range between authoritarianism and libertarianism.
You answer a series of questions and the site places you on the political compass. You can see how you compare to people like Stalin, Thatcher, Mandela or Hitler.
They even have a page showing the positions of the Irish political parties.
We know that the western world has settled, more or less, on the social market economy model to run society. So there's really not much to choose from in terms of ideology. If people were honest the battle is mainly about personalities and banalities. Spin, a la Blair, if you like.
Meanwhile, the political movement along the other great political axis, between liberty and state control, is all going in one direction. We are sleepwalking ourselves into a police state.
And none of our political parties has anything principled to say about this. Over the next twenty years the ability of the state to gather information about people and to process it will expand tremendously with computing power, especially with wireless computer chips.
The usual thicko response is: "if you're not doing anything wrong, you've nothing to fear." The word 'wrong' here means a refusal to comply with laws on your personal safety that you have never been asked about or that are imposed by a majority on a minority. I don't want to live in a society like that but our political parties don't mind.
I think I'll have to start my own party for the next election.
I would like to vote for someone who shares my opposition to compulsory safety laws like the seatbelt law or the helmet law, and the precedents that these set.
I would like to vote for someone who opposes the wholesale extension of the power of the state that is going on all over the western world, whether it is on grounds of security, the so-called 'war-on-terror' or the tabloid inspired over-reaction to crime.
What I want is a philosophy where people are allowed to take their own risks. It's called freedom.
But there is no candidate standing in this election, anywhere in the state, who is prepared to fight the growth of state power.
Now you may say that the big issues are the state of the health service, education, pensions or the economy, stupid.
Well they are indeed big issues. But I don't honestly believe that either coalition alternative is not going to make a lot of difference on these issues.
Look at the situation that will exist over the five years of the next government. Ninety-five percent of the laws of 2007 will still be in place. A huge swathe of laws and policies are determined by the EU. Most of our economic and social policies are determined by the partnership talks.
And if all that weren't true, the ideological ground in dispute has narrowed to almost nothing. All over Europe the concept of right and left is almost redundant as political parties compete to occupy the middle ground.
There's a great website online called politicalcompass.org and the purpose of this site is to determine your position on the political compass. It not only measures right and left but also the range between authoritarianism and libertarianism.
You answer a series of questions and the site places you on the political compass. You can see how you compare to people like Stalin, Thatcher, Mandela or Hitler.
They even have a page showing the positions of the Irish political parties.
We know that the western world has settled, more or less, on the social market economy model to run society. So there's really not much to choose from in terms of ideology. If people were honest the battle is mainly about personalities and banalities. Spin, a la Blair, if you like.
Meanwhile, the political movement along the other great political axis, between liberty and state control, is all going in one direction. We are sleepwalking ourselves into a police state.
And none of our political parties has anything principled to say about this. Over the next twenty years the ability of the state to gather information about people and to process it will expand tremendously with computing power, especially with wireless computer chips.
The usual thicko response is: "if you're not doing anything wrong, you've nothing to fear." The word 'wrong' here means a refusal to comply with laws on your personal safety that you have never been asked about or that are imposed by a majority on a minority. I don't want to live in a society like that but our political parties don't mind.
I think I'll have to start my own party for the next election.
Walking could be the new Luas
Why would you walk when you could take the car? For most of the last century the answer to that question was: you wouldn’t. It was a matter of logic.
We might, in our suffering, like to think that Dublin is unique in the gravity of its traffic problems. For sure, it’s worse than a lot of European cities in that we never cracked the public transport problem. And we’re mightily blighted by urban sprawl which makes designing public transport an economic nightmare.
But most cities, more or less, are in the same boat. A large part of their population is dependent on the car to get them to work or education.
And what is happening is that car speeds are getting slower every year because congestion is increasing. It’s now got to the point where walking is now competitive again.
But is there really scope for people to walk? And would it make any difference?
Well consider these numbers. Every working day in Dublin 33,000 journeys are made to school or college in a car over a distance of less than a mile. Can you believe it? And another 27,000 similar journeys are under two miles.
Going to work is pretty similar. 55,000 car trips to work are under two miles.
So walking, if it were a mass transit system, has the capability and market to shift a lot of bodies.
There has been a couple of developments in the last few years that might well make walking a mass transit system. This has been the evolution of fast walkways systems.
The first of these opened in Paris around three years ago in Montparnasse train station. This revolutionary system has the ability to move you along at 11kmph and if you were to walk on it at the same time you would be moving along at around 16kmph, quite a clip.
Of course, there’s a problem. In order to accelerate you up to speed the engineers used a system of rollers, each one moving slightly faster than the last. It works fine, as long as you have your feet on the ground. If you don’t, you’re likely to go ass over tit, as many poor unfortunates have. The result has been the need for staff to oversee people getting onto the walkway and the average speed has been reduced to 9kmph.
The new Pier F in Toronto has a similar system which moves along at 7kmph or 12kmph if you are walking. The system they have used is reputedly better at keeping you upright during acceleration than the Paris concept.
Nevertheless, even though these walkways extend only a couple of hundred meters, it shows that walking, as opposed to putting up massive expensive tram and train projects, can work.
Think, for example, if walkways had been used instead of the Luas. The average speed of the Luas is less than 20kmph and you’ve got to wait for it. If sections of walkway were built in 500m lengths, for example, it wouldn’t be long before a network could be built that would better replicate the journeys that people undertake.
Of course, it wouldn’t work in all situations and it would form a bit of a barrier in parts of the city but overpasses and underpasses should be easy to design as you’re only carrying people.
Remember, you read it here first. If technology can solve some of our problems then moving walkways have a future.
We might, in our suffering, like to think that Dublin is unique in the gravity of its traffic problems. For sure, it’s worse than a lot of European cities in that we never cracked the public transport problem. And we’re mightily blighted by urban sprawl which makes designing public transport an economic nightmare.
But most cities, more or less, are in the same boat. A large part of their population is dependent on the car to get them to work or education.
And what is happening is that car speeds are getting slower every year because congestion is increasing. It’s now got to the point where walking is now competitive again.
But is there really scope for people to walk? And would it make any difference?
Well consider these numbers. Every working day in Dublin 33,000 journeys are made to school or college in a car over a distance of less than a mile. Can you believe it? And another 27,000 similar journeys are under two miles.
Going to work is pretty similar. 55,000 car trips to work are under two miles.
So walking, if it were a mass transit system, has the capability and market to shift a lot of bodies.
There has been a couple of developments in the last few years that might well make walking a mass transit system. This has been the evolution of fast walkways systems.
The first of these opened in Paris around three years ago in Montparnasse train station. This revolutionary system has the ability to move you along at 11kmph and if you were to walk on it at the same time you would be moving along at around 16kmph, quite a clip.
Of course, there’s a problem. In order to accelerate you up to speed the engineers used a system of rollers, each one moving slightly faster than the last. It works fine, as long as you have your feet on the ground. If you don’t, you’re likely to go ass over tit, as many poor unfortunates have. The result has been the need for staff to oversee people getting onto the walkway and the average speed has been reduced to 9kmph.
The new Pier F in Toronto has a similar system which moves along at 7kmph or 12kmph if you are walking. The system they have used is reputedly better at keeping you upright during acceleration than the Paris concept.
Nevertheless, even though these walkways extend only a couple of hundred meters, it shows that walking, as opposed to putting up massive expensive tram and train projects, can work.
Think, for example, if walkways had been used instead of the Luas. The average speed of the Luas is less than 20kmph and you’ve got to wait for it. If sections of walkway were built in 500m lengths, for example, it wouldn’t be long before a network could be built that would better replicate the journeys that people undertake.
Of course, it wouldn’t work in all situations and it would form a bit of a barrier in parts of the city but overpasses and underpasses should be easy to design as you’re only carrying people.
Remember, you read it here first. If technology can solve some of our problems then moving walkways have a future.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
We need a new type of bus service
I admit that I do most of my travelling around Dublin in a car. The bus doesn't suit my trips. When you're sitting in Lucan behind a mile of cars the thing that strikes me the Dublin traffic disaster is the sheer waste of time of it all. Millions of human hours.
You can listen to the radio or make phone calls if you have the right equipment. However, as the road safety campaigners will tell you, making phone calls is distracting. It leads to poor quality driving and, conversly, poor quality calls.
This is one advantage that public transport could have over cars: you can work and travel at the same time. And yet in Dublin there is little chance to work in either bus or train.
When most workers are travelling to work you are lucky to get a seat, never mind sitting down and opening a laptop. So many of the people in this city who could be tempted to leave their cars at home at the prospect of working on their commute, continue to sit in their cars.
What is required is a different type of bus service that is geared to the working commuter. What I have in mind is this.
Let's say that Dublin Bus offer the new service. The fare structure is exactly double that of the ordinary fares. The bus runs the same routes as the normal services
The key would be single seating and a small drop-down tray to work on, like in an airplane. Instead of one aisle there would be two, upstairs and downstairs. Each seat would have a surface on which a laptop could be placed (or a notebook in the case of dinosaurs). About 30 people could be fitted on such a double decker bus.
On the bus would be a wifi service that would allow users to connect to the internet. The length of the commute wouldn't matter so much as people could get some work done, catch up with their emails or browse the web.
The advantage for this type of bus service is that is could actually make an impact on the all important goal of transport mode change. It would present the car user with the option of making better use of their time with the attraction of better personal space, which I think is a critical factor in keeping people in their cars.
In order to add to the reliability of the service, people could book a seat the previous night , in order to plan their day, to reassure them that a seat will be available and that they won't have to stampede.
It would be relatively easy to try this out as a pilot project. One of the leading busmakers in the world in terms of design and innovation, Wrightbus, is based up the road in Ballymena and the government has already lodged significant bus orders with them.
Might I suggest that they start with the 46A route. It crosses the city centre. It travels through a lot of territory (Foxrock and the like) where people work in offices. It's the busiest route on the system according to Dublin Bus, so it needs new buses anyway. It's famous being mentioned in that song. And, finally, I used to edit an august journal called '46A Magazine' so I have a soft sport for the route.
What more reasons could you need?
You can listen to the radio or make phone calls if you have the right equipment. However, as the road safety campaigners will tell you, making phone calls is distracting. It leads to poor quality driving and, conversly, poor quality calls.
This is one advantage that public transport could have over cars: you can work and travel at the same time. And yet in Dublin there is little chance to work in either bus or train.
When most workers are travelling to work you are lucky to get a seat, never mind sitting down and opening a laptop. So many of the people in this city who could be tempted to leave their cars at home at the prospect of working on their commute, continue to sit in their cars.
What is required is a different type of bus service that is geared to the working commuter. What I have in mind is this.
Let's say that Dublin Bus offer the new service. The fare structure is exactly double that of the ordinary fares. The bus runs the same routes as the normal services
The key would be single seating and a small drop-down tray to work on, like in an airplane. Instead of one aisle there would be two, upstairs and downstairs. Each seat would have a surface on which a laptop could be placed (or a notebook in the case of dinosaurs). About 30 people could be fitted on such a double decker bus.
On the bus would be a wifi service that would allow users to connect to the internet. The length of the commute wouldn't matter so much as people could get some work done, catch up with their emails or browse the web.
The advantage for this type of bus service is that is could actually make an impact on the all important goal of transport mode change. It would present the car user with the option of making better use of their time with the attraction of better personal space, which I think is a critical factor in keeping people in their cars.
In order to add to the reliability of the service, people could book a seat the previous night , in order to plan their day, to reassure them that a seat will be available and that they won't have to stampede.
It would be relatively easy to try this out as a pilot project. One of the leading busmakers in the world in terms of design and innovation, Wrightbus, is based up the road in Ballymena and the government has already lodged significant bus orders with them.
Might I suggest that they start with the 46A route. It crosses the city centre. It travels through a lot of territory (Foxrock and the like) where people work in offices. It's the busiest route on the system according to Dublin Bus, so it needs new buses anyway. It's famous being mentioned in that song. And, finally, I used to edit an august journal called '46A Magazine' so I have a soft sport for the route.
What more reasons could you need?
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
I’m glad I’m in debt
Here’s an admission. I’m in debt. Up to my (insert whistle here). We’re talking a six figure sum.
Now the questions is: is this good or bad?
The answer is: you don’t know because you are missing two vital pieces of information. One, can I make the monthly repayments? And two, does my assets exceed my liabilities?
Just for the record the answer to these two questions is yes, so the bailiff’s arrival is not imminent.
I mention all this because Fianna Fail have just announced the most dimwitted policy ever to be put in front of the Irish people. They have said that if they are elected back into government that they will eliminate public debt. (And, might I say, it is thoroughly dishonest).
Let’s think about how stupid this is. Imagine if all the people in Dublin waited until they had saved up enough money before they bought a house. Where would they live? How would they mind their children? How would they accumulate assets that people need to secure their future?
Imagine a young lad who is offered a job out of his area. Should he forego the opportunity just because he wants to avoid a car loan? Even if the job will pay for the car? It’s a total nonsense.
Now let’s look at the national picture. If Fianna Fail have their way our children will have to sit in overcrowded classrooms, our sick will have to sit in overcrowded A&E rooms, our housing estates will remain bleak wastelands. All because we don’t want to borrow money. Money that will pay for itself over time. This is utterly daft.
Our broadband infrastructure is amongst the worst in Europe. We could borrow a couple of billion euro and put a fibre optic cable into every house in Ireland. It would benefit every home, child and business and pay back for itself a hundred times. But we won’t do it because we don’t want to borrow money. A completely crazy policy.
And there are hundreds of other examples. Providing facilities for drug users is a no-brainer in terms of crime reduction. But we don’t have the money.
And the dishonest thing about this is that Fianna Fail are clever enough to know that avoiding investment will eventually ruin Ireland. They plan to have the investment all right, but they plan that it will come from their friends in the private sector.
So huge swathes of Irish infrastructure is being handed over to the private sector in PPP arrangements.
An example of this is the motorways. Private companies are being asked to finance and build these new roads. So the cost doesn’t appear on the national accounts. Nice trick. But every year Irish people pay millions of euro on tolls to compensate for this ‘debt-free’ situation. It’s a smoke-and-mirrors job.
The vast majority of people go into debt because it makes perfect sense to do so. The critical thing is to borrow sensibly so that the loan can be maintained and will pay for itself in the end.
That’s common sense. The only sense that Fianna Fail is talking is nonsense.
Now the questions is: is this good or bad?
The answer is: you don’t know because you are missing two vital pieces of information. One, can I make the monthly repayments? And two, does my assets exceed my liabilities?
Just for the record the answer to these two questions is yes, so the bailiff’s arrival is not imminent.
I mention all this because Fianna Fail have just announced the most dimwitted policy ever to be put in front of the Irish people. They have said that if they are elected back into government that they will eliminate public debt. (And, might I say, it is thoroughly dishonest).
Let’s think about how stupid this is. Imagine if all the people in Dublin waited until they had saved up enough money before they bought a house. Where would they live? How would they mind their children? How would they accumulate assets that people need to secure their future?
Imagine a young lad who is offered a job out of his area. Should he forego the opportunity just because he wants to avoid a car loan? Even if the job will pay for the car? It’s a total nonsense.
Now let’s look at the national picture. If Fianna Fail have their way our children will have to sit in overcrowded classrooms, our sick will have to sit in overcrowded A&E rooms, our housing estates will remain bleak wastelands. All because we don’t want to borrow money. Money that will pay for itself over time. This is utterly daft.
Our broadband infrastructure is amongst the worst in Europe. We could borrow a couple of billion euro and put a fibre optic cable into every house in Ireland. It would benefit every home, child and business and pay back for itself a hundred times. But we won’t do it because we don’t want to borrow money. A completely crazy policy.
And there are hundreds of other examples. Providing facilities for drug users is a no-brainer in terms of crime reduction. But we don’t have the money.
And the dishonest thing about this is that Fianna Fail are clever enough to know that avoiding investment will eventually ruin Ireland. They plan to have the investment all right, but they plan that it will come from their friends in the private sector.
So huge swathes of Irish infrastructure is being handed over to the private sector in PPP arrangements.
An example of this is the motorways. Private companies are being asked to finance and build these new roads. So the cost doesn’t appear on the national accounts. Nice trick. But every year Irish people pay millions of euro on tolls to compensate for this ‘debt-free’ situation. It’s a smoke-and-mirrors job.
The vast majority of people go into debt because it makes perfect sense to do so. The critical thing is to borrow sensibly so that the loan can be maintained and will pay for itself in the end.
That’s common sense. The only sense that Fianna Fail is talking is nonsense.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Fancy landing in a bog?
The decision on the second runway at Dublin Airport is now imminent, probably next month. My money is on the runway getting approval but you never know.
The Portmarnock group UPROAR have fought a long battle against this runway. One of the good things about their campaign is that they suggested an alternative.
The alternative seems at first a bit barmy, but on closer inspection has a lot of merit to it. What they propose is that a new airport be built in the boglands of north Kildare or eastOffaly.
Mad, isn't it?
Well not on closer inspection. The bogland in question in north Kildare is just 25 miles from O'Connell Bridge or just a fifteen minute drive on the motorway from Lucan. It would probably be as convenient for most southsiders as Dublin Airport.
One of the problems with Dublin Airport is that it is not just an airport for Dublin. It is the airport for all of Leinster and a large chunk of Ireland beyond Leinster. It is a huge draw for traffic into Dublin much of it with no interest in being in Dublin at at all.
An airport in north Kildare would serve the whole midlands on popular routes such as London while Dublin Airport could continue to serve the city of Dublin and the lesser used routes.
The site is also very well connected being midway between the M4 and the M7, two of the busiest roads in Ireland; and also very close to the railway commuter lines into Dublin. Finally, the proposed outer motorway ring from Drogheda toNaas would be very close to the site.
That's all very well, I hear you say, but what about the money?
Consider this. As UPROAR have pointed out, building land in Dublin will set you back millions per acre. If the land now being allocated to the second runway was allocated to housing it would be worth billions. That's a fact.
The land in question in North Kildare is worth whatever turf it has still on it and it is already in state ownership. So, basically, it's free.
The second runway is a done deal, in my humble opinion, but Casement Aerodrome at Baldonnel is awaiting a big plan. If the military were to be located to a new airport in North Kildare, Baldonnel would also be worth billions and would be potentially of far more use to the city of Dublin than being set aside for an airport.
It's not just the runways, car parks and terminals that use up land - huge swathes of land under the flight paths cannot be used once an airport is built.
The land in North Kildare is also not virgin bogland. It has been industrially mined for turf so that the environmental consequences would be small. I'm not a civil engineer but I'm sure the task of building on former bogland would not be insurmountable.
Even if the new runway at Dublin Airport gets the go ahead, there is a strong case for a second major airport in North Kildare. Given the strains at the current airport with passenger numbers crossing 20 million a year, the time to start thinking about a new airport is now.
The Portmarnock group UPROAR have fought a long battle against this runway. One of the good things about their campaign is that they suggested an alternative.
The alternative seems at first a bit barmy, but on closer inspection has a lot of merit to it. What they propose is that a new airport be built in the boglands of north Kildare or eastOffaly.
Mad, isn't it?
Well not on closer inspection. The bogland in question in north Kildare is just 25 miles from O'Connell Bridge or just a fifteen minute drive on the motorway from Lucan. It would probably be as convenient for most southsiders as Dublin Airport.
One of the problems with Dublin Airport is that it is not just an airport for Dublin. It is the airport for all of Leinster and a large chunk of Ireland beyond Leinster. It is a huge draw for traffic into Dublin much of it with no interest in being in Dublin at at all.
An airport in north Kildare would serve the whole midlands on popular routes such as London while Dublin Airport could continue to serve the city of Dublin and the lesser used routes.
The site is also very well connected being midway between the M4 and the M7, two of the busiest roads in Ireland; and also very close to the railway commuter lines into Dublin. Finally, the proposed outer motorway ring from Drogheda toNaas would be very close to the site.
That's all very well, I hear you say, but what about the money?
Consider this. As UPROAR have pointed out, building land in Dublin will set you back millions per acre. If the land now being allocated to the second runway was allocated to housing it would be worth billions. That's a fact.
The land in question in North Kildare is worth whatever turf it has still on it and it is already in state ownership. So, basically, it's free.
The second runway is a done deal, in my humble opinion, but Casement Aerodrome at Baldonnel is awaiting a big plan. If the military were to be located to a new airport in North Kildare, Baldonnel would also be worth billions and would be potentially of far more use to the city of Dublin than being set aside for an airport.
It's not just the runways, car parks and terminals that use up land - huge swathes of land under the flight paths cannot be used once an airport is built.
The land in North Kildare is also not virgin bogland. It has been industrially mined for turf so that the environmental consequences would be small. I'm not a civil engineer but I'm sure the task of building on former bogland would not be insurmountable.
Even if the new runway at Dublin Airport gets the go ahead, there is a strong case for a second major airport in North Kildare. Given the strains at the current airport with passenger numbers crossing 20 million a year, the time to start thinking about a new airport is now.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Straight Talking enters the Blogosphere
Here's the plan. From this week onwards Straight Talking will live a dual existence.
It will appear in print as usual but it will also appear as a blog on the web at the address niallgormley.blogspot.com.
For those of you who don't know a 'blog' is short for a Web Log, a sort of an online diary that allows people to express their views as they wish. But it also allows readers to make comments and observations and thus earns the status of 'interactive' media.
Some say that this method of publication is the future and some of the old media owners are indeed rattled by it. The reason for this is that it operates 24 hours a day and can respond in real time unlike daily or weekly papers. Some people, indeed, see this type of interactive media as the death knell for newsprint.
Well, maybe. Down the line.
What we are going to do is to try and combine the two. My column, for example, has never been about reportage. I don't break news and I couldn't even if I wanted to.
The column has always been about ideas and ideas don't have deadlines. Ideas get worked through by debate and reaction. In some cases the same ideas resurface again with new slants and takes.
The blog will allow this to happen. And when it does, we intend to publish the emerging ideas back into the paper where those ideas can be exposed to the audience of the old media.
Online views many be more plentiful but only in a handful of cases is the readership more than a few hundred. We have three newspapers here at the Dublin Media Group with a combined distribution of 158,000 copies a week. My column appears in all three (except when we run out of space), so the readership potential is pretty big.
There's an opportunity here that doesn't exist with other online blogs and discussion boards. What I intend to do is to run a short recap of my column each week accompanied by the best contributions from the blog, edited by myself for space. And we'll see how it goes.
I do have an online presence at the moment at niallgormley.com. I haven't been good at keeping it up to date and the last column I put up on it is from November 2005. This demonstrates a flaw that all websites have - the tendency to go out of date.
The way around this, and the way for all users of the web to overcome this, is to actually do the work online. The reason my website is out of date is because I do my writing for the newspaper and I upload it later. Then the uploading never gets done!
In future I will be writing the column online and it will be worked on there in order to make it fit for publication both online and in print. When this happens I will truly have made the transition to the cyberworld. My first column online is 22 October 1999 and I think I must have been pretty much the first Irish journalist to have my own website. It's taken seven years to get to the next step. I've been dawdling on the superhighway.
Talk to you over at the blog. (niallgormley.blogspot.com)
It will appear in print as usual but it will also appear as a blog on the web at the address niallgormley.blogspot.com.
For those of you who don't know a 'blog' is short for a Web Log, a sort of an online diary that allows people to express their views as they wish. But it also allows readers to make comments and observations and thus earns the status of 'interactive' media.
Some say that this method of publication is the future and some of the old media owners are indeed rattled by it. The reason for this is that it operates 24 hours a day and can respond in real time unlike daily or weekly papers. Some people, indeed, see this type of interactive media as the death knell for newsprint.
Well, maybe. Down the line.
What we are going to do is to try and combine the two. My column, for example, has never been about reportage. I don't break news and I couldn't even if I wanted to.
The column has always been about ideas and ideas don't have deadlines. Ideas get worked through by debate and reaction. In some cases the same ideas resurface again with new slants and takes.
The blog will allow this to happen. And when it does, we intend to publish the emerging ideas back into the paper where those ideas can be exposed to the audience of the old media.
Online views many be more plentiful but only in a handful of cases is the readership more than a few hundred. We have three newspapers here at the Dublin Media Group with a combined distribution of 158,000 copies a week. My column appears in all three (except when we run out of space), so the readership potential is pretty big.
There's an opportunity here that doesn't exist with other online blogs and discussion boards. What I intend to do is to run a short recap of my column each week accompanied by the best contributions from the blog, edited by myself for space. And we'll see how it goes.
I do have an online presence at the moment at niallgormley.com. I haven't been good at keeping it up to date and the last column I put up on it is from November 2005. This demonstrates a flaw that all websites have - the tendency to go out of date.
The way around this, and the way for all users of the web to overcome this, is to actually do the work online. The reason my website is out of date is because I do my writing for the newspaper and I upload it later. Then the uploading never gets done!
In future I will be writing the column online and it will be worked on there in order to make it fit for publication both online and in print. When this happens I will truly have made the transition to the cyberworld. My first column online is 22 October 1999 and I think I must have been pretty much the first Irish journalist to have my own website. It's taken seven years to get to the next step. I've been dawdling on the superhighway.
Talk to you over at the blog. (niallgormley.blogspot.com)
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Demonising kids is doomed to failure
I have complete sympathy for any shop, business or private house plagued by gangs of unruly young people.
It is a total stressfest to be confronted with a bunch of teenagers transformed from their usual self-absorption to a hungry pack intent on entertaining themselves with their own bravado at the expense of the hapless local or passer-by.
So the arrival of the new 'Mosquito' device will no doubt tempt a lot of people who suffer these gangs. In case you haven't heard about it, the Mosquito is a device that emits a high pitched noise that can only be heard by people under the age of 25 or so. After around ten or fifteen minutes the noise becomes so annoying that the young people move away.
It’s a brilliant technical triumph. It also represents complete social failure.
It means we are now treating young people as a form of vermin to be hunted away.
But away where? Where are these kids going to go?
The reason that kids gather around shops is because they have nowhere else to go in order to hang out. After being at school all day, a venue provided by the state, there is nowhere they can gather for free. The only places open are restaurants and pubs. Practically all leisure centres have entry charges of some sort.
So although the local parade of shops can solve their own problems by installing the Mosquito device, the community is still left with the problem of bored youngsters with nothing to do. Hunting them away from the lit up areas might well backfire.
We have been down this road before. In the 1970s and 1980s many shops and businesses put up shutters in order to protect themselves from anti-social behaviour. Commercial areas became like war zones as the downward spiral encouraged graffiti and vandalism, and drove people away.
So when local authorities, residents groups and business associations sat down to improve their areas they realised that the shutters would have to go. The lesson was, and is, that you can’t run away from problems and that if you allow the environment to be created by anti-social behaviour, then everyone suffers.
I don’t want to sound pious about this, but the only long-term solution to teenage nuisance is to engage with them. Treating them as outcasts is only going to further alienate them.
I’ve no doubt that the solution to some of the nastier gangs has to a law and order response. Rather in the way that some people who are interested in photography or jam making, say, will find each other out – delinquents can be similarly sociable. You can end up with a gang whose common interest is in creating as much misery as they can. But even in this case, they are unlikely to be reformed by high pitched beeping sounds.
And in most cases what we have are boisterous local kids who are growing up and being loud and annoying about it. Which is pretty much like we all were.
I run some young hurling teams from the ages of around ten to sixteen. Yes, the kids would drive you to distraction sometimes. But mostly they respond positively when provided with stimulation (in this case pucking a sliotar about) combined with respect and some discipline. Generally, they are great kids well worth while engaging with.
It annoys me that these children would be targeted by universal crowd control devices such as the Mosquito. But, more than that, the whole philosophy is all wrong and is a sticking plaster for the failure of our communities to operate as communities.
We need to know our local neighbours and their kids so that we can have leverage with them. So that we can have expectations of them and responsibly for them.
If we don’t, a little beeping device isn’t going to cure the problem.
It is a total stressfest to be confronted with a bunch of teenagers transformed from their usual self-absorption to a hungry pack intent on entertaining themselves with their own bravado at the expense of the hapless local or passer-by.
So the arrival of the new 'Mosquito' device will no doubt tempt a lot of people who suffer these gangs. In case you haven't heard about it, the Mosquito is a device that emits a high pitched noise that can only be heard by people under the age of 25 or so. After around ten or fifteen minutes the noise becomes so annoying that the young people move away.
It’s a brilliant technical triumph. It also represents complete social failure.
It means we are now treating young people as a form of vermin to be hunted away.
But away where? Where are these kids going to go?
The reason that kids gather around shops is because they have nowhere else to go in order to hang out. After being at school all day, a venue provided by the state, there is nowhere they can gather for free. The only places open are restaurants and pubs. Practically all leisure centres have entry charges of some sort.
So although the local parade of shops can solve their own problems by installing the Mosquito device, the community is still left with the problem of bored youngsters with nothing to do. Hunting them away from the lit up areas might well backfire.
We have been down this road before. In the 1970s and 1980s many shops and businesses put up shutters in order to protect themselves from anti-social behaviour. Commercial areas became like war zones as the downward spiral encouraged graffiti and vandalism, and drove people away.
So when local authorities, residents groups and business associations sat down to improve their areas they realised that the shutters would have to go. The lesson was, and is, that you can’t run away from problems and that if you allow the environment to be created by anti-social behaviour, then everyone suffers.
I don’t want to sound pious about this, but the only long-term solution to teenage nuisance is to engage with them. Treating them as outcasts is only going to further alienate them.
I’ve no doubt that the solution to some of the nastier gangs has to a law and order response. Rather in the way that some people who are interested in photography or jam making, say, will find each other out – delinquents can be similarly sociable. You can end up with a gang whose common interest is in creating as much misery as they can. But even in this case, they are unlikely to be reformed by high pitched beeping sounds.
And in most cases what we have are boisterous local kids who are growing up and being loud and annoying about it. Which is pretty much like we all were.
I run some young hurling teams from the ages of around ten to sixteen. Yes, the kids would drive you to distraction sometimes. But mostly they respond positively when provided with stimulation (in this case pucking a sliotar about) combined with respect and some discipline. Generally, they are great kids well worth while engaging with.
It annoys me that these children would be targeted by universal crowd control devices such as the Mosquito. But, more than that, the whole philosophy is all wrong and is a sticking plaster for the failure of our communities to operate as communities.
We need to know our local neighbours and their kids so that we can have leverage with them. So that we can have expectations of them and responsibly for them.
If we don’t, a little beeping device isn’t going to cure the problem.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Still no need to go nuclear
The nuclear debate is hotting up again. The ICTU has thrown its weight in saying that the debate should be opened up - meaning that nuclear power should be considered.
Dublin has been living with nuclear power for many years. The Wylfa reactor on the island of Anglesey is a mere 70 miles from O'Connell Street. That's as near as Newry, Cavan, Athlone or Wexford. The planned 1970's nuclear station in Carnsore Point was further away. So it's close. But still out of mind.
I don't have any hang-ups about nuclear power. If it solves our problems then lets use it. However, my opposition to nuclear is based on just that basis - it won't solve our problems and it's unnecessary.
I have three main problems with nuclear power.
Firstly, if our new nuclear power station was the last one to be built, we'd be laughing. It would sort us out into the future. However, the problem is that uranium is in the same basic position as oil - it's running out.
At the moment nuclear power provides around 6 per cent of world electricity. Clearly, to make a dent in future energy demand the number of nuclear reactors would have to increase by at least fivefold. At the present use there is just decades left of commercial uranium supply. You do the maths.
The nuclear industry says that we will get better at finding uranium as it becomes more valuable. That's a polite way of saying 'become more desperate'. Can we build a future on these terms?
Secondly, what are we going to do with the waste? All of the waste produced since nuclear power started in the 1950s is being stored in temporary facilities. The long-term solution is to bury the waste in deep underground depositories.
How many of these are there in the world? None. Not one.
When they are built they will have to be minded and protected for at least the next 10,000 years. I am at a total loss as to how the real cost of nuclear power can be calculated given this long-term commitment.
Thirdly, pretty much anybody who can generate nuclear power can make nuclear weapons. If you don't believe this ask yourself why the Americans don't want Iran to have nuclear power. Why are they closing the North Korean reactor?
I probably don't sound that objective about nuclear power. But I'm a realist. At present we are mortgaging our future for a carbon economy. Nuclear would be a better alternative than that. That's true.
But that doesn't have to be. North Wales also holds the alternative as well. Just 40 miles down the road from Wylfa is Dinorwig Power Station which is one of the largest pumped storage power stations in the world. It can supply 1700MW, bigger than any power station in Ireland. What Dinorwig does is store electricity by pumping water from a lower reservoir to an upper one and then releasing the water to generate electricity when it is needed.
If we had just two or three of these stations (we have one already at Turlough Hill) we could power our electricity system entirely by wind on land and off-shore, with practically no emissions, no waste and no danger. And then there's biofuels, wave power, solar power, conservation, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Those who say there is no better alternative to nuclear power are simply wrong.
Dublin has been living with nuclear power for many years. The Wylfa reactor on the island of Anglesey is a mere 70 miles from O'Connell Street. That's as near as Newry, Cavan, Athlone or Wexford. The planned 1970's nuclear station in Carnsore Point was further away. So it's close. But still out of mind.
I don't have any hang-ups about nuclear power. If it solves our problems then lets use it. However, my opposition to nuclear is based on just that basis - it won't solve our problems and it's unnecessary.
I have three main problems with nuclear power.
Firstly, if our new nuclear power station was the last one to be built, we'd be laughing. It would sort us out into the future. However, the problem is that uranium is in the same basic position as oil - it's running out.
At the moment nuclear power provides around 6 per cent of world electricity. Clearly, to make a dent in future energy demand the number of nuclear reactors would have to increase by at least fivefold. At the present use there is just decades left of commercial uranium supply. You do the maths.
The nuclear industry says that we will get better at finding uranium as it becomes more valuable. That's a polite way of saying 'become more desperate'. Can we build a future on these terms?
Secondly, what are we going to do with the waste? All of the waste produced since nuclear power started in the 1950s is being stored in temporary facilities. The long-term solution is to bury the waste in deep underground depositories.
How many of these are there in the world? None. Not one.
When they are built they will have to be minded and protected for at least the next 10,000 years. I am at a total loss as to how the real cost of nuclear power can be calculated given this long-term commitment.
Thirdly, pretty much anybody who can generate nuclear power can make nuclear weapons. If you don't believe this ask yourself why the Americans don't want Iran to have nuclear power. Why are they closing the North Korean reactor?
I probably don't sound that objective about nuclear power. But I'm a realist. At present we are mortgaging our future for a carbon economy. Nuclear would be a better alternative than that. That's true.
But that doesn't have to be. North Wales also holds the alternative as well. Just 40 miles down the road from Wylfa is Dinorwig Power Station which is one of the largest pumped storage power stations in the world. It can supply 1700MW, bigger than any power station in Ireland. What Dinorwig does is store electricity by pumping water from a lower reservoir to an upper one and then releasing the water to generate electricity when it is needed.
If we had just two or three of these stations (we have one already at Turlough Hill) we could power our electricity system entirely by wind on land and off-shore, with practically no emissions, no waste and no danger. And then there's biofuels, wave power, solar power, conservation, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Those who say there is no better alternative to nuclear power are simply wrong.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)