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.

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.

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.

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.