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.

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.

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.