The times they are a changing, the recessionary days are rapidly returning. Is it not appropriate that our language also evolves to reflect the changing circumstances? We need to cut our linguistic cloth according to our measure and now is the time for more austere language. We need to get back to basics.
During the boom we used boom language. Language that we imported from America to adequately describe the serious and urgent manner in which we were going about the accumulation of money and ahem..... stuff. The time has come to send all that packing and reassert our national dialect which is more in keeping with these straitened economic times.
When you‘re a go getter you “call” people on your phone. This is something that you do “right now” because naturally there is no time to lose. You also have the option to “touch base” with someone to give them the “heads up”. How about we all calm down and decide instead that you will “give him a ring there later on” or “give him a buzz and tell him the crack”. Anyhow you can’t “touch base” with someone who’s down to their last tenner, it just doesn’t fit. No, in such a scenario it is more fitting to “give him a shout”. More leisurely I think, not as clinical or aggressive. In fact let’s put back the lovely expression “at the minute” where it belongs. Let’s not be stuck in traffic “right now”, let’s be stuck in traffic “at the minute”. To a lot of people the term “bejaysus” belongs in the past when Irish people were generally perceived to be uncouth and uneducated, but I can see a role for it in today’s climate. Instead of saying “right now we are seeing a significant decline in retail activity” we should say “bejaysus we’re seeing a significant decline in retail activity”. I think you will agree that this is a much more effective way of conveying the gravity of the situation and the associated despair you are experiencing as a result.
In the boom words such as “approximately” or “roughly” were replaced by the catch all expression “in the ballpark”. We only had a vague handle on the origin and actual meaning of these three words but this did not stop us trotting them out at every opportunity. A provisional price from a contractor for home improvement work was “in the ballpark”, a bit of parallel parking that could have been better but was not strictly speaking illegal was “in the ballpark”, an exorbitant price for some three piece faux leather abomination was, somehow, “in the ballpark”. Well we should now make these three words the hardest ones to say and replace them with the much more Irish “close enough”. “Am I all right with the kerb there? Close enough”. “Is that within your budget? Close enough” “Will my arse fit into these trousers? Close enough”. It is much more suggestive of that relaxed, casual approach that we Irish became famous for in the days before the invention of sectional sofas and kitchen islands.
We are facing a dire set of circumstances and those in the know seem to think that there is no end in sight. We need a word which conveys the despair and helplessness we all feel. The good news is we already have one, “Ochon” should be resurrected and reintroduced into everyday usage. “Ochon, ochon my Range Rover has been repossessed”. “Ochon, ochon my apartment in Croatia has been foreclosed on”. Our native tongue could prove to be very useful in these circumstances in providing words which hark back to our tragic past. “A few years ago I was a high flier but sure now I’m no more than a spailpin”
Blight is a word with tragic historical connotations for Irish people, the time is now right to dust it down and bring it back “we are faced with the blight of ghost estates the length and breadth of the country”. The term “coffin ship” conjures vile associations which go back to an era in our history of unprecedented poverty, death and despair. Many would contend that the current impasse has the potential to be comparable and that we should give consideration to renaming the “ghost estate” the “coffin estate” because, let’s face it, you’ll probably be dead before they finish yours.
The “zombie hotel” is a close relative of the “coffin estate“. Unfortunately it’s not the name of an obscure Doors album from the early seventies or a themed weekend getaway wherein you participate in the solving of a fictional murder, but a real country wide phenomenon where lavish hotels are lying idle. How could they be used, having, as they do, state of the art facilities and all manner of hedonistic delights?
How about redeploying them as Correctional Facilities for white collar criminals? I’m sure the coming months and years will see the unearthing of all sorts and scales of financial irregularities, corruption and deception which took place during the boom. We are going to need somewhere to house all the offenders and cannot contemplate clogging up the real prisons with such reprobates. Since all the money is gone there is very little chance of these people re offending so a minimum security facility would suffice for their rehabilitation. Employment could be created by retrofitting the inmates with electronic tagging devices and constructing electric perimeter fencing. We could euphemistically refer to these compounds as “tribunals”, the inaugural facility being “The Fitzpatrick Tribunal”.
What used to be an iced frappacinno and a wholemeal bap with prosciutto, mozzarella, water cress and guacamole has quickly become a can of fanta, a yorkie and a bag of Hula Hoops. From knocking on the door of Nashville to a residency in The Cush Inn Kildangan, we are the fiscal equivalent of Ray Lynam.
Ochon, Ochon.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Television - Shrug Of The Nation
I’d call it tripe but when cleaned up and prepared in the correct way, tripe is very appetising and fulfilling, no matter what you do with this it is still an unpalatable abomination.
The term reality TV is quite promising insofar as it suggests a footing in and a reflection of the world in which we all live. It becomes apparent pretty quickly though that we are dealing with the reality of some other species, a parallel reality perhaps.
Is there another civilisation that I don’t know about living on this planet, one we never see or encounter, who don’t share anything with us apart from one thing - they watch TV. They don’t participate in our world in any other way, but they all have cable subscriptions - this is it, this has got to be the target market.
Because nobody I know or know of, is of the opinion that watching a show in which busty blond Samantha who once went out with a fella who went to school with John Terry “wins” by virtue of being able to eat more dung beetles than a chap who once had a walk on part in Byker Grove is first rate entertainment.
It in fact provides a new basis for refusing to pay the TV licence - “but you don’t produce any programs for my species”. I’d like to see a Circuit Court judge’s reaction to that defence if you were to really dig your heels in and trust the judiciary to arrive at the only morally acceptable outcome. “I find in favour of the defendant based entirely on his wholly plausible contention that your product is aimed at other life forms”
Producing shows such as Failte Towers and Living with Lucy is considered by the powers that be in RTE to be preferable to putting money into the nurturing of real talent or worthwhile drama and documentary programmes. When I first heard the term Reality TV, I in my naiveté assumed that it was in fact a new, most likely American, way of describing a documentary. RTE don’t have funding issues they have misappropriation issues.
I’m sure I’m not alone in being able to remember a time when Channel Four was good, their flagship show now is called Celebrity Big Brother. My Sky package gives me half a dozen American evangelical channels but not BBC Three or Four, two channels whereon you would harbour some faint hope of coming across something connected to planet earth. It took a forty minute phone call one day to reconfigure my setup and squeeze them in between Living +12 and Men & Motors.
You, like myself, probably have a lot of little jobs around the house that you keep meaning to take care of but never quite do. The niggly things that started out small but have evolved into gargantuan, epic tasks and grow by the second. I’m talking about the pollyfilla for the hole in the kid’s bedroom wall, the new handle for the kitchen cabinet, hanging the timber shelves that have been propped in a corner unopened since last Easter.
Well let me share a motivational technique I discovered recently that will help you to reclaim your realm from the demons of procrastination. 1.Throw a few logs on the fire, get a cup of tea, sit down, make yourself comfortable and grab the TV remote. 2. Try to find something that a reasonable, rational, sane person would find enlightening or entertaining. 3.Nothing on the first circuit? Try again. Repeat three times.
Now turn off the TV, sit back for a moment and ponder this. Which is the more enticing - climbing into the attic to lag the water pipes or sitting through an hour of Fat Teenagers Can’t Hunt? Exactly.
Now I’m prepared to admit that this could be my fault; that somehow I’m not tuned into the zeitgeist or am even participating in the same consciousness as everybody else. I after all live a fairly sheltered existence in rural Ireland and know only trivial things, for example that milk comes from cows or that Sacramento is the capital of California.
And in all likelihood it’s knowledge like that which is putting me at a disadvantage. Could it be that I know too much to enjoy reality TV or that on the other hand I don’t know enough about the right things ? I think I’m safe in saying that everybody I know is aware that milk comes from cows also and none of them enjoy reality TV either.
All this time me and my ilk have been in pursuit of the wrong kind of knowledge, in our misguided quest for useful and worthwhile pieces of information we have firewalled ourselves from the primal glee to be derived from watching someone very few people have heard of scream racist abuse at someone even fewer people have heard of on live television.
There are I’m sure large swathes of the population that are similarly out of the loop when it comes to this issue. It is in fact a splendid idea for a reality TV show - “Skinny Culchies Don’t Know Reality TV”. Bear with me. We could be assigned a series of tasks in which we are required to re enact legendary scenes from seminal reality shows or reproduce famous lines of dialogue uttered by participants, and the public could vote off those of us who do it unsatisfactorily or unconvincingly.
There could be a three person judging panel who would provide insightful tips and constructive criticism as the weeks progressed. Bill Cullen, Grainne Seoige and Bertie Ahern. Because there’s nobody knows show business like Bertie knows show business. The good cop bad cop routine. Bill could provide the hard nosed put downs while Bertie could as always be everybody’s friend with Grainne entrusted with the casting (e) vote when the situation, or the viewing figures required it. Bertie, having spent the last decade as the lead in a never ending pantomime should have a particular aptitude for such a setting.
I’m a Homo Sapien, Get me out of Here.
The term reality TV is quite promising insofar as it suggests a footing in and a reflection of the world in which we all live. It becomes apparent pretty quickly though that we are dealing with the reality of some other species, a parallel reality perhaps.
Is there another civilisation that I don’t know about living on this planet, one we never see or encounter, who don’t share anything with us apart from one thing - they watch TV. They don’t participate in our world in any other way, but they all have cable subscriptions - this is it, this has got to be the target market.
Because nobody I know or know of, is of the opinion that watching a show in which busty blond Samantha who once went out with a fella who went to school with John Terry “wins” by virtue of being able to eat more dung beetles than a chap who once had a walk on part in Byker Grove is first rate entertainment.
It in fact provides a new basis for refusing to pay the TV licence - “but you don’t produce any programs for my species”. I’d like to see a Circuit Court judge’s reaction to that defence if you were to really dig your heels in and trust the judiciary to arrive at the only morally acceptable outcome. “I find in favour of the defendant based entirely on his wholly plausible contention that your product is aimed at other life forms”
Producing shows such as Failte Towers and Living with Lucy is considered by the powers that be in RTE to be preferable to putting money into the nurturing of real talent or worthwhile drama and documentary programmes. When I first heard the term Reality TV, I in my naiveté assumed that it was in fact a new, most likely American, way of describing a documentary. RTE don’t have funding issues they have misappropriation issues.
I’m sure I’m not alone in being able to remember a time when Channel Four was good, their flagship show now is called Celebrity Big Brother. My Sky package gives me half a dozen American evangelical channels but not BBC Three or Four, two channels whereon you would harbour some faint hope of coming across something connected to planet earth. It took a forty minute phone call one day to reconfigure my setup and squeeze them in between Living +12 and Men & Motors.
You, like myself, probably have a lot of little jobs around the house that you keep meaning to take care of but never quite do. The niggly things that started out small but have evolved into gargantuan, epic tasks and grow by the second. I’m talking about the pollyfilla for the hole in the kid’s bedroom wall, the new handle for the kitchen cabinet, hanging the timber shelves that have been propped in a corner unopened since last Easter.
Well let me share a motivational technique I discovered recently that will help you to reclaim your realm from the demons of procrastination. 1.Throw a few logs on the fire, get a cup of tea, sit down, make yourself comfortable and grab the TV remote. 2. Try to find something that a reasonable, rational, sane person would find enlightening or entertaining. 3.Nothing on the first circuit? Try again. Repeat three times.
Now turn off the TV, sit back for a moment and ponder this. Which is the more enticing - climbing into the attic to lag the water pipes or sitting through an hour of Fat Teenagers Can’t Hunt? Exactly.
Now I’m prepared to admit that this could be my fault; that somehow I’m not tuned into the zeitgeist or am even participating in the same consciousness as everybody else. I after all live a fairly sheltered existence in rural Ireland and know only trivial things, for example that milk comes from cows or that Sacramento is the capital of California.
And in all likelihood it’s knowledge like that which is putting me at a disadvantage. Could it be that I know too much to enjoy reality TV or that on the other hand I don’t know enough about the right things ? I think I’m safe in saying that everybody I know is aware that milk comes from cows also and none of them enjoy reality TV either.
All this time me and my ilk have been in pursuit of the wrong kind of knowledge, in our misguided quest for useful and worthwhile pieces of information we have firewalled ourselves from the primal glee to be derived from watching someone very few people have heard of scream racist abuse at someone even fewer people have heard of on live television.
There are I’m sure large swathes of the population that are similarly out of the loop when it comes to this issue. It is in fact a splendid idea for a reality TV show - “Skinny Culchies Don’t Know Reality TV”. Bear with me. We could be assigned a series of tasks in which we are required to re enact legendary scenes from seminal reality shows or reproduce famous lines of dialogue uttered by participants, and the public could vote off those of us who do it unsatisfactorily or unconvincingly.
There could be a three person judging panel who would provide insightful tips and constructive criticism as the weeks progressed. Bill Cullen, Grainne Seoige and Bertie Ahern. Because there’s nobody knows show business like Bertie knows show business. The good cop bad cop routine. Bill could provide the hard nosed put downs while Bertie could as always be everybody’s friend with Grainne entrusted with the casting (e) vote when the situation, or the viewing figures required it. Bertie, having spent the last decade as the lead in a never ending pantomime should have a particular aptitude for such a setting.
I’m a Homo Sapien, Get me out of Here.
No Punditry For Old Men
There is a very British trait emerging in the realm of our sports journalism. Lampoon and harangue everything and everyone. Our sportspeople should be venerated not chastised. Save your scorn for incompetent politicians and crooked financiers. Leave Robbie Keane alone. He, amongst others, has never failed in his passion or commitment, has manifestly given his all every time he pulls on the jersey yet attracts the bile of hacks who in their wisdom detect something lacking in the character of the man. And what’s worse is it transmits to the sheep on the terraces who start to boo instead of getting behind the team. Another British import, are we as a nation incapable of having a collective original thought. If they do it in America or Britain it’s good enough for us. Booooo, aren’t we great lads? Sophisticated fans, well versed in the nuances of the game. We know dross when we see it.
At the end of Staunton’s reign apparently it was all about the results. He was seen as a man incapable of getting us results. Trapattoni was appointed to get us results. Which is exactly what he is doing. Only now it’s about the results AND Andy Reid. Who knew the landscape could shift so flippantly? You see Trap is perplexed by this; anywhere he has ever worked his techniques were lauded as long as he was accumulating the points. He was accorded the respect that his stature and track record merited. He has been blindsided by the sophistication of Anto and Deco who, apparently, all of sudden, demand results and champagne football. Champagne football into Blue Nun players won’t go.
Who are these guys to second guess Giovanni Trapattoni? A man who has achieved as much as he has still has to suffer being second guessed in press conferences by two bit hacks in a language he does not understand. Humiliating. He will handle Andy Reid and Stephen Ireland how he sees fit for the overall good of the team and the ultimate aim of procuring results. These hacks believe it displays considerable insight and tactical savvy to know enough to be even second guessing him in the first place. That’s why they do it. “I know enough to know that we don’t have enough creativity in midfield”. Great, good man yourself. Do you think Trap has not considered this? Do you think you are capable of insight that has eluded a man who has won everything he has attempted? Get behind the team and give it a rest.
How much of the blame for this can be laid at the door of the sheep cheerleader Eamon Dunphy is hard to work out. Eamon has been one of our leading pundits for a generation now. Eamon touted the claims of Paul Jewell for the Irish job. That, more than any of the countless shockers he has been guilty of over the years, encapsulates the extent of Eamon’s insight.
He has achieved something remarkable, he has ascended to the top of a field about which he knows four, maybe five fundamental things. These tenets are trotted out at every opportunity in a “passionate” manner which replaces the need for any real insight or indeed, research. The sweeping statements on European nights bear this out. “Spain has had to import ALL its top level defenders, which is strange for a country the size of Spain” The Argentinean Robert Ayala was identified as the proof of this thesis. And nobody else, because Eamon did not know of anybody else who fit the profile. Yet there is something about the delivery which means that there are people who will take away this erroneous tripe as gospel. “Italian football is in the toilet". This is knowledge that Eamon has garnered from his regular trips to Milan, Rome and Turin to experience first hand the deterioration he refers to. One can only presume he has people on the ground in Italy as well who provide him with the detailed feedback one would require to arrive at such a conclusion.
Yet we still defer to Eamon because we have somehow come to believe that saying something defamatory about some one or giving an airing to your latest churlish prejudice is edgy punditry. We laugh at the BBC with their boring shirts and their well informed, well researched, balanced, judicious assessments and think how lucky we are to have Eamon to verbally dismantle forty goal a season Ronaldo every week. Podge and Rodge is not comedy, Eamon Dunphy is not a pundit – he’s the bearded lady. Putting Dunphy beside Souness on European nights in the hope that he can goad the Scotsman into a row is cynical, childish and manipulative on the part of RTE.
All of this could of course be justified if it was indeed any good, if it provided any entertainment. Alas all it provides is the same tired spectacle, another depressing example of the Irish obsession with playing to the gallery.
If I knew four things about Economics would this entitle me to hold down a position as Chief Economics Correspondent for RTE for twenty years? You would have thought that fairly soon the game would be up. Well the game was up for Eamon some time ago but the Barnum and Bailey factor so beloved of RTE producers has kept him where he is. Himself and his doppelganger George Hook.
George Lee is capable of telling us more than that the Financial Regulator lacks moral courage or is devoid of a cutting edge going forward. We insist upon genuine insight and expertise in the area of politics and finance but are perfectly prepared to waive those requirements when it comes to sport, an area we are all supposedly obsessed with.
Time to empty the bench.
At the end of Staunton’s reign apparently it was all about the results. He was seen as a man incapable of getting us results. Trapattoni was appointed to get us results. Which is exactly what he is doing. Only now it’s about the results AND Andy Reid. Who knew the landscape could shift so flippantly? You see Trap is perplexed by this; anywhere he has ever worked his techniques were lauded as long as he was accumulating the points. He was accorded the respect that his stature and track record merited. He has been blindsided by the sophistication of Anto and Deco who, apparently, all of sudden, demand results and champagne football. Champagne football into Blue Nun players won’t go.
Who are these guys to second guess Giovanni Trapattoni? A man who has achieved as much as he has still has to suffer being second guessed in press conferences by two bit hacks in a language he does not understand. Humiliating. He will handle Andy Reid and Stephen Ireland how he sees fit for the overall good of the team and the ultimate aim of procuring results. These hacks believe it displays considerable insight and tactical savvy to know enough to be even second guessing him in the first place. That’s why they do it. “I know enough to know that we don’t have enough creativity in midfield”. Great, good man yourself. Do you think Trap has not considered this? Do you think you are capable of insight that has eluded a man who has won everything he has attempted? Get behind the team and give it a rest.
How much of the blame for this can be laid at the door of the sheep cheerleader Eamon Dunphy is hard to work out. Eamon has been one of our leading pundits for a generation now. Eamon touted the claims of Paul Jewell for the Irish job. That, more than any of the countless shockers he has been guilty of over the years, encapsulates the extent of Eamon’s insight.
He has achieved something remarkable, he has ascended to the top of a field about which he knows four, maybe five fundamental things. These tenets are trotted out at every opportunity in a “passionate” manner which replaces the need for any real insight or indeed, research. The sweeping statements on European nights bear this out. “Spain has had to import ALL its top level defenders, which is strange for a country the size of Spain” The Argentinean Robert Ayala was identified as the proof of this thesis. And nobody else, because Eamon did not know of anybody else who fit the profile. Yet there is something about the delivery which means that there are people who will take away this erroneous tripe as gospel. “Italian football is in the toilet". This is knowledge that Eamon has garnered from his regular trips to Milan, Rome and Turin to experience first hand the deterioration he refers to. One can only presume he has people on the ground in Italy as well who provide him with the detailed feedback one would require to arrive at such a conclusion.
Yet we still defer to Eamon because we have somehow come to believe that saying something defamatory about some one or giving an airing to your latest churlish prejudice is edgy punditry. We laugh at the BBC with their boring shirts and their well informed, well researched, balanced, judicious assessments and think how lucky we are to have Eamon to verbally dismantle forty goal a season Ronaldo every week. Podge and Rodge is not comedy, Eamon Dunphy is not a pundit – he’s the bearded lady. Putting Dunphy beside Souness on European nights in the hope that he can goad the Scotsman into a row is cynical, childish and manipulative on the part of RTE.
All of this could of course be justified if it was indeed any good, if it provided any entertainment. Alas all it provides is the same tired spectacle, another depressing example of the Irish obsession with playing to the gallery.
If I knew four things about Economics would this entitle me to hold down a position as Chief Economics Correspondent for RTE for twenty years? You would have thought that fairly soon the game would be up. Well the game was up for Eamon some time ago but the Barnum and Bailey factor so beloved of RTE producers has kept him where he is. Himself and his doppelganger George Hook.
George Lee is capable of telling us more than that the Financial Regulator lacks moral courage or is devoid of a cutting edge going forward. We insist upon genuine insight and expertise in the area of politics and finance but are perfectly prepared to waive those requirements when it comes to sport, an area we are all supposedly obsessed with.
Time to empty the bench.
Ask Not What Your Country Can Do......
We’re definitely in a pickle and we are going to need boat loads of innovative thinking to get us out. We look to our leaders for guidance, positivity and some inkling that a plan is afoot which will begin to make a dent in the problem. Alas there is very little forthcoming, thus far at any rate.
Now there’s lateral thinking which we all believe will be employed by the Obama administration and there is quadrilateral thinking which is what we’ve been getting here i.e. nothing is in parallel to anything else, too many angles are represented with the sum total amounting to 360 degrees to get us right back to where we started from.
So as far as I can see it’s up to ourselves. And not being constrained or shackled by party politics or chief whips we are free to devise a new strategy. Right now the country craves ideas, here’s a few.
Now in the wake of the excess of the Celtic Tiger we all need to rediscover our humility and reignite our spiritual lives. Religion is no longer so nineteen eighties. To this end a lot of people will choose to make the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick in Mayo this summer. It’s a great and unique tradition. This year we need to make it compulsory. And I don’t mean just for everyone living here, I’m talking about the diaspora. There are fifty million Irish passport holders all over the world. I want every last one of them at the foot of Croagh Patrick in July ready to bleed for the cause. Grand so far but you’re thinking how is it going to spin a few quid? Sponsorship. If each of the fifty million can generate a paltry €50 in sponsorship that equates to €2.5 billion just like that. Deduct expenses such as printing sponsorship cards etc. and we can still walk away with serious money. Now factor in the impact of fifty million zealots descending en masse on the local economy. By my calculations the VAT from the sale of rosary beads alone would pay ministerial transport costs for a week.
Why not, instead of going about things in the time honoured, unpopular and sneaky way like raising taxes and implementing cutbacks, the government just came clean and appealed to the compassion in all of us? I am itching for a chance to take one for the team and I’m sure you’re the same.
There are approximately one million smokers in the country, consuming an average of twenty a day. A pack of twenty cigarettes is now about €8.00. How about all of these people abstain for just one week and donate the savings to the exchequer. By my reckoning that’s about €56 000 000.00. Now when you deduct the taxes that would have gone into the coffers if those people had just continued smoking you are still looking at a profit of around €25 000 000.00. Now take it one step further and distribute sponsorship cards to those participating in the smokeout and the sky’s the limit. An improvement in public health is a beneficial side effect of this plan.
How about getting every male in the country over the age of eighteen to start growing a beard? Sponsorship could be procured from a range of sources and for every week of growth a contribution would be due. Beards would only to be shaved off when national debt falls to 5% of GNP or the growth rate rises for two consecutive quarters or Britain elects a black prime minister, whichever happens first. The people are thus incentivised; we feel we have a hand in our own destiny. No one would want to have to wear an uncomfortable, unsightly beard for any longer than was absolutely necessary and would therefore work ceaselessly to get to a point where it can legitimately be shaved off. Economists would devise colourful graphs plotting national beard growth alongside GDP growth, they would appear on Prime Time to spot and analyse trends. Good for €1 billion I reckon.
We all know that Lidl is cheap but some of us mystifyingly continue to shop elsewhere. Well let’s force everyone to shop exclusively at Lidl for a month and pass on the savings to Brian Lenihan. The timing of such an initiative could not be better as we desperately need ways to re build goodwill in Europe and this would surely illicit a few brownie points from Queen Angela of Bavaria. The earnings here are not easy to calculate in that you will have lost VAT on sales and some redundancies at the other stores but over a month you are surely looking at €50 000 000.00, not to mention getting the Chancellor back on side. You can’t put a price on that.
After last week there are a lot of super skilled technology types in Limerick on the lookout for an opportunity. Well here it is. We have a warehouse full of electronic voting machines which, the consensus is, will never be used. I think it would be well within the compass of someone who used to build micro chips to get into the guts of these things, rework a bit of software here, a bit of circuitry there, solder on the appropriate pipe work and before you know it you have a kidney dialysis machine. The benefits here are obvious and threefold - people are kept off the live register, we avoid any more storage costs for the bloody things and the HSE gets a fleet of badly needed hardware for next to nothing as the initial capital expense has long since been swallowed up by some departmental budget or other. I’m going to err on the low side here and suggest possible savings of €30 000 000.00.
These plans don’t need Oireachtas sub committees or public accounts committees or any involvement whatsoever from on high. We don’t need to produce green or white or any other kinds of papers. Nothing needs to be painstakingly translated into Irish. There is no need to siphon any precious time from the good people at the Department of Trade, Enterprise & Employment.
I’ve done all the legwork. These babies are good to go. I can take care of everything, soup to nuts, with a reasonable deduction off the top for “administrative” expenses. I will of course need reliable transport to ensure that everything goes off without a hitch. That 08 Mercedes E350 that the Taoiseach can’t even bring himself to look at never mind ride around in would suffice, I suppose.
Now feel free to put the wheels in motion yourself. You would buy a ticket for a dinner dance, the proceeds of which were going to send someone seriously ill to Lourdes, wouldn’t you? Well our country is terminal so get off your ass and let’s put together the biggest benefit night we’ve ever seen.
Now there’s lateral thinking which we all believe will be employed by the Obama administration and there is quadrilateral thinking which is what we’ve been getting here i.e. nothing is in parallel to anything else, too many angles are represented with the sum total amounting to 360 degrees to get us right back to where we started from.
So as far as I can see it’s up to ourselves. And not being constrained or shackled by party politics or chief whips we are free to devise a new strategy. Right now the country craves ideas, here’s a few.
Now in the wake of the excess of the Celtic Tiger we all need to rediscover our humility and reignite our spiritual lives. Religion is no longer so nineteen eighties. To this end a lot of people will choose to make the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick in Mayo this summer. It’s a great and unique tradition. This year we need to make it compulsory. And I don’t mean just for everyone living here, I’m talking about the diaspora. There are fifty million Irish passport holders all over the world. I want every last one of them at the foot of Croagh Patrick in July ready to bleed for the cause. Grand so far but you’re thinking how is it going to spin a few quid? Sponsorship. If each of the fifty million can generate a paltry €50 in sponsorship that equates to €2.5 billion just like that. Deduct expenses such as printing sponsorship cards etc. and we can still walk away with serious money. Now factor in the impact of fifty million zealots descending en masse on the local economy. By my calculations the VAT from the sale of rosary beads alone would pay ministerial transport costs for a week.
Why not, instead of going about things in the time honoured, unpopular and sneaky way like raising taxes and implementing cutbacks, the government just came clean and appealed to the compassion in all of us? I am itching for a chance to take one for the team and I’m sure you’re the same.
There are approximately one million smokers in the country, consuming an average of twenty a day. A pack of twenty cigarettes is now about €8.00. How about all of these people abstain for just one week and donate the savings to the exchequer. By my reckoning that’s about €56 000 000.00. Now when you deduct the taxes that would have gone into the coffers if those people had just continued smoking you are still looking at a profit of around €25 000 000.00. Now take it one step further and distribute sponsorship cards to those participating in the smokeout and the sky’s the limit. An improvement in public health is a beneficial side effect of this plan.
How about getting every male in the country over the age of eighteen to start growing a beard? Sponsorship could be procured from a range of sources and for every week of growth a contribution would be due. Beards would only to be shaved off when national debt falls to 5% of GNP or the growth rate rises for two consecutive quarters or Britain elects a black prime minister, whichever happens first. The people are thus incentivised; we feel we have a hand in our own destiny. No one would want to have to wear an uncomfortable, unsightly beard for any longer than was absolutely necessary and would therefore work ceaselessly to get to a point where it can legitimately be shaved off. Economists would devise colourful graphs plotting national beard growth alongside GDP growth, they would appear on Prime Time to spot and analyse trends. Good for €1 billion I reckon.
We all know that Lidl is cheap but some of us mystifyingly continue to shop elsewhere. Well let’s force everyone to shop exclusively at Lidl for a month and pass on the savings to Brian Lenihan. The timing of such an initiative could not be better as we desperately need ways to re build goodwill in Europe and this would surely illicit a few brownie points from Queen Angela of Bavaria. The earnings here are not easy to calculate in that you will have lost VAT on sales and some redundancies at the other stores but over a month you are surely looking at €50 000 000.00, not to mention getting the Chancellor back on side. You can’t put a price on that.
After last week there are a lot of super skilled technology types in Limerick on the lookout for an opportunity. Well here it is. We have a warehouse full of electronic voting machines which, the consensus is, will never be used. I think it would be well within the compass of someone who used to build micro chips to get into the guts of these things, rework a bit of software here, a bit of circuitry there, solder on the appropriate pipe work and before you know it you have a kidney dialysis machine. The benefits here are obvious and threefold - people are kept off the live register, we avoid any more storage costs for the bloody things and the HSE gets a fleet of badly needed hardware for next to nothing as the initial capital expense has long since been swallowed up by some departmental budget or other. I’m going to err on the low side here and suggest possible savings of €30 000 000.00.
These plans don’t need Oireachtas sub committees or public accounts committees or any involvement whatsoever from on high. We don’t need to produce green or white or any other kinds of papers. Nothing needs to be painstakingly translated into Irish. There is no need to siphon any precious time from the good people at the Department of Trade, Enterprise & Employment.
I’ve done all the legwork. These babies are good to go. I can take care of everything, soup to nuts, with a reasonable deduction off the top for “administrative” expenses. I will of course need reliable transport to ensure that everything goes off without a hitch. That 08 Mercedes E350 that the Taoiseach can’t even bring himself to look at never mind ride around in would suffice, I suppose.
Now feel free to put the wheels in motion yourself. You would buy a ticket for a dinner dance, the proceeds of which were going to send someone seriously ill to Lourdes, wouldn’t you? Well our country is terminal so get off your ass and let’s put together the biggest benefit night we’ve ever seen.
The Savvy Investor
Who are these investors? Every time you turn on a business report you hear about investors losing confidence, investors not being attracted to one thing or another. Do you know any of these people? From the descriptions you would be inclined to think they are a slightly more glamorous version of professional gamblers, cocooned in a windowless room surrounded by banks of televisions tuned to Bloomberg, CNN and MSNBC, poring over the Wall Street Journal, the investor’s Racing Post. Or are they really normal people like you or me as we are led to believe? I don’t know any stockbrokers and nobody I know knows any stockbrokers. In what realm does all of this investing take place?
The supposed tragedy of the Anglo Irish debacle was that for every Sean Quinn there was a swathe of normal people who got burnt. By normal now I’m sure they didn’t mean carpenters, butchers and delivery drivers – the kind of people who help out with the under 10s at their local GAA club on a Saturday morning. No, by normal they meant people who live within earshot of Landsdowne Road. Or people who, from their living room, can see south across the bay all the way to Killiney, on a clear day.
You will never hear a financial expert on the radio try to decode the language he is speaking so that we can understand what he’s saying. Matt Cooper will occasionally ask them to unravel the meaning contained in a particularly gnarly sentence, but he’s the only one. These people like to wrap themselves in their own nonsensical incomprehensible dialect to give themselves cache, a certain detachment from Joe Public. Did you ever hear Neil Francis analyzing rugby on the radio on a Friday evening? Neil tries very hard to convey impression that his insights, no matter how cumbersome, irrational or half cocked represent the absolute, incontestable truth. He will sigh and do the radio equivalent of rolling his eyes when taken to task on a particularly errant prediction he has made. He considers himself the supreme rugby being and it is this conviction that keeps him where he is. If you act like you know what you’re on about, roughly half the population will buy it, and that’s enough.
The financial chaps are similar with their cloak and dagger language, the bullshit about corporate instruments, deleveraging and so on. This is all designed to shroud them with a mystique that is intended to blow normal peoples’ minds. The reason it is such a tight knit circle is that it is only physically possible to withstand the stench of bullshit emanating from a certain number of exponents at any one time. We need to confine these areas, to create a kind of bullshit quarantine, Dublin four is obviously the most famous of these compounds but there are others which are trying to claw their way into the premier league.
Ranelagh for example. The Raneligians are unusual in that they try to camouflage their intent in a bit of what used to be called street cred. They let on to be interested in what John Gormley says, they let on to have a bit of taste in music: Ray LaMontagne ticks all the boxes on this one- he’s got a beard, he says sod all, he appears to be in mortal pain all the time, his music is dreadfully dull but faintly profound, he’s perfect for the new age right winger. They eat noodles seven nights a week and can be seen heading down for the Sunday papers in sandals and khaki shorts from the first week in March onwards. Their place of work has a room that’s full of beanbags. Don’t let any of this mislead you though, these people are hardcore. They are investors. And they have their annual conference in one of those wigwams at the Electric Picnic.
The radio just told me that there are still plenty of worthwhile options out there for the savvy investor. Being an investor is one thing, being a savvy investor opens up a whole other frontier. Like Roy and Robbie they sound similar but are nothing but. Because any eejit can go to work, pay the bills, live life and enjoy it, save a bit, provide a decent home for themselves and their family and carry on in a low key, contented way. But who’d want to, when you can be an investor or, god bless us and save us, a savvy investor? “You see savvy comes from the French verb savoir, to know, you know, so this guy knows his stuff, he’s in the know, you know”
So the savvy investor apparently possesses a knowledge that is unattainable to the rest of us and the language that the savvy investor and his savvy investor friends use is designed to keep it that way. Thus we hear talk of Keynesian solutions, short options, hedging and all manner of delectable financial instruments.
Now having your own dialect is fine if the realm in which you operate is actually of some use to the wider world. Neuro surgeons for example speak a language entirely of their own making and we don’t have the slightest problem with it. We are prepared to forgive them this little indulgence in light of the fact that they are uniquely equipped to save lives as a matter of routine. Our investment manager friends have no such saving graces. Their language is an indulgence we are not prepared to tolerate in light of the fact that they are uniquely equipped to destroy lives as a matter of routine. Everyone’s lives, not just those of their savvy investor subjects.
We have no problem with seemingly meaningless jargon from people with genuine talent who had a calling and had to endure tortuous twenty hour day residency programmes to get where they are. However, if your career path began with a phone call from someone, a good friend of Charlie McCreevy’s, telling you where to sit and who to go for a few pints with, that’s a different story. You, my friend, can shut the feck up.
The supposed tragedy of the Anglo Irish debacle was that for every Sean Quinn there was a swathe of normal people who got burnt. By normal now I’m sure they didn’t mean carpenters, butchers and delivery drivers – the kind of people who help out with the under 10s at their local GAA club on a Saturday morning. No, by normal they meant people who live within earshot of Landsdowne Road. Or people who, from their living room, can see south across the bay all the way to Killiney, on a clear day.
You will never hear a financial expert on the radio try to decode the language he is speaking so that we can understand what he’s saying. Matt Cooper will occasionally ask them to unravel the meaning contained in a particularly gnarly sentence, but he’s the only one. These people like to wrap themselves in their own nonsensical incomprehensible dialect to give themselves cache, a certain detachment from Joe Public. Did you ever hear Neil Francis analyzing rugby on the radio on a Friday evening? Neil tries very hard to convey impression that his insights, no matter how cumbersome, irrational or half cocked represent the absolute, incontestable truth. He will sigh and do the radio equivalent of rolling his eyes when taken to task on a particularly errant prediction he has made. He considers himself the supreme rugby being and it is this conviction that keeps him where he is. If you act like you know what you’re on about, roughly half the population will buy it, and that’s enough.
The financial chaps are similar with their cloak and dagger language, the bullshit about corporate instruments, deleveraging and so on. This is all designed to shroud them with a mystique that is intended to blow normal peoples’ minds. The reason it is such a tight knit circle is that it is only physically possible to withstand the stench of bullshit emanating from a certain number of exponents at any one time. We need to confine these areas, to create a kind of bullshit quarantine, Dublin four is obviously the most famous of these compounds but there are others which are trying to claw their way into the premier league.
Ranelagh for example. The Raneligians are unusual in that they try to camouflage their intent in a bit of what used to be called street cred. They let on to be interested in what John Gormley says, they let on to have a bit of taste in music: Ray LaMontagne ticks all the boxes on this one- he’s got a beard, he says sod all, he appears to be in mortal pain all the time, his music is dreadfully dull but faintly profound, he’s perfect for the new age right winger. They eat noodles seven nights a week and can be seen heading down for the Sunday papers in sandals and khaki shorts from the first week in March onwards. Their place of work has a room that’s full of beanbags. Don’t let any of this mislead you though, these people are hardcore. They are investors. And they have their annual conference in one of those wigwams at the Electric Picnic.
The radio just told me that there are still plenty of worthwhile options out there for the savvy investor. Being an investor is one thing, being a savvy investor opens up a whole other frontier. Like Roy and Robbie they sound similar but are nothing but. Because any eejit can go to work, pay the bills, live life and enjoy it, save a bit, provide a decent home for themselves and their family and carry on in a low key, contented way. But who’d want to, when you can be an investor or, god bless us and save us, a savvy investor? “You see savvy comes from the French verb savoir, to know, you know, so this guy knows his stuff, he’s in the know, you know”
So the savvy investor apparently possesses a knowledge that is unattainable to the rest of us and the language that the savvy investor and his savvy investor friends use is designed to keep it that way. Thus we hear talk of Keynesian solutions, short options, hedging and all manner of delectable financial instruments.
Now having your own dialect is fine if the realm in which you operate is actually of some use to the wider world. Neuro surgeons for example speak a language entirely of their own making and we don’t have the slightest problem with it. We are prepared to forgive them this little indulgence in light of the fact that they are uniquely equipped to save lives as a matter of routine. Our investment manager friends have no such saving graces. Their language is an indulgence we are not prepared to tolerate in light of the fact that they are uniquely equipped to destroy lives as a matter of routine. Everyone’s lives, not just those of their savvy investor subjects.
We have no problem with seemingly meaningless jargon from people with genuine talent who had a calling and had to endure tortuous twenty hour day residency programmes to get where they are. However, if your career path began with a phone call from someone, a good friend of Charlie McCreevy’s, telling you where to sit and who to go for a few pints with, that’s a different story. You, my friend, can shut the feck up.
Find Your Happy Place
“I’m not in a good place right now” ”You need to get yourself into a good place” We hear people use lines like these and initially wonder what dialect they are speaking, what exactly they mean. Are they speaking geographically, have they unwittingly found themselves astray in Drumshanbo on the way to Westport? “I’m not in a good place“ we now take to mean that mentally I’m not best positioned to do what I need to do, to do my job, take care of my affairs. The Americans are masters at devising turns of phrase, figurative expressions that inevitably work their way into the lexicon over here. “I’m not in a good place” - it’s pithy, precise and also capable of several applications.
In embracing terminology like this, which up to recently would have been the preserve of self absorbed, touchy feely, tree hugging yanks, are we showing ourselves to be capable of expanding the dialogue on stress, mental health and it’s related areas? With our newfound lifestyles has there also come an acknowledgement that the pursuit of affluence at all costs will exact a greater toll on some more than others.
We all need to be in a good place. On a permanent basis. Whether your current role in life is to manage multi million euro investment funds or clean toilets we all need to be positively predisposed to what we do. To do it with verve, gusto, energy and enthusiasm, whatever “it” may be is the very definition of being in a good place.
We take this for granted, but then we just have to look around to see examples of people being in a bad place. Brian Cowen at the moment is in a bad place. He looks like he would rather blow torch his armpits than face another day of questioning in the Dail chamber.
Up to recently he was in a very good place, but he contributed to his own plight by failing to face changing circumstances. He didn’t “stay ahead of the curve” as the Americans would also brilliantly say. You can protect your happy place by taking a look every so often to see what’s coming down the pike and reacting accordingly.
Pat Kenny on the radio is in a good place. Pat Kenny on the television is in a very bad place. On the radio Pat is Lord of the Manor, effortlessly conducting his two hour show. Putting waffling politicians in their place, sensitively dealing with tales of loss or human interest, an odd exhibition of humour is not even beyond Pat of the Radio.
All of that poise and composure evaporates however when he crosses the car park and becomes Pat of the Television. Watching Pat host the Late Late is like watching a man who has relinquished control, who seems to be at the mercy of any random disastrous act. The authoritarian air is gone, the body language is defensive and sheepish.
The tragedy is that it doesn’t have to be like this, Pat surely knows who his guests on a Friday night are going to be yet he always looks nervous and unprepared. For those of us who are fans of the swaggering Pat of the Radio this is an unbearable spectacle every week. Pat of the Television is reacting to, rather than setting the agenda and that’s his problem, he’s not staying ahead of the curve. He has surrendered his Happy Place to the vagaries of chance.
One man who is not in the habit of surrendering anything is Michael O’Leary. He appears to be permanently in a good place. You look at O’Leary in action and think nothing could possibly bother him - early mornings, recession, bad weather, extortionate oil prices, bumbling politicians, Armageddon.
O’Leary doesn’t stay ahead of the curve, he designed it. This is the man who declared that astronomical oil prices were no bad thing as it would probably drive several of his competitors out of business. Come to think of it he would in all likelihood have no truck with designations such as happy or sad places, or emotions in general for that matter, he just is. Can you imagine Michael O’Leary in therapy? No, neither can I. It is an image that the brain, miraculous organ though it may be, does not have the power to conjure.
Unlike O’Leary, who was hardcore from the word go, there are plenty of Celtic Tiger charlatans who are now in a very bad place. O’Leary learned early on that if you’re going to rob people you have to let them know about it first. The odd one might kick up a bit about mysterious charges or a draconian baggage policy but generally people tow the line because they were put in the picture at the outset. You can get away with a lot if you put people in the picture. This is just another example of being ahead of the curve.
All the charlatan hard luck stories that have come out and many more that have yet to emerge will have one common thread, they tried to exclude people from the picture. Not the big picture, just the picture. People generally react badly when they get ripped off without knowing about it in advance.
The chap who tiled my hallway is in a happy place. My butcher who I see every Saturday in the local town is in a happy place. The caretaker who I meet at my kid’s school every morning is in a happy place. These are people who ooze positive energy and go about their work cheerfully and diligently. They would have no time for psychoanalytical buzz words or clever Americanisms. They just are. They’re ahead of the curve because they never even knew there was one. We take the Happy Place for granted, it’s not that spectacular when you’re in it, it’s pretty apparent though when you’re in it’s opposite. Just ask Mary Coughlan.
There can only be so many Michael O’Learys. The rest of us get on with the more serious business of deciding the complexion of the real world. In so doing we can learn a lot from the Mullingar man. Stick your head up every so often. Take a look around. Protect your Happy Place.
In embracing terminology like this, which up to recently would have been the preserve of self absorbed, touchy feely, tree hugging yanks, are we showing ourselves to be capable of expanding the dialogue on stress, mental health and it’s related areas? With our newfound lifestyles has there also come an acknowledgement that the pursuit of affluence at all costs will exact a greater toll on some more than others.
We all need to be in a good place. On a permanent basis. Whether your current role in life is to manage multi million euro investment funds or clean toilets we all need to be positively predisposed to what we do. To do it with verve, gusto, energy and enthusiasm, whatever “it” may be is the very definition of being in a good place.
We take this for granted, but then we just have to look around to see examples of people being in a bad place. Brian Cowen at the moment is in a bad place. He looks like he would rather blow torch his armpits than face another day of questioning in the Dail chamber.
Up to recently he was in a very good place, but he contributed to his own plight by failing to face changing circumstances. He didn’t “stay ahead of the curve” as the Americans would also brilliantly say. You can protect your happy place by taking a look every so often to see what’s coming down the pike and reacting accordingly.
Pat Kenny on the radio is in a good place. Pat Kenny on the television is in a very bad place. On the radio Pat is Lord of the Manor, effortlessly conducting his two hour show. Putting waffling politicians in their place, sensitively dealing with tales of loss or human interest, an odd exhibition of humour is not even beyond Pat of the Radio.
All of that poise and composure evaporates however when he crosses the car park and becomes Pat of the Television. Watching Pat host the Late Late is like watching a man who has relinquished control, who seems to be at the mercy of any random disastrous act. The authoritarian air is gone, the body language is defensive and sheepish.
The tragedy is that it doesn’t have to be like this, Pat surely knows who his guests on a Friday night are going to be yet he always looks nervous and unprepared. For those of us who are fans of the swaggering Pat of the Radio this is an unbearable spectacle every week. Pat of the Television is reacting to, rather than setting the agenda and that’s his problem, he’s not staying ahead of the curve. He has surrendered his Happy Place to the vagaries of chance.
One man who is not in the habit of surrendering anything is Michael O’Leary. He appears to be permanently in a good place. You look at O’Leary in action and think nothing could possibly bother him - early mornings, recession, bad weather, extortionate oil prices, bumbling politicians, Armageddon.
O’Leary doesn’t stay ahead of the curve, he designed it. This is the man who declared that astronomical oil prices were no bad thing as it would probably drive several of his competitors out of business. Come to think of it he would in all likelihood have no truck with designations such as happy or sad places, or emotions in general for that matter, he just is. Can you imagine Michael O’Leary in therapy? No, neither can I. It is an image that the brain, miraculous organ though it may be, does not have the power to conjure.
Unlike O’Leary, who was hardcore from the word go, there are plenty of Celtic Tiger charlatans who are now in a very bad place. O’Leary learned early on that if you’re going to rob people you have to let them know about it first. The odd one might kick up a bit about mysterious charges or a draconian baggage policy but generally people tow the line because they were put in the picture at the outset. You can get away with a lot if you put people in the picture. This is just another example of being ahead of the curve.
All the charlatan hard luck stories that have come out and many more that have yet to emerge will have one common thread, they tried to exclude people from the picture. Not the big picture, just the picture. People generally react badly when they get ripped off without knowing about it in advance.
The chap who tiled my hallway is in a happy place. My butcher who I see every Saturday in the local town is in a happy place. The caretaker who I meet at my kid’s school every morning is in a happy place. These are people who ooze positive energy and go about their work cheerfully and diligently. They would have no time for psychoanalytical buzz words or clever Americanisms. They just are. They’re ahead of the curve because they never even knew there was one. We take the Happy Place for granted, it’s not that spectacular when you’re in it, it’s pretty apparent though when you’re in it’s opposite. Just ask Mary Coughlan.
There can only be so many Michael O’Learys. The rest of us get on with the more serious business of deciding the complexion of the real world. In so doing we can learn a lot from the Mullingar man. Stick your head up every so often. Take a look around. Protect your Happy Place.
Babies R' Us
Having kids is hard work. Hard bloody work. I look at the time we spend gathering and tending the kids and compare it to commitments that friends of mine without kids have and the difference is frightening.
A decision to have children is the most major of all lifestyle choices and one the magnitude of which I don’t think people really appreciate when taking it. Or maybe they do and just carry on regardless because if you sat down to clinically weigh everything up, there is a lot to frighten you away from having children. This is one area where some creative rationalisation is required, not so much a leap as an orbit of faith. It precludes so much else.
It is an admission that all those things you fantasised about doing, all the places you dreamed of going, the idea of your life being one big freeform bohemian escapade can now be put on hold until you clamber to the top of the other side of the baby canyon. You find yourself doing the sums in your head - “well the youngest is five so he’ll be self sufficient in thirteen years at which stage I’ll be fifty. Grand still young enough to go inter railing.” Or maybe not, will people look at me like I’m some sort of mutant? Better bring the wife too, to deflect the withering glances and provide some shred of credibility.
Each stage of a kid’s development provides it’s own unique challenges. The newborn requires constant supervision and having no concept of day or night will think nothing of interrupting your hard earned deep sleep with demands for food and a clean diaper. This continues for a few months until the first breakthrough - when he can hold his own bottle. Oh the joy of being able to set him up snugly amongst a bunch of pillows, get the angles right and leave him at it while you get the head down again. But let’s be honest all you’re really doing is getting the head down again, you never really allow yourself to return to deep slumber because you know that soon enough you’ll have to rouse yourself again to perform burping duty. The process is not complete until he sends forth a reverberating belch, the hooter at the end of mealtime, a return to sleep for all.
You have to wait a while for the next great leap forward. There are milestones along the way of course - first steps, first words but none of these really make your life any easier, in fact it‘s just the opposite. Overseeing them walking is way more complicated than pushing a buggy - all the risk analysis and hazard assessment, hovering over them, hanging back a bit, breaking into a sprint when you spot some imminent peril, relaxing again, slowly and stealthily being diverted from your original course until you find yourself in the middle of a Laurel bush chasing a sweet wrapper. And we all know when speech arrives, questions aren’t far behind. An ability to provide timely and detailed responses to these most abstract of questions which satisfy the child himself should surely be introduced as a criterion available to the Nobel judging panel.
No, the next rung on the ladder to self sufficiency is self dressing. The halleluiah chorus plays at full volume in your head the day you see your four year old, first of all, locate his clothes and, secondly, put them on in the correct order, right side out. From that moment on the request “Hey buddy could you go get dressed please” is not greeted with grumpy protestations of ignorance but a gentle hum of acquiescence.
At that point he also assumes responsibility for his own wardrobe management, the time thus freed up for you compounding even further. No more probing under beds and behind couches for errant socks and underwear, no more fraught quests to locate missing uniform components at ten past nine on a Tuesday morning when you still have three lunches to make, two batches of homework to sign off on, money for dancing classes to locate and parent teacher meeting acknowledgement slips to find and return. Responsibility for crucial decisions regarding the readiness of a particular item for the washing machine is typically also delegated at this point which, when you’re dealing with boys at any rate, results in comparatively low wash loads. In my experience a garment needs to be in a fairly sorry state before a boy under ten will consign it to a laundry basket.
You then enter into a barren few years without much significant progress on the me time front. First Communions come and go, games consoles are traded in and upgraded, bicycles get bigger.
And then one day it happens, out of the blue. You had long since forgotten about the way your heart was warmed by the bottle holding or self dressing landmarks. You thought there would never be another event to bestow such a scale of benevolence or well being upon you. And then ten year old sidles up to you and suggests that, when required, he could cycle the mile and a bit up to the shop for you for basic things such as milk, bread, firelighters, isotonic drinks and so on. Your first instinct is to dismiss it as being far too fraught with danger and unknown hazards. But you stop yourself and begin to appreciate the symbiosis such an arrangement could create.
He gets a sliver of much yearned for independence and you get back the chunk of your life that is currently given over to loading everyone into the car in all types of weather to go to the shop to get items that slipped through the cracks of the weekly shop. It’s time consuming and depressing. It’s a chore you can let ten year old take from you and in the process come across as the hero who is granting him a bit of freedom. It’s the perfect storm of goodwill.
You follow him the first couple of times to reassure yourself that everything falls within the acceptable risk management framework and he doesn’t fall foul of any rabid dogs or delinquent cattle. Not a bother. You’ve had a taste and now you want more but you have to remind yourself he’s only ten, it will be at least five more years before he can baby sit. This will have to do. For now.
Artists, writers, musicians all take on ambitious projects which by way of consuming so much energy and passion are translated into their bodies of work. What defines them, what remains after them as a testament to a creative and disciplined mind. We look at people like that and conclude that the regimen required for such endeavour is way beyond us. But many of us bring up children without giving the process much thought. What about that process requires any less discipline, any less hard work, any less creativity, any less relentless self motivation than that required to produce a series of epic novels?
A family is a living, breathing body of work. A testament to a life fully lived. The only mistake we make is in trying to hurry it up, in viewing it’s creation as some other option foregone. Is there really anything else you would rather be doing?
A decision to have children is the most major of all lifestyle choices and one the magnitude of which I don’t think people really appreciate when taking it. Or maybe they do and just carry on regardless because if you sat down to clinically weigh everything up, there is a lot to frighten you away from having children. This is one area where some creative rationalisation is required, not so much a leap as an orbit of faith. It precludes so much else.
It is an admission that all those things you fantasised about doing, all the places you dreamed of going, the idea of your life being one big freeform bohemian escapade can now be put on hold until you clamber to the top of the other side of the baby canyon. You find yourself doing the sums in your head - “well the youngest is five so he’ll be self sufficient in thirteen years at which stage I’ll be fifty. Grand still young enough to go inter railing.” Or maybe not, will people look at me like I’m some sort of mutant? Better bring the wife too, to deflect the withering glances and provide some shred of credibility.
Each stage of a kid’s development provides it’s own unique challenges. The newborn requires constant supervision and having no concept of day or night will think nothing of interrupting your hard earned deep sleep with demands for food and a clean diaper. This continues for a few months until the first breakthrough - when he can hold his own bottle. Oh the joy of being able to set him up snugly amongst a bunch of pillows, get the angles right and leave him at it while you get the head down again. But let’s be honest all you’re really doing is getting the head down again, you never really allow yourself to return to deep slumber because you know that soon enough you’ll have to rouse yourself again to perform burping duty. The process is not complete until he sends forth a reverberating belch, the hooter at the end of mealtime, a return to sleep for all.
You have to wait a while for the next great leap forward. There are milestones along the way of course - first steps, first words but none of these really make your life any easier, in fact it‘s just the opposite. Overseeing them walking is way more complicated than pushing a buggy - all the risk analysis and hazard assessment, hovering over them, hanging back a bit, breaking into a sprint when you spot some imminent peril, relaxing again, slowly and stealthily being diverted from your original course until you find yourself in the middle of a Laurel bush chasing a sweet wrapper. And we all know when speech arrives, questions aren’t far behind. An ability to provide timely and detailed responses to these most abstract of questions which satisfy the child himself should surely be introduced as a criterion available to the Nobel judging panel.
No, the next rung on the ladder to self sufficiency is self dressing. The halleluiah chorus plays at full volume in your head the day you see your four year old, first of all, locate his clothes and, secondly, put them on in the correct order, right side out. From that moment on the request “Hey buddy could you go get dressed please” is not greeted with grumpy protestations of ignorance but a gentle hum of acquiescence.
At that point he also assumes responsibility for his own wardrobe management, the time thus freed up for you compounding even further. No more probing under beds and behind couches for errant socks and underwear, no more fraught quests to locate missing uniform components at ten past nine on a Tuesday morning when you still have three lunches to make, two batches of homework to sign off on, money for dancing classes to locate and parent teacher meeting acknowledgement slips to find and return. Responsibility for crucial decisions regarding the readiness of a particular item for the washing machine is typically also delegated at this point which, when you’re dealing with boys at any rate, results in comparatively low wash loads. In my experience a garment needs to be in a fairly sorry state before a boy under ten will consign it to a laundry basket.
You then enter into a barren few years without much significant progress on the me time front. First Communions come and go, games consoles are traded in and upgraded, bicycles get bigger.
And then one day it happens, out of the blue. You had long since forgotten about the way your heart was warmed by the bottle holding or self dressing landmarks. You thought there would never be another event to bestow such a scale of benevolence or well being upon you. And then ten year old sidles up to you and suggests that, when required, he could cycle the mile and a bit up to the shop for you for basic things such as milk, bread, firelighters, isotonic drinks and so on. Your first instinct is to dismiss it as being far too fraught with danger and unknown hazards. But you stop yourself and begin to appreciate the symbiosis such an arrangement could create.
He gets a sliver of much yearned for independence and you get back the chunk of your life that is currently given over to loading everyone into the car in all types of weather to go to the shop to get items that slipped through the cracks of the weekly shop. It’s time consuming and depressing. It’s a chore you can let ten year old take from you and in the process come across as the hero who is granting him a bit of freedom. It’s the perfect storm of goodwill.
You follow him the first couple of times to reassure yourself that everything falls within the acceptable risk management framework and he doesn’t fall foul of any rabid dogs or delinquent cattle. Not a bother. You’ve had a taste and now you want more but you have to remind yourself he’s only ten, it will be at least five more years before he can baby sit. This will have to do. For now.
Artists, writers, musicians all take on ambitious projects which by way of consuming so much energy and passion are translated into their bodies of work. What defines them, what remains after them as a testament to a creative and disciplined mind. We look at people like that and conclude that the regimen required for such endeavour is way beyond us. But many of us bring up children without giving the process much thought. What about that process requires any less discipline, any less hard work, any less creativity, any less relentless self motivation than that required to produce a series of epic novels?
A family is a living, breathing body of work. A testament to a life fully lived. The only mistake we make is in trying to hurry it up, in viewing it’s creation as some other option foregone. Is there really anything else you would rather be doing?
Bankers Anonymous
There is a new national pastime which is gathering momentum at the moment and it has the potential to be right up there with drinking pints - banker bashing. In the wake of the sudden fiscal meltdown of last year it was decided that the blame for all our woes lay squarely at the door of a handful of a few arrogant and unscrupulous bankers. It fits very neatly with the media jingoism but is it strictly true? Is there not adequate blame to distribute to a few more areas?
Large areas of the landscape of this country have been disfigured by a frenzy of second rate, misguided development. We have a new phrase in the lexicon, the “ghost estate” - developments which began close to the end of the frenzy and which now sit unfinished at the edges of towns and villages all over the country. A scandal and an undoubted scar on the landscape.
But why have they come about, why was such development relentlessly undertaken in the face of unambiguous warning signs from every quarter? I find it bewildering to think that at no point was an adequate assessment done of our actual housing need and development sanctioned on that basis. Why was planning permission handed out for forty , fifty , sixty and more unit developments in small provincial towns without some reference to what was actually required to meet demand? Is it not within the remit of the planning authorities to assess such demand and grant planning on that basis, particularly as we had already had a decade of full throttle building and common sense would have suggested that the end had to be nigh?
During the boom relationships between builders/developers and their bankers were initiated and developed in the rosy, warm glow of full employment and insatiable consumer demand. As a consequence the symbiosis between banker and builder grew into a veritable force of nature - the banker sanctioned large collateralised loans thereby growing market share and driving the share price skywards, the builder got all the credit he needed to keep producing his product which he then sold at large profits. Everyone was happy.
Now put yourself in the shoes of the banker - you have built up a strong professional relationship with a developer over say a ten year period, he has never let you down and you have no reason to suspect he ever will. One of the last loans sanctioned was for a development that now lies unsold. Now our problems begin. But the notion that all of those problems are our friendly banker’s fault needs to be examined.
Local authorities were still handing out planning permission. The good word coming from our government, our economic think tanks, the institute of auctioneers was that the housing market was as buoyant as ever, demand was strong and there was nothing whatsoever to worry about. In the face of all this sweetness and light a loan was sanctioned to a customer with a flawless history. Not the most reckless decision ever made, I would have thought.
The propaganda which came down from on high created a nice, warm fuzzy feeling which bore no resemblance to what was actually taking place. The ESRI, IAVI and every known stockbrokerage firm in Dublin were to be heard daily on the airwaves with their cosy forecasts about , at the very worst, a “soft landing” for housing. These were the experts, why wouldn’t we buy into what they were telling us? David McWilliams was the only one who tried to inject a bit of harsh reality into the debate and he was summarily dismissed as a crackpot, a begrudger. He looks like a genius now. Vested interests talked the situation up and up until before we knew it we were teetering at the edge of the plank with no idea how we got there.
But we got there, and there we will remain. Our leaders have been desperate in recent months to be seen to have some idea as to how to get us out of here. According to themselves they had no idea that this was where we were headed in the first place so confidence in their ability is not exactly at an all time high. But “we are where we are” as Mary Coughlan would say and what we desperately need are ideas, any ideas.
One that the cabinet appear to have hung their hat on is something called the knowledge economy. As far as I can establish this consists of every Irish person in the future being employed in the production of microprocessors, scientific research and development and financial services. It’s not clear from the plan at this stage whether we should hold back a few bricklayers just in case the mixers are ever switched on again.
The logic of talking up our knowledge based economy is not apparent coming as it is from a bunch of politicians who have just carried out the first in what will be a series of savage cuts to our education system. Now unless I’m missing something, the basis of a knowledge economy is, surprisingly enough, knowledge, which can traditionally be gained through education. Reducing teacher numbers, increasing class sizes and reintroducing third level fees while simultaneously talking up our knowledge credentials and potential makes this cabinet look downright crazy.
It should also bring into the debate the place of the Irish language in our schools. We, contrary to popular opinion, enjoy no competitive advantage over our European neighbours in the realm of education. Countries such as Poland and others of the former Eastern bloc are rapidly assuming the mantle of best educated (and cheaper) workforce available.
From the age of five through to eighteen, our students will spend up to 20% of their time in the education system grappling with the Irish language. Most will graduate from secondary school unable to speak it with any degree of fluency.
Now take some of that massive chunk of classroom time over that thirteen year period and devote it to the teaching of something which is more applicable in the world economy, European languages perhaps.
If Mr. Cowen and company are serious about tooling up our kids for the knowledge economy rather than merely throwing it out as a buzzword to buy himself some time, then we need to have a debate about how to maximise the benefit of our kids’ time in the classroom. Streamline the teaching of Irish, that’s all I’m suggesting - these desperate times surely justify it.
Large areas of the landscape of this country have been disfigured by a frenzy of second rate, misguided development. We have a new phrase in the lexicon, the “ghost estate” - developments which began close to the end of the frenzy and which now sit unfinished at the edges of towns and villages all over the country. A scandal and an undoubted scar on the landscape.
But why have they come about, why was such development relentlessly undertaken in the face of unambiguous warning signs from every quarter? I find it bewildering to think that at no point was an adequate assessment done of our actual housing need and development sanctioned on that basis. Why was planning permission handed out for forty , fifty , sixty and more unit developments in small provincial towns without some reference to what was actually required to meet demand? Is it not within the remit of the planning authorities to assess such demand and grant planning on that basis, particularly as we had already had a decade of full throttle building and common sense would have suggested that the end had to be nigh?
During the boom relationships between builders/developers and their bankers were initiated and developed in the rosy, warm glow of full employment and insatiable consumer demand. As a consequence the symbiosis between banker and builder grew into a veritable force of nature - the banker sanctioned large collateralised loans thereby growing market share and driving the share price skywards, the builder got all the credit he needed to keep producing his product which he then sold at large profits. Everyone was happy.
Now put yourself in the shoes of the banker - you have built up a strong professional relationship with a developer over say a ten year period, he has never let you down and you have no reason to suspect he ever will. One of the last loans sanctioned was for a development that now lies unsold. Now our problems begin. But the notion that all of those problems are our friendly banker’s fault needs to be examined.
Local authorities were still handing out planning permission. The good word coming from our government, our economic think tanks, the institute of auctioneers was that the housing market was as buoyant as ever, demand was strong and there was nothing whatsoever to worry about. In the face of all this sweetness and light a loan was sanctioned to a customer with a flawless history. Not the most reckless decision ever made, I would have thought.
The propaganda which came down from on high created a nice, warm fuzzy feeling which bore no resemblance to what was actually taking place. The ESRI, IAVI and every known stockbrokerage firm in Dublin were to be heard daily on the airwaves with their cosy forecasts about , at the very worst, a “soft landing” for housing. These were the experts, why wouldn’t we buy into what they were telling us? David McWilliams was the only one who tried to inject a bit of harsh reality into the debate and he was summarily dismissed as a crackpot, a begrudger. He looks like a genius now. Vested interests talked the situation up and up until before we knew it we were teetering at the edge of the plank with no idea how we got there.
But we got there, and there we will remain. Our leaders have been desperate in recent months to be seen to have some idea as to how to get us out of here. According to themselves they had no idea that this was where we were headed in the first place so confidence in their ability is not exactly at an all time high. But “we are where we are” as Mary Coughlan would say and what we desperately need are ideas, any ideas.
One that the cabinet appear to have hung their hat on is something called the knowledge economy. As far as I can establish this consists of every Irish person in the future being employed in the production of microprocessors, scientific research and development and financial services. It’s not clear from the plan at this stage whether we should hold back a few bricklayers just in case the mixers are ever switched on again.
The logic of talking up our knowledge based economy is not apparent coming as it is from a bunch of politicians who have just carried out the first in what will be a series of savage cuts to our education system. Now unless I’m missing something, the basis of a knowledge economy is, surprisingly enough, knowledge, which can traditionally be gained through education. Reducing teacher numbers, increasing class sizes and reintroducing third level fees while simultaneously talking up our knowledge credentials and potential makes this cabinet look downright crazy.
It should also bring into the debate the place of the Irish language in our schools. We, contrary to popular opinion, enjoy no competitive advantage over our European neighbours in the realm of education. Countries such as Poland and others of the former Eastern bloc are rapidly assuming the mantle of best educated (and cheaper) workforce available.
From the age of five through to eighteen, our students will spend up to 20% of their time in the education system grappling with the Irish language. Most will graduate from secondary school unable to speak it with any degree of fluency.
Now take some of that massive chunk of classroom time over that thirteen year period and devote it to the teaching of something which is more applicable in the world economy, European languages perhaps.
If Mr. Cowen and company are serious about tooling up our kids for the knowledge economy rather than merely throwing it out as a buzzword to buy himself some time, then we need to have a debate about how to maximise the benefit of our kids’ time in the classroom. Streamline the teaching of Irish, that’s all I’m suggesting - these desperate times surely justify it.
Grand Resigns
In my head, it was better than this. It’s still early days so the actual manifestation of how exactly it would be better is still unclear to me so perhaps it’s more accurate to say in my head it was different to this.
The idea to buy an almost derelict farm cottage in the countryside and over time refurbish and eventually extend it contained so much romantic potential for us that when we happened upon this place, it’s allure proved too much to resist.
To be so perfectly smitten is to ignore so much that is fundamentally flawed or inherently impractical, a leap of faith is what is required, a reliance upon one’s own work ethic and vision to transform a place, that in all good conscience you wouldn’t put chickens, into something suitable for a young family, three boys under ten and another en route.
We’ve all seen the shows on television where a couple come across a ruined castle or some such logistical nightmare, proclaim themselves to have fallen in love with it and promptly risk every shilling they have, their relationship and most pointedly their mental and physical health to restore it to it’s former glory.
No forethought is given to the likes of throwing yourself at the mercy of unscrupulous builders, fastidious planners, uncooperative bankers, bewildered family. Because like the real act of falling in love, such things transcend mere worldly or practical considerations. We’re building a legacy here people, get with the programme.
That’s typically how it plays out in the mind of the protagonists at any rate. Drama is usually introduced into the show with the host’s repeated summations of the budgetary situation in relation to the amount of work actually complete and his dark and dire musings on how this misguided adventure of a couple of air headed tree huggers might end up. By the end of act three the participants usually have our sympathy but then in the final act everything comes together, a little too smoothly for my liking.
I have often felt emotionally conned looking at these shows, my pity has been successfully drummed up only to be made look completely misplaced as the final moments give us a camera panning around a sumptuous, luxurious finished product that seemingly appeared with an effortless “ta da” a la David Copperfield.
But that’s the Hollywood ending for you , or a version of it at any rate. If we had signed up for such a show I doubt if our footage would ever see the airwaves. There’s your typical unprepared, dysfunctional, delusional subject and then a few notches down the pole, there would be us.
Our place is about an acre and a half composed of several old farm buildings, a hayshed and a very distressed cottage, the rest being made up of what we still like to call “paddocks” despite their being as close in appearance to a paddock as Baghdad High Street.
The refurbishment of the cottage which we have just completed can be viewed as these types of projects in microcosm - twice as difficult, twice as long, twice as expensive and half as satisfying as anticipated. This phenomenon can be neatly encapsulated into what is known as the Self Build quadratic equation 2d + 2l + 2e = S/2.
All the time that you imagined was going to be available for growing vegetables, making garden furniture and long lazy walks is now consumed by septic issues, locating frozen pipes, unclogging gutters and the daily calculation of exactly how far into February your laughable stockpile of turf will get you. (“Are you sure you won’t take another trailer load? Not at all, sure we’ll have loads“)
Endeavouring to go off grid you see, that’s another important aspect of the package you’ve signed up for. Little point in trying this lifestyle at all if you’re still in hock to faceless corporations who on a whim and in the face of global turmoil could withdraw your ability to keep yourself warm. I’d rather screw that up myself cheers, local turmoil only here thank you very much.
The reality rarely ascends to the dizzy heights of the fantasy, even on a gorgeous January day such as this - low winter sun creeping nonchalantly across the yard liberating it from thick silver ground frost, not a breath of wind, dry, deathly quiet, the beast of a black cast iron stove humming determinedly in the corner sending grey smoke vertically into a translucent blue sky.
What it is we hope for is hard to establish. I think that we take all the physical aspects for granted - it will be picturesque, it will be rustic but we look to a setting such as this to imbue us with a calm, a peace of mind and a contentment that it can’t provide. I have dozens of books stored in a shed that I’m anxious to read - I wanted the cottage to grant me the time to read them. I bestowed magical powers on the place and it has unceremoniously rejected the mantle.
The feeling we crave can only evolve as life moves forward, when kids become more self sufficient, when free time is more plentiful. Perhaps it’s fitting in the midst of all this post Celtic Tiger revisionism to find that it can’t be bought, it just happens - and it can happen just as easily in a two bedroom apartment behind a supermarket as a rustic farmhouse in the rolling hills.
The idea to buy an almost derelict farm cottage in the countryside and over time refurbish and eventually extend it contained so much romantic potential for us that when we happened upon this place, it’s allure proved too much to resist.
To be so perfectly smitten is to ignore so much that is fundamentally flawed or inherently impractical, a leap of faith is what is required, a reliance upon one’s own work ethic and vision to transform a place, that in all good conscience you wouldn’t put chickens, into something suitable for a young family, three boys under ten and another en route.
We’ve all seen the shows on television where a couple come across a ruined castle or some such logistical nightmare, proclaim themselves to have fallen in love with it and promptly risk every shilling they have, their relationship and most pointedly their mental and physical health to restore it to it’s former glory.
No forethought is given to the likes of throwing yourself at the mercy of unscrupulous builders, fastidious planners, uncooperative bankers, bewildered family. Because like the real act of falling in love, such things transcend mere worldly or practical considerations. We’re building a legacy here people, get with the programme.
That’s typically how it plays out in the mind of the protagonists at any rate. Drama is usually introduced into the show with the host’s repeated summations of the budgetary situation in relation to the amount of work actually complete and his dark and dire musings on how this misguided adventure of a couple of air headed tree huggers might end up. By the end of act three the participants usually have our sympathy but then in the final act everything comes together, a little too smoothly for my liking.
I have often felt emotionally conned looking at these shows, my pity has been successfully drummed up only to be made look completely misplaced as the final moments give us a camera panning around a sumptuous, luxurious finished product that seemingly appeared with an effortless “ta da” a la David Copperfield.
But that’s the Hollywood ending for you , or a version of it at any rate. If we had signed up for such a show I doubt if our footage would ever see the airwaves. There’s your typical unprepared, dysfunctional, delusional subject and then a few notches down the pole, there would be us.
Our place is about an acre and a half composed of several old farm buildings, a hayshed and a very distressed cottage, the rest being made up of what we still like to call “paddocks” despite their being as close in appearance to a paddock as Baghdad High Street.
The refurbishment of the cottage which we have just completed can be viewed as these types of projects in microcosm - twice as difficult, twice as long, twice as expensive and half as satisfying as anticipated. This phenomenon can be neatly encapsulated into what is known as the Self Build quadratic equation 2d + 2l + 2e = S/2.
All the time that you imagined was going to be available for growing vegetables, making garden furniture and long lazy walks is now consumed by septic issues, locating frozen pipes, unclogging gutters and the daily calculation of exactly how far into February your laughable stockpile of turf will get you. (“Are you sure you won’t take another trailer load? Not at all, sure we’ll have loads“)
Endeavouring to go off grid you see, that’s another important aspect of the package you’ve signed up for. Little point in trying this lifestyle at all if you’re still in hock to faceless corporations who on a whim and in the face of global turmoil could withdraw your ability to keep yourself warm. I’d rather screw that up myself cheers, local turmoil only here thank you very much.
The reality rarely ascends to the dizzy heights of the fantasy, even on a gorgeous January day such as this - low winter sun creeping nonchalantly across the yard liberating it from thick silver ground frost, not a breath of wind, dry, deathly quiet, the beast of a black cast iron stove humming determinedly in the corner sending grey smoke vertically into a translucent blue sky.
What it is we hope for is hard to establish. I think that we take all the physical aspects for granted - it will be picturesque, it will be rustic but we look to a setting such as this to imbue us with a calm, a peace of mind and a contentment that it can’t provide. I have dozens of books stored in a shed that I’m anxious to read - I wanted the cottage to grant me the time to read them. I bestowed magical powers on the place and it has unceremoniously rejected the mantle.
The feeling we crave can only evolve as life moves forward, when kids become more self sufficient, when free time is more plentiful. Perhaps it’s fitting in the midst of all this post Celtic Tiger revisionism to find that it can’t be bought, it just happens - and it can happen just as easily in a two bedroom apartment behind a supermarket as a rustic farmhouse in the rolling hills.
The Curious Case of B & B
So Brian Lenihan didn’t read the entire report into Anglo Irish Bank. Brian Cowen didn’t read the entire Lisbon Treaty. There’s a pattern emerging here, B & B are dossers. They’re trying to pull off the oldest trick in the book: not reading the book.
Back in the Leaving Cert days nobody wanted to submit themselves to such an unpleasant experience as actually reading “Persuasion” so one Saturday afternoon we all headed up to Reads of Nassau Street on the bus and bought the “notes”. The notes were a little handbook, no more than forty pages long, summarizing what, if anything, actually took place in the novel and providing you with a few indispensable nuggets of analysis to trot out on your exam paper thereby guaranteeing that you would convey a full understanding of the nuances of Austen’s masterpiece. Job done.
This is not what you would call pulling out all the stops but it is what’s called making an effort. However half arsed, it is an effort nonetheless. Guess what, B&B aren’t even reading the bloody notes; they’re not making any effort. They’re not even bringing a few cogs into the hall with them. These lads are complete amateurs. They have gone for the all or nothing approach – I won’t bother my arse reading it and if called to account on it I will throw my hands up, mea culpa and fair cop guv. There’s no middle ground with these lads, they are determined to be either heroes or villains.
Now I heard a startling statistic the other day to the effect that there are two hundred people employed by the office of the Taoiseach. And neither of the Bs could delegate the reading and summarizing of either of these cumbersome tomes to one of them. Every one of these individuals were so saturated with other duties pertaining to Armageddon that no one was available to throw an eye over these documents and give the Bs the heads up.
Now when the fundamental component of your job is arming yourself with information relevant to what is going on in the jurisdiction you purport to be governing, it strikes me as somewhat on the negligent side not to bother making any attempt whatsoever to procure that information. That, gentlemen, is what’s called taking the piss.
You go in for a root canal procedure, the nurse shows you in to the surgery, she gives you a gown to put on and invites you to make yourself comfortable. A minute later the dentist arrives, reassures you that everything is going to be ok, picks up a drill and looks at it for a second, turns it around and looks at it from the other direction for a minute, scratches his head, hands it to you and asks “Hey, have you any idea how to use this yoke?” What would you do? You’d run a mile and on the way you’d ring the Medical Council and report him. Or would you have second thoughts because he at least had the sensitivity to explain to you that everything was going to be ok? B&B are displaying similar ineptitude when it comes to tooling themselves up to perform the fundamental aspects of their jobs.
But who can we report them to? The Financial Regulator, the Ombudsman, the National Consumer Agency? “ Hi I want to report a case of overcharging in Liffey Valley yesterday and one hundred and sixty six cases of professional negligence in Dawson Street every day” “Please stay on the line your call is important to us” Can we ring Joe Duffy, or request a meeting with Mary out in the Park. Is there anything Eamon Dunphy can do for us, or the no nonsense Graeme Souness?
If your car breaks down in the middle of the night somewhere on the bog road between Walsh Island and Rhode, you wouldn’t tolerate one of your passengers first of all throwing the manual into a boghole and secondly doing sod all to help because it is his contention that the fundamentals of the engine are sound and, besides, you are perfectly positioned to avail of a lift if and when one emerges from the infinite gloom. No you wouldn’t tolerate it; you’d probably have a fairly decent crack at killing the bugger. Yet every day we are subjected to the sight of B&B doing the equivalent.
But what can we do about it? What do you do when you need someone taken out of circulation for the greater good? When you need to prune out a bit of deadwood so the whole tree can regain it’s vitality and go on to prosper again. Well anyone who watches Discovery Max on a Tuesday morning (i.e. anyone who has, like, a clue) knows that there is only one place you can go, one man you can turn to and that’s Dog the Bounty Hunter. When a situation descends to a low such as ours he’s the only man who is equipped to retrieve it. When all other options have been exhausted, Dog is waiting in the wings, poised. Dog, being a man of such principle, would I’m sure consider it an honour to serve our national interest by fabricating a few Hawaii parole violations and file extradition orders to get B&B over there for a hearing. Dog and his entourage arriving down at Leinster House to serve the papers on the lads, what a sight that would be. If staged in the proper way it could be a showcase for the country right up there with the Special Olympics or the Eucharistic Congress. By the time the legal technicalities have been unraveled and the lads have been repatriated Joan Burton would have everything sorted. What about planting a bit of weed on them, is that constitutional? I’m not sure, I’ll have to get a lawyer to review the intricacies of it, or maybe I’ll adopt the B&B approach and not bother my arse.
Anything that could be grounds for an election and a fresh start will do. Could we derail the Offaly B with the technicality that nobody actually voted for him to be in charge, he just happened to be mooching around in the corridor long enough to get the job? He tells us repeatedly that the fundamentals are strong and that everything will be cool, but we know it won’t. The country is turning to custard and they couldn’t be bothered to read the fecking instructions. The pair of clowns are going to destroy every viable business this side of Achill Island. This is one B&B that’s definitely not Bord Failte approved.
Say nothing; I’ll give Dog a call. You didn’t hear it from me.
Back in the Leaving Cert days nobody wanted to submit themselves to such an unpleasant experience as actually reading “Persuasion” so one Saturday afternoon we all headed up to Reads of Nassau Street on the bus and bought the “notes”. The notes were a little handbook, no more than forty pages long, summarizing what, if anything, actually took place in the novel and providing you with a few indispensable nuggets of analysis to trot out on your exam paper thereby guaranteeing that you would convey a full understanding of the nuances of Austen’s masterpiece. Job done.
This is not what you would call pulling out all the stops but it is what’s called making an effort. However half arsed, it is an effort nonetheless. Guess what, B&B aren’t even reading the bloody notes; they’re not making any effort. They’re not even bringing a few cogs into the hall with them. These lads are complete amateurs. They have gone for the all or nothing approach – I won’t bother my arse reading it and if called to account on it I will throw my hands up, mea culpa and fair cop guv. There’s no middle ground with these lads, they are determined to be either heroes or villains.
Now I heard a startling statistic the other day to the effect that there are two hundred people employed by the office of the Taoiseach. And neither of the Bs could delegate the reading and summarizing of either of these cumbersome tomes to one of them. Every one of these individuals were so saturated with other duties pertaining to Armageddon that no one was available to throw an eye over these documents and give the Bs the heads up.
Now when the fundamental component of your job is arming yourself with information relevant to what is going on in the jurisdiction you purport to be governing, it strikes me as somewhat on the negligent side not to bother making any attempt whatsoever to procure that information. That, gentlemen, is what’s called taking the piss.
You go in for a root canal procedure, the nurse shows you in to the surgery, she gives you a gown to put on and invites you to make yourself comfortable. A minute later the dentist arrives, reassures you that everything is going to be ok, picks up a drill and looks at it for a second, turns it around and looks at it from the other direction for a minute, scratches his head, hands it to you and asks “Hey, have you any idea how to use this yoke?” What would you do? You’d run a mile and on the way you’d ring the Medical Council and report him. Or would you have second thoughts because he at least had the sensitivity to explain to you that everything was going to be ok? B&B are displaying similar ineptitude when it comes to tooling themselves up to perform the fundamental aspects of their jobs.
But who can we report them to? The Financial Regulator, the Ombudsman, the National Consumer Agency? “ Hi I want to report a case of overcharging in Liffey Valley yesterday and one hundred and sixty six cases of professional negligence in Dawson Street every day” “Please stay on the line your call is important to us” Can we ring Joe Duffy, or request a meeting with Mary out in the Park. Is there anything Eamon Dunphy can do for us, or the no nonsense Graeme Souness?
If your car breaks down in the middle of the night somewhere on the bog road between Walsh Island and Rhode, you wouldn’t tolerate one of your passengers first of all throwing the manual into a boghole and secondly doing sod all to help because it is his contention that the fundamentals of the engine are sound and, besides, you are perfectly positioned to avail of a lift if and when one emerges from the infinite gloom. No you wouldn’t tolerate it; you’d probably have a fairly decent crack at killing the bugger. Yet every day we are subjected to the sight of B&B doing the equivalent.
But what can we do about it? What do you do when you need someone taken out of circulation for the greater good? When you need to prune out a bit of deadwood so the whole tree can regain it’s vitality and go on to prosper again. Well anyone who watches Discovery Max on a Tuesday morning (i.e. anyone who has, like, a clue) knows that there is only one place you can go, one man you can turn to and that’s Dog the Bounty Hunter. When a situation descends to a low such as ours he’s the only man who is equipped to retrieve it. When all other options have been exhausted, Dog is waiting in the wings, poised. Dog, being a man of such principle, would I’m sure consider it an honour to serve our national interest by fabricating a few Hawaii parole violations and file extradition orders to get B&B over there for a hearing. Dog and his entourage arriving down at Leinster House to serve the papers on the lads, what a sight that would be. If staged in the proper way it could be a showcase for the country right up there with the Special Olympics or the Eucharistic Congress. By the time the legal technicalities have been unraveled and the lads have been repatriated Joan Burton would have everything sorted. What about planting a bit of weed on them, is that constitutional? I’m not sure, I’ll have to get a lawyer to review the intricacies of it, or maybe I’ll adopt the B&B approach and not bother my arse.
Anything that could be grounds for an election and a fresh start will do. Could we derail the Offaly B with the technicality that nobody actually voted for him to be in charge, he just happened to be mooching around in the corridor long enough to get the job? He tells us repeatedly that the fundamentals are strong and that everything will be cool, but we know it won’t. The country is turning to custard and they couldn’t be bothered to read the fecking instructions. The pair of clowns are going to destroy every viable business this side of Achill Island. This is one B&B that’s definitely not Bord Failte approved.
Say nothing; I’ll give Dog a call. You didn’t hear it from me.
Emigration II - The Sequel
There’s a feeling of dislocation that accompanies me a lot of the time. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. It could I suppose be most adequately described as being between two worlds, two lives and not being sure to which you most properly belong. The feeling is most acute I would speculate in people of my age who have incorporated diverse chapters into their lives.
To grow up in Ireland in the eighties and be faced with the almost unavoidable spectre of emigration is something that our most recent generation have not had occasion to give much thought to. There is a general feeling now however that such an option may begin to re appear on the radar screen after a twenty year hiatus.
If you live abroad for an extended period you will inevitably absorb something of the character and the fabric of that place. You can try to remain as culturally exclusive as you can but a certain amount of the host country’s identity will diffuse into your being. And once it weaves it’s way in, it’s in for good.
In my case I went to England in 1994, returned to Ireland for a few months in 1997 and then moved to the north eastern United States until 2006. I am conscious every day of the effects on my character of this movement. The stay in the US by virtue of it being considerably longer of course but also because of my positive disposition towards the place, the region and its people in particular made a profound impact.
In my college years recession was the unchanging backdrop in this country, the background noise. We may have been through cycles before but I don’t think normal people really noticed, time passed amidst the hum of making do, of getting on with it.
And people did get on with it, it’s one of the great myths that has sprung up in the last decade that pre 1997 the country was merely sleepwalking through it’s existence. We did things - we went out for the occasional dinner, students went away on J1 visas every summer, we had a few pints at the weekend, we went to rugby internationals. We did all these things and squeezed more glee out of them than we do out of the equivalent things now, because they didn’t come easy.
I remember going to a match in Landsdowne Road with my father and a friend of his who was a bank manager. Part of the preamble to the game was the bank’s hospitality suite in Clonskeagh. We surveyed the scene like the Israelites did the Promised Land - all manner of exotic finger foods, wine, beer, desserts, help yourselves lads.
In subsequent years such opulence became the stuff of legend as tales such as the one of getting the bartender to fill an empty lucozade bottle with brandy on our way out were told to hysterical approval. If you were to lay out the same feast today it would probably impress very few, the hors d’oeuvres would probably draw scowls of disapproval from certain strands of our nouveau riche.
The idea that we were all moping miserably around waiting for the gods to bestow an economic miracle upon us is just nonsense. In fact I would suggest that the Dublin of that era was a lot more urbane, sophisticated and downright cool than it is now when you allow for the economic status of the place at the time. I’d rather talk about the blues with some stranger over breakfast in the Red Rose for a couple of hours as I did one morning back then than talk about negative equity with someone nowadays.
The inescapable truth of that era though was that when the college party was over jobs needed to be got and Ireland could not provide them, not in my discipline at any rate. And therein lies what I think is the fundamental difference between that generation and this, we had an expectation that things wouldn’t be easy, we were ready to do whatever was necessary to get the show on the road and if that meant heading for Dublin Airport then so be it. We almost embraced the notion of leaving, I didn’t see it as being bad or good, I never once stopped and made a judgment on it, it was just how things were.
Graduates over the past dozen years have stepped into a full employment economy. Lavish starting salaries, cheap used cars, competition in the market to insure them, easy credit - these things have all made it relatively easy to hit the ground running and stay running.
Now comes the real test. Because it’s pretty easy to move into a bedsit in Ealing or a dingy studio in Dorchester when what you’ve come from is barely comparable if not worse. The transition is harder when compromises have to be made, when maybe for the first time you are reliant on help - maybe from a relative, a family friend or whoever.
It’s easy to be smug, there seems to be a lot of schadenfraude around at the moment. It’s also easy to forget that amidst the train wreckage that sees greedy builders and unscrupulous bankers get what many see as what’s coming to them are also entangled the fates of people who didn’t decide where we were going or how we were going to get there but jumped aboard because they just wanted to go somewhere. Derailment wasn’t their idea.
And here we are, emigration is back on the table. It’s back because anyone with a shred of common sense knew that what emerged here over the last dozen years couldn’t last forever. We didn’t expect it to come to such a shuddering halt either. Boom then bust, it’s a cycle as old as money itself.
Emigration. Not a dirty word, embrace it, if viewed as an opportunity for personal development, growth and enrichment then it’s not too scary a concept. To live somewhere else, to soak it up and allow the experience to enhance you and broaden your view, even to become dislocated is not as irreversible as it sounds. I have in fact only good things to say about the feeling.
We at least have the comfort of knowing that, despite years of political ineptitude, we are better placed now to participate in whatever type of recovery presents itself than we ever were twenty years ago. We will never return to the days when emigration decimated families and butchered communities all over the country.
Emigration II - This time it’s not so personal.
To grow up in Ireland in the eighties and be faced with the almost unavoidable spectre of emigration is something that our most recent generation have not had occasion to give much thought to. There is a general feeling now however that such an option may begin to re appear on the radar screen after a twenty year hiatus.
If you live abroad for an extended period you will inevitably absorb something of the character and the fabric of that place. You can try to remain as culturally exclusive as you can but a certain amount of the host country’s identity will diffuse into your being. And once it weaves it’s way in, it’s in for good.
In my case I went to England in 1994, returned to Ireland for a few months in 1997 and then moved to the north eastern United States until 2006. I am conscious every day of the effects on my character of this movement. The stay in the US by virtue of it being considerably longer of course but also because of my positive disposition towards the place, the region and its people in particular made a profound impact.
In my college years recession was the unchanging backdrop in this country, the background noise. We may have been through cycles before but I don’t think normal people really noticed, time passed amidst the hum of making do, of getting on with it.
And people did get on with it, it’s one of the great myths that has sprung up in the last decade that pre 1997 the country was merely sleepwalking through it’s existence. We did things - we went out for the occasional dinner, students went away on J1 visas every summer, we had a few pints at the weekend, we went to rugby internationals. We did all these things and squeezed more glee out of them than we do out of the equivalent things now, because they didn’t come easy.
I remember going to a match in Landsdowne Road with my father and a friend of his who was a bank manager. Part of the preamble to the game was the bank’s hospitality suite in Clonskeagh. We surveyed the scene like the Israelites did the Promised Land - all manner of exotic finger foods, wine, beer, desserts, help yourselves lads.
In subsequent years such opulence became the stuff of legend as tales such as the one of getting the bartender to fill an empty lucozade bottle with brandy on our way out were told to hysterical approval. If you were to lay out the same feast today it would probably impress very few, the hors d’oeuvres would probably draw scowls of disapproval from certain strands of our nouveau riche.
The idea that we were all moping miserably around waiting for the gods to bestow an economic miracle upon us is just nonsense. In fact I would suggest that the Dublin of that era was a lot more urbane, sophisticated and downright cool than it is now when you allow for the economic status of the place at the time. I’d rather talk about the blues with some stranger over breakfast in the Red Rose for a couple of hours as I did one morning back then than talk about negative equity with someone nowadays.
The inescapable truth of that era though was that when the college party was over jobs needed to be got and Ireland could not provide them, not in my discipline at any rate. And therein lies what I think is the fundamental difference between that generation and this, we had an expectation that things wouldn’t be easy, we were ready to do whatever was necessary to get the show on the road and if that meant heading for Dublin Airport then so be it. We almost embraced the notion of leaving, I didn’t see it as being bad or good, I never once stopped and made a judgment on it, it was just how things were.
Graduates over the past dozen years have stepped into a full employment economy. Lavish starting salaries, cheap used cars, competition in the market to insure them, easy credit - these things have all made it relatively easy to hit the ground running and stay running.
Now comes the real test. Because it’s pretty easy to move into a bedsit in Ealing or a dingy studio in Dorchester when what you’ve come from is barely comparable if not worse. The transition is harder when compromises have to be made, when maybe for the first time you are reliant on help - maybe from a relative, a family friend or whoever.
It’s easy to be smug, there seems to be a lot of schadenfraude around at the moment. It’s also easy to forget that amidst the train wreckage that sees greedy builders and unscrupulous bankers get what many see as what’s coming to them are also entangled the fates of people who didn’t decide where we were going or how we were going to get there but jumped aboard because they just wanted to go somewhere. Derailment wasn’t their idea.
And here we are, emigration is back on the table. It’s back because anyone with a shred of common sense knew that what emerged here over the last dozen years couldn’t last forever. We didn’t expect it to come to such a shuddering halt either. Boom then bust, it’s a cycle as old as money itself.
Emigration. Not a dirty word, embrace it, if viewed as an opportunity for personal development, growth and enrichment then it’s not too scary a concept. To live somewhere else, to soak it up and allow the experience to enhance you and broaden your view, even to become dislocated is not as irreversible as it sounds. I have in fact only good things to say about the feeling.
We at least have the comfort of knowing that, despite years of political ineptitude, we are better placed now to participate in whatever type of recovery presents itself than we ever were twenty years ago. We will never return to the days when emigration decimated families and butchered communities all over the country.
Emigration II - This time it’s not so personal.
Where's All The Money Gone?
So all the money in the world has disappeared. It’s just gone, people like Bernie Madoff ( the most aptly name con artist ever) Breifne O’ Brien and Michael Lynn took every shilling. You know the few bob you had put away to do the back garden next Summer, Michael Lynn is using that to buy cosmopolitans for his wife in Costa Rica as we speak.
So maybe it’s not correct to say it has disappeared, it’s just been moved from where we all assumed it was to a secret location known to only a select few. Madoff and O’Brien, we are told, were operating pyramid schemes which presumably lured people in on the false pretext that they would be getting into the Egyptian property market on the “ground floor“ as they say. “Oh it’s a lovely two bedroom place, fifteen minutes to downtown Cairo, Nile views.” Their money is now an artifact.
Lynn used a bank’s money to get himself a nice big pile up in Howth and then used the profile of said pile to convince several other banks to give him yet more money, all collateralised by the fantasy that the value of the property would head skywards and never stop. It did stop and the dream died.
Sean Fitzpatrick found himself a bit short one day despite the €3 million approx. per year he was pulling out of his employers in wages and bonuses. So he went into work that very day and decided to write himself a loan for €87 million to tide himself over till pay day.
The government then decided in an act of unparalleled benevolence that they would use our money to shore up his bank and leave it up to Fitzy himself to decide if he wanted to continue working there. Less than two years ago a share in this bank would have cost you the price of a round of drinks in a Dublin nightclub. Today the same share can be had for the price of a Macaroon bar.
Now it’s the people who have to produce the paper trail to reflect all these comings and goings that I feel sorry for. The financial oompa loompas. Did you ever get yourself ensnared in a cycle of small loans amongst a group of people? And then when you were flush again you had to go about sorting it all out. “Here’s the fiver I borrowed off you the other day but you owe Frank a tenner so I’ll just give this to him and you still owe him a fiver but Frank owes Paddy fifteen quid so when you get that fiver give it to him and Frank will owe Paddy a tenner but I got three quid off Paddy the other day for the papers so you give him seven and give me three, actually give me back that fiver I gave you a minute ago and I’ll give you two quid. Right . Everyone happy.”
Now imagine trying to do this with hundreds of parties, seven figure sums and infinite paperwork. Is there even any point, it’s obvious not much attention has been paid to procedure up to this point, will anyone even read the stuff.? Price Waterhouse Cooper are supposed to be experts and they didn’t bother, it’s the Financial Regulator’s raison d’etre and he didn’t bother.
I think the best thing to do would be to wipe the slate clean. It’s like a game of monopoly that has gotten out of control. You’re still up at five in the morning, delirious and confused alleging all manner of collusion and sharp practice. All you own is a derelict bottle factory, the guy beside you has that much money you can’t even see him. You know shenanigans have taken place but are not certain what. Heel up the table, let a few roars and insist we start again.
What do you do when your PC starts giving you messages you don’t understand? You shut it down, reboot and that usually sorts it out. The government should adopt a similar technique, shut down the economy and reboot. Give everyone a hundred quid seed money and see what happens.
Let’s make use of some of those islands off the west coast and banish anyone not playing by the rules. A financial leper colony. We could have a lavish ceremony to open it with President McAleese performing the ribbon cutting and officiating at the introduction of the first inmates - Fitzy, O’Brien and Lynn (if we can find him of course). We would need to pick a fairly small, barren island with scarce grazing in order to provide the right conditions for penance and mature reflection. Throw Bishop Magee over there as well to fill the modern day Fr. Matthew role.
Of course if we’re starting over we can’t have the same tired old hacks running the show. Sweeping changes are needed. I think that based on what we’ve seen over the last year there is only one credible candidate for Taoiseach and that is Bill Cullen.
A man of seemingly unshakeable principle. A candidate on the televised job interview which he hosted last year employed a bit of deception and sharp practice in order to win a task and she was immediately and ruthlessly dismissed by Bill.
A man deeply rooted in working class Dublin, savvy and streetwise. A self made man who has never lost sight of his austere beginnings, who knows the value of a dollar and most importantly will not suffer fools gladly. A man of considerable charm, an important attribute considering the task we face in re ingratiating ourselves in Europe after the shambles of last year.
What a difference six months make, we didn’t want to play last summer because the bullies owned the game now we’d love to play because, with the help of the meltdown, we have figured out that the prospect of kicking stones around the corner of the yard by ourselves indefinitely doesn’t appeal.
A man who unlike the current occupant understands that politics is show business, and he has already proven himself to be pretty adept at that. But mostly because we all know who up there needs the P45 treatment and the thought of Bill lining them up and uttering those two magic words is too good to ignore.
So maybe it’s not correct to say it has disappeared, it’s just been moved from where we all assumed it was to a secret location known to only a select few. Madoff and O’Brien, we are told, were operating pyramid schemes which presumably lured people in on the false pretext that they would be getting into the Egyptian property market on the “ground floor“ as they say. “Oh it’s a lovely two bedroom place, fifteen minutes to downtown Cairo, Nile views.” Their money is now an artifact.
Lynn used a bank’s money to get himself a nice big pile up in Howth and then used the profile of said pile to convince several other banks to give him yet more money, all collateralised by the fantasy that the value of the property would head skywards and never stop. It did stop and the dream died.
Sean Fitzpatrick found himself a bit short one day despite the €3 million approx. per year he was pulling out of his employers in wages and bonuses. So he went into work that very day and decided to write himself a loan for €87 million to tide himself over till pay day.
The government then decided in an act of unparalleled benevolence that they would use our money to shore up his bank and leave it up to Fitzy himself to decide if he wanted to continue working there. Less than two years ago a share in this bank would have cost you the price of a round of drinks in a Dublin nightclub. Today the same share can be had for the price of a Macaroon bar.
Now it’s the people who have to produce the paper trail to reflect all these comings and goings that I feel sorry for. The financial oompa loompas. Did you ever get yourself ensnared in a cycle of small loans amongst a group of people? And then when you were flush again you had to go about sorting it all out. “Here’s the fiver I borrowed off you the other day but you owe Frank a tenner so I’ll just give this to him and you still owe him a fiver but Frank owes Paddy fifteen quid so when you get that fiver give it to him and Frank will owe Paddy a tenner but I got three quid off Paddy the other day for the papers so you give him seven and give me three, actually give me back that fiver I gave you a minute ago and I’ll give you two quid. Right . Everyone happy.”
Now imagine trying to do this with hundreds of parties, seven figure sums and infinite paperwork. Is there even any point, it’s obvious not much attention has been paid to procedure up to this point, will anyone even read the stuff.? Price Waterhouse Cooper are supposed to be experts and they didn’t bother, it’s the Financial Regulator’s raison d’etre and he didn’t bother.
I think the best thing to do would be to wipe the slate clean. It’s like a game of monopoly that has gotten out of control. You’re still up at five in the morning, delirious and confused alleging all manner of collusion and sharp practice. All you own is a derelict bottle factory, the guy beside you has that much money you can’t even see him. You know shenanigans have taken place but are not certain what. Heel up the table, let a few roars and insist we start again.
What do you do when your PC starts giving you messages you don’t understand? You shut it down, reboot and that usually sorts it out. The government should adopt a similar technique, shut down the economy and reboot. Give everyone a hundred quid seed money and see what happens.
Let’s make use of some of those islands off the west coast and banish anyone not playing by the rules. A financial leper colony. We could have a lavish ceremony to open it with President McAleese performing the ribbon cutting and officiating at the introduction of the first inmates - Fitzy, O’Brien and Lynn (if we can find him of course). We would need to pick a fairly small, barren island with scarce grazing in order to provide the right conditions for penance and mature reflection. Throw Bishop Magee over there as well to fill the modern day Fr. Matthew role.
Of course if we’re starting over we can’t have the same tired old hacks running the show. Sweeping changes are needed. I think that based on what we’ve seen over the last year there is only one credible candidate for Taoiseach and that is Bill Cullen.
A man of seemingly unshakeable principle. A candidate on the televised job interview which he hosted last year employed a bit of deception and sharp practice in order to win a task and she was immediately and ruthlessly dismissed by Bill.
A man deeply rooted in working class Dublin, savvy and streetwise. A self made man who has never lost sight of his austere beginnings, who knows the value of a dollar and most importantly will not suffer fools gladly. A man of considerable charm, an important attribute considering the task we face in re ingratiating ourselves in Europe after the shambles of last year.
What a difference six months make, we didn’t want to play last summer because the bullies owned the game now we’d love to play because, with the help of the meltdown, we have figured out that the prospect of kicking stones around the corner of the yard by ourselves indefinitely doesn’t appeal.
A man who unlike the current occupant understands that politics is show business, and he has already proven himself to be pretty adept at that. But mostly because we all know who up there needs the P45 treatment and the thought of Bill lining them up and uttering those two magic words is too good to ignore.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Nobody Knows Anything
These are uncertain times and we have a tendency to look to experts in certain fields for insight and analysis, to spot trends and make predictions. We want to know how bad things are going to get or when, in fact, things are going to improve. We want to equip ourselves with as much expert knowledge as possible in order to make informed choices regarding matters which affect our futures. This is all very sensible and commendable but where can we now go for reliable and credible information? We have seen over the last year a systematic discrediting of practically all the traditional sources of what we would have once considered sound or reliable analysis. We have arrived at a point where nobody knows anything.
These are dark days indeed for punditry of all types. Locally we have had the ESRI , every stockbrokerage firm in Dublin, the IAVI and ultimately the Department of Finance having to revise reports or forecasts as soon as they were broadcast because “ehh.. fundamentals have changed”. Internationally we have had venerable institutions like the OECD, the World Bank, IMF all do likewise because nobody had the faintest idea what was unravelling or how big the mess would be when it did. The tone of political or economic commentary that was available in our well respected newspapers and magazines mutated on a daily basis to keep pace with the slurry being unearthed in the real world. Forecasts relating to economic growth, inflation, interest rates, borrowing requirements, unemployment etc. were all turned out with smug nonchalance only to be “updated” the following day because 3rd quarter Bolivian GDP figures had not been as robust as expected. Ahem. Globalisation, you see.
So nobody knows anything. Nobody, that is, except David McWilliams. You see a couple of years ago Daithi produced a series for RTE wherein he outlined for us in gory detail what would happen to us all when (not if but when) the property genie got back into her bottle. We sat back and we had a good laugh at Daithi with his cumbersome demographic labels like “decklanders” and “the Jagger Generation”. We wondered what would drive a man, one of our own, to such depths of bitterness and begrudgery. What could make someone so cynical, we felt sorry for this little ginger creature in his everlasting navy suit whose only source of amusement was to try and rain on everyone’s parade. So we watched for a few minutes, chuckled, and turned over to The Naked Camera.
We thought the Celtic Tiger had put paid to the type of begrudgery that Daithi now seemed to be peddling. He had our sympathy because the rest of us had transcended all that ’oul nonsense. We dismissed him as a crank but at the same time we couldn’t shake the idea of Daithi and his dire prognostications. What if some naive types out there started to buy into what he was saying, what if doubt slowly started to creep in, what if the cracks started to appear? Well if they did we at least knew who to blame.
And so it came to pass, Daithi single handedly sent us plummeting into the mother of all recessions. And I would be hesitant to limit the extent of Daithi’s liability at Ireland’s threshold, I would be inclined to suggest that the entire global meltdown of which we are now in the throes can be laid squarely at Daithi’s Dalkey Doorstep. The anecdotal evidence would seem to suggest that the glut of overpriced semi d’s in Ashbourne was the final nail in the coffin for Lehman Brothers.
So Daithi knows what is happening right now, he knows a great deal about what has happened in the past and he can predict the future with frightening accuracy. Some would say he can even shape the future. In any other country a man of this proven stature would be revered as a kind of deity. He would be elevated to high office and at the very least would have a bank holiday named after him. Daithi Day. So what have we done in Ireland to avail of his talents, to exploit his talismanic qualities? Ehh... zilch is the answer to that. Absolutely nothing.
That’s not to say that Daithi is marginalised, that he doesn’t have a captive audience. He produces articles in a daily newspaper which tell the powers that be, in step by step fashion so as to be easily understood, what to do. If he is proposing a task force or a committee to deal with a particular issue he will even name them, the “untouchables” for instance. Daithi does all the legwork so the government doesn’t have to. Yet what evidence do we have that any of Daithi’s suggestions are being taken on board and implemented? None, because they are not. They are being ignored. The one man in the country who knows something is being ignored.
Could it be that there is something other worldly about the level of knowledge that Daithi possesses? Those who currently hold the reins are afraid that such genuine expertise could destabilise everything and bring the whole system as we know it tumbling down. In the presence of such cosmic brilliance the current equilibrium of mediocrity would surely be undermined and collapse. We all know what happened when Samson eventually made his way into the temple. The current mob know that if Daithi were to arrive, their days would be numbered. The public could no longer tolerate talentless charlatans when they have had a taste of someone who knows his stuff about stuff that relates to us and can articulate such stuff in a fashion that is quite comprehensible, pleasant and agreeable. Not at all stuffy.
So that’s why Daithi is not running the show. Daithi would recommend remedial action which would threaten the cosy network, and we can’t have that. Daithi is capable of coming up with ideas, good ideas, from his very own head. He is photogenic, articulate and charismatic and those are qualities we have no need of here. This, after all ,is not America.
Alas, for now Daithi is confined to his newspaper forum while the real power resides in the hands of those who have proven themselves to be incapable of using it for the good of anyone apart from themselves. His following will remain loyal and patient, the opportunity will eventually present itself, and when it does the suit will be navy and the shirt will be tieless.
Take me to your leader.
These are dark days indeed for punditry of all types. Locally we have had the ESRI , every stockbrokerage firm in Dublin, the IAVI and ultimately the Department of Finance having to revise reports or forecasts as soon as they were broadcast because “ehh.. fundamentals have changed”. Internationally we have had venerable institutions like the OECD, the World Bank, IMF all do likewise because nobody had the faintest idea what was unravelling or how big the mess would be when it did. The tone of political or economic commentary that was available in our well respected newspapers and magazines mutated on a daily basis to keep pace with the slurry being unearthed in the real world. Forecasts relating to economic growth, inflation, interest rates, borrowing requirements, unemployment etc. were all turned out with smug nonchalance only to be “updated” the following day because 3rd quarter Bolivian GDP figures had not been as robust as expected. Ahem. Globalisation, you see.
So nobody knows anything. Nobody, that is, except David McWilliams. You see a couple of years ago Daithi produced a series for RTE wherein he outlined for us in gory detail what would happen to us all when (not if but when) the property genie got back into her bottle. We sat back and we had a good laugh at Daithi with his cumbersome demographic labels like “decklanders” and “the Jagger Generation”. We wondered what would drive a man, one of our own, to such depths of bitterness and begrudgery. What could make someone so cynical, we felt sorry for this little ginger creature in his everlasting navy suit whose only source of amusement was to try and rain on everyone’s parade. So we watched for a few minutes, chuckled, and turned over to The Naked Camera.
We thought the Celtic Tiger had put paid to the type of begrudgery that Daithi now seemed to be peddling. He had our sympathy because the rest of us had transcended all that ’oul nonsense. We dismissed him as a crank but at the same time we couldn’t shake the idea of Daithi and his dire prognostications. What if some naive types out there started to buy into what he was saying, what if doubt slowly started to creep in, what if the cracks started to appear? Well if they did we at least knew who to blame.
And so it came to pass, Daithi single handedly sent us plummeting into the mother of all recessions. And I would be hesitant to limit the extent of Daithi’s liability at Ireland’s threshold, I would be inclined to suggest that the entire global meltdown of which we are now in the throes can be laid squarely at Daithi’s Dalkey Doorstep. The anecdotal evidence would seem to suggest that the glut of overpriced semi d’s in Ashbourne was the final nail in the coffin for Lehman Brothers.
So Daithi knows what is happening right now, he knows a great deal about what has happened in the past and he can predict the future with frightening accuracy. Some would say he can even shape the future. In any other country a man of this proven stature would be revered as a kind of deity. He would be elevated to high office and at the very least would have a bank holiday named after him. Daithi Day. So what have we done in Ireland to avail of his talents, to exploit his talismanic qualities? Ehh... zilch is the answer to that. Absolutely nothing.
That’s not to say that Daithi is marginalised, that he doesn’t have a captive audience. He produces articles in a daily newspaper which tell the powers that be, in step by step fashion so as to be easily understood, what to do. If he is proposing a task force or a committee to deal with a particular issue he will even name them, the “untouchables” for instance. Daithi does all the legwork so the government doesn’t have to. Yet what evidence do we have that any of Daithi’s suggestions are being taken on board and implemented? None, because they are not. They are being ignored. The one man in the country who knows something is being ignored.
Could it be that there is something other worldly about the level of knowledge that Daithi possesses? Those who currently hold the reins are afraid that such genuine expertise could destabilise everything and bring the whole system as we know it tumbling down. In the presence of such cosmic brilliance the current equilibrium of mediocrity would surely be undermined and collapse. We all know what happened when Samson eventually made his way into the temple. The current mob know that if Daithi were to arrive, their days would be numbered. The public could no longer tolerate talentless charlatans when they have had a taste of someone who knows his stuff about stuff that relates to us and can articulate such stuff in a fashion that is quite comprehensible, pleasant and agreeable. Not at all stuffy.
So that’s why Daithi is not running the show. Daithi would recommend remedial action which would threaten the cosy network, and we can’t have that. Daithi is capable of coming up with ideas, good ideas, from his very own head. He is photogenic, articulate and charismatic and those are qualities we have no need of here. This, after all ,is not America.
Alas, for now Daithi is confined to his newspaper forum while the real power resides in the hands of those who have proven themselves to be incapable of using it for the good of anyone apart from themselves. His following will remain loyal and patient, the opportunity will eventually present itself, and when it does the suit will be navy and the shirt will be tieless.
Take me to your leader.
Mind Your Head
What if your grown up kids won’t talk to you? Imagine putting in all that effort over the years tending to their every need, trying your best only for them to ultimately reject you. For them to develop the idea that there was something in your approach, some element of the way you tried to rear them that they found irrevocably offensive. You tread a very fine line and it’s an easy thing to err slightly on one side or the other, too draconian or too liberal. In most cases once children reach a certain age they automatically forgive parents of everything heretofore by putting it down to a clash of youthful angst and mature conservatism. What, typically, is the reason for the animosity to be carried over into adulthood?
An obviously tyrannical approach on the part of the parent is one obvious answer. To enforce such a level of strictness as to stymie a child’s social development or inhibit his or her ability to relate in a normal healthy way to peers can quite justifiably be the source of considerable resentment later in life. Any level of emotional or physical abuse will obviously also lead to resentment. But what of the situation where a parent is adopting reasonable methodology, avoiding either extreme? We have all seen even these situations spill over into open hostility later in life.
The simple explanation could be all about the age in which we live. Nowadays we are subjected to an ever expanding tornado of media. The sources are many and varied. We have a 24/7 news cycle with a choice of several all day TV news channels, the internet, not to mention the plethora of traditional print media, newspapers and magazines. The field is crowded and the amount and variety of content seems to be on the increase all the time. One daily paper will introduce a healthy living supplement on Wednesday and before long they all have one. The ante is constantly on the up and in an effort to stay ahead of the competition you will get newspapers unveiling features week by week on all manner of topics. Travel specials, spring garden planting specials, personal finance, health and more appropriately for the subject at hand, mental health.
Discussion of mental health and related issues have quite rightly assumed a much more prominent position in Ireland in recent years. We now feel more inclined to talk openly about things that we would not have up to even as recently as a decade ago. We are a more affluent people, travel more and are generally more inclined to take notice of how things are done elsewhere. There are aspects of American culture in particular that we have as a nation become enamoured with and consequently sought to assimilate into our own lives. It is seen as a mark of our new found sophistication to adopt elements of the lifestyle that we perceive as being progressive and urbane and is thus in keeping with our own self image in this regard. A couple of the characters in Sex and the City for example provide a model for many women on how it’s possible to take control of your professional and personal life and in the process subvert what would be considered by many to be traditional values here in Ireland.
We look to the United States as the origin of practically all social phenomena which eventually work their way into the fabric over here. We look at their literature, cinema and TV drama to which we are all exposed and we see characters openly discussing relationships, feelings, emotions. Such characters are usually placed in affluent settings - they are professional, educated people. We aspire to such openness, we see it as being progressive, mature, sophisticated. We want to be seen as complex individuals with the depth to tackle such issues candidly and without self consciousness. We are affluent, cultured people why shouldn’t we also be complex?
And so over time the landscape changes, each successive generation being that little bit more inclined to broach subjects that were heretofore off limits. Familiarity with psychological and psychoanalytical terminology becomes more widespread, strands of the language start to change. We talk about things such as abandonment issues and separation anxiety. We begin to look at elements of our past: our childhood, our relationships with siblings, with parents. We might resurrect a memory that bears analysis in a new light, in the framework of seeking to understand why it is that we are who we are. And it’s here that something long forgotten may get flagged under the new microscope of introspection, an incident or a comment becomes a slight or an injustice, a reason to change the dynamic of a relationship.
Discussions of this nature become synonymous with people like the characters represented in the show “Brothers and Sisters”: slightly dysfunctional absolutely but also educated, intelligent and complex and therefore very attractive in our eyes. It follows that if the characters are alluring then the subject matter and it’s discussion inevitably is also. Pop culture has such a power to destigmatise things for us. To endorse a certain type of behaviour, to validate a certain type of discussion.
Is it possible that left unchecked such pervasive cultural influences will eventually erode our national identity - that we will cease to be Irish people with all the associated quirks and foibles and become a nation of people with “issues”? We have shown ourselves to be more than willing to absorb everything that America throws at us, have we passed the tipping point, are we capable of screening out what is pulp and just accepting what is worth while? The United States is the template for how so much of our lives unfold despite our protestations to the contrary. You cannot on the one hand bad mouth imperialist America while simultaneously accepting without question every one of it’s cultural exports.
There was a recent Ray D’Arcy radio show which involved a discussion about childhood bedrooms being redeployed as something else by the parents once the children in question had grown up and moved out. Listeners were invited to text and e mail their comments and feelings on the topic. Such a show would have been inconceivable even ten years ago. Back then people in this country would not have received encouragement from any quarter to “feel” anything about such a frivolous thing, but now there are prods from all directions. Nothing is too trivial to have feelings about. This is the message we are getting. From the supplement with your newspaper to women’s fashion magazines to every second drama on television. It’s OK to feel. The logical conclusion of such interminable analysis of life’s minutiae could easily be the reinterpretation of some parental guideline from the dim and distant past as an attempt to crush your dreams or decimate your childhood.
In the realm of emotional health the media and ultimately ourselves have allowed life to imitate art. The discussion may have been opened on our behalf but we can still decide when we want to change the subject.
Care to share? Because you’re worth it.
An obviously tyrannical approach on the part of the parent is one obvious answer. To enforce such a level of strictness as to stymie a child’s social development or inhibit his or her ability to relate in a normal healthy way to peers can quite justifiably be the source of considerable resentment later in life. Any level of emotional or physical abuse will obviously also lead to resentment. But what of the situation where a parent is adopting reasonable methodology, avoiding either extreme? We have all seen even these situations spill over into open hostility later in life.
The simple explanation could be all about the age in which we live. Nowadays we are subjected to an ever expanding tornado of media. The sources are many and varied. We have a 24/7 news cycle with a choice of several all day TV news channels, the internet, not to mention the plethora of traditional print media, newspapers and magazines. The field is crowded and the amount and variety of content seems to be on the increase all the time. One daily paper will introduce a healthy living supplement on Wednesday and before long they all have one. The ante is constantly on the up and in an effort to stay ahead of the competition you will get newspapers unveiling features week by week on all manner of topics. Travel specials, spring garden planting specials, personal finance, health and more appropriately for the subject at hand, mental health.
Discussion of mental health and related issues have quite rightly assumed a much more prominent position in Ireland in recent years. We now feel more inclined to talk openly about things that we would not have up to even as recently as a decade ago. We are a more affluent people, travel more and are generally more inclined to take notice of how things are done elsewhere. There are aspects of American culture in particular that we have as a nation become enamoured with and consequently sought to assimilate into our own lives. It is seen as a mark of our new found sophistication to adopt elements of the lifestyle that we perceive as being progressive and urbane and is thus in keeping with our own self image in this regard. A couple of the characters in Sex and the City for example provide a model for many women on how it’s possible to take control of your professional and personal life and in the process subvert what would be considered by many to be traditional values here in Ireland.
We look to the United States as the origin of practically all social phenomena which eventually work their way into the fabric over here. We look at their literature, cinema and TV drama to which we are all exposed and we see characters openly discussing relationships, feelings, emotions. Such characters are usually placed in affluent settings - they are professional, educated people. We aspire to such openness, we see it as being progressive, mature, sophisticated. We want to be seen as complex individuals with the depth to tackle such issues candidly and without self consciousness. We are affluent, cultured people why shouldn’t we also be complex?
And so over time the landscape changes, each successive generation being that little bit more inclined to broach subjects that were heretofore off limits. Familiarity with psychological and psychoanalytical terminology becomes more widespread, strands of the language start to change. We talk about things such as abandonment issues and separation anxiety. We begin to look at elements of our past: our childhood, our relationships with siblings, with parents. We might resurrect a memory that bears analysis in a new light, in the framework of seeking to understand why it is that we are who we are. And it’s here that something long forgotten may get flagged under the new microscope of introspection, an incident or a comment becomes a slight or an injustice, a reason to change the dynamic of a relationship.
Discussions of this nature become synonymous with people like the characters represented in the show “Brothers and Sisters”: slightly dysfunctional absolutely but also educated, intelligent and complex and therefore very attractive in our eyes. It follows that if the characters are alluring then the subject matter and it’s discussion inevitably is also. Pop culture has such a power to destigmatise things for us. To endorse a certain type of behaviour, to validate a certain type of discussion.
Is it possible that left unchecked such pervasive cultural influences will eventually erode our national identity - that we will cease to be Irish people with all the associated quirks and foibles and become a nation of people with “issues”? We have shown ourselves to be more than willing to absorb everything that America throws at us, have we passed the tipping point, are we capable of screening out what is pulp and just accepting what is worth while? The United States is the template for how so much of our lives unfold despite our protestations to the contrary. You cannot on the one hand bad mouth imperialist America while simultaneously accepting without question every one of it’s cultural exports.
There was a recent Ray D’Arcy radio show which involved a discussion about childhood bedrooms being redeployed as something else by the parents once the children in question had grown up and moved out. Listeners were invited to text and e mail their comments and feelings on the topic. Such a show would have been inconceivable even ten years ago. Back then people in this country would not have received encouragement from any quarter to “feel” anything about such a frivolous thing, but now there are prods from all directions. Nothing is too trivial to have feelings about. This is the message we are getting. From the supplement with your newspaper to women’s fashion magazines to every second drama on television. It’s OK to feel. The logical conclusion of such interminable analysis of life’s minutiae could easily be the reinterpretation of some parental guideline from the dim and distant past as an attempt to crush your dreams or decimate your childhood.
In the realm of emotional health the media and ultimately ourselves have allowed life to imitate art. The discussion may have been opened on our behalf but we can still decide when we want to change the subject.
Care to share? Because you’re worth it.
Have I Got News For You
How much information can you absorb at one time? If you want to catch up on World News and tune into CNN or Bloomberg you will have data coming at you from three sources simultaneously.
The newscaster is speaking to you, there is a square grid in the corner of the screen with figures which change every few seconds and then there is the horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen which is constantly in motion. When you first tune in it is overwhelming. You actually need a few minutes to find your feet. It is not possible to successfully assimilate information coming at you from several sources at the same time. So you have to decide which one to concentrate on , which is hard work.
If you want to just listen to the voice it requires a lot of effort to exclude the other visual content. You could of course close your eyes but this is TV, sound and vision, so closing yourself off to the vision fundamentally diminishes the whole experience. You can try to just read one of the blocks of information which is even harder because the voice constantly pulls at you, you will pick up a word or a bit of a sentence that demands your attention and by the time you have extricated yourself from it’s grip the piece of the information that you were half way through on the bottom bar has disappeared. Would listening to your I Pod at the same time help? Probably not as you would simply get yourself entangled in a song with similarly distracting consequences.
It can be a thoroughly frustrating experience and an arrangement which is slowly finding it’s wicked way onto other channels. Ireland AM has the horizontal bar at the bottom which dispenses weather updates, Munster team news and general newsworthy tit bits while Sinead and Mark tell you about an unmissable wedding fair next week in the RDS.
The Sunday Game on RTE now has the dreaded bottom bar which ensures that we are kept up to date with everyone’s point of view such as those of Seamus in Caherciveen who thinks that “the referee in Killarney today was an absolute disgrace” or Tadhg in Ballina who reckons that “ the Connaught championship is a total shambles”. There are four pundits in the studio, I really don’t think the subject matter at hand requires any more input.
What could be at work in the case of The Sunday Game is that somebody in RTE is convinced that the programme is watched only by uncouth culchies for whom the sight of their comment scrolling across the screen would provide the thrill of a lifetime. A kind of audience participation. “Go on Joe send it, send it sure it’s great gas.”
Sky News and Sky Sports News have long been offenders. How can I digest information in relation to the status of Manchester City’s bid for Kaka, Carling Cup quarter final results and the results of Patrice Evra’s appeal to the FA disciplinary committee at the same time? I can’t because it’s not possible. What’s all the panic about anyway? Why can’t these items, all worthy stories in their own right be taken individually and dealt with one at a time? Believe me, football fans who are watching Sky’s lunchtime report on a Tuesday afternoon are going nowhere, they can stick around, slow down.
In trying to do everything at once they end up doing nothing. I have tried too many times to navigate my way through these types of bulletins only to come away bleary eyed, ill informed and frustrated.
The best you can hope for is a deranged cocktail of information, a smattering of everything “ Ronan O’Gara is fit to line out today as UN Humanitarian Director for Hezbollah in New York as they take on bottom of the table Abbeyfeale who require a bonus point win to keep them in touch with the Tamil Tigers who have just announced nineteen hundred redundancies and are relocating to Poland”. Grand, that’s me up to speed then.
Maybe women are the target market. The general perception is that they are capable of performing several tasks at once or “multi tasking“ as it‘s commonly known.
It’s not a myth either - I have seen my wife make lasagne, bathe the kids, pay tolls online, file utility bills and keep abreast of developments on Coronation Street all at the same time. I on the other hand need to apportion at least one hour of my time to the sole task of pairing socks which will inevitably still remain incomplete.
Mercifully the nine o’ clock news on RTE contains no such focus splitting shenanigans. They do however have a penchant for a phenomenon which I first encountered on local news channels in the United States - the on the spot live reporter. Somebody on the production team up there is of the view that a certain amount of urgency and edginess can be instilled into the most humdrum story by placing a reporter at the scene.
Now this is fine if the report concerns ,say, a jack knifed lorry or a civil disturbance. We get a view of the scene and a consequent insight into the scale of what has taken place.
But when the story concerns a meeting at the labour court or an announcement of a few job losses at a component manufacturer in Dundalk the live reporter is utterly pointless. How often have you seen an unfortunate reporter cowering under an umbrella at 9.15 at night in front of an office building wherein nothing noteworthy has happened since at least five hours previously. Everyone concerned has long since gone home. I’m sure he or she would prefer to deliver the commentary sitting across the desk from the anchor in a cosy studio. But that just wouldn’t feel as live though would it? There’s nothing like the sight of traffic moving in the background and the sound of a gale force wind howling to generate the feeling that you are witnessing something monumental unfolding before your eyes.
George Lee, he gets to speak from the studio every night. And I suppose that’s fair enough because with the kind of news he’s been delivering recently, we all need to be sitting down.
The newscaster is speaking to you, there is a square grid in the corner of the screen with figures which change every few seconds and then there is the horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen which is constantly in motion. When you first tune in it is overwhelming. You actually need a few minutes to find your feet. It is not possible to successfully assimilate information coming at you from several sources at the same time. So you have to decide which one to concentrate on , which is hard work.
If you want to just listen to the voice it requires a lot of effort to exclude the other visual content. You could of course close your eyes but this is TV, sound and vision, so closing yourself off to the vision fundamentally diminishes the whole experience. You can try to just read one of the blocks of information which is even harder because the voice constantly pulls at you, you will pick up a word or a bit of a sentence that demands your attention and by the time you have extricated yourself from it’s grip the piece of the information that you were half way through on the bottom bar has disappeared. Would listening to your I Pod at the same time help? Probably not as you would simply get yourself entangled in a song with similarly distracting consequences.
It can be a thoroughly frustrating experience and an arrangement which is slowly finding it’s wicked way onto other channels. Ireland AM has the horizontal bar at the bottom which dispenses weather updates, Munster team news and general newsworthy tit bits while Sinead and Mark tell you about an unmissable wedding fair next week in the RDS.
The Sunday Game on RTE now has the dreaded bottom bar which ensures that we are kept up to date with everyone’s point of view such as those of Seamus in Caherciveen who thinks that “the referee in Killarney today was an absolute disgrace” or Tadhg in Ballina who reckons that “ the Connaught championship is a total shambles”. There are four pundits in the studio, I really don’t think the subject matter at hand requires any more input.
What could be at work in the case of The Sunday Game is that somebody in RTE is convinced that the programme is watched only by uncouth culchies for whom the sight of their comment scrolling across the screen would provide the thrill of a lifetime. A kind of audience participation. “Go on Joe send it, send it sure it’s great gas.”
Sky News and Sky Sports News have long been offenders. How can I digest information in relation to the status of Manchester City’s bid for Kaka, Carling Cup quarter final results and the results of Patrice Evra’s appeal to the FA disciplinary committee at the same time? I can’t because it’s not possible. What’s all the panic about anyway? Why can’t these items, all worthy stories in their own right be taken individually and dealt with one at a time? Believe me, football fans who are watching Sky’s lunchtime report on a Tuesday afternoon are going nowhere, they can stick around, slow down.
In trying to do everything at once they end up doing nothing. I have tried too many times to navigate my way through these types of bulletins only to come away bleary eyed, ill informed and frustrated.
The best you can hope for is a deranged cocktail of information, a smattering of everything “ Ronan O’Gara is fit to line out today as UN Humanitarian Director for Hezbollah in New York as they take on bottom of the table Abbeyfeale who require a bonus point win to keep them in touch with the Tamil Tigers who have just announced nineteen hundred redundancies and are relocating to Poland”. Grand, that’s me up to speed then.
Maybe women are the target market. The general perception is that they are capable of performing several tasks at once or “multi tasking“ as it‘s commonly known.
It’s not a myth either - I have seen my wife make lasagne, bathe the kids, pay tolls online, file utility bills and keep abreast of developments on Coronation Street all at the same time. I on the other hand need to apportion at least one hour of my time to the sole task of pairing socks which will inevitably still remain incomplete.
Mercifully the nine o’ clock news on RTE contains no such focus splitting shenanigans. They do however have a penchant for a phenomenon which I first encountered on local news channels in the United States - the on the spot live reporter. Somebody on the production team up there is of the view that a certain amount of urgency and edginess can be instilled into the most humdrum story by placing a reporter at the scene.
Now this is fine if the report concerns ,say, a jack knifed lorry or a civil disturbance. We get a view of the scene and a consequent insight into the scale of what has taken place.
But when the story concerns a meeting at the labour court or an announcement of a few job losses at a component manufacturer in Dundalk the live reporter is utterly pointless. How often have you seen an unfortunate reporter cowering under an umbrella at 9.15 at night in front of an office building wherein nothing noteworthy has happened since at least five hours previously. Everyone concerned has long since gone home. I’m sure he or she would prefer to deliver the commentary sitting across the desk from the anchor in a cosy studio. But that just wouldn’t feel as live though would it? There’s nothing like the sight of traffic moving in the background and the sound of a gale force wind howling to generate the feeling that you are witnessing something monumental unfolding before your eyes.
George Lee, he gets to speak from the studio every night. And I suppose that’s fair enough because with the kind of news he’s been delivering recently, we all need to be sitting down.
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