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Category Archives: Government

Earth is moving also for Limerick City of Culture

I was delighted to follow the developments today in Limerick, culminating in the resignation of the CEO from Limerick City of Culture 2014. One down, a few more to go, before there may be a possibility to build a board and a structure that can actually see a successful year of City of Culture through. A proper board only needs one bean counter. I doesn’t need any Gombeen-men (or women). It needs people who are experienced culture workers, with roots in Limerick and with a global outlook.

A good working board should be able to multiply the State contribution of €6 million, raising funds from other sources, if the successful delivery so requires. A real board should be transparent, making a year-long experience of high impact possible.

Limerick City of Culture 2014 Public Meeting

It was a public meeting, following the resignations of the artistic director of Limerick City of Culture 2014, Karl Wallace and two of his co-workers.

Many of us at the meeting requested that the board of Limerick City of Culture 2014 take their responsibility and step down, or at least, that the CEO steps down. Over the past few days, all the bad headlines in media have been caused by the Board – not the culture workers or people of Limerick.

The honest questions from culture workers and members of the public were met with political platitudes, such as Pat Cox’s statement that Karl Wallace’s resignation “was only a bump in the road”. Cox also claimed that the board, altruistically, “works for free”. I think we need to see the full accounts and ledgers of Limerick National City of Culture 2014 Ltd if we were to believe that statement. From where are the €120,000 coming, to pay the CEO?

Limerick National City Of Culture 2014 Ltd (Company Registration Number: 533149) was set up on Tuesday the 24th of September 2013 in Limerick. The company’s current directors Conn Murray and Tom Gilligan have been the directors of 16 other Irish companies between them, 2 of which are now closed.

Show us the documents

If  Irish politicians wanted to stay credible and trusted, they would force all the material, documents and recordings around the Anglo Irish Bank and all other connections to be published, on-line, on the web. Full open source disclosure, of more than 24 million documents.
First of all, it would open up the corrupt mess to citizens’ data mining, connecting the often murky threads and build cases against all those responsible. There will be nowhere to hide. As the Irish state cannot afford to have civil servants or consultants to work through this enormous material, enabling everybody to participate in this analysis could be a way forward. There is no need to have the truth filtered by expensive commissions, inquiries, solicitors, barristers, PR consultants, etc. Just give us full access to the big mess and I’m sure we will get it properly analyzed in a fully transparent way. Making all information available will also be a great source for research by future historians and economists.

Europe should demand that Ireland provides proper medical care

Over the last few days,  we’ve heard the usual Irish patriarchs rant about the value of life, etc., in Irish media. This is, without any doubt, in relation to forthcoming political and legal decisions following on from the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar (who was denied proper medical treatment in Galway University Hospital while suffering from a miscarriage). It is appalling to see and hear the Irish politicians running away from responsibility, as their self-deception continues.

What if a woman from another EU country, with proper laws and medical practice, had died in Ireland due to similar circumstances? Would the Irish government have dared to carry on with their inhumane, medieval shenanigans? It has been very close a few times that EU Citizens have been close to death in Irish hospitals due to the Irish Catholic delusions of medical practitioners and administrators.

As Ireland is about the hold the Presidency of the Council of the European Union from the 1st of January 2013, I think all Europeans coming here should demand that the Irish government accepts that it is now the 21st century and by European ethics, standards and medical practice, every woman should be given proper medical care, including abortion.

Some other links:

Ireland – no country for young women

Savita inquiry-falls-apart

Abortion in Ireland, the X-case

European Court: Irish abortion laws breach of Human Rights

Challenging times for learning science and technology

When I was growing up, I really enjoyed learning by experimenting with all kinds of things. I also learnt a lot from various educational science kits that sympathetic parents bought, probably trying to facilitate my interests (or hoping to contain the interests on the safe side of science and technology). There were all kinds of exciting kits, ranging from The Little Electrician, to the Chemistry kit, to the Nuclear Energy exploration kit….

In addition to this, it was really fun to combine the kits with Lego, Meccano and bits and pieces from broken things found in the basement.
Back in the 1960s, it was also possible, as a kid, to walk in to the local pharmacy and buy all kinds of interesting stuff (e.g. HCL, HNO3, H2SO4, NH3, more or less the whole chemical alphabet….). You could also get a good variety of electronic components in all radio shops.

Later in life, I have always tried to choose stuff with open-ended educational value when buying (or making!) birthday gifts to young people. Sadly, the possibility to send anything interesting abroad by post has recently been made almost impossible.

The Irish postal service An Post now demand that you fill out an Aviation Security Declaration when sending a larger letter or small parcel. As far as I have googled this, it’s a fairly recent thing (February 2012?). Perhaps it’s the UK that have forced Ireland into this, as most of the stuff posted in Ireland with destinations in Europe pass through the UK, and with the Olympics and other silly antics around the corner, they are really paranoid about everything.

This leaves me with the only option, to post the most dangerous of all things: books. Books may contain ideas that may change the world.

Are there Vogons in Clare County Council?

Vogon deodorant

A couple of weeks ago, our local community in Lisnagry and Annacotty in county Limerick discovered that our neighbour, county Clare, are planning to build a dual carriageway (what some would call a highway or cheapish motorway) straight through our local community. Their plans would require several houses to be demolished, farms to become unviable and the community segregated by a sacrifice on the altar of unlimited growth in road traffic.
Clare County Council claimed that they had made the plans publicly available already last year and that they had conducted at least one round of public consultation, which is really strange as none of us in the target area had any notion of this. Not even the farmers and landowners that the road would have a direct impact on (obliteration) had received any notice – no letter, no email, no carrier-pigeon, no nothing.
This, of course, reminds me of Douglas Adams‘ book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where Arthur Dent‘s house is about to be demolished due to the construction of a motorway and while Arthur is trying to protect is house, the Vogon Constructor Fleet arrives in the sky and shortly thereafter demolishes planet Earth. The plans for the new intergalactic route, for which Earth was an obstacle, had been exhibited for several years at Alpha Centauri 4.1 light-years away, on public display in a filing cabinet in the basement of the Galactic planning authority.
The pure arrogance of post-Celtic Tiger politicians is stunning. Having read all available documents (they are still holding back the Constraints Study!), it is very clear that they have extrapolated growth in traffic volume exponentially based on a few years historical data when cars were whizzing around paid for by pretend-money from some of the now defunct banks and trucks were rolling in every second with globalised goods to be consumed in an ever-increasing death spiral by the happy Irish consumers. It is just tragic that Clare County Council and the consultants they hired have completely missed the fact the Planet Earth have just passed Peak Oil and it would be time to consider alternative economies and different ways of living, for example, growing your own food, use a bicycle and stop buying cheap and unnecessary garbage products from far away factories filled with child labourers.

Un-Building

One of the main problems behind the boom-to-gloom economy is the illusion that buildings create value, or at least some kind of buildings. As I’ve written before, making things is crucial for our survival, but to keep making the wrong things for the wrong reasons is counterproductive, or put it more direct – stupid. Making things is good if these things are needed. If they are not needed, don’t make them. This applies to buildings as well. There’s no point building a garden shed if you don’t need it.
But more seriously, do we need more shopping centres in Limerick? I read in the Limerick Post today that the current Mayor of Limerick, Jim Long, wants more of the UK chains further dilute the viability of the few existing shops in the city.

“…my own preference here is for the Sainsbury, Marks and Spencer and the Asda chain, so successful in the North of Ireland.”

Now, that is the most stupid thing I’ve read, when said by a Limerick politician while the Limerick City Centre is decaying due to that the City and County have built an almost endless number of retail parks (what an oxymoron!) around the city. For each big chain store that opened along Childers Road, Ballysimon Road, etc., the local and often family run shops in town were forced to either close or relocate. You get what you plan for.

Parkway Valley chaos

Looking at the Parkway Valley area, there was a plan approved to build one of the largest shopping malls in Europe, which is totally insane when you consider that the population of the Limerick area is only about 140,000. The originally almost useless land on the east side of the Singland plane was envisaged to be worth multimillions if commercial rents and rates could be extracted for every square meter of soggy old flood plain. With the current state of the site, with massive unfinished concrete structures in place, the land is even worth less, and in my opinion it now has a negative value as the land cannot be used for anything sensible.

With the so called Opera Centre (which is a silly name), we still have time to do something more sensible. I think we should apply the term un-building to the site, which basically means to remove the derelict buildings and restore the land to a state where grass, trees and plants can grow, people can walk, play and breath and perhaps even have a few allotments for growing vegetables. Just imagine how inviting the city may look if the entrance to the city centre was green. By un-building, we open up all kinds of possibilities for the future while being able to enjoy the place now.

New (Irish) Dictionary

dead christmas tree

Arab Spring – a novel elastic form of democracy, originally developed in North Africa. It’ll never work in Ireland due to scattered showers and sunny spells.

Bailout – letting perpetrators get away while asking for more. Cf. dig-out, whip-around.

Billion – something you have never had but that you now have to pay to someone you don’t owe.

Bonus – an absurd amount of money paid to laid-off politicians, bankers, quango board members and higher civil servants in return for amnesia.

Crisis – what politicians and bankers experience when realising that their goal (making themselves richer) is not congruent with the goals of the general public.

Deficit – the current measure of trust in authority.

Haircut – a bald move, if succesful.

Household charge – the amount of electricity it takes to charge a mobile phone.

NAMA – an Irish nonsense word (cf. Bla bla bla), used for explaining all unmentionable things, avoiding truth (a.k.a. lying) and as a motivation for all kinds of unreasonable an irrational political decisions.

Occupation – reclaiming what is already ours.

Trolley – a major attraction in Irish hospitals. To be placed on a trolley makes you realise you’ve been taken for a ride, for years.

…to be continued…

>Muppet Republic

>Greedy businessmen (and women), many known as real-estate developers, in collaboration with the Irish banks drained the Irish economy of at least 90 billion euro over the last few years. That is the remaining balance when the economy now has ground to a halt and the developers say they cannot pay. The Irish government now wants the Irish people to pay them to pay the banks at least 90 billion to bail out the greedy developers.

Let’s think this through. There are outstanding “toxic” (i.e. cannot be repaid) loans of 90 billion. This amount was lent to the developers by the banks and profits have probably been moved off-shore, elsewhere, or just plainly spent on excessive consumption, by the aforementioned developers and bankers. As developers and bankers are now so unhappy, having to pay for themselves or go bankrupt or cease to be or disappear, they want us, you and me, to pay them 90 billion euro to allow them to continue their life styles and spend some quality time to try to figure out their next scheme to rob us of our savings (if any remaining), work (if any), life, pensions (if any), etc.

If we allow the defunct Irish government to proceed, we will all (every baby, teenager, adult, pensioner) be made to pay or owe 22,000 euro each, or, if the Central Statistics Office figures hold, about 62,000 euro per household.

Can you afford that?

Links: National Assets Management Agency (NAMA)