TB Is Not To Be

I kind of figured Tommy Broughan was not going to be standing for leadership of the Labour party when he phoned my mother on Wednesday night about a pretty minor local matter she had raised with his office. This was not exactly the mark of a man forming a kitchen cabinet and preparing to launch a campaign for the hearts and minds of Labour members.

Tommy is a hard working constituency politician, a reasonable Dail speaker and by most accounts, a decent fellow. Unfortunately for him, these are not sufficient qualities to be party leader. He lacks any visible support from any Labour big hitters. He lacks a national profile - but possibly this will-he-won't-he business was intended to raise one. Perhaps he thought that in a potentially divisive election between rival Labour factions he might - conceivably - have got in as a compromise candidate in a Jack Lynch, Jim Hacker sort of way. With no one else opposing Gilmore, that slim possibility was gone.

Since the election the point has been done to death but the lot of an opposition backbencher really is not a particularly happy one. He got my mother's minor matter sorted out with admirable efficiency but possibly this was the final straw for him.

'Screw this' he must have thought 'if I don't give this leadership lark a go, I'll be stuck dealing with this shite out of that shaggin' caravan 'til I retire'.

If every post had to be written in this way...

Succinctness would be considerably more treasured. Mrs PT has the laptop for the night so I decided to try out web browser on my Wii. Very impressive for reading and browsing, hellish for writing. every letter has to be pointed to on a virtual keyboard on screen. it has taken ten minutes to input this!

How do you prove you have read a webpage?

Why? Because of an increasingly pointless and dull discussion here.

I know, I know - I should know better.

On a brighter note, I found out I passed my exams yesterday. Extreme relief all round. Roll on the next level.

Update! Comments on the article have been closed and removed, "due to trolling". It could be the first occasion someone has cut off debate because of their own trolling but I'm assuming it is aimed at me (it is all about me, donchaknow?). But most people will never see it and make up their own minds. I guess when you call your blog Dublin Opinion it doesn't necessarily mean you always want people to give theirs or question yours too much. All that apart, it is normally a fine blog with lots of interesting stuff. Just don't ask Conor where he gets his statistics from...

New Definition Proposed

Election (n): That event that occurs every five years where the Irish people exercise their right to vote in a new Opposition.

But, it turns out we are happy

... and what's worse for Labour, it's because of our adoption of the dreaded Anglo Saxon model of capitalism.

I've been dealing with a French company at work extensively for the past few months. I have to send replies to emails from them with large cc: lists. The game is to try and see what is the most number of I'm-out-of-the-office autoreplies you can get with one email. Sending on a Monday is obviously good. Just after Christmas is better but anytime when they 'faire le pont' (take a day's holiday between a public holiday and the weekend), you are pretty much guaranteed a 33% rate of 'Je suis en congés jusqu'au ...' responses.

With a minimum 25 days holiday, more public holidays than here and the magic of RTT (réduction du temps de travail) whereby any hours over 35 in a week can be built up and used as extra holidays, it means they can easily have over 45 working days off in a year. I am envious. Everyone in the office is envious. It sounds so civilised, such a great way to live, so happy.

Except French workers are not happy at work. And we are.

What gives?

Some research on happiness in OECD countries by Deutsche Bank helps explain. Looking at the different models of capitalism in each country and comparing it with their level of happiness, the report identifies three broad groups of countries: "happy", "less happy" and "unhappy". The surprising result: the happy group were the Anglo-Saxon model capitalists (including us), the Nordic countries and Spain. The less happy group included France, Germany, Austria and Belgium. The unhappy group were the Southern Europeans (Italy, Greece and Portugal) and Japan and Korea.

Ten indicators were identified as being conducive to happiness: High levels of trust in fellow citizens, low corruption, low unemployment, high levels of education, high income, high employment rate of older people (retire later), small shadow economy, extensive economic freedom, low levels of employment protection and high birth rates.

Comparing Ireland and France on each of the indicators we are broadly similar on levels of corruption, high levels of income, size of shadow economy and birth rates. Where Ireland does better than France is on levels of trust, unemployment, education, employment rate of older people, extensive economic freedom and low levels of employment protection. The level of trust in a society is not really something you can legislate for, it is either there or it is not. Leaving aside education, the remaining cluster of indicators (economic freedom, low levels of employment protection, low unemployment rate and later retirement) are all related. With the exception of education, what appears to make Irish people happier than French people is that we are more economically free - despite our crap number of holidays.

It a case of happiness resulting from being closer to Boston than spending more time in Biarritz.

Hiatus

The weather improved, the baby started crawling, work suddenly got busy and I've got exams in a few weeks.

Back in five mins (or so).

Fecklessnessiosity

The ESRI released a report last week on participation levels in sport amongst different classes in Ireland and the resulting policy implications. It found that people with low income or low educational attainment had much lower participation in sport.

Regarding income, more people who play sport come from the top 25 per cent of earners than from the bottom 50 per cent. Regarding education, 43 per cent of people who play sport have a third-level qualification, compared to 28 per cent in the wider population.

It appears that around 53% of top half earners (the 'rich') play sport as opposed to only 30% of bottom half earners (the 'poor'). Uh oh, I know what you're thinking; lots of ammunition for the less PC / more rabid columnists at the Sunday Independent in those stats. Well the ESRI thought of that and are very eager to head it off at the pass:

It could be argued that there is no direct impact of income or education on playing sport, but that people with high motivation are simply more inclined to work hard to earn money, to obtain qualifications, and also to make the physical effort required to play sport. If this were to be true, then the relationship between income, educational attainment and playing sport revealed in the last chapter would be driven by a common underlying cause, motivation, and it would be incorrect to assert that low income and low educational attainment themselves cause people to play less. However, this hypothesis based on motivation finds little support in the data.

They go on to give the stats on levels of interest and non-interest in playing across the income quartiles. It turns out that a fairly consistent 58% or so, say they are interested in playing sport - with little variation due to income. So that's alright then. But it strikes me that interest and motivation are two different things. I, for one, am interested in playing sport but not sufficiently motivated to do so (it's too cold, I left my P.E. gear at home, I have a note).

For sheer devilment, lets assume that only those interested in playing sport are actually playing it. Based on this around 90% of the 'rich' that are interested in playing sport, do so but only around 52% of the 'poor' that are interested in playing sport, do so. This means that 48% of the poor who want to play sport, don't, compared to 10% of the rich.

The ESRI seeks external reasons for the disparity (what in society is preventing poor people playing sport). The report says the participation differences are not down to lack of facilities or sport being too expensive. It has a little to do with not having a car or not living in a big city, but these are only relatively minor effects. The report never really examines the case for 'internal' reasons (what is different about poor people that they do no play sport, even if interested) being the cause. It does, however, admit:-

Overall, it is not possible to rule out underlying psychological causes, such as motivation.

.. while being anxious to point out ..

But there is nothing in the data to suggest that this is a helpful approach for explaining the strong relationships between income, educational attainment and playing sport.

One could imagine that if there was something in the data that suggested that poorer people were interested but just lacked the motivation to play sport, the ESRI would think very, very hard about publishing it. They know that the day after they did, the newspapers would be full of 'ESRI Says The Poor Are Feckless' headlines. Fintan O'Toole et al would have a conniption. There would be apoplexy on the Joe Duffy show, questions in the Dail and righteous indignation all over the blogosphere . Probably best not to go looking for such data too hard, eh?