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'.

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.

Some Dutch Gold To Ease Our Election Angst

Maybe Bertie communes with CJH using Ray Burke as a medium.
Maybe Enda has trouble fighting off a cold let alone knife wielding muggers.
Maybe Michael wears a leather overcoat and peaked cap in the privacy of his own home.
Maybe Pat keeps a €20 note printing press in the back of his wardrobe.
Maybe Trevor dreams of hunting endangered species in an SUV with no catalytic converter.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Call me hopelessly naive and old fashioned but isn't voting for a new government meant to have some small relation to picking the party or candidates with the policies you are most in agreement with? Sure character is important both in terms of having the credibility and ability to get their policies implemented and also for the nature of the response to unknown future events that a five year term are bound to throw up. But whatever about their character, the important thing is for voters to want to get done what the parties say they will do.

"I like Bertie Enda Pat Etc. He'll get things done. I just disagree with what he wants to do."

During the Dutch elections an online service called Vote Match helped take some of the personality element out of the voting equation.

The Vote Match system compares your political preferences with questions and statements taken from election documents of political parties contesting the elections. You can give your views on these statements by clicking on 'agree', 'disagree', ‘neutral’ or 'don’t know'. After responding to all statements, you can indicate which issues you consider of extra importance. The program will then calculate which party has opinions closest to yours, and rank the other parties in descending order.

So who wants to create an Irish election version of this? And given the recent policy gyrations, would there be any point?

Because Tonight All the Parties Think It's 1979

Labour promises to keep changing policies until they discover one votes like lower tax rates. The PDs promise to buy votes increase social welfare spending on pensions. Fianna Fail warns everyone not to get carried away and talks about fiscal responsibility.

Who has been spiking the drinking water at Leinster House?

Maybe We're Just Not That Into It, Minister O Cuív

I have been arguing that people wanting to support the Irish Language should speak it if they know it, learn it if they don't (as distinct from just paying lip service to the language).

I wondered how would a working adult, who had forgotten most of their school Irish, go about (re)acquainting themselves with it? The rather obvious answer is to take some classes. So I had look on http://www.nightcourses.com for Irish language courses in Dublin. Results back: 157. 'My that's impressive' I thought 'a veritable groundswell of support. Must be those Seoige sisters..'. And then I started scrolling through the returned result. Ahh.

The nightcourses website search facility is a little eager and brings back everything mentioning 'Irish' in its blurb. So the Irish Taxation Institute courses are included along with those for Gael Linn.

So how many actual Irish language classes are being offered in Dublin?
Answer: I counted 71 classes in 34 different institutes, including ones for Irish Sign Language.

So plenty of choice and no excuse not to learn it, if you want to use and support it.

But then I came across this: Éamon O Cuív says "At a time of increasing affluence and choice in Irish society, it would appear that more and more people are opting for the Irish language."

Hmm.

I wanted to test out the Minister's contention that more and more people are opting for the Irish language. I wondered how many classes were being offered in other languages. For comparison purposes I did this search - for Italian classes in Dublin. After weeding out the cookery and opera classes I found there was 88 classes in 41 institutes.

More and more people may be opting for Irish. But it looks like, in Dublin at least, more still are opting for Italian.

How to Measure Media Slant

There is an interesting discussion over on the Cedar Lounge Revolution about the editorial movement to the right/centre/take-your-pick of the Irish Times. Apparently there are only three or so left-wing commentators remaining now that Eddie Holt has been axed. Personally I have my doubts about that but it does raise a really interesting question - how do we measure the 'slant' of a writer or paper one way or another? Fortunately I remembered an article (scroll to the end) I discovered on FinFacts about research by two University of Chicago economists, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, entitled “What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers”.

The methodology the researchers used was clever. They identified 1000 partisan phrases (from political speeches) and measured how frequently different newspapers used them in their non-editorial pages. So for example Republicans say “death tax” while Democrats say "Estate tax". They both mean the same thing but using one or the other reflect a certain slant. The results were pretty much as might expect - The Washington Times used Republican phrases while papers like The San Francisco Chronicle and The Boston Globe used Democratic ones. It is a useful ready-reckoner if you find yourself reading something from a non-familiar source - you can determine what slant they are likely to be coming from. The data can be found here.

The question is if one was attempting something similar for Irish papers or individual columnists (or even bloggers), what 'partisan' phrases should one use? For example: On the right: "national competitiveness", On the left: "race to the bottom".

I would love to hear suggestions for others.

An Outrageous Suggestion

US Military Flights For Knock?

You have got to be kidding. Haven't the poor bastard soldiers suffered enough?

All These New Ones

When did all this 'neo' prefixing start?

'Neo-liberal'. 'Neo-conservative'. 'Neo-Darwinian'.

Was it the Matrix?

OK so a 'neo-con' (being former lefties converted to, eh, righties with an invasive attitude) is actually distinct from a traditional conservative and the neo- prefix is at least linguistically justified. But neo-liberal? Who or what are they?

Is it too obvious to say that users of these terms hope they will subconsciously link them with everyone's favourite neos - neonazis? Yes folks, just add 'neo' to your least favourite political label for instant added sinisterness. More to the point, since we're so fond of Greek, are there such things as paleoconservatives or paleoliberals, ?

Prosperity = Good, Poverty = Bad

There was a piece in the Irish Times by academic Joe Clery on Saturday about Fairytale of New York, the Pogues classic, it concludes:

"And when our home-grown neoliberals summon up the sorry ghost of the 1980s to remind us we have never had it so good, MacColl's and MacGowan's duet can be a reminder that not all back then was misery and despair; there was also resilience and resistance."

The fact that hard times can bring out good qualities in people is no argument to return to them. Out of necessity, solidarity in Blitz time London was sky high, but I don't see anyone making a case against peace. Have people really forgotten just how fucking miserable the 80's were in Ireland? It Sucked-with-a-capital-S. We were a poor, insular, insecure, Church-ridden, tax-dodging, miserable little people. I got out as soon as I could and so did 50% of my friends and classmates to London, New York, Amsterdam. There was 16.7% unemployment when I left college. I can remember only a handful of Irish companies recruiting on the Milk Round and loads and loads of UK ones. Tell that to the young people today, and they just won't believe you...

So anytime I hear someone bemoaning our recent prosperity (I can't bring myself to write 'C____c T___r') or the "Oh dear what have we become" brigade, I get quite uptight. Give me the problems of prosperity over those of poverty any day. Yeah even the traffic. Or the house prices. Or the 'loss of our spirituality', whatever that is. As Des Bishop points out, we have traffic jams because now people have jobs to go to and can afford cars to do so. If you had a decent enough job in the 80's life wasn't too bad because relative to everyone else you were quids in. Back then my father was able to drive from the northside of Dublin to his job in Ballsbridge in about 40 minutes. Great. Wonderful. But two of his three sons had to emigrate. We're both back now, because of prosperity.

It wasn't just poverty that made Ireland in the 80's shite. Hand-in-hand with it, went the small-town, small-mind, squinting-window begrudger attitude. Nobody could disentangle cause and effect relationship with those two. We were poor because we were shite and vice versa. I suspect there are at least two types of people people complaining now that everything has gone to hell in a hand basket since we 'got rich':

• Those who were pretty comfortable during the bad times and now only see the down side of prosperity. Their relative position in society has slipped. After all what's the point of being able to go on a second foreign holiday if your house painter can too?
  
• Those who object to how we got here because it does not fit with their political ideology. We got here through a combination of many things but most people agree that our low tax policy and foreign direct investment primarily from U.S. companies were key. If you denigrate the outcome, you denigrate the process by which we got here.
  

Prosperity clearly has not benefited everyone equally or even fairly. Growth has created huge problems, exacerbated by our sometimes pitiful Governmental response to it. But it has resulted in the greater good to the greater number. People are a) happier despite what our commentariat tell us and b) here. It gives us the means to assist those who, for whatever reason, have not benefited from it - if we want to. Would the Niall Mellon house building initiative in South Africa been possible in the 80's (if apartheid had not existed)? It has also gone hand in hand with a dismantling of a lot of the old begrudger attitudes. Success can be admired now rather than be derided as the product of 'pull' or dodgy-dealing or luck.

Repeat after me. Prosperity = Good, Poverty = Bad.

Even when the prosperity we have is unbalanced and sometimes inequitable. If pointing this out makes me a 'neoliberal', I'll take that risk.

Missives to Madam #1

Ah! The ever entertaining Irish Times Letters Page ...

MURDER ON THE STREETS

"I would have thought that our bustling financial centre would be a safe haven from the criminals."

[perhaps the letter writer thought there is some sort of fellow professional criminal courtesy code?]

FF'S EUROPEAN PARTNERS

"This week it was confirmed that MEPs from the extreme right-wing "League of Polish Families" and "Northern League" (Italy) will join forces with Fianna Fáil in the European Parliament."

[insert obvious PD joke here]

REHOUSING THE OIREACHTAS

"Why cannot the Oireachtas be brought back to the building designed to house it? Perhaps if we ceased using our noblest public building [Bank of Ireland's College Green premises] as a temple to Mammon it would do something to restore national respect for the democratic process and the younger generation might even be tempted to get out and vote."

[there must be few purposes less salubrious than banking for the old House of Lords, but being the Dail debating chamber would certainly be one of them]