And so it is done This morning our noble leader, el Bertie, got our President to dissolve the Dáil (parliament) so we could have an election on the 24th of May. This is one of those rare occasions when something gets dissolved in order to create a headache. For a start, the Constitutional challenge to …
The good news The Minister for the Environment today announced the establishment of a Commission to review the electoral constituencies. This is exactly what he said couldn’t be done a few weeks ago, before the constitutional challenge to the current state of the constituencies was launched as the ‘final census figures weren’t in’. The figures …
RTE today have a story about the changing demographics revealed by the Census. This story mentions specifically the possible need for an additional TD in Dublin West as a result of the 8000 population growth in the area that the Census shows. RTE have, unfortunately, failed to point out the other constituencies that are under …
Interesting developments (well developments at least) over in the Hight Court… The Constitutional challenge to the Electoral boundaries will be heard next week. This isn’t really news to those of us who have been keeping an eye on mcgarrsolicitors over the past few weeks. What does it mean? Well it means that any chance of …
There is an election in the offing here in Ireland. However there are (or rather should be) some concerns still about the quality of the electoral register. Over on the IQ Network site there is a short article about the importance of timeliness of information as a measure of its quality and accuracy.. An important …
I’m frankly baffled. We are in the run up to a General Election here in Ireland. All the media pundits are quoting 24th May as the date of the (as yet unannounced) election. This would require our parliament to be dissolved at the latest next week. Ireland runs a Proportional Representation/Single Transferable Vote system. It …
What the…? – Irish Political coverage ignores the Elephant in the room Read More »
The DobBlog is 1 year old today. What have we achieved? Well, about 50,000 words on the state of the Irish Electoral Register, syndicated publication of an article based on those words in two International newsletters for IT/Business Intelligence professionals and a wordpress template I’m finally not unhappy with. The electoral register is still buggered …
First Post Anniversary… Electoral Register Processes Still Broken Read More »
Last night I was doing some housekeeping on the site and I noticed that the year-ometer on the DoBlog is about to turn over. The first post on www.obriend.com (as it was then) was on 18th April 2006. It was about the Electoral Register. With an Election looming in the next few weeks it is …
CNN.com has an interesting report on a study that was conducted by IDC, an industry think tank and research company, into the volume of information that we are creating and storing – and more importantly who is creating that information. IDC estimates that the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will …
ka-BOOM – the Information Age Explosion is upon us. Read More »
Also on the Register this morning is a worrisome story where the Daily Mail has done an experiment to see just how secure UK biometric passports are. Short answer – not very really. For a start the data on the card can be read wirelessly, but requires a decryption key to read it. It seems …