The DOBlog

So Batty O’Keefe is flying kites in the run up to the Leaving Cert results. Nice one centurion. He has proposed the reintroduction of college fees for students from families where people are earning an “excellent” salary. He defines this as being somewhere to the north of “anybody on €100,000″ and “millionaires”. Mr O’Keefe seems to be living in Vague City here, flying an amorphous kite in what appears to be a painfully non-fictional episode of Yes Minister.

Is it proposed that this will be the joint household income or the income of each earner in the family? What about a project manager in a utility company who is married to a civil servant at HEO level? Combined salaries here could encroach on the €100,000 level . These are not exactly high flying jobs however, particularly if you factor in costs related to commuting etc on top of normal day to day family costs.

What happens if you have a windfall in a given year (like old uncle Davy popping his clogs and leaving you his prize collection of original Beano comics)? Would such unforseen windfalls be included in the calculations?

What would the cost to the Exchequer be of administering the ‘Santa List’ of people who are Naughty (earn too much in Mr O’Keefe’s view) and Nice (earn what Mr O’Keefe thinks to be a reasonable salary)?

Would Universities be required to gather information on parents earnings before awarding students places (so they know who to charge what and when)? How would the costs of capturing, analysing and securely storing this information be met? (Yes, I know.. from fees).

Would families be able to earn full tax relief on the college fees paid (and if so, what would that cost the Exchequer and how would those costs be offset in the tax take)?

Would there be exemptions of a household had more than one child at 3rd level at any given time? In a household of 3 students, with fees costing approximately €5k per year (based on the current costs of Masters degrees) would the family pay a flat €5k for the 3, €7500, €10,000 or the full €15k? Would the minister be suggesting a “buy 2 get 1 free” for degrees?

When would this come into effect? Would families with students who started 3rd level last year or starting this year find themselves having to find a few grand more in the kitty in 2009 or 2010?

What exactly is the Minister expressing here (other than expressing a need to have his name in the headlines during a dull August and a need to be seen to be doing things?)

What Minister? What?

Yes, 3rd level education requires more funding. I know, I teach there from time to time, and I was taught there from time to time. I was one of the ‘transition’ students who started their college career paying fees back in the early 1990s and were then set free.

I’ll admit was skeptical about the Labour Party plan to bring in free fees and heartily opposed it as a student during debates in UCD - which lead to a few ‘discussions’ with my more left-wing friends. I felt at the time that there was bound to be a more equitable format which would not squeeze University funding unduly while still allowing for social equity and more open access to 3rd level for families from disadvantaged backgrounds.

But the human face of free fees for me was my brother. He was 2 years behind me and, but for free fees, would have had to face the choice of deferring his 3rd level education for 2 years until I had finished my degree. And if I’d gone on to post-graduate study, his chance to shine as a student might perhaps have been put off longer. Free fees meant my mother was able to send her two eldest sons to University at the same time, paving the way for el guapo (the Third) to follow a few years after.

Batt O’Keefe’s proposals (and it is worth noting that the Green Party are making it clear that this is NOT a government proposal, Mary Hanafin has likewise come out against it, as has the leader of the Progressive Democrats, Ciarán Cannon) have some merit if you look at the argument that those who can afford to spend thousands per year on private education at second level for their children might well be asked to foot the bill at 3rd level. However, one must as the question - why do people opt to send their children to fee paying private schools when there is competition for places at 3rd level? Might the apparent availability of better resources, teacher and student supports and other factors (like working toilets and roofs that don’t leak) when compared with state funded schools be a factor? Will the Minister’s proposals address those root causes?

If the logic for bringing back in fees is to extract funding from people on “excellent salaries” (and we are I must remind you that we are living in Vague City with that term) why not just levy a tax on high earners to create an “Education Fund” to support 3rd level and state funded 2nd Level and Primary sectors? This tax could be levied on all earners of “excellent salaries”, not just those who have children of University going age. The amount levied per year could be smaller (as the pool affected would be larger and over an indefinite period). However, the taxes so collected MUST be ringfenced for education spending only at each level - and not on vanity projects for Ministers but on fundamental tools and resources such as flushing toilets that don’t double as class rooms, and funding research on broad issues rather than focussed industry sponsored research projects.

The collection of this tax could be done through the normal taxation system (no additional costs). Exemptions could easily be given on grounds of social need through the existing system. Fees could be kept free; the 2008 equivalent of me and my brother would dodge the bullet and the guilt of one having to forego their place just because of costs.

Ultimately, this would be more equitable as all “millionaires” in the country would be asked to chip in to fund education and learning - the very education and learning that helped develop the economy which allowed them to make their money. Millionaires would not be discriminated against simply because of they have kid or two with delusions of ‘edumication and learning’.

Fairer for all, and certainly more structured than the vague and amporphous kite-like citizen of Vague City that Batt O’Keefe has floated on the rain-sodden air.

Ultimately - investment in the training, development and intellectual capital of our country is a key element in developing future productivity and capability. That has to start at Primary level, be continued to Secondary level and then capped off at 3rd level. Minister O’Keefe has an opportunity to take a considered and courageous stand on funding for education in a way that is of benefit to most rather than punitive to many.

Or he might bring down the government… either way a positive contribution.

…or “Why the f*ck can’t I get a decent broadband service in Wexford for love or money?”.

So, following from my last post (and btw the saga continues off-blog in a reality far far away), I’ve been looking at my other options for getting zippy fast communications that might allow me to work more productively from home for my day job (and, heaven forfend, perhaps form the basis of a revenue creation and job creation buzz here in fair Wexford. After all I can’t commute the monster commute every week for the rest of my life).

I’ve signed up to 3’s service which proudly announced on their coverage map that they had service in my area… and zip-tasticly not slow it would be as well. Eh… it’s not. It’s painfully slow. Think of how it would feel to have your skin whipped from your bones by a slug who’d just smoked an entire University campus worth of cannabis and was more concerned with what flavour mars bar he’d like to eat and you get an idea of how slow the service is. If that doesn’t work, here’s a picture of a GOOD result…

However, 3’s customer service are quite good, helpful, polite, and professional, with all my details to their finger tips. They have eventually told me there is an issue in Wexford town and its environs that has been known about for some time in 3’s engineering section who are working on it with no ETA for a solution. So why is the coverage map showing lots’ of deep blue around Wexford? Is it perhaps some form of marketing ploy that might possible be easily confused with lying (which it simply isn’t.. that would be wrong).

I’m giving it a week. Then I return it and get my money back if it isn’t working above 1MB at least. Anything less isn’t broadband speed.

I am depressed reading the Government’s Broadband strategy. It’s a joke. They don’t have one. They are clutching at straws. There is a vast amount of ‘dark fibre’ network in the country. CIE has some, and wouldn’t it be a nice way to keep rail travel costs down if they could lease that dark fibre to companies who might help service the needs of teleworkers (who might then use the train to travel to meetings when they had to).

Counting people who have access to broadband in work in their stats for people who have access to broadband is a bit of a cop-out. Are the DCENR seriously proposing that it is OK for people to use company-provided broadband services (which are usually accessed via controlled and firewalled office networks) to do personal business?

Boss: McMurphy… where’s my audit report?
McMurphy: I don’t have it done yet boss, I was just uploading photos of my kids to facebook, myspace, bebo, flickr while chatting on GChat with Mike from accounts who left to go to Australia
Boss: McMurphy… you’re fired (for a documented breach of the company’s acceptable internet use policies).

My needs are simple… a reliable broadband connection, with a download speed faster than running and an upload speed faster than walking (2MB down, 1 - 2 MB up would do, but I’d like more). I’d like the service to be not prone to sudden and inexplicable outages. I’d like my wife to be able to rely on it so she can video chat with me when I’m travelling for work… usually to Dublin where I’ve broadband a-plenty. I’d like to be able to use VPN tunnelling to access my work servers securely, rather than poxy bloody PSTN dial-up that takes forever to open the tools I use to do my job. I’d like to be able to use that broadband connection to give me choices about my work life balance, future career path, lifestyle etc.

I’d like to live in the 21st Century, not the 1980s. I’d like to feel that my ability to work with the interweb and adopt a lifestyle that let me blend my work and homelife through telework tools had actually moved on since I first got on-line in 1993 and started reading about the telework studies that they did in Puget Sound in the US and thought “that’s what I’d like to do” (at the time I was trying to run a business out of my bedroom… shortest commute I’ve ever had).

Right now it doesn’t feel that way. Right now I am painfully personally aware of the ‘digital divide’. This is more than just a pursuit of a Giffen Good (in economic terms). This is a quest for an enabling technology, a commodity not a luxury. Will “access to broadband” join “near a road”, “close to a river” etc. as critieria for discussion in junior cert geography or business studies when the students are asked to site a factory or school or government department in an exam question?

This ‘enabling technology’ is on a par with rural electrification in the 1940s (a project which didn’t end until the 1970s) , which significantly changed the nature and outlook of life in rural Ireland. One commentator describes the situation pre-rural electrification thus:

At that time, few towns in Ireland, outside of the major cities, had a local electricity supply. For example, Kilkenny had no electricity supply while others like Carlow had a local supply

Sounds very like our Broadband situation.

So, in the absence of a Broadband equivalent of Rural Electrification (which the Government’s broadband strategy definitely isn’t and which the National Broadband Scheme fails to be), or a reliable local provider of reliable local broadband (”all the bits and bytes are made local boss”) I’m pondering training pigeons to deliver messages for me through the medium of interpretive dance.

Failing that, a note nailed to their ankles will have to do.

From time to time the DoBlog allows honoured guests to write posts (well I would if anyone asked). When I’m stuck for honoured guests, sometimes I invite family, and I even let them get a byline on the piece. No cuttypasty-and-claim-as-my-own here thanky much.

This post is penned by the brother. If he would actually get off his backside and do a proper blog hisself (he lives over at “Another Crying Shame“) I’m sure the O Brien clan would soon be festooned with Obsessive Blogger badges from Fergal Crehan.

So… here’s the brother’s take on the Great Big Bertie Bye Bye:

While it’s certainly good news in a visceral ‘Death to my Enemies’ kind of way I think it will in the long run mean very little or even be a bad thing for the Irish body politic
(more…)

Simon over at Tuppenceworth shared his thoughts yesterday on comments by our Minister for the Information Society and another Public Servant on bloggers at a conference that had nothing to do with blogging (’twas about Software Quality and testing).

[Update - Imagine my shock when I found the speech on the Dept of the Taoiseach website...scroll down to the section on Innovation and see the exact terms used by the Minister responsible for the Information Society. On one hand he has a point, but it could have been phrased a lot more... politically]

As usual, bloggers have shaken their fists or slapped their foreheads in disbelief at what it seems was said.

Now now children. Comparing a Junior Minister to a scooby doo villain is impolite if chucklesomely accurate. Also, it is just possible that they may having been having a go at BOGGERS - an equally maligned group that is misunderstood and misrepresented by ‘traditional’ media. (Just watch Killnascully for the evidence). [Sadly that was not the case, as evidenced by the text of the speech]

I was at the conference in question and having thought about it overnight I think the Local Government Computing Services person’s comments should probably be taken in the context of decisions to adopt open standards or not… bloggers are all for mashups and open standards based solutions as it is the “Web2.0 thing”. However if it all falls apart because the person making the widget that holds it together stops maintaining their stuff then you get kicked. If you are a blogger your site goes down or comments don’t work or your google maps mashup goes on its arse.

If you’re a government organisation you end up on the front page of the Irish Times… “Government IT investment fiasco”. The we bloggers chip in and the spin and bluster gets questioned and then your day goes from ‘challenging’ to ‘fricking nightmare’ in a matter of hours. But guess what… project managers in the private sector have to put up with that stuff too. I have no sympathy. Lots of empathy though.

Looking back at notes from that presentation, at the time he made the comments about bloggers he was discussing Open Source solutions. His point was simply that Open Source solutions bring a degree of risk with them, particularly if they are being adapted for use in a given context - if an Open Source solution falls in the forest and there is no developer community to hear it, is your solution f*cked?

That is a risk that all companies have to balance between Open Source and Proprietary solutions. His mistake, as I would see it, has been to take criticism from bloggers about decisions a little bit too personally. Of course, if the bloggers turned out to be right in their criticisms then that might make things sting even more.

Another presenter on the day gave a good insight into how to pick Open Source tools though.. he recommended only picking stuff from SourceForge with 90% or higher activity showing a maintained and managed piece of software, not a hobby project.

Also bloggers are not synonymous with Open Standards/Open Source developers. We’re just as screwed if someone moves the cheese and useful piece of software or useful standard stops being supported (PHP4 vs PHP5 for example… too many webhosts are still running PHP4 while Open Source developers are moving to PHP5 based apps - I think of Drupal and CiviCRM as examples. Hosting providers who can’t support PHP5 leave organisations using Open Source tools like civicrm stuck on less effective or efficient and unsupported versions of the applications. A bit like a proprietary vendor end-of-lifing an application).

I’ve written extensively on this blog over the past two years about information management/information quality issues in government processes (PPARS, Electoral Register, IBTS etc) so I think I might fall in to the category of annoying and obsessive bloggers. However, and I’m open to correction, I do believe that I’ve ‘played the ball and not the man’ at each turn, with my focus being on leadership (ie Ministers) and on sound practices (many people I spoke to yesterday who had happened on my blog said nice things about my IBTS posts). And I’ve never shied away from debating the point to build a better understanding of issues.

Importantly, I believe that my posts and comments have been fairly balanced. I did my best to argue that the problem in PPARs wasn’t the software or the project team but the sheer mind numbing complexity of consoldiating non-standard data and divergent processes into a system that requires standards and standardisation. Each ‘custom’ work calendar represented a ‘customisation’ in the application - ergo the cost. The project team did a great job to achieve anything with the mess they were given to start with. The electoral register… I put the blame were it needed to be - on the Minister who is responsibile for defining strategy and allocating resources. I analysed the root causes and issues and criticsed the door to door clean up because it wasn’t a solution and it wasn’t operated consistently. I won’t mention the IBTS in detail but to say… harrumph - and watch this space (I’m not finished there).

Tom Kitt’s comments, however, baffle me as it did seem to be a throw away remark triggered by some deep seated frustration. Perhaps my focus on Dick Roche’s bumbling mis-management of the Electoral Register issue and John Gormely’s apparent lack of a sense of urgency to implement the legislative changes required to correct the processes (rather than pissing around on the edges doing scrap and rework and working with a marketing company to design a new logo for the department that looks like three snails in an orgy) have irked the political classes? Perhaps the blogger commentary on the Mahon Tribunal have peeved the Fianna Fail leadership?

Perhaps some blogger has written something nasty about Minister Kitt’s offsprung, the folksy crooner David Kitt? (Twenty - if you did … tut tut). Maybe he read some comments about the car in the re-invented Knightrider TV show and took them out of context?

Who knows.

What I do know is that an Information Society starts with an informed community that shares information. Blogs and blogging provides an opportunity for informed people with experience and insights into niche areas and obscure disciplines to share their thoughts and views on things.

Occassionally that means that the type of person who, in the Service would never be left alone in the same timezone as a Minister because they are hard-core techie (beard, jumper and sandals with socks - and that’s just the wimmin) and are passionate about a solution or approach that is not ’status quo’, can find a platform to make their opinion known. An occasionally a newspaper picks up on that (not, sadly, in the case of the Electoral Register) and it gets a broader airing.

More often, it means that people who have experience in a particular industry, process or discipline but might otherwise have no access to media can peer behind the spin and bluster put out by the political classes and their handlers and by public sector organisations to raise questions about what might have happened really or suggest alternative approaches for consideration. If that makes people uncomfortable then tough. An informed society requires higher standards.

However, Marshall McLuhan’s view that ‘the medium is the message’ has gone the way of the dodo. The medium is not the message. Not all bloggers are good. Not all bloggers are informed. Not all bloggers want to criticise constructively. But to dismiss all bloggers and their opinions with a frustrated sigh is to miss the point completely (a bit like Mr Waters did).

The blog is the medium. The message comes from each blogger as an individual member of society.

An Information Society. (tada!)

Of course, to counter the criticism bloggers need to up their game and take a moment’s pause to engage their brains a bit before letting their fingers to the talking. The right speak does not guarantee you the right to be heard. But speaking well, clearly and appropriately, with sound ideas that you are willing to accept critique on (as long as that critique likewise plays the ball and not the man) increases the chance that people will want to listen to you.

By improving the quality of your personal blogging you improve the quality of the Information Society. By ensuring that you have checked your facts (or are willing to correct errors quickly) you improve the Information Quality in this Information Society. Then we will find ourselves in a functioning, citizen supported, Information Society.

Another aspect of Tom Kitt’s alleged comments might also relate to the fact that there are a sizeable proportion of the population who aren’t bloggers (yet). Government needs to manage for the needs of the State as a whole, not just the needs of lobby groups or hobby groups or bloggers. (I’m shitting myself laughing as I write this)

Informed lobby groups (trade unions, IBEC, the SFA, even the late lamented IrelandOffline) influence Government policy to various extents. The media affects government policy (if it gets criticised in the media the Minister may hold off pushing the policy, particularly around election time). Grumpy old men walking around outside Leinster House with placards on their backs… well they don’t really achieve anything on their own (perhaps they should blog).

Whether you blog or not does not deprive you of your right as a citizen to seek to affect and effect change in government. So, you can seek to influence through an established media fair play.. get your op ed piece in The Irish Times, go on Questions and Answers and rip the token politician a new one (or punch right wing columnists who haven’t got a clue about the real world), write your letters to the editor, or start a pressure group and doorstep your elected representatives. Fair play to you.

Or you can start a blog to raise awareness of the issue (perhaps combined with the other approaches). If the handful of bloggers who have written specifically about Information Society issues or the challenges of may government/quasi-government IT projects and performed a critique of the strategy (or lack of), best practices (or lack of) or solutions (or lack of) that were delivered can raise the frustrated ire of the Minister responsible for the Information Society then we’re a pretty darned effective group.

If the government chooses to dismiss your opinions because you are not an established lobby group or because you are just ‘citizens’ then there is something rotten in the pre-Information Society society.

Minister for the Information Society… we’re bloggers. We’re here. We’re informed and we want to be social, socially active, active on social issues, and to build a strong foundation for a ‘realised information society’. Some of us are already elected officials, some of us might consider running for office. Some of us might be advisors to your opposition. It’s not because we’re bloggers. It’s because we’re citizens.

Dismiss us if you want, but like the smell of boiling cabbage on a hot summer’s day we’re not going away in a hurry. To paraphrase Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman:

“Makers of an Information Society. Creators of an Information Society.Be careful what kind of Information Society you’re producin’ here.

hoo hah.

(of course, that cuts both ways - bloggers need to seek to seperate the ’signal’ from the ‘noise’ so that good blogs and bloggers can be distinguished from waffle and bile).

But I still can’t f**king stand David Kitt’s music and the Knightrider car is just dire (sorry).

It seems that there is a deal imminent in the US Writers Strike.

Lawyers are due to present the final draft to the writers and studios tomorrow. But already Joe Esterhaz has been lined up to ’sex it up’ for the masses and Jerry Bruckheimer will produce the mammoth deal, with Paul Verhoven lined up to direct.

“Esterhaz has a strong track record of taking limp material and making it something people would want to be a part of over and over again.”, says Bruckheimer, “so he was the natural choice to polish the lawyer’s draft. And Verhoven was the best choice to direct because of his gritty vision, strong production values and, with a Paul Verhoven movie, you know someone’s going to get screwed royally at some stage in the action”.

Commenting on the choice of Bruckheimer to produce, William Shatner was quoted as saying

” Well. JerryBruckheimer. Is. thelogicalchoice. to. produce. something. on. the. scale. of. the. impendingend. of. worldasweknowit. Which this was. Yes.”

Shatner has denied rumours that he is to release an a cappela album of the terms of the agreement put to the music of the Artic Monkeys.

The Director General of RTE was quick to highlight the role of the Irish national broadcaster in resolving the dispute.

“Given how much of our evening schedules are based around US syndicated dramas and comedies, we had a strong motivation to help resolve this long running dispute. For feck’s sake, we had been reduced to running documentaries produced by the BBC, which half our viewers had already avoided watching when they were on the BBC. To that end we dispatched our most experienced facilitator and chair person, John Bowman, to the States to help get people in a room and bash heads together until there was a deal. It was either that or go cap in hand to the History Channel for a few series of documentaries on the Nazis. And we all know that those things are like home movies to that shower of…”

The Irish national broadcaster later retracted the above statement when it was revealed that the chair of the negotiations committee in the writers strike was actually a totally different John Bowman and it appeared that the Irish John Bowman might actually have liked the addition of documentary programming to the Irish national broadcaster’s schedules.

While the successful completion of a draft script is a key milestone, there is still a risk that the developmental project will be held up by the studios until the money is right, the cast is right or the ground temperature in Hell falls below zero. One Hollywood insider has told us that:

“If the studios don’t feel the market is ready for an epic cinematic journey through the intracies of intellectual property ownership in a post Web2.0 landscape then they may keep the whole production in development for years. Unless their sense of the market is that the money will be there to make the investment pay off they just won’t do it. Too many people were burned by Heaven’s Gate… big production values, lots of investment, but a very long road to payback.

All of the above is a work of fiction and any similarity to real people living or dead is entirely co-incidental, if a little amusing.

The Dublin Chamber of Commerce has called for the roll-out of wireless broadband access on public transport including Dart, buses and commuter trains to support the development of Dublin as a ‘knowledge city’.

Frankly, speaking as a regular long haul commuter (Wexford to Dublin by train or bus, hail rain or shine), this is just nuts.

The investment necessary to achieve this would be far better spent developing some form of ‘knowledge worker hubs’ in what are currently satellite dormer towns and villages within the East coast commuter belt (which stretches now to Wexford Town). This would reduce the need for people to commute, support development of local communities, support the nuturing of relationships and families etc.

Sticking wifi on the Wexford to Dublin train would not work (and I suspect similar reasons would apply on other commuter routes).

Firstly, there are quite large stretches of the line where there is no mobile access (and I’m not talking spanky 3g here, I’m talking ‘hello, I’m on the train’ phone call territory). So that creates a technical challenge to create a network that will actually work and let people do things on the train. Secondly the train in the morning is pretty much full from Gorey up (people were standing from Wicklow this past Monday).

So the social impact of fishing out a laptop is not to be underestimated as you would inevitably have to smack the person next to you in the head with it (I’ve taken to using my pda to make notes on the train using my spanky bluetooth keyboard to avoid such faux pas). Also, the tables on current commuter trains are tiny and are actually too small to use a laptop on without taking up ALL of the table (again, PDA and small foldy keyboard work OK). For those times when I absolutely have to use my laptop to send/receive email or such like I have a mobile broadband dongley thing from vodafone which meets my needs (until I hit ‘dark territory’ on the route when all bets are off and I just read a book).

There is of course some spanky technology about that, to an extent, solves the problems of maintaining connectivity when on/in a moving target (actually, the mobile broadband stuff does this reasonably well in my experience using it on the 002 bus to/from Dublin or the aforementioned train). But the issues of network black spots, managing contention, and the physical challenges of actually working on a overcrowded train would take a lot of investment in infrastructure to overcome.

What is the cost/benefit analysis for this? Is there a better mix that would deliver greater benefit overall?

As a commuter, I’d much rather have the investment that this would require spent on developing and promoting knowledge economy industries in areas such as the South East, promoting broadband availability to regions (through telcos or local providers), developing integrated ticketing for public transport, increasing capacity, frequency and comfort on commuter rail and generally raising public transport to a point where it is actually possible to work on the train. Reducing the cost of public transport to the passengers would also be a good investment. I already have the level of wireless broadband connectivity I need for working as I travel to Dublin.

And let’s not forget the terrorist risks, as highlighted by the Steven Seagal movie Under Seige 2, where a terrorist uses a train as a mobile platform to wreak havoc and destruction - using a wireless network connection (where did I put that mobile broadband dongle?).
Come to think of it, there was a network blackspot as a major plot point in that movie as well.

The Younger McGarr (Simon that is) has a very detailed and well written post on the data protection issues that arise (and seemingly are ignored) by Facebook. It can be found over at the McGarr Solicitors website. He has already picked up some complimentary comments, including one from Thomas Otter (who has written on these issues previously). (Surely a reply from Robert Scoble is only a mouse-click away?)

I’ve been scratching away on some notes for a post on Facebook myself (never one to miss a rolling bandwagon me). Expect more on this soon. (ie as soon as I’ve written the buggering thing).

One or two of the comments (and emails) I received after the previous post here were enquiring about some stuff I’d written previously (2006 into 2007) about the state of the Irish Electoral Register.

It is timely that some people visited those posts as our Local Elections are coming up in less than 18 months (June 2009) and frankly, unless there is some immense effort going on behind the scenes that I haven’t heard of, the Register is still in a poor state.

The issue isn’t the Register per se but the processes that surround it, the apparent lack of a culture where the leadership take the quality of this information seriously enough to make the necessary changes to address the cultural, political and process problems that have resulted in it being buggered.

There are a few consolidating posts knocking around on this blog as I’ve pulled things together before. However a quick search for “Electoral Register” will pull all the posts I’ve done on this together. (If you’ve clicked the link all the articles are presented below).

I’ve also got a presentation on the subject over at the IQNetwork website, and I did a report (which did go to John Gormely’s predecessor) which can be found here, and I wrote Scrap and Rework articlethat I submitted to various Irish newspapers at the time to no avail but which has been published internationally (in print and on-line).

At this stage, I sense that as it doesn’t involve mercury filled CFLs or Carbon taxes, the state of the electoral register and the legislative framework that surrounds it (a lot of the process issues require legislative changes to address them) has slipped down the list of priorities our Minister has.

However, with Local Elections looming it is important that this issue be addressed.

So there I was, in that horrid hypnogogic state between wakefulness and dreams, when I heard John Waters’ voice booming in my ears like the baritone chimes of God himself (or maybe that was Charlton Heston).

“Ahh”, thought I hypnogogically, “this will be one of those pontifical nightmares I get after too much cheese and it will be gone in a moment.”

Then, to my horror, I realised that I was wide awake and the Voice of Waters was coming from my alarm clock radio. He was on Newstalk and he was bitching about bloggers again. So I snapped awake and listened a bit.

The gist of his argument basically boils down to “All bloggers are [insert prejudice here]“. He proudly informed the nation that he doesn’t engage with blogs or read them but he is adamant that they are full of nonsense. Effectively his argument is that “All Bloggers are [insert prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”.

And the Internet is full of porn. Let’s not forget that. (but so is the top shelf in my newsagents, let’s not forget that either).

Lovely. Those are firm arguments that one can engage with on so many levels. Oh, hang on, they aren’t.

Let’s play the ‘parse the argument game’ where we take the structure of an argument and swap the context around a bit to see if the underlying premise is either

a) a seriously thought through and evidenced argument based on sound reasoning or,
b) a tenuously cobbled together series of “neo-luddite” prejudices and half-arguments motivated by fear, mistrust, ignorance or the desire to join Kevin Myers in the Independent.

So here we go…

1. “All unmarried mothers are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”
2. “All immigrants are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”
3. “All [insert ethnic group of choice] are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”
4. “Women priests are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one
5. “People who write songs for Eurovision are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”

Hmm…, I’m not 100% sure but I don’t think that the logic John Waters is applying to his position is keeping particularly good company. I could go on with further examples, but that would be labouring the point.

Yes, there are some appallingly poor bloggers out there. There are people who think that their opinion is worth listening to, no matter how bizarre, poorly founded or just plain crazy. But then there are people like that in the Op-Ed and letters pages of national papers every day. Yes there are bloggers who can’t write legible, comprehensible or intelligible English and whose posts I wouldn’t print out to hang on a nail in the outside loo in case the toilet paper runs out. But then there are a good number of journalists that I have the same opinion about.

But just like there are good journalists whose writing and research is good, there are good bloggers who through passion, special expertise or insight, or just plain hard work produce interesting and thought provoking pieces, or give us things that make us laugh and lighten our days a bit. I don’t shout out that all journalists are idiots just because there are journalists who I can’t stand to read.

However, all bloggers look alike to John Waters (who doesn’t read blogs apparently).

Waters challenged the Newstalk Breakfast show to find him “a blogger who can string three sentences together”. This abruptly, superficially and prejudicially dismisses some excellent people who blog intelligently about subjects that they are passionate about or have a particular specialist expertise in. Some of these people (dare I say it) are also print journalists.

Immediately I think of Edward McGarr in McGarr Solicitors, Simon and the punters over on Tuppenceworth, the unstoppable Damien Mulley, Steve Tuck’s Data Quality blog, the Freaknomics blog on the Wall Street Journal, or some of Mr Water’s colleagues in the Irish Times, the investigative insights of Maman Poulet (why can’t mainstream press get scoops like this?). And let’s not forget the irrepressible Twenty Major.

Using the same prejudiced thinking (in a different context) Waters might equally have challenged Newstalk to find him a black man or a woman who would have the ability to be credible candidates for the Presidency of the US. Oh… what’s that Internet?

I do hope that Newstalk consider rising to John Waters’ challenge. Get Mulley, either (or both) of the McGarrs, and a few of the Irish Times bloggers into a room.

Of course it is fundamentally unfair for those of us who blog to take task with the arguments put forward by John Waters. As he claims not to read blogs or to engage with blogs he has opted out of his right to reply in this medium. So I’d ask anyone commenting to:

1. Refrain from playing the man… play the ball. Address the logic, comment on the fear or philosophy that might be motivating it, but do not play the man. I’ll red card anyone who plays the man and they’ll be put in the sin bin (ie I’ll won’t approve your comment and the world will never see your wit and erudition.)
2. Each commenter should say one nice thing about John Waters in their comments. The nice thing should be really nice, not sarcastic. I’ll suggest a template for the nice thing… “John Waters is [insert nice thing about John Waters here], but I’ve never met him“. If you have met him, please share the most pleasant thing you can recall about the experience (did he tell a funny joke, pull a funny face, rescue a small child from a burning building, that kind of thing.)

   [Update: As some people seem to find this challenging, I'll extend it to allow for surreal or illogical compliments to JW. However they should still be nice things and not outrageously sarcastic. Think Satire not Sarcasm.]

3. If you want, please include in your comment a link to a particularly well written, informative and reliable blog (ie one that is not prone to publishing lies and that quickly corrects errors in their posts - that kind of thing).

My starter - John Waters looks like he takes good care of his hair, but I’ve never met him.

Of course the blogging community could just decide to ignore the issue all together.

But I have a dream. I dream that one day the children of bloggers and ‘traditional media’ journalists will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that the children of bloggers will not be judged by the medium they choose write in but by the quality of their content. I have a dream that one day, John Waters might actually go on-line and read some good blogs (he could start with some of the Irish times ones, particularly Shane Hegarty’s) and realise that sweeping arguments built on sand have been overturned many times in the past.

[Update: The podcast of this morning's John Waters' bit on Newstalk this morning is up on the Newstalk site, a little over 8 minutes 50 seconds in.. My views here are based on his comments this AM and on his previous comments, which I'd like to link to but the link to the podcast seems broken.]

[Update - I've decided to close comments on this as I'm bored of it now - I can't quite rouse Damien's passion about JW. Pings are still allowed however. Thanks to everyone who contributed.]

[Update: Wikipedia have picked up on this whole bruhaha and John Water's profile includes reference to the 'Blogging Controversy'. Twenty Major and this site are cited as references.]

My sister-in-law is currently deciding what she wants to do when she leaves school. She will be sitting the Leaving Certificate this year. She has decided she wants to pursue a career in law. The advice to her from friends of mine who are lawyers was “don’t study law in university if you want to be a solicitor or barrister - do something else that interests you and will give you extra skills”.

As there are no longer any exemptions for law degree graduates on the professional qualifications for solicitor or barrister there is no advantage there.

However, one might suspect that if you have studied Tort, Criminal law, Legal Systems and a raft of other subjects that are part of the core exams for professional qualification you would have some sort of advantage or ‘head start’ (I suspect this is the thinking behind my sister-in-law’s persistence at wanting to do a law degree first). This would seem to make sense and would be, as JK Galbraith put it, “Conventional Wisdom”.

But interestingly, some research has been done on just this question (admittedly in the US) and the results were interesting enough for the Freaknomics guys to write about it on their blog on the New York Times.

To quote from the article:

no relationship existed between law school courseloads and the passage rate of students ranked in the first, second or fourth quarters of their law school class, while only a weak relationship existed for students who ranked in the third quarter.

In other words, smart people with work ethics (the top 2 quarters of the class) passed the Bar exams regardless of the courses they studied in law school. The bottom tier failed regardless of what courses they took. The middle ground people… well for them it might have helped a little bit - but only a bit.

My legal friends view was that given that you have to study for the professional exams anyway, it would be better to become a more rounded person with perspectives from other disciplines before embarking on the legal route. Many of the solicitors I know from college either didn’t study law or, for those that did, went into another career for a few years before returning to the law with a wider skillset.

One of the most thoughtful and insightful legal minds I know doesn’t have a law degree from University. He studied classics and was a civil servant for a while. He took the professional qualification route to solicitor (as everyone has to). As a result he is an interesting fellow to talk to about things ranging from politics and social ethics to the campaigns of Philip of Macedon and the merits of the Kaiser Chiefs. He has been known to give pretty good legal advice too.

That’s not to say that people with law degrees are dull and boring. Many of them are not. I must categorically state this… law degree holders are not boring (on average). (Disclosure… in my misspent youth I spent 4 years studying in UCD’s Law faculty to get my BBLS)

So, the anecdotes from my lawyer friends are that if you want to be a lawyer you should spend three to four years studying something else that interests you before you embark on your professional qualification. That learning will round you out as a person, give you different perspectives on the law, it might give you contacts you can call on in the future (expert witnesses, plumbers, whatever) and at the very least it gives you time to be certain you want to be a lawyer.

The scientific evidence is that what you study in law school doesn’t affect your ability to pass professional qualifications (and I know that the study relates to the US and Bar exams and similar studies might have different results here… but I doubt it). Add to that the fact that you can enter the legal profession here through a variety of routes and don’t need to have completed a law degree first and I am left with the question…

Why study law if you want to be a lawyer?

I’m not sure if anyone has done a similar study in Ireland but it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between pass grades in Solicitor FE1s or Kings Inns exams for people actually having completed a law degree versus those without.