The DOBlog

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.

Last week the Government was telling us that they had no choice about the imposition of water charges on schools that it was being imposed on us by the ‘evil’ EU (cue pantomime boos and hisses). Then various opposition TDs and MEPs pointed out that that wasn’t actually correct to the point of pretty much being a blatant and unmitaged lie.

So now the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) has announced that schools should hold off on paying the bills that they have at the moment because there may be some alternative to the thing that they were only just saying that they had no control over.

For frak’s sake (thank you Battlestar Galatica for giving me safe profanities), what are these muppets playing at? In the struggle to retain some veneer of actually being in control of things and working for the good of the people who elected them they are executing more flip flops than a footwear firing squad on an Australian surfing beach.

In true pantomime tradition, why don’t all the children look around the stage and see where their credibility and believability have gone? Oh yes indeed, it’s behind them… waaaaayyyyyy back there. Dying like an old man on a dirty hospital trolley in a plague ridden hospital.

The row back on the “b*starding EU has tied our hands” obviously has nothing to do with Ireland being the only country in the EU that requires a Consitutional referendum to ratify the new EU Consitution-Lite Treaty. No. Not a bit of it. Not that, and nothing either with them being found out as being as economical with the truth about this issue as our Taoiseach is about what money he got from where and why when he was Minister for Finance.

Amazon. The f*ckers. Yet again they decide to clumsily shaft the residents of the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland. Their Amazon Prime service has been launched and I was all clicky-fingered ready to sign up and pay my stg£49 to get this useful service.

However, I forgot just how crap Amazon are at geography and how they seem to be incapable of recognising that

• ‘Northern Ireland’ is just one part of a larger island
• Ireland is a large, literate country with reasonably high disposable incomes
• ..and a lot of their business is actually based here (customer services in Cork, a data centre in Dublin
• Deliveries shipped to Belfast or Derry often are transited through Dublin airport

So, I trundled through the terms and conditions of their service. Deliver to ‘Mainland UK’, delivery to ‘Other United Kingdom Locations’ which includes the Channel Isles and British Forces Posted Overseas, but not a whit of delivery to the Republic of Ireland.

So, I decided to see if they have any logic that prevents people in the Ould Sod from signing up, much like they have checks and balances to stop us buying software or computer games or electrical goods.

Ehhh… nope, I’m allowed to right through to the bit where I’d have to part with cash irrespective of what address I use.

So, Amazon will take money off me for a service that they can’t/won’t deliver (no pun intended), because they are not using information they have about me (my address) to prevent me parting with cash, or they can deliver it (ie Prime deliveries to Irish Republic) but they have bungled their Terms & Conditions because they’re idiots, like those people who claim Oscar Wilde was British.

I’m fricking angry now. Must go have a coffee to cool off.

Mulley - if you’re reading a Nintendo Wii will calm me down nicely.

Curses. I missed the deadline for yesterday’s competition over on Mulley.net to win a Wii in National Science week.

I will not make the same mistake twice. Today’s question is “What invention would you like to see most in the future?“.

Given I missed yesterday’s deadline I was tempted to go for a TARDIS or similar time travel machine (not a De Lorean as Simon would probably try to open the gull wing doors to make it fly, thus not breaking the “rules of the game”). However I dismissed this as that would open up the whole time travellers paradox… If I’d posted and been in with a chance to win the Wii would I have wished for a time machine to bring me back in time to post and win the Wii and if I hadn’t would I have won or would the original timeline have continued on.. (ohhh my brain hurts after that).

I then thought about Giant Killer Robots (ideally made of gold). However Roosta beat me to it. Curses. Perhaps I should ask for my time machine?

However a more mature pondering of the question made me consider my commuting and the implications for future family life (I live in Wexford, work in Dublin) and my carbon foot print (I tend to travel to the UK and US a few times a year to speak at conferences) and the fact that it took a colleague 2.5 hours to get from Swords to the city centre yesterday due to the buses - or specifically the lack thereof.

So the invention I’d most like to see in the future is a transporter like wot they have on Star Trek. My commute to the office would be a lot shorter (speed of light vs speed of bus eireann), I could zip back to wexford for lunch with the family, work late for my wage-masters and be back home for tea and tucking in etc. And my colleague would be able to get from Swords to Dublin before he has to turn around again and retire.

And I’d never have to deal with Ryanair’s baggage allowance or Baggage manglers handlers ever again.

Yup. Transporters it is. And interestingly we are getting closer to this technology… extend the range and move from simple matter to slightly overweight bloggers.

Economy on the slide. House prices falling. Talk of having to raise taxes to cover essential day to day costs of running the government. Rumblings of voluntary redundancies in the Health Services, grumblings of the need to ensure more productivity in public services before further benchmarking payments are made… and all this after an election season where we were assured it was only a matter of time before we were all walking on water and had free flying cars (well not quite, but you get the picture).

But our noble Taoiseach (already one of the highest paid elected officials in Europe) is today awaiting the announcement of a pay rise to bring his €260,000 a year salary up to something that a fella can live on in today’s Ireland.

Update: RTE now have the figures… The Taoiseach’s new salary is €310,000, a 14% pay rise.

To put it another way, the CEO of a large corporation seemingly lied to shareholders at an AGM (the election) about the performance of the business, failing to disclose adequately (if at all) the level of material risk associated with future performance of the enterprise, or recognise the levels of chronic mismanagement within his executive team and now he is to be rewarded with a payrise (which also means a raise in his already generous pension as Taoiseach).

George W. Bush has a total ‘package’ including expenses and allowances of around $470,000. At today’s exchange rate that comes to just over €330,000. Will Bertie get more than him in ‘raw’ cash? The salary component of GW’s package comes to just over €280,000 at today’s exchange rates - only €20,000 more than Bertie.

Pretty soon POTUS will want a raise as well, just to keep up with el Berto.

Irish Government ministers and other TDs (as well as judges) will also get a bump in the bank account as a result of this review.

If the Taoiseach is serious about leading the country through a period of solemn fiscal tightening before his party claim saviour status in the next election then he should start with himself. Reject the payrise… Send a signal to his ministerial colleagues that it is entirely their own choice if they want to take the pay rise, if they do they’ll be on their own in the PR stakes.

With one simple gesture he could rout the opposition and reclaim his ‘man-o-the-people’ image before buggering off to a content retirement.

Yeah… right… like that will happen.

Update: Quelle surprise. A pay rise of 14% for the Taoiseach, 15.5% for the Tanaiste (who is also our minister for Finance) and a raft of further increases for other roles and we find ourselves in a position where the management of the country cannot now really argue for ‘belt-tightening’ or wage restraint within social partnership, at least not without falling over giggling.

Let them eat cake indeed.

A while back I reviewed Trademark2.0 by R.Todd Stephens. The book is now available from Amazon.co.uk…

My review of the book can be found here…

RTE news this evening (2007/08/08) reported that the Irish Government was considering removing the mandatory retirement age of 65.

Historically, the concept of a mandatory age for retirement has its origins in the 19th Century. Germany was the first country to introduce a state-funded retirement pension in 1889. Otto von Bismarck set the retirement age at 70 (although this was later dropped to 65 and in Germany now stands at 60 for women and 65 for men, with women being raised to 65 in 2012).

So from the retirement age of 70 all Germans were entitled to their old age pension paid by the state until their death. The average life expectancy of a German male in 1889 was (apparently) 72 with the majority making it not much further than their late 60s. Some sources I’ve looked at give a range of averages between 66 and 72 so I’d welcome some definitive statistics here rather than peddle myth and misinformation.

In any case the social brotherhood of workers only had to fund each other’s pensions for a ball park period of 2 - 3years.

This of course means that many people never got to claim their pension because, as every primary school child will tell you, the average is made up of the sum of all ages in the population divided by the number of people in that population. So the economics of Bismarck’s Social Security pension were fairly harsh.

Now, our life expectancies are much longer. The choices are to either remove the mandatory requirement to retire at 65 and make it an optional age (ie the state will provide your pension at any time after you are 65) or raise the retirement age to a level that Bismarck would approve of. The legend is that when setting the retirement age Bismarck simply asked his civil servants at what age did most people die and then added a year or two.

There is a good discussion of this at this link, and again discussed here.

The Irish Central Statistics Office publishes statistics on Life expectancy in Ireland (funnily enough). From the most recent factoid available the following points are worth noting:

• In 1926 an Irish male infant was expected to live only 57.4 years (or 7.6 years short of the 65 year retirement age).
• Over the last 75 years, life expectancies have increased by 20% for men and 40% for women.
• The life expectancy of an Irish male after retirement at 65 in 2002 was 15.4 years, with women living a further 18.7 years. It is likely that this has increased yet again.

Compare this last figure to the approach of Bismarck to the German Social Security system.

If he was Minister for Finance in Ireland today (Biffo von Bismarck if you will) and he was to ask his civil servants at what age do most people die, the answer would be between 80 and 84 years on average. He’d push for the median age (the age in the middle of the dataset from which the average is calculated), which I’d guesstimate to be about 85.5 based on the detailed table of life expectancies that can be found here (I’ve worked off life expectancies for people over 65).

He’d smoke his pipe (I can’t find any pictures of Bismarck with a pipe, but he has that look about him - pipe smoker.) He may or may not inhale. He’d scratch his head and probably set a mandatory retirement age of….

….(sound of large calculator whirring and crunching numbers)
….(sound of figure being pulled out of thin air)

….82(ish)

This figure would be picked because it would give, on average, a pension payment for 2 years to retirees but the majority of people who aspired to retire would most likely expire before that age was reached. Which is exactly the logic that was applied in the foundation of the world’s first social security retirement pension.

Ultimately, the objective of Bismarck’s pension scheme was to provide an insurance against the physical disability of old-age that affected the largely manual heavy labour of the time. In this information age much of our work involves mental capability and is less reliant on physical ability.

In that regard I would argue that the best approach would be to raise the retirement age slightly (perhaps back to Bismarck’s original 70 years) and then make it optional for people to retire at that age or to keep working and contributing until they feel that they no longer need to, want to, or could be bothered to. Many jobs today do not require the same level of physical capability that would have been needed even fifty years ago - we are now knowledge workers in an Information economy… the capability of the brain and the ability to continually learn and improve skills are key. A co-worker may benchpress more than me, but we don’t move data in wheelbarrows.

One of the visions of retirement is it provides more time in your twilight years to spend time with grand-kids or pursuing hobbies. Web2.0 technologies increasingly provide the means for people to turn hobbies into niche businesses or to be flexible in how they provide their skills to potential employers. I suspect in my retirement years we will see an army of ’silver surfers’ engaging in shorter engagements on their own terms allowing them to mix the benefits of retirement (more time with grand-kids or pursuing hobbies) with the benefits of working in industry niches that excite them and provoke passion. In these roles the minds that would otherwise have been put out to pasture will provide valuable coaching and mentoring for the younger workers without necessarily requiring full time employment - unless they wanted it.

A flexible model is required that might allow a person to choose a time after a certain age when they will stop working or cut back, and a framework will be required that will allow people to take their full pension allocation or a reduced amount while they continue to work, with the freedom to claim their full pension if they choose not to work for a period of time.

I’d love in 40 years to be able to work for 3 months on a project for an economic rate, paying taxes and paying pension contributions, while drawing 50% of my normal pension (or similar) and then to take 6 months off to do as I wish while drawing down my full State pension to cover basic costs and then go teaching (for a salary) for a few months. All of this would require legislative changes in terms of tax treatments and such like but the day of the flexible retirement will come soon.

One alternate model might be a ‘graduated retirement’ that the retirement age could be either kept at 65 or set slightly higher and that those who wished not to work after retirement could do so and would be paid the basic pension, but those that wanted to continue working could take a reduced pension payment (say 75% of the basic amount) with the balance being paid into a reserve account. As the worker would continue to pay state pension contributions while working (which would increase the ‘pot’ for paying the basic pension to all), the reward would be that once they decided to cease working they could draw down from their ‘reserve’ account to increase the level of their State pension once they had stopped working.

The Irish Government have again trundled out a proposal to force mandatory registration of pre-paid mobile phones. It is stated that this will be a wonderful weapon in the war on drugs, organised crime and pixies.

There are two small problems with the proposal as it currently stands.

1. It is unlikely to work as the politicians claim it will
2. It is unlikely to work as the politicians hope it will

Now, technically, this is just one problem but it is such a doozy I thought it would be worth mentioning at least twice.

The reason it is unlikely to work as the politicians claim it will is that in order to ensure that the Register of Mobiles does not become filled with Michael M. Ouses or I.P Freelys the process will require some form of validation of name and address. In order to mitigate the risk of forged or fraudlent documentation being used (which would result in Mr Freely freely getting his fone phraudulently phone fraudulently) this documentation will need to be of some ‘official’ form.

For Bill Pay phones the usual documentation required is a passport or drivers licence (a work ID on its own is not usually sufficient in my experience) and a utility bill - these prove you are who you say you are and you live where you say you live. In order for the Register of Mobiles to meet the stringent evidentiary requirements that the stated purpose require (to deter criminals using mobiles and to assist in tracking and apprehending them via their mobile records) then a very high level of validity and verifiability will be required of the information used for identification purposes when the phone is being purchased.

The majority of Ready-to-go customers would seem to be children and teenagers (I’ve lost track of the number of phones my teenage sister-in-law has had over the past few years). They may not have a passport, are unlikely to have a driver’s licence (until they are in their late teens) and are extremely unlikely to be in possession of a valid utility bill in their name.

So how will they register their phones? Are the Government proposing that the phones would be registered to the parents of these children and teenagers? What then if the child is involved in some criminal activity? Does the parent become a suspect because of the mobile phone records?

“I didn’t beat up little Johnnie… I’d left my phone at home. My ma hates Johnnie - she must’ve done it!”.

One solution proposed to this (which according to the Irish Daily Mail came from Civil Servants in a review of this idea update– thanks to Antoin at eire.com who has a blog post which quotes the Dept of Communications on this topic) would be to implement the Register of Mobiles only after a National Identity Card was introduced in Ireland. In theory, this would give a standardised, State-backed identity (and possibly a unique identifier for the person). However there are no current proposals to implement such a card and previous proposals have met with opposition from various quarters.

A further issue is that name and address data ages over time. People move house, get married, get divorced or die. What mechanism will the Government require to ensure that the information registered on the Register of Mobiles is maintained accurately and in a form that meets or exceeds the evidentiary requirements of the legal system? This is not an issue for bill Pay phones as if the bill ceases to be paid the phone is cut off… and if the bill is still being paid but the address is no longer valid the Authorities have other investigative avenues open to them (such the payment records). For ‘ready-to-throw’ mobiles this is and will be a critical problem. Not only can the person move address, but the phone may ‘move person’ by being swapped, loaned or shared between family members (this may happen with bill pay phones but it is reasonable to assume that in the case of a bill pay phone the ’sharing’ or ‘lending’ of the phone would be temporary).

Currently we have a very important national register of people which is collated and maintained for a very serious and important function in the operation of the State. It’s called the Electoral Register and, not to put too fine a point on it, it has some ‘issues’ with the quality of the information there-in and the levels of duplication and inaccuracy in the data. What confidence should we have that the Government will have learned the lessons of the Electoral Register in the design and implementation of any new Register of Mobiles?

I am not saying we should not require registration of pre-pay mobile phones (all operators currently encourage registration through ‘free credit’ bribes). However if we are to require citizens to give up elements of personal privacy and provide information about their mobile phone usage to State Agencies then it is essential that the system work as it is intended it will and that the information captured meets or exceeds the expectations of the politicians, the police and, most importantly, the citizen. Crucially this must happen with out the information captured being excessive or irrelevant to the stated purposes for registration.

If we require people to provide information into a system and set of processes that will eventually degrade into an unmanaged cacophony of inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent and otherwise just plain awful data rather than a symphony of polished, reliable and policed information then we will have achieved nothing other than a layer of paperwork and a burden on mobile phone operators and their customers. Those with criminal intent will pervert the system - foreign SIMS, imported phones, stolen phones etc.

By definition they don’t play by the rules.

The counting of votes for the Irish Senate begins today. As a graduate of the National University of Ireland, UCD I had expected to have a vote. As a member of the Alumni Association (and a regular recipient of the lovely colour magazine produced by the University Alumni office) I should have received my ballot paper by registered post.

My wife is also a graduate of the same university and likewise has given the Alumni Association her current address (which happily is the same as mine).

Neither of us have received ballot papers. Unfortunately I ran out of time to chase this up with the University authorities but…

…if they can send me the Alumni newsletter to my home why didn’t I get my ballot paper? These were supposed to have been sent by registered post, so I would have expected a ‘non-delivery’ notice from An Post if we weren’t there.

Perhaps the State Electoral register isn’t the only electoral register which has ‘issues’? I wonder if any other UCD graduates failed to receive their Senate ballot papers?