The DOBlog

Tag: Politics & Culture

  • Lunchtime, Day 4 – Spin Review

    OK, Day 3 was a bit hairy for Government party spin people… Day 4 should be a piece of cake though, with the worst over right?

    Lunch time trawl of headlines:

    Nurses plan escalation of dispute

    After talks breakdown, the nurses plan further disruption to healthservice.

    This particular patient’s condition is getting increasingly critical. Get me 10CC of strikebreakers STAT!!

    National Competitiveness

    Garda Representative Association Conference has been told that if the nurses get a pay rise they’ll look for one too. This isn’t quite what we mean by “National Competitiveness” but it a doozy.
    What will happen if we get a ‘blue flu’ but have no nurses working to tend to this virulent and disruptive illness?

    BreakingNews.ie has more here.

    Martin Cullen admits the possiblity of having made a bit of an arse of electronic voting

    The Irish Examiner reports it today, picking up on an interview on NewsTalk radio yesterday.

    Cullen admits mistake over e-voting debacle
    By Paul O’Brien, Political Reporter

    TRANSPORT Minister Martin Cullen has finally conceded he got it wrong on
    electronic voting.

    “I suppose with hindsight, yes, I might have dealt with it differently,”
    he said last night of the manner in which he handled the issue. “I’ll put
    my hands up”.

    Mr Cullen’s willingness to acknowledge mistakes is in stark contrast to
    the Taoiseach, who only last week attempted to blame the opposition
    parties for the debacle, saying they had set out to find fault with the
    €52 million system.

    If anyone has a podcast or audio of that particular interview I’d love to hear it… were the words muffled by the big slice of humble pie he was cramming down?

    Of course, of the these the first two are problems that whatever parties win the election will have to deal with. The other is just funny. Why for would a Minister attempt to distance himself from a leader who is having some tricky questions asked about him right now?

    Hindsight is great, even if it does mean having to accept you were talking out of your behind.

    Cash in the Attic Scandal continues

    Ok, it wasn’t in the attic but where the hell did it come from and what was it for?

    FF party line is that this isn’t an election issue (and if you are seeking droids, these are not the ones you are looking for and you should move along [wave of jedi hand]).

    However, the fact that we’re in Day 4 of the Campaign and there has been nothing to counter the impression that their leader is a man running from a shady past who cannot be trusted as far as you could throw a thing that is inherently unthrowable does make it an election issue. The ‘corporate culture’ of denying a problem until it either goes away or becomes a large enough crisis for Minister Zapp Brannigan to wade in to resolve it seems to be kicking in.

    Well they are consistent.

    Here’s a REAL journalist’s take on the events of day 3… (what would I know)

  • Spin again…

    Day 4 of the elections and spin is being spun.

    Trevor Sargent has laid into el Berto for calling the election on a Thursday and disenfranchising young voters. Trevor encourages young voters (students etc.) to register to get on the supplemental register where they are currently living.

    What about us poor commuters though? I have a home, mortgage, cats and family in the far flung county of Commuterania. I don’t want to vote in Dublin North East where I rest my head mid week. I would have used the postal vote system but there was not enough time for me to

    • find form on line
    • Get boss to sign form
    • Get form back to the County Council of Commuterania

    . That is another less emphasised impact of the Dail being dissolved on a Sunday morning.

    I want to feel that I have had a say in electing the people who represent my local interests on the national stage. So I’ll have to juggle my schedule the last week in May to make sure that I am in the Far Flung County and can use my low tech, high trust paper and pencil to vote.

  • Spin that..

    Of course things might get a bit busier for the spin doctors by the end of the week.

    Some updates over at McGarr Solicitors. While it won’t affect the validity of the on-going election it has the potential to cause some mild discomfort to the relevant Minister.

  • Spin this…

    I would love to be a fly on the wall in Fianna Fail or PD central this evening. Things haven’t gone exactly well on the PR front today.

    Tricky issues in the High Court.

    A 17 year old girl who is pregnant with a child who has been diagnosed with an ailment that means they will not survive outside the womb has had to go to the High Court to try and get the State Agency whose care she is in to let her make her own decisions about how to proceed with the pregnancy. Tricky legal and moral issues… very hard for a politician to give answers about their view on the situation without alienating either extreme in Irish political life.

    Little spin to be spun on that one.

    Prisoner phones prominent talk show using a mobile phone smuggled into their cell

    Please note I’ve avoided using the phrase “cell-phone” (American readers will just need to put up with my quaint Oirish ways).

    A prisoner banged up for armed robbery in one of Ireland’s main prisons managed to phone in to one of Irelands most popular afternoon radio shows today using a mobile phone that had been smuggled into his cell. The segment of the show in question featured Paul McWilliams, a well known criminal reporter. The lads in the cell knew his work well but apparently didn’t think too highly of it. (Of course, by criminal reporter I mean a reporter on criminal activities).

    Apparently the Prisoner is not a number, he’s a human being.

    The Minister for Justice is a bit peeved – apparently “somebody has to take accountability for all of this”.

    Wrap the spin-doctor in copper wire and stick a magnet by his head…. we’re makin’ electricity now!

    UPDATE: The Podcast for this liveline show is available HERE about 52 minutes in. Paul McWilliams reaction when he realises that the guy he is talking to is in a maximum security prison is priceless.

    After years insisting there were no unfound significant archaelogical finds on the route of the M3 Motor way…

    ..and not 3 weeks after our Heritage body An Taisce was denied a Judicial review of aspects of the proposed motorway through one of the former seat of the High Kings of Ireland and (it gets better) only ONE DAY after the flashbulbs popped and soundbites bit at the turning of the first sod on the road by Martin Cullen TD, our Minister for Road Building Transport, an archaelogical site the size of THREE football fields is found. It could only be funnier if Cullen’s spadework had uncovered the danged thing on camera.

    To cap it all off, Minister Cullen was quoted yesterday as saying that the project was not gamble. I wonder if this new and significant archaelogical find will strengthen or weaken An Taisce’s case in their upcoming Supreme Court challenge to the route of the Motorway?

    Nurses Talks collapse (may be stuck on a trolley in a corridor for a while)

    Our nurses are revolting. And they’ve been going on strike. Talks that have been kicked off to try and stop hospitals being shut during the election campaign have collapsed again. Unfortunately the hospitals have run out of beds so the talks have been left on a trolley in the hallway until they are feeling well enough to be sent either home or to a respite care home.

    Things to do after the election – get sick.
    Things to do before the election – not get sick.

    Commuter heaven

    Actually no. Can’t find a link to a source for this one, but it appears that due to roadworks in Co.Dublin a tailback occured this morning that stretched from a roundabout on the outskirts of Dublin city all the way back to Naas in Co. Kildare. That’s a fair stretch of road for a tailback.

    This one could be hearsay, an urban myth. However just in case it isn’t it is lucky the election will be on a Thursday so commuters can’t vote (well not easily – polls are open to 10:30 it seems. As we only had 2 days notice, postal voting is a red herring for most of us).

    An Finally… Bertie pays stamp duty (?) on a house he is renting but the money winds up with his then girlfriend who he wasn’t renting from

    This just gets weirder and weirder. A large cash sum (£30k) is paid (in cash) to the girlfriend of the prime-minister. His explanation is that it is a “stamp duty matter” – but stamp duty isn’t payable to the renter of a property (how i wish it was) and related to ‘refurbishments’ to a house that was, at the time only 3 years old.

    Brain hurting trying to figure it out… the bods over at irishelection.com seem to share my confusion.

    So all in all a busy day for the outgoing Government’s spin teams.

  • A plug for the bruvver

    Thought I’d take a quick time-out to plug the brother’s blog over at http://anothercryingshame.blogspot.com.

    I particularly liked his post on the Electoral Consitutencies issue, especially his description of Dick Roche as the late lamented Government’s top crisis manager… which I quote here…

    …that man is the greatest crisis manager the FF/PD’s have. So great are his skills of crisis management that he has been known to leave entirely solvable problems alone for years until they become the sort of crises that have citizens of the state doubled over with the shitty squits, just so he can flex his crisis solving muscles.

    As he is younger and less mature, he can get away with things that a more mature mind would hesitate over (and then quote anyway). Some elements of accuracy may be lacking in that description, but Turlough is right – there has been a Zapp Brannigan-esque approach to managing things.

  • You cannot change the laws of physics.

    So, the Dail has dissolved. The Mahon Tribunal has been frozen. The franchise of students and commuters has been all but evaporated. The Constitution appears to have been transformed into just an insubstantial vapour.

    My understanding of the physics of matter moving between states (from frozen to disolved for example) suggests to me that it is inevitable that we’ll have some leaks in the near future.

  • Dis Dissolution is catching…

    RTE radio have just announced that the Mahon Tribunal is (as suspected) postponing the next phase of its hearings until after the election. What a fortuitous coincidence. It does recommence right after the election – when the haggling will be going on about who will be in the Government.

    Also, the brother has rowed in with his euro’s worth on the timing of the election. I am sure that if I hadn’t beaten him to the punch he would have out-pendatried me as he is, to borrow PJ O’Rourke’s description, ‘the political nut who lives around here’.

    I’m just a commuter whose opinion appears not to matter to a Taoiseach who seems to be out of touch with the realities of Celtic Tiger life.

  • Dissolve this for headaches…

    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 our Electoral Boundaries is still be be heard. One can only assume that a roll of the dice is being taken here on the assumption that the High Court (and possibly the Supreme Court) would view, on balance (yada yada) that the disenfranchising of consitutents who are currently under-represented in our Parliament is slightly less embarassing and legally problematic then not actually having a government to run the country. This sheer arrogance in the face of our Constitution and the rights of citizens to be represented in proportion to the population in their area is gonad numbing in its scale.

    Students and Commuters – Who needs ’em!

    From time to time I lecture 3rd level students. Not so long ago I was one myself. Now I’m a commuter. Calling the election for the 24th of May (right in the middle of university exams) disenfranchises students. Given that on the 24th of May I’m scheduled to be working 3 counties away from where I live, I’ll have to take a day of work to exercise my franchise. So will a lot of other commuters… you can’t exactly pop home on your lunch break if it takes you 2 hours to travel there and back. If my gonads weren’t already numbed by the nose-thumbing that the Constitution has received, I’d have numb ones now.

    Dear My Boss,
    I will be unable to report for work on the 24th of May due to an increased numbing of my gonads caused by the arrogance of political leaders who choose to disenfranchise me by calling elections in the middle of the week.

    My GP informs me that if I can restore my Number 1 preference to its correct order I might be back in work by June.

    Yours

    Me

    I really hope that a large number of students and commuters make the effort to vote that day – but to vote the arrogant and insular leaders that we currently have out of office.

    Could it be that the Commuters can see on a daily basis the failure of our infrastructure planning and the total failure to connect dots and provide for people’s quality of life might have been seen as issues that would put them in the ‘anti-incumbent’ camp?

    The Taoiseach’s timetable

    The media coverage has been peppered with references over the past few weeks to the fact that the whole decision rested with one man – El Bertie. So he has made a decision on the basis of his personal timetable. I wonder what his drivers were? Maximising the numbers of voters who might be able to turn out obviously wasn’t one of them. What could it have been I wonder?

    Certainly not the investigation into his alleged involvements in planning corruption that is to be conducted by the Mahon Tribunal over the coming weeks … oh, hang on… the Tribunal will shut up shop on that part of their investigation for the duration of the election.

    What a coincidence.

    Constitutional Challenge

    However, the Constitutional Challenge trundles on with a trial date likely next Thursday. At that stage we’ll know just how many other voters will not have their voices heard, or at least not heard as loudly as they should be.

    That rumbling you hear are the dice rolling…

    … Mr McGarr over at McGarrSolicitors has his thought also.

  • Little victories..(?)

    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 that were available were good enough though to form the basis of funding allocations under the Local Government Fund.

    So after weeks of denying there was a problem that needed to be sorted out, Minister Roche as convened a commission to sort out the problem. I wonder if he will have to “bash some heads together” like he did when he went to Galway to part the waters?

    The even better news

    The even better news is that there could now be a full 6 months for Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats to club together and push through all those reforms they had promised as part of their election manifestos policy statements about things that might be important in an election. They’ve costed them all and were just looking for a fresh mandate to do them.

    Sure, hasn’t the constitution given them a few more months to deliver the goods.

    53 promises from Bertie equates to about 10 a month. I wonder if they’ll start with the promises in FF’s Economic policy manifesto document ? Or will the PDs get their way and tinker with stamp duty?

    Will they put something in place in the next 6 months to address the flaws in the processes underpinning the Electoral Register (look for posts earlier than 18th April on this one!)? After all, Minister Roche seems to be getting into his problem solving, head-bashing stride.

    Come on gang… a lot done, more to do.

    …or will they still leap lemming -like into the arms of the Electorate before the end of June?

  • Better late then never..

    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 represented and the half-dozen or so that are over represented. They do, however, make the point that the cities in Ireland (of which there are only 5) have lost population share to other areas…

    Of course this information was available in the public domain since the 29th of March and forms the basis of the Constitutional challenge to the Electoral constituency boundaries (or rather the failure of the Government to rework those boundaries in light of the census data).