Observations from the beach

Plus ca change

2010-07-10T18:56:00.003+01:00

So the UK census is expensive and inefficient and should be scrapped, according to Tory MP, Francis Maude. Next year's census will be the last in a system that dates back 200 years. In future, we can expect our population mapping to come from other (cheaper) sources such as the Post Office and credit reference agencies.

Since 1801, every ten years, the census of population has taken a snapshot of all people in the UK on a given date. In addition to recording the names and locations of all individuals in the jurisdiction on census day, each census gathered additional information such as occupation and religious persuasion. In it's 200 year history, 1941 was the only occasion when a UK census was not taken, due to the war.

Among the administrative institutions that Ireland inherited from the UK was the census of population. As a university student, I worked on two censuses - not because I was an eternal student but because the census of 1971 was postponed due to lack of funds and had to be rushed through in 1979 to ensure it was completed before the next due census in 1981.

A job as a census enumerater (what a grandiose addition to a CV) was better paid than other student jobs. Each census enumerator had an area of about 300 households to account for and final payment was withheld until all returns were submitted. My first census included a number of bed-sits and households that did not welcome the attention of the state. I learned to be persistent to the point of stalking my quarry. My second census was of an area that included a psychiatric hospital where I had to deal with fewer individual households but lots more bureaucracy.

Aside from the pay, working as a census enumerator helped me in my historical studies, giving me a special understanding of the value of the census in historical research. The census informed profound social and political change in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 21st century, the world wide web helps the rivers of migration to connect with family around the globe.

The value of a census goes beyond knowing how many people live in a street. While it might be more cost-effective to get the numbers from other sources, this approach ignores the richer importance of this information. It also ignores the fact that those that want to hide will not be stalked by the persistent evaluator that wants to complete the picture.

Scrapping the census may not appear to be important in these times of economic crisis. But the buck has to stop somewhere and this is a very important place. Since the start of the banking crisis, the wealthy have raided the coffers of the ordinary - our penions and rights are eroded, our childrens' futures are sold, dead and gone. And now they plan to put the census into the hands of credit reference agencies. To cite Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karrm (former editor of Le Figaro) Plus ca change, plus c'est le meme chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same).

Time to buy a wheelbarrow

2009-02-19T08:46:00.005Z

Whew - we can all relax now - our economic woes are coming to an end and the country will be awash with money. Soon we'll have more cash than we know what to do with. The nice chappies over at the Bank of England have put their thinking caps on and come up with a simple solution - they're going to print more money. We can all get back to being manic shoppers and forget all this caution and thrift that is making life so dull and boring.

If you're quick, you'll be able to snap up bargains on the car lot and buy cheap flights to Antigua. And if you're really quick and really lucky, while you're there you might spot the elusive Sir Allen Stanford in a helicopter and claim a juicy reward from the SEC. This will add some dollars to your collection of crisp new notes, hot of the printing presses.

Because you'll have more money than you'll know what to do with, you might decide to donate some of these dollars to Meg Whitman's campaign to be elected Governor of California. Who better to sort out the chronic finances of California, after all, than the former boss of eBay? She will be able to teach those silly Californian liberals a thing or two and help them sell their souls to the highest bidders.

I've got it all worked out. I've been down to Staples where I got a great deal on a printer that does scanning too. I'll save Alistair Darling the trouble of getting my wads of cash to me - he's a busy man these days. I'm a bit worried about the silver strip and watermark and stuff they use to stop counterfeiters but I'm guessing that they won't have much time for such niceties once they get printing in earnest - and they won't mind anyway 'cos I'm only saving them the trouble.

I'm working on my shopping list now. I'm not planning to be greedy and I don't see this as an excuse to forget the planet. But there is a small matter of neglected air miles to collect and, after the rubbish summer we had last year, I think it's only sensible to buy some outdoor heaters. And, lest you think I'm throwing caution to the wind, I'm going to invest in a stainless steel, indestructible wheelbarrow. The garden is in need of some TLC and, if the money splurge leads to galloping inflation, I can cart my cash to the shops and beat the price increases.

Throwing good money after bad

2009-02-16T10:53:00.006Z

On the BBC this morning, Geoff Mulgan accused governments around the world of poring good money after bad, propping up big failing industries including banks and car manufacturers. A former policy adviser to the Blair government and now Director of the Young Foundation, Mulgan's opinions carry a lot of weight. He points out that all initiatives so far are biased towards big business and very little is being channeled into iniatitives that help us prepare for future needs, such as green industries and finding new models for supporting an increasingly aged population.

Mulgan is not alone in questioning the wisdom of bailing out the banks, with eminent economists proposing alternative solutions in bastions of the conservative media, including the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and Daily Telegraph. Nobel economist, Joseph Stiglitz says we should let the bad banks fail and set up new good banks instead. Paul Romer, from the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research has the same idea. Accepting that we need banks, Romer says "Turning bad banks into good banks is a difficult and risky way to get them. It's simpler and safer to start entirely new banks." Financier and philanthropist, George Soros, stops short of the new bank idea but argues that we should not purchase the toxic assets of bad banks. William Buiter, from the London School of Economics, sees a common logic between these proposals and says that "Bailing out the holders of existing bank debt and other bank creditors would be outrageously unfair: they did the lending and made the investments, they should eat the losses."

Less eminent writers are also tackling the issue on the blogosphere. Irish blogger, Niall Larkin, blogged about a conversation he had with an economist friend about the possibility of dumping bad banks in place of new, good internet banks, perhaps using the Post Office and Credit Union network for on-the-ground activities. The commentary includes a post from a lady in New Zealand who tells us about the Kiwibank that is doing exactly that. And, even the right-wing Daily Telegraph published a blog by Tracy Corrigan where she references Voltaire for reasons "Why executing bankers is good for morale".

I'm not sure that execution is either a humane or practical way to fix things, but the blog sums up the sense of moral outrage people in the UK have been feeling recently. Last week, some of the leading bankers in the country appeared before the Treasury Select Committee to account for themselves. Despite glib apologies, it was abundantly clear that none of them felt any real remorse. One of them gave great offense when he described his income as modest and, on further questioning, we learned that he has been earning an average of £1million per year. This in a country where the minimum hourly wage is under £6.

The committee hearings occured at the same time that we learned that the banks intended to pay themselves their customary enormous bonuses. Despite swallowing up billions of tax payers money, the government said it was necessary to pay the bonuses due to contractual obligations. An online petition was set up to stop the bonus payments and is open for any UK citizen or resident to sign.

On the Baseline Scenario, blogger James Kwak, suggests excessive bonuses be paid in the form of toxic assets from the institution. "That would get the assets off the bank’s balance sheet, and into the hands of the people responsible for putting them there - at the value that they insist they are worth."

Irish economist and writer, David McWilliams has also given thought to how we can turn crisis into opportunity. Describing public service cuts as "social vandalism", McWilliams turns his focus on the social consequences of mounting unemployment. He suggests following the course taken by Argentina during economic crisis, where they matched middle-aged, out-of-work experts with young, innovative but inexperienced entrepreneurs. The process led to to the establishment of many successful businesses and helped turn around the economic decline.

This blog describes just a handful of the ideas and suggestions that are out there. But, for all the great ideas, it will take political will to make a difference. We won't stop propping up the old order until we make it clear to our rulers that nothing less is acceptable. In these desperate times it is not enough to talk about things and expect somebody else to do them for us. We are all responsible for our future.

References
http://short.ie/mulgan

http://short.ie/corrigan

http://short.ie/stiglitz

http://short.ie/romer

http://short.ie/soros

http://short.ie/buiter

http://short.ie/larkin

http://www.kiwibank.co.nz/

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/bank-greed/

http://short.ie/baseline

http://short.ie/mcwilliams

Did Dick Turpin apologise?

2009-02-11T14:58:00.007Z

Yesterday, some of the leading bankers in the UK appeared before the House of Commons Treasury Committee to explain themselves in light of the near collapse of our economy due to their collective greed. Although quick to apologise, none showed any real remorse for their actions. At least two of them made fulsome apologies to their shareholders but I heard no apologises to the English taxpayers that will be paying for their greed and stupidity for generations.

Outside an RBS branch in Scotland, the BBC sought public opinion on these shallow apologies and one wag summed it up with "Dick Turpin probably apologised too". Dick Turpin was a thief, murderer and highwayman who was hanged in 1739 in York for horse-rustling. His legend is more glamorous, depicting him as a dashing champion of the poor, more in the tradition of Robin Hood.

The bankers who were questioned yesterday were a motley crew, elevated (?) to nobility (?) by the Blair/Brown government, earning obscene amounts of money and without a banking qualification between them. Rewarding themselves with monthly salaries that most people don't make in a year, these are only small change compared to the annual bonuses they earn.

The Treasury Committee investigation happens against the backdrop of announcements that these banks intend to pay bonuses as usual this year. In the case of the RBS, this amounts to bonus payments of over £1 billion being paid to the staff of a business that recently reported approx £8 billion losses for last year (the biggest corporate loss in UK commercial history), and which has been bailed-out by the government to the tune of £20 billion. When questioned how this can be allowed to happen, our government tells us that the banks have contractual agreements that must be honoured. Excuse me - did I hear that right? We, the tax payers, own 68% of the RBS - does that not give us any say in arrangements?

Since when did a bonus become a right, not a reward? Who wrote these contracts and what court would uphold them? You can write all the contracts you want but if they are illegal, based on bad law, then they won't stand up. And what on earth are our elected representatives up to, giving £20 billion of our money to an organisation without any provisos such as "you won't steal from us anymore" and "you won't get any more big salaries or pay rises until you pay back every single penny you borrowed from us"?

At the same time we hear that the FSA (Financial Services Authority) that oversaw this fiasco plan to reward themselves with £13 million in bonuses. We could be forgiven for thinking that this is all one big conspiracy of the powerful and the wealthy and that our government is as complicit as the rest of them.

As the country heads into the worst recession for a hundred years, according to Ed Balls, close confidante of the Prime Minister, jobs are rapidly disappearing as small and large businesses go to the wall. The High Streets are becoming ghost towns and local government is cutting back. It won't be long before children are going to school hungry and going to sleep cold. What is the future for them, saddled with a debt that will last for generations, supporting an increasingly aged population and a national debt the scale of which we can't even comprehend.

We can't undo the damage done by immoral shysters in suits, drinking gold champagne and storing their ill-gotten gains offshore, beyond the reach of the taxman. We can, however, insist that the rot stops now. You can start by signing a petition to stop the banking bonuses at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/bank-greed/ and you can email your MP and councillors and ask for an explanation.

There are other things we can do, such as think about new economic and banking models where we stop throwing good money after bad and take control into our hands. More on this soon.

Pret-a-porter for the web?

2008-07-20T09:43:00.002+01:00

The term "pret a porter" means ready to wear. Is the web about to explode with ready-to-wear content the same way as 60s fashion moved things out from the couture house to the high street and the market stall? Blogs, wikis and Facebook, Flickr and podcasts, RSS and Twitter - all have helped. But chaos prevails in our online activities - too many passwords, sites, profiles, contact groups, communication channels and more and more. Dataportability aims to address this and, today, they reached a significant milestone with the selection of a steering group of 12 people to drive the effort.

Since the group formed late last year, organisational issues have hampered progress. Two attempts at establishing a logo (a simple task you might think!) have been met with cease and desist communiques from various quarters. As an open movement, many large internet companies were quick to jump on board but the actual day-to-day work was left to a small number of committed volunteers. Everybody had an equal voice and a unique set of opinions, making it difficult at times to find consensus or to stay focused.

The new steering group has a lot of work to do. A guick glance at the dataporatiblity wiki will frighten all but the most curious minds. Too many links, too many directions, too much information - too much of which ends in blind alleys and unfinished business. But the underlying idea is almost clear - a desire to give web users ownership and control of their data on the web.

The challenges facing the steering group remind me of the film, Twelve Angry Men, where Henry Fonda was relentless in his pursuit of truth and fairness. Their prolonged deliberations were concerned with:

coming to the truth
overcoming personal limitations
serving the public
coming to know people they would never meet otherwise
a pressure cooker because the stakes were high
great personal cost
every voice was important

The stakes for dataportability are very high. The aim of breaking down the walls of privacy on the web is commendable, but turning a list of standards and protocols into a viable framework with solid working examples is not easy. In an industry where many web developers don't even pay lip service to the needs of security or accessibility, the business case for adopting dataportability must be crystal clear and the techniques and processes must be well-devised and documented.

The open movement is maturing and gaining credibility. But, until the use of open standards becomes an expectation from users and businesses, the revolution will limp along while the software giants continue their race for control of our online activities and content. If the dataportability group can deliver concrete working examples, solid business cases and a viral mechanism for spreading the news, we could be on the brink of something great.

Dataportability is an open movement and anybody can join and help out. If you are interested, visit their website or just go directly to their wiki, where all the meaty (and confusing) stuff resides. There you will find links for various different action groups and links to google groups and skype public chats.

Open source synergies

2008-06-10T22:51:00.002+01:00

Today I was in London to help users understand how to use a new Drupal site I am developing for an educational research project in London. Tonight I attended the inaugral meeting of the Drupal for NGOs group because it coincided with my trip and seemed like a useful way to spend my evening.

Now I am sitting in All Bar One in Holborn, who had a sign outside inviting people to come and hot desk here. My time is short or I'll miss the last tube so here it is. Today's training was exciting and interesting - lots of user feedback, occasional friction but amazing progress and vision going forward. Tonight was amazing.

The synergies between open source , theeducation sector and NGOs is mind-boggling and the passion, commitment and professionalism I met this evening was heart-warming. This is where I want to be, where I want to work and be useful.

I learned that the scary timeframe I have of delivering a Drupal site as a public prototype in 2 weeks is unheard of. Six months seems to be considered a reasonable timeframe. I met the guy that designed one of the Drupal core themes and designed it with a view to accessibility. I met a couple of guys that are stuck on some aspects of a stunning social network site for people with cancer - and learned from them what are the technical blockers to their project. I met with a compatriot from Dublin who works for Concern (the "fasting charity" all us Irish know and love so well) - he's over to learn more about Drupal and off to Bristol with a bunch of tonight's attendees to be trained in scrums - think agile development rather than scrummage. I met a young developer from Brighton as young as my kids that referenced Douglas Adams (a boy thing) and Bucky Fuller - an over there, totally creative thing.

My mind is full of ideas, creativity and the potential of open source and Drupal to empower. But now I must dash to catch last tube back to Balham. What a day, what a night, bring on more of the same.

Little peepel doing it for themselves

2008-04-10T20:20:00.004+01:00

The last few weeks have been as volatile as they get in the stressy life of a tech writer in the world of web apps, open source and agile development - when the ink is hardly dry on a text string or a protocol before the terminology, the requirements and the brand itself are reinvented - again.

In the midst of this chaos, it seemed like a good idea to ground myself and my aspirations in an office. Bucking nigh-on 15 years of home-working tradition (ironically, my stint at Skype was the exception), I took an office in a new business centre at the end of my street. Home working has been good to me, enabling me to earn a reasonable income living in remote and idyllic places while being more productive in my writing which is, in its defining moments, a solitary task.

It has become more difficult for me to work from home - when the kids return from school they want to natter and too often I respond with "later, I've got to work right now" - sound familiar? So, I got an office and on Tuesday I moved in. The office has 2 desks and a filing cabinet and a view over the playground where my kids sometimes play. The children are on school vacation and my daughter has taken up residence on the second desk as my "apprentice".

Wednesday, my apprentice sets up a spreadsheet for my business expenses. To do so, she had to download and install Open Office, all done easily and without problem. Wednesday I also learn that OpenX, the main source of my current income, is moving HQ from London to LA - oops - who will pay my office rent? Time for some soul-searching.

Thursday, in the office before 9am, and a number of pings about OpenX news. My apprentice arrives and I put her to work on another spreadsheet but this time she is a "guinea pig" 12-year-old using Peepel. She captured my ideas on whiteboard first. Next, she set up a Peepel account. Then she entered the contents of a new spreadsheet which defines different rates for different tasks/expertise. Finally, my apprentice shared this with me through my Peepel account, which I was able to edit before returning edit control to her.

I've been a small business for a long time and have learned many ways and means of collaboration to simplify my work. Personally, I'm not a lover of Google apps because I don't trust their motives or the ability of a monster to deliver the goods for the individual. I'm impressed by the ability of Peepel to make it easier for me to collaborate with my daughter without a big learning curve or complicated downloads.

Smiling Irish fall foul of Quebec language police

2008-02-16T20:29:00.005Z

On a business trip to Montreal, I was amused and slightly perturbed by an article I read in the Montreal Gazette about a local Irish pub, McKibbins. The pub is in trouble with the Quebec Office Quebecois de la Langue Francaise (OLF) because a customer complained that they did not receive service in French. When the OLF inspected the premises, they were not impressed by the many antique, English-only adverts for Irish beers and other products. The antique signage must come down, the bar was told, or face a fine of $1,800 for each offending sign.

Bishop Street, home of McKibbins downtown bar, boasts not one, but three Irish bars, and an Indian, Brazilian and a Mexican restaurant among others. Down the street from McGill and Concordia Universities, the street reflects the multicultural dynamic that makes Montreal a great place to visit. Everywhere you go in this city, people slip easily and seamlessly between French and English - non-French speakers are never made to feel like outsiders here as happens in Paris. And if you stumble in your effort to speak in French, you get a smiling helping hand and not the cold reproof you encounter so often in northern France.

It is a credit to Quebec that it has retained a vibrant language and cultural identity in a nation and continent that is largely english-speaking. But, as a bilingual Irish person, I think that linguistic repression is counter-productive. I was brought up speaking Irish in an era when it was distinctly untrendy to speak our ancient language. The language was force-fed to every Irish schoolchild and you could not work in government service or qualify for university without it. Virtually all of my peers hated it and promptly forgot the little they learned as soon as they left school.

In the past 20 years, a seed change occured. The Irish language became non-compulsory for school leavers and, at the same time, the Gaelscoil (Irish language school) movement was born. A network of independent primary schools developed where Irish was the core medium of teaching and parents (many of whom spoke no Irish) were invited to play a much more proactive role in the running of the school. This spawned a new generation of bilingual Irish people, largely middle class, who were proud of, and knowledgeable about, their linguistic heritage. By removing compulsion, Irish was enabled to grow and flourish among an appreciative audience. The movement is so significant it has made its own entry in wikipedia.

En route to Montreal on this trip, I stopped in Bordeaux for a few days. The Bordelaise have a reputation for being bourgeois (whatever that means in this day and age!). I found them warm, friendly, and increasingly multilingual, unlike their northern counterparts. I had the same mix of french and english conversations with people there that I enjoy in Montreal, while in Paris they still cling to a monocultural attitude that the world has little interest in supporting. The biggest English-speaking country in the world is India and it doesn't seem to be doing their culture or economy much harm.

McKibbins is enjoying a certain notoriety and increase in business because of the media attention surrounding this bizarre story - they've made national TV - you couldn't buy that publicity as a side-street bar in Montreal. And they have decided to fight the language police (as they are known locally). On Monday they launch a website where visitors will be able to register their views on the matter - as they say in French - quel bordel. I know what I'll be voting as an Irish-English-French speaker.

The genius of Apple

2007-12-30T15:06:00.000Z

With the huge resurgence in popularity and profitability at Apple, the importance of sleek design is clear. But I wish they would apply the same rigour (and some of their soaring value) to customer support. I spent five years in the Windows wilderness until I returned to Mac world three months ago.

All was peachy until Christmas night when the Mac battery stopped charging on Christmas Day. On close investigation we discovered that a staple was embedded in the magnetic power socket and was interfering with the contacts on the power adaptor. Even after removing the staple, the adaptor was not working and the magnetic pull was very strong. I went to bed and slept on the problem and the following day I tried again. The mac booted up, but only on the external power and only when the battery was removed. When the battery was in place, the mac booted but the screen remained dark - pointing to a power management issue.

Apple telephone support advised me to take it to my nearest Apple store - in Exeter, quite a distance from me. I had to ring and book an appoinment with a "genius" - another two day delay and a half day's time. The genius replicated the behaviour and said I'd have to leave it with them for investigation. He also suggested that the staple might invalidate my warranty.

When I said that it's pretty shabby to have to leave my three month old computer with them and not receive a replacement, the genius said that BMW would probably not give me a replacement car if they found a banana skin shoved up the exhaust pipe. I fail to see the connection between shoving a banana skin into something and not noticing that my socket has attracted a small, neighbouring object. And the bottom line is, if my car breaks down, it's easy to find an alternative. It is not easy to find an alternative computer where you can transfer your applications and files in a seamless manner.

Why is it not possible to rent a replacement machine at a low rate while your machine is in for repair? Before you buy, all the literature tells you why you must buy this product, how it will transform the way you work and socialise. But when something goes wrong, there's no hurry now, you'd better learn to manage without it!

Number crunching in the garden

2007-12-27T15:00:00.001Z

This time last year, my social networks stretched to Skype. LinkedIn and a dormant blog. Nowadays, I must perform a growing number of housekeeping tasks to keep on top of a busy online lifestyle.

Today I went to delete some Facebook groups and was intrigued by the numbers.

I love Openads has 70 members and is administered by seven of the winning team at Openads. These people and this software is a major highlight of my year.

The Skype Developer group has 56 members but represents a platform delivering millions of software extras for Skype. Three of the group administrators no longer work for Skype.

The Techcrunch group has a surprisingly modest 282 members. Mike Arrington isn't among the two administrators - is this an oversight, a mistake or deliberate?

Om Malik is miles ahead of Arrington with more than 2,000 members in the GigaOM group. Personally administered by the great guy himself - the personal touch matters it seems.

With an exciting almost 1,000 members, the off-valley tech commentary proves its value and interest and benefits from personal supervision from key staff.

At 123 members, the Blognation group wasn't rounding up members like Om or RWW. But Blognation Belgium group (111 members) and Blognation Canada group
(60 members) showed the potential reach of the troubled project.

The Tech Writers, at 134 members is a fine size for a group that receives nil activity or administration. Membership is safe and requires no effort I guess. I will try to get some input going soon.

At the bottom of the scale are 10 Social Hermits. This group is a friendly cave to hide when the social whirl gets too much; a space for peace and contemplation.

Finally, off the richter scale, is 6 Degrees of Separation with a whacking 3.3 million + users. Gaining hundreds of thousands of members per day, and run by a Steven Jackson (sole admin) from London, author of a recently published thriller. I have absolutely no idea what this is about but it seems to be working - go spam go.

Hearing things on Skype

2007-12-18T21:29:00.000Z

Today I was going to blog about curtains at Blognation - an elegant closure to a sorry tale. But my atttention has been distracted by something far more interesting and positive; a series of tutorials to help blind people to use Skype.

A blind lady has put together a series of voice tutorials to help blind people navigate their way around Skype. The navigation uses various scripts to translate Skype menus into the JAWs application that helps blind (Windows) users interpret the content of computer windows. As a sighted person, I closed my eyes and tried to visualise my way through the complex menu focus and commands but I could not follow the JAWs instructions which were way too quick for my poor ears. But JAWs users prefer to control the speed setting to speed past the page elements they already understand (or don't want) to reach the element that concerns them. At that point, they can reduce the speed until they are familiar with that element.

For all their focus on usability, few web 2.0 products are designed with accessibility in mind. Of all the sites using AJAX to create a drag and drop user interface, how many consider the needs of blind viewers? Of all the sites that incorporate sound and video, how many factor in deaf or blind users? When bloggers add widgets to their blogs to enrich the user experience, how many examine the impact on disabled users? And when programmers write the UI code, how many consider the learning curve for blind users when they make UI changes? These are serious considerations for web 2.0 developers because, with freedom comes responsibility. If you want to push your product into various institutional markets, accessibility is a basic entry requirement.

I learned about these tutorials in a public chat frequented by Skype afficionados, staff, developers and general onlookers. The developer of the Chat Translator for Skype has been working with Marrie (the blind tutor) and other blind volunteers who helped him build accessibility into his Chat Translator extra. This application manages some of their accessibility issues because JAWs will only read chats from the window that is in focus and if multiple chats are ongoing, messages will be missed. The Chat Translator overcomes this issue because you can set an option to read all chats aloud.

Before my Christmas package from Skype last year, I enjoyed early previews of the Chat Translator and discussed the possibilities for people with disabilities at some length. But I failed to make a sufficient business case for participation and then I had some basic survival matters to focus on. This was not the first time that Skype glanced at the area of usability and disability (a.ka. accessibility) as Stuart Henshall wrote about in Skype Journal over two years ago. But each previous concept was shelved in the face of more compelling business priorities - it's all a matter of priorities I guess.

Usability is a big word these days and grabbing UI feedback from Jo(e) User prior to development is an essential part of the meagre budget of many web 2.0 startups. But usability has many elements and blind readers have an awful lot to teach us about it. Shut your eyes and visualise your way around your application and you will lose your way. Try to figure how to navigate between internal and external widgets, between mandatory and required fields in forms, around flash images and google maps . . . Blind users must develop an internal mind map of their computers, remembering vast sequential routes to information and target pages. By working with these users, developers can gain deep insight into usability.

When this chat came up this evening I had a thought. If everybody in this chat donated a few bucks and a few hours, we could build this type of development into common practice. We could incorporate user feedback from some of the most savvy users on the web into our UI design - and it need not cost much when you incorporate these principles into site and UI design from the get go. If you are interested in donating 20 bucks and 20 hours to this simple goal, please leave a comment. If more than 10 people offer to help, we'll set something formal up - otherwise - thanks for the interest.

Sethi fraud was all Mike Arrington's fault

2007-12-14T10:42:00.000Z

After a frenzied week of speculation around the blogosphere, Sam Sethi has finally thrown in the towel, and posted his resignation as CEO of Blognation. And even in this closing statement he couldn't show any grace or decency. It's nice to know that it is Mike Arrington's fault that I didn't get paid for two months work plus a stack of expenses. I can sleep better at night knowing that Sam is going to sell Blognation and I can finally expect my cheque in the post. And I don't have to worry about any more threats from him because he is too busy threatening others to have time.

I don't think anybody doubts that Blognation was (and I hope will continue to be) a great idea. That is why I joined - not for the ego-boost or the party invites or the self-aggrandisement - in fact I hated those aspects of it. I'd love to see it survive but I fear that Sam will take it down with him. He writes that he plans to auction Blognation and use the money to pay his debts. I have no doubt that he will try to sell it but I have little faith in fair dispersal of the income. He has said or done nothing in the past six months to inspire any confidence in this promise.

It astounds me that in light of the debacle, so many of the comments to Sam's post wish him luck. Not so Mathew Ingram (sensible chappie) who says "this is one of the most mealy-mouthed and insincere posts I’ve seen from an alleged business person since Conrad Black stopped blogging." A year ago, Sam had his infamous spat with Mike Arrington and it is interesting to read Marc Canter's views on that part of the Sethi soap opera.

Loic has every right to call Sam an asshole. He is an asshole. A manipulative asshole. BUt that’s how they train them at Microsoft.
But Sam is gonna make a fortune on this controversy. He’ll land someplace sweet, same as Jason Caacanis did. And Scoble - too. The more controversy - the better the NEXT job is.

So, it seems not everybody was taken in by slimy Sam's charm and posh shoes. For everybody's sake I hope the last paragraph doesn't come true - serial entrepreneur my ass, more like serial cheat.

Marc Orchant fund

2007-12-10T10:15:00.000Z

As promised, you can donate to the fund to help Marc's family at http://tinyurl.com/2l66wz. The world is a sadder place today.

Marc Orchant RIP

2007-12-10T02:45:00.000Z

I didn't know Marc - he came later to Blognation than me, but he passed away today after a massive heart attack last weekend. My heart goes out to his family and tomorrow (it's now nearly 3am) I will add a link to pay into a fund to help his family deal with the costs. I never met Marc but I liked his writing - the topics he chose and the voice he adopted - a fine writer. We had some mutual friends but that was not a "thing" in a life when everything continues. But it doesn't and Marc is gone and I never got to meet him.

R.I.P.

Triona

the corporate family

2007-12-09T20:25:00.000Z

I haven't posted for a long time because I had some bad times and some good times - and there was no time for blogging. But events of the past week have driven the priority of posting a blog up the scale.

This week two matters close to my heart came to a head: meltdown at Blognation and redundancies at Skype including at the Developer Program. I worked on both these projects and was passionate about their respective missions - both dumped me in unceremonious fashion and rewarded my loyalty and expertise with rudeness and mistreatment.

A year ago almost to the day, I was a victim of the first big round of redundancies at Skype, weeks before Christmas. On that day they axed the entire technical writing function in Skype, as well as many others. The HR team were dressed, to a person, in black for the occasion. Both my uber-boss and direct manager gave me the same line that this would be the best thing for me in the future - I didn't appreciate it at the time and I'm not sure I do now - other than that I'm happy I'm no longer working for such people.

It took me months to get back on my feet and, along the way, a friend invited me to participate in Blognation. I was assured that funding was in place in advance for this adventurous project and I was to be editor for Ireland and play a special role in developing editorial standards. After a couple of months of serious planning including team and standards building, we met up in London as a team for the Essential Web conference. It was clear from the moment we arrived that Sam Sethi was not going to devote any time to team building and it became crystal clear by the second night that he was not paying his way either. That was in July.

My life has turned around from these grim times - I'm consulting for a really positive and winning team at Openads, and have the freedom to work and build other projects. I recovered from my second financial and emotional hit in a year and life began to settle into a nice pattern. Until this past week.

First off was the explosion of news around the blogosphere about Blognation - from the trigger, Oliver Starr, but covered in depth by Blognation rival, TechCrunch, as well as drawing attention of Dan York (who inspires and educates me and has made the best response so far I believe), Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, and Jemima Kiss of The Guardian among others.

As I was still reeling from the feelings this aroused, I had a couple of scary pings from former Skype colleagues about firings going on - another Christmas package from the Skype HR angels. This time the guy that fired me got the bullet along with many others. They have decimated the developer program and there have been hits right across the London operation.

I was concerned by how upset I was for people this week, including the git that axed my job in Skype, and I started to explore the reasons. And my conclusion is that teams are not unlike families. You may disagree internally but you show a united face in public. When teams split, by reason of redundancy or whatever, it is like splitting a family - you lose your siblings and connections. Companies do basic things to cover their legal backs when they make you redundant but they do not include any form of counselling for dealing with loss - either for those that are dumped or those that survive. A quick pep talk from the idiot that broke the team doesn't usually cut it. And while it's nice to get some redundancy money it is rarely enough to cover you to replace that job if yours is a specialist job.

Of my extended family of the past couple of years, many are in pain now and even the gits have my sympathy. In both cases the managers were the worst gits. I need to get back on track for next week, back on focus in my interesting job with a good team. All I want for Christmas is that my "work siblings" get by and that the same doesn't happen again soon.

And I'd like to forward Skype and Blognation a lump of coal to save Santa the trip.

An essentially London take on web 2.0

2007-07-03T10:54:00.000+01:00

On June 29th, Library House hosted a one-day conference on the Essential Web to showcase more than 40 web 2.0 products from Europe. Earlier in the week I read in The Independent that the creative sector is now as valuable to the UK economy as the financial sector, and the quality and number of suits at this event showed that powerful synergies are emerging between these sectors. The place had more suits than Moss Bros - even some of the geeks wore them (albeit with a certain degree of discomfort)!

The format for the event ensured an intense immersion into current web trends, with expert panels chairing sessions of selected 5 minute presentations around themes which covered search and identity, building large user bases, trust-based environments, collaboration and mobile web. While a few of the products seemed a tad unimaginative, most were useful, innovative and some were very disruptive.

My highlight of the day was Jaiku. I came to the event with a certain cynicism about the value of micro-blogging but this was swept away with simple use cases and an uncluttered presentation - clearly underlining the value of "less is more". When Jyri, the presenter, stressed the importance of interoperability during the panel discussion, I became certain that Jaiku and Jyri do and will add significant value to the web.

ParkAtMyHouse is another exciting product that offers a green parking solution in urban areas. People can advertise unused parking spaces for rent, and users can enter a location by post code, place etc. and view a map of adjacent parking spaces, including price and availability. As well as reducing carbon emissions from cars searching for parking in congested areas, by teaming up with US-based zipcars, the project can also reduce overall car ownership in urban areas and thereby liberate more parking spaces for the service. Based on a combination of revenue-share, advertising and strategic partners, ParkAtMyHouse has a viable and sustainable business model that could make it a real winner in the future.

Zubka is based on a simple idea that could turn the recruitment industry on its head. Veteran recruiter, David Shieldhouse, started his presentation with a question to the audience; "How many of you have referred somebody you know for a job in the past?". Predictably, all hands in the auditorium were raised. He followed with "How many of you received payment for any of these referrals?" and all hands were lowered. Zubka aims to simplify and speed recruitment by enabling companies to post job ads on their website where individuals make referrals for these jobs and get paid for successful ones. Given the enormous cost and slowness of conventional recruitment, Zubka could be highly attractive to HR experts.

The only Irish entry was from Louder Voice, which provides a review platform for web users. Unlike other online review services, Louder Voice is not a vertical portal for theme-based reviews. The service operates as a hub, where users can enter reviews and then publish the content on blogs and websites. Now with a twitter integration (which, sadly, Conor O'Neill did not present on the day), Louder Voice could and should become a core destination for reviewers both online and on the mobile web. What will make or break the service is whether it can achieve critical mass without seeding initial content by rewarding reviewers, as recently announced by welovelocal.com.

Of the 27 featured showcases, my other favourites included:

Trexy - enables users to remember and share online searches as search trails
Data Patrol - trawls the web for information about a user which it aggregates into a report that includes advice on managing the info
Seatwave - an online marketplace for tickets
huddle and Yuuguu - two companies providing collaboration tools who announced that they will collaborate in the future

There was lots, lots more and the panel discussions threw up even more food for thought. The following morning at the Open Coffee Club, I chatted with Sanjay Sharma, Director of Startups and Emerging Markets at Sun. We talked about web 2.0 and the current excitement and high-level of investment and Sanjay wondered if this is another bubble or does it have a more substantial foundation than the dot com era. We agreed that this time round, innovation has become unstoppable because user demand and user-generated content are the drivers rather than the corporate, top-down focus that dominated in the first phase.

Work 2.0

2007-06-11T13:36:00.000+01:00

The list of things to blog gets longer by the day - and the time to do it gets shorter. Last week I stumbled across a great new idea, the Open Coffee Club, which brings together innovators and investment people in a friendly and informal environment. Clubs are opening up all over the world where members can network with each other and with other clubs when they are travelling.

With a couple of hours to spare before meetings in London on Wednesday, I popped into my first Open Coffee Club event. I chatted to Sandi Wassimer from Copious, about the joys and some of the pitfalls of working from home. New to home working, Sandi is over the moon about the extra time it gives her with her family. After spending a year commuting from Devon to London to Estonia, I know that feeling.

I caught up with Saul Klein of Index Ventures - serial entrepreneur and founder of the Open Coffee Club - who introduced me to Sam Sethi. Sam invited me to get involved in an exciting new project he's cooking and will be rolling out shortly - of which more very soon. Hence less time to spare for rulabula - I'm on a whirlwind of networking, connecting and researching right now.

I would have loved to stay longer but had to dash over to the Strand for my meeting with Rod Geoghegan at Metropolis . With my customary geographic accuracy I went to the wrong building first - just as well, it was a dump by comparison with Rod's gaff - coworking brought to a new level. Rod and I sat in a comfortable and stylish basement cafe bar next door to the restaurant - the smells were great and the menu was fancy - I must get him to buy me lunch on my next visit. Rod is in the business of helping marketers to embrace the digital age and I'm helping out with some first hand insights.

So not a minute for my rants at the moment - I did, however, get around to changing my title here, and moved from the fireside to the deckchair in honour of the sun that finally made its way into my life again last weekend. I sat in the garden squinting at the screen of my laptop - too much to do to get to the beach but at least I have a deckchair.

Moving doesn't get easier

2007-05-31T18:49:00.000+01:00

I have neglected my blog this month but I have a good excuse - I was moving house. You'd think that with my experience of moving, I'd have it down to a tee but no - it's still the most frustrating and traumatic thing you can possibly imagine, and then some.

In 2000 I moved to an offshore island and learned a lot about tide and time waiting for no man - and the usefulness of the phrase "weather permitting". In 2002 I moved from the island, via Ireland and England, to north west France. There I learned more about logistics as well as the joys of french paperwork, plumbing and wiring. The next move in 2003 was to England, which I thought would be easy peasy after the previous 2 experiences. But if you have ever tried to open a bank account or set up accounts with utilities etc in England, you will know what I mean when I say that it was like walking around with fraudster painted on my forehead.

This month's move was just down the road - I could almost have moved with a wheelbarrow. Except, again, I was horrified by the amount of stuff you can accumulate in a few years - mountains of expensive plastic rubbish, reams of paperwork that you don't have time to filter for keep or chuck, assorted screws and fixings that, again, you don't have time to filter - it goes on. After exporting a monster spider from Sherkin Island to France, I have learned that it's important to clean before you leave - but where does all that dust come from?

I prepared as much in advance - gave up counting when I had packed 19 boxes of books that nobody in the house will probably ever read again. Spent a couple of days on phone and internet informing people about change of address and that's when things started to slide downhill. I have never learned to tolerate fools, much as I try to empathise with the monkeys who are paid peanuts to deal with my call.

First problem was transferring my broadband service. I have been a loyal customer of virgin DSL broadband services for three and a half years - all I wanted to do was transfer this account to my new address. But virgin recently transformed itself into virgin media, adding cable broadband to its existing DSL broadband services. If I switched to cable service, I was told, the transfer could be almost immediate but would take two weeks if I stayed with DSL service, for some obscure and ill-explained technical reasons. I was happy to switch until I discovered that I could not port my existing email address to the new service and they would not provide forwarding from my old email address for more than one month. The reason is that they are phasing out the old email server over the next year - hmm. It seems that they now have two separate mail services and they haven't got the joined up thinking to connect them - it gets worse. But if I signed up to virgin.net today as a new dial up customer, I could use the old mail server. But they don't allow you to downgrade. How's that for customer service? Eventually, after losing most of 2 days on calls to what must be their entire customer service team, annoyed that nobody seemed to have notes of my previous calls, I gave up and opted to retain the DSL service that would take 2 weeks. But they neglected to tell me that 2 weeks would be almost 3 weeks because their was a holiday weekend in the mix. And, while I waited, I had to rely on a temporary downgrade to the dial up service I'm not allowed to buy, costing 3 pence per minute and taking about 3 minutes to download one email. Having ensured that I didn't have the bandwidth to sort out any other moving-related comms issues, I had to endure internet withdrawal as a reward for being a loyal customer.

The next issue was with my water provider. They privatised water provision in Britain some years ago but each region is run by a monopoly service provider. I deal with South West Water, who have happily taken about 1000 pounds a year out of my bank without a please or thank you. The average water bill in the country is less than 400 pounds but we pay for the pleasure of keeping the local beaches clean for the yoiks from London and up North that come and pollute them every summer. I was moving from a house without a water meter to a house with a meter so it's all systems change. Again, the customer falls foul of company process. They advised me to ring when I moved to provide them with a meter reading. Before I had a chance to locate the meter, let alone read it, I received a bill from them for more than 1000 pounds, requiring payment within 14 days. The bill was issued the day I rang them, before I had even moved and at a time when they actually owed me almost 100 pounds. I spent a morning on the phone to a patronising git who explained it was all my fault for not providing the meter reading. I asked for a formal letter of apology and, in its place, received a letter that lectured me about not providing my meter reading. Nice work guys.

The phone company sent me a bill for transferring the phone line, the gas people sent me a letter after a couple of weeks full of dire warnings about not taking on the debts of the previous occupants, a debt collector called the first weekend looking for the previous occupants - what other delights are in store I wonder. The plumbing is a mess, the garden is a jungle of weeds and builder's rubble and it has been raining constantly since the day I moved in.

But my broadband is back, my fon wifi is solid, I've found a change of clothes and there's plenty of room in the loft for my boxes. Summer starts tomorrow and heaven help the weather god if he lets me down - I'll shake my fist in despair, name him and shame him on my blog and I'll write a stiff letter of complaint - I'm getting plenty of practice at that.

In the midst of all this, I didn't get a chance to continue my commentary on Estonia or to write about elections in Ireland, the undemocratic rise to power of Gordon Brown, the shameless departure tour of Tony Blair or the even more shameless vote in the House of Commons to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act. I'm promising myself I will get to them soon unless the plumbing or the weeds get the better of me.

Peaceful protest against Estonian government meets hardline response

2007-05-01T14:03:00.000+01:00

Just got word that there is more trouble in Estonia. At midday Estonian time (GMT+2), for half an hour people drove their cars through the city at 5km per hour, hooting their car horns, in protest at the government of Prime Minister Ansip. Large numbers of police were in the city centre, noting the number plates of the cars. The media broadcast a thank you from the police to the helpful people who rang up with car numbers, and advised that all participants will be sent fines.

With the city returning to calm after the weekend riots, it seems strange that a relatively peaceful protest is greeted with such severity. Surely a drive past is preferable to street battles and looting? As Chairman of the Tartu Communist Party in 1988, Ansip quelled protests against the Soviet Union. It is ironic that 20 years on, he is quelling protests in the guise of great Estonian nationalist. Now that's a clever bit of reinvention.

Conspiracy theories are flying around which blame foreign influence on recent events. If there is undue external influence it is not clear who is behind it. One theory suggests that the goal is to halt a gas pipeline project that would connect Russia and Germany, circumventing the Ukraine. The pipeline was constructed in the Soviet era and passes through Estonian waters. Perhaps the goal is to destablise the EU. Or maybe there is no conspiracy at all, just bad luck and mismanagement? Only time will tell.

True lives in Estonia (Part 1)

2007-04-30T22:05:00.000+01:00

Calm has returned to Tallinn for now and there is time to reflect. Jaanus Kase contemplates on national identity, symbolism and much more - a generous and illuminating attempt at understanding the eruptions in Estonia last weekend. Meantime, Russian and Estonian speaking friends in Estonia shared their impressions with me and I hope to share their views in a neutral space.

Sometimes it is easier to understand complex stories by focusing on simple personal stories. Today a Russian Estonian (let's call him Paddy for the sake of his privacy) told me his story. At 3 years old, his family moved to north eastern Estonia to assist in the "economic reconstruction" in 1978. In this corner of Estonia near the Russian border, more than 90 per cent of his neighbours were Russian. His parents were construction workers and their home was given to them by the state (as was with everything under the Soviet regime). They settled there and worked hard. He went to school and worked hard. Paddy did not learn Estonian at school because it was not an option. And he learned a different version of history and culture to you, me and his neighbouring Estonian speakers I guess.

Paddy was a clever chap and made his way to study in Tallinn. He went to work in a Russian-speaking software company in Tallinn. There is a circle of Russian-speaking companies in Estonia which operates in a separate dimension to Estonian-speaking companies. Externally, these circles of companies do business with the same trading partners but internally, the two circles do not mix.

Slowly Paddy started to learn to speak Estonian and, at the age of 28 he was able to take the plunge and apply for work with an Estonian-speaking company. He tends to earn a lower wage because the negotiating strength of the Estonian-speaking employee is higher. But he doesn't encounter any explicit racism in the workplace, although he may not receive as many social invites as his Estonian-speaking colleagues.

But Paddy's parents are not so lucky. They lost everything in 1991 when Estonia asserted her nationhood. They scratch a living in basic jobs to survive and, because they can't speak Estonian, they are victims of the limited reportage in Russian language media. Nothing to go back to and nothing to look forward to.

Paddy is not an Estonian citizen but he has an alien passport. With entry into the EU, he now has the same inter-European travel rights as other Estonians, but he has no nationality - just permanent resident rights. Unless he marries a native Estonian who is a citizen, his children will also not have equal rights to nationhood and citizenship as their schoolmates.

Paddy is one of the success stories - he has made the leap out of the enclosed underclass of his fellow Russian-speakers in Estonia. He is not a sad, disaffected, drunken looter and nor is he an apologist for the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation. But he feels empathy with the Russian-speaking youth who disgraced themselves last weekend in the riots - he understands their pain for their parents, their lackof national identity, their sense of meaningless in a society that consigns them to the dustbin of historical revenge. He comes from a culture that is constrained by lack of cultural exchange - a Russian-only media that has its own agenda - he knows this, understands the impact but has no means of changing it.

Understanding these complex problems is tiring. Tomorrow I will tell Mick's story (another pseuodnym) - an ethnic Russian who is second-generation Estonian. Mick was disgusted with the violence of last weekend and said he was ashamed to share the same language with the rioters. More anon.

When is an Estonian not an Estonian?

2007-04-29T23:18:00.000+01:00

More tension in Tallinn - a third night of violence and trouble has spread to other towns across Estonia. One news report suggests this will continue to fester until 9th May and, with native Estonians working with the police to protect society, vigilanteism rears its ugly head. I fear for my friends and former colleagues in Estonia and I fear for Estonia itself. The great Russian bear is angry and the EU is caught between a rock and a hard place.

A comment on my earlier posting corrected me on my mistaken understanding of citizenship and nationality in Estonia. Wolli said

You can become French by getting French citizenship. You can only become Estonian by being born to Estonian parent(s). You can indeed become an Estonian citizen but in this country, "nationality" and "citizenship" are two different concepts.

Therein lies the thing, wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King (to quote Shakespeare roughly speaking). I was aware of many racist issues in Estonia - to discover that it is institutionalised to this degree is scary. To learn that across the EU we are supporting state-sponsored racism with our tax euros is very bad news.

We emerge from the womb as accidents of birth and cannot be blamed for our parents or location. But, in Estonia, it seems that we can. If I am born in Estonia of non-Estonian parents, I am not entitled to be an Estonian; as I take my first breath I can look forward to a life of no passport, no rights, no equality. That's sick.

Not everybody in the EU favoured the enlargement of the union. Now we learn that we have included a country that does not accord nationality to children born in that country. The European Union could fast become a failed experiment when its citizens discover that we are subsidising a new member state that operates as a two-tier society.

At the risk of flame, I question what Estonia and the EU are doing.

Rising above racism

2007-04-28T18:51:00.000+01:00

There was more trouble in Tallinn last night but the police, no longer distracted by the need to protect a big heap of metal, seem to have gained better control of the situation - only 100 arrests and no news of any fatalities. My blog inspired some interesting comments as well as a number of personal discussions on the topic.

I'd like to quickly apologise to any Estonians who feel my blog was a personal attack on them - it was not my intention to single them out as the racists of Europe - I am sadly conscious that racism is rife in every nook and cranny of our federation and little has been achieved in the past 50 years to improve matters. But because it is commonplace, does not mean it is morally acceptable or economically or politically sensible.

In the waiting room of my doctor's surgery in rural France a few years ago (aside: a sign on the wall offered free horse manure - enquire within), I read an article in a glossy magazine about racism in France. I learned that an astonishing 63 per cent of French people admit to being racist, are even proud of it. This was in stark contrast to the UK - where racism was not only regarded as a fatal character flaw but could also land you in big legal trouble. I grew up in a country (Ireland) which was uniquely unicultural because nobody wanted to immigrate to a wet and soggy island where there was no work and no money - even if we were the friendliest, most fun-loving people on the planet.

In the 80s, living in London, I felt my share of racist slurs - my 2:1 degree was poor protection against the dumb Paddy image, and my anti-war beliefs didn't help when the IRA were bombing mainland Britain. In today's London, the hitherto dumb Paddy is the guy on the mobile phone managing the building project, and the hod carrier is from Poland or perhaps Estonia. Where racism is concerned, pecking orders change over a generation or two it seems.

In France in the early noughties, I felt the whack of racism again in the lead up to the Iraqi war. As soon as Tones went off the rails in pursuit of his place in history, the shallow veneer of Anglo-French detente disappeared and it was all "roast beefs go home" from then. And, like most stupid people who shoot first and ask questions later, nobody bothered to ask if I was English before they thrashed my trailer tent on one occasion and burnt my car to dust on another. Nor did anybody ask my views on the war. Different towns, different perpetrators, same ignorance.

Escaping back to the UK, I got a new car and licked my wounds in a society where we Irish have risen towards the top of the social pile. Only to find new racial tensions erupting because of the perceived threats from terrorism and EU enlargement. It seems that there is nowhere to escape intolerance and fear of "otherness".

And what has this to do with the price of eggs or Estonia's current social crisis? By looking out we understand the inside better - as they say, travel broadens the mind. Estonia has made very brave and effective strides to shrug off its unhappy history, but it's never enough. I am not aware of any truly inclusive society, but if we don't all strive to that goal we sink into moral and cultural torpor and might as well close the curtains on the European experiment.

Tension in Tallinn

2007-04-27T10:54:00.000+01:00

This morning I wake to news of riots in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, following protests by ethnic Russians against the removal of a Soviet-era war memorial from the city centre. Giuliano, an Estonian blogger, is waiting for the government spin to begin, now that the event is over. His assumption that the riots were a flash in the pan is rather naive and ignores the ethnic issues that culminated in a night of violence where 1 person died, 43 are injured and more than 300 were arrested.

Tallinn is the home of Skype software development and was my second home for about a year. It is a city of stark contrasts, between the freezing dark winters and the warm bright summers and between the charming, higgledy-piggledy medieval buildings of the old town and the ugly, utilitarian suburbs of the soviet era.

Estonians are very proud of their achievements and so they might be. After centuries of subjugation by various neighbours, they have emerged as a beacon of economic stability and vibrancy in the post-Soviet Baltic states. But, lurking under the surface, is something dark and sinister which Estonia has failed to recognise or address.

The problem no Estonian wants to deal with is that of the ethnic Russians who were left behind when the iron curtain collapsed. Under the Soviet regime, ethnic Russians were the cream of Estonian society, holding the best jobs, living in the nicest houses, children attending Russian-speaking schools and not mixing with lowly Estonian children. Ethnic Russians make up more than quarter of the Estonian population, and almost half of the population of Tallinn.

There is an apartheid system in operation I discovered. Ethnic Russians are not entitled to Estonian passports and have become, to all intents and purposes, stateless people imprisoned in a nation that despises them. They are issued with national identity cards but the field for nationality remains blank unless they pass an Estonian language exam. For many of the older ethnic Russians, this is almost an insurmountable task - Estonian is a very old and grammatically complex language. A sign at the entrance to the Tallinn Summer Fair last year offered discounts to pensioners but was limited to Estonian pensioners only.

Ask any Estonian and they will tell you proudly that they have forgiven the ethnic Russians and they are all one big happy family. The facts belie this fairytale however. Ethnic Russians have become a new underclass in Estonia, doing menial jobs when they can get them with many turning to prostitution and crime in the absence of any viable alternatives. Native Estonians blame them for being lazy and naturally criminal and seem blind to the damage this apartheid segregation causes; to their communities, to their international reputation and to the long-term stability of their society.

Tensions were heightened this Spring in the lead up to parliamentary elections, with politicians playing to these deep social divisions to gain the emotional upperhand at the polls. The promise to remove the war memorial was a ploy used by the winning nationalist party in their campaign and trouble has been brewing since.

Yet the Estonian police seemed completely unprepared for the trouble that ensued. According to a friend in Estonia, they stayed in place surrounding the statue, expecting everybody to get fed up and go home. Instead, there were pitched battles through the streets of the capital between native Estonians and ethnic Russians, accompanied by damage to property, cars and general looting.

The EU wants the problem sorted quickly, adding to the stress of a government that seems incapable of facing up to the complexities of the situation. They have called in the army to stop ethnic Russians travelling to the capital today from eastern Estonia against a backdrop offury in the Russian parliament, which is threatening to sever diplomatic relations with its Baltic neighbour.

Will this crisis help Estonia wake up from its torpor and start facing the demons of its Soviet past? Can Estonia afford not to?

Who is stealing my identity?

2007-04-26T09:05:00.000+01:00

With yet another IT bungle, today we learn that the NHS has exposed personal information about junior doctors to the public at large. The abysmal tech failures of the mammoth health care organisation are widely reported and continue to bleed UK taxpayers dry, so I won't labour the point here. This latest gaff points to another major concern - the vulnerability of individuals to protect their identities in the most surveilled society in the west.

On the one hand, we are bombarded with dire warnings about the increasing dangers of identity theft while, on the other hand, our personal information is required to perform the most mundane transactions. Here are just a few examples I personally experienced. I learnt on the news recently that my bank information was compromised following the theft of an employee's laptop. Breaking the story, the BBC informed us that the theft occured some months ago but the bank had not bothered to alert its customers. Charming!

Hot on the heels of this story, I learn that my credit card details may have been included in the theft of customer details from a UK-based retailer - another stolen laptop - this time in the US, owned by the parent company of the retailer. And again, first thing I hear about it is on the news - not a word from the company responsible.

Against this backdrop, I am bombarded by unsolicited phone calls from a credit card company that wants to sell me identity theft protection. Seemingly incapable of protecting my data, they spot an opportunity to play on my fears to charge me even more money for their incompetence. Who are these jokers?

It's not easy (in fact probably impossible) to avoid giving your information to banks and retailers and their negligence is nothing short of criminal. But the danger doesn't stop there. Recently, I was in the market to rent a house. Property rental agencies require a myriad of references for would-be tenants, and charge hefty fees for the "service". After finding a suitable property, I picked up the referencing paperwork from the agency. This agency outsourced the referencing process to a third party, passing not only bank details but also tax and employment information to an anonymous internet-based service. They wanted to charge me 100 pounds for the service for which they paid less than 20 pounds (I did my homework), and if I failed to meet the secret criteria of this third party my fee was forfeit. The agency were surprised at my misgivings - am I the only person that notices such things? I looked elsewhere for a house.

At the same time I replied to a telecommuting job advert posted on Craigslist and was pleased to receive a positive response. Until I looked at the fine print which required me to scan my university transcript, proof of ID (such as passport or driving licence) and email them to some stranger. And, of course, if I wanted payment, they would also require my bank details, a nice haul for any criminal. That's one job I won't be taking up.

Fortunately, because I try to avoid driving, I was not a victim of the major credit card fraud that has been occuring at petrol stations across the length and breadth of the UK. There is a suspicion that these thefts are the work of a ring of Sri Lankan criminals and that the proceeds are being used to fund the Tamil Tigers. Isn't that just fine and dandy.

With the exception of the job advert, these dangers are of a physical nature. The online threats are even scarier. Maintaining my list of online passwords is a total pain and gets worse by the day - especially since I'm one of those paranoid people that likes to have a unique password for each site I join. The response from the great and the good of the internet is the Open ID initiative, described as a free distributed authentication systems. The idea is that we all set up a personal ID and password, either on our own servers or with an Open ID provider, and we can then use this single ID to identify ourselves at all internet sites that participate in the system.

Getting rid of the password hassles is very appealing but at what price? Corporate identities can be safely managed by company servers and subject to their security policies, but what of the individuals that have to purchase the service from an Open ID provider. I don't expect they will provide the service free of charge so the system will introduce a cost for internet entry which might prove prohibitive to many. And why should I trust the security policies of any of these providers which must, surely, be a magnet for hackers and criminals?

Something else that bothers me about Open ID is the profound lack of negative commentary about the initiative. With giants like Microsoft and AOL coming on board, the idea is gaining ground rapidly. But, as I said earlier, corporations can run their own servers and can impose heavy-duty security policies on their implementations. For them, the system is practical and provides them with greaters controls than before. Are these the same giants that favour the two tier internet and fight against net neutrality I wonder? Will Open ID emerge to be just another attack on internet freedom, excluding the poor and making them even more vulnerable to fraud?

Beat congestion - stay at home

2007-04-23T09:09:00.000+01:00

With the news today that even the Queen is green, the pressure is mounting for people to take a more responsible approach to travel and its impact on the environment. But, now that cheap air travel has opened up the world to people, it is not easy to turn back the clock and tell people to stay at home. For the wealthy, there is the new trend of offsetting the impact of their trips with investment in green projects (as the Queen plans to do). But for your average Joe, this puts the cost of travel beyond reach and doesn't seem very fair.

Meantime, with increasing congestion in the skies and on the roads, we hear a lot of talk and debate, but don't see much real action. The government wants to introduce road charging to reduce congestion and assures us that this is not another stealth tax but a scheme which will benefit everybody. They claim that when the driving public becomes aware of the real cost of motoring, we will be happy to reduce our time at the wheel. What a load of codswallop.

Most people don't choose to sit in traffic jams morning and evening, 5 days a week. They are there because they have to get to and from work in a country where public transport is increasingly inadequate, unreliable and prohibitively expensive. In a society which requires all schoolchildren and workers to arrive at school or work at approximately the same time every day, it is little wonder there is congestion at peak times.

There are a number of practical steps we could take to improve matters without taxing people. We could stagger school opening times for example, taking the pressure of the school run out of the rush hour. And we could also stagger the school holidays to avoid the travel chaos that occurs every holiday. In light of the inflated travel costs during school holidays, this move would be welcomed by parents and teachers alike I think.

And, rather than penalising people for driving to work, we could reward them for staying at home. Some jobs require a physical presence, such as doctors and teachers and shop keepers. But in our service-based economy a very large percentage of us could use modern communication tools to perform many of our tasks remotely. Not only can telecommuting reduce congestion, but there are proven benefits in terms of increased productivity and enhanced work-life balance. Instead of charging people to use the roads, reward home workers with grants to equip home offices, subsidised broadband and lower taxation for work done from home. Instead of building more roads and airports, invest the money in free wifi and cheap access to video-conferencing facilities in all communities.

A major barrier to the growth of telecommuting is a culture of distrust among employers, a belief that workers will take advantage of the situation and not pull their weight. This is a sad attitude that says more about the employer's lack of self-belief than about the trustworthiness of the workforce. With good communications and efficient performance management, employers will find that workers can be trusted and, with less stress, they will tend to perform beyond expectation. Companies will also benefit from a reduction in the cost of office accommodation and better staff retention. It's a win win situation.

So why isn't it happening? There seems to be an astounding lack of political will to upset the status quo in a way that would reduce our reliance on planes, trains and automobiles. A cynic might say that this arises from the vested interest of car makers, oil companies and the travel sector. That may be the case, but the time when this was acceptable is rapidly running out. When compared to the complicated, costly and socially invasive plans for road charging, the telecommute option appears simpler, less intrusive and rewards people rather than penalising them.

Virginia victims

2007-04-19T14:30:00.000+01:00

Like the rest of the world, I was deeply saddened by the news of the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech University - when 32 students and staff were gunned down by a fellow student before he turned his gun on himself, bringing the final death toll to 33. I watched the news coverage in horror, when we saw amateur video footage of the killer, striding across the campus looking like Neo from the Matrix - maybe that's how he imagined himself.

There followed the memorial service, where the President preached, and students and parents hugged and tried to find some solace and come to terms with this atrocity. I read and watched interviews with students who had been lucky enough to escape with their lives, describing their experiences and attempting to make some sense of it all. Even more horrible than the shootings perhaps, listening to these students, was their universal lack of recognition that there is a connection between gun culture and gun crime. One interviewee went as far as agreeing with the view of the gun lobby that the answer to the problem is to arm all students.

From a European perspective, the American obsession with guns is obscene and not acceptable in a civilised society. It is quite shocking to discover that bright young people, who have had such an intimate experience of the horrific results of lax gun control, are so totally blind to one of the main causes of that experience. To deny that there is a connection between easy access to guns and violence is to ignore the evidence of the U.S. homicide statistics which are higher than those in Europe by a factor of 10 or even 20 I guess.

Another thing struck me in the news coverage. One report spoke about the 32 victims of the carnage - but 33 people died. It seems that the shooter is not regarded as a victim by some which is a terrible shame. The sad loner who was so at odds with his peers and his society - is he not a victim also? And what about his poor parents, who have to add the guilt for his dreadful actions to their grief at his suicide? To lose a child is the saddest thing a parent can endure (some don't), but to lose a child in such circumstances - their lives since then must be a living nightmare.

For any good to come of this awful event, it is time America recognises the connection between easy access to guns and the all too frequent abuse of this freedom, not alone by criminals but also be socially-inadequate, emotionally-charged young people. Over on this side of the pond, we are overwhelmed with grief for all of the victims and their families and friends, but we are also astounded by the gun culture that enables it. If the tragic deaths at Virgina Tech are to mean anything, it is essential that America grabs this opportunity to review gun laws and put them beyond the reach of people without proper licensing and control. To do less is to disrespect their memories as has, sadly, been done already with the victims of Columbine and all the other tragic victims of meaningless murders on the streets of America.

UI design for the cow people

2007-03-12T17:45:00.000Z

I mentioned the cow people to some people in a chat, which some people found hilarious although others were a bit less taken with the discussion. It led to the following comment from Phil Wolff at SkypeJournal.

Seriously, let's talk about UI design for cows and chickens.
Very simplified contact lists.
Maybe big buttons for a very few messages ("Go away", "I'm hungry", "I'm in estrus", "I'm thirsty", "Danger!").
Moo recognition for the cows; peck sensitive keyboard for the chickens. Webcams for chickens since they don't respond much to audio.
GPS and presence for a cow's family; you-are-getting-hotter/colder signalling for finding your mother/calf.
Alerting for feeding/milking times.
For the chickens, you'd want gear that would fit in/next to a cage. For cows, something they could wear like a cowbell or staple to the ears like an RFID tag.
Hardware must be rugged for the farm; must survive water, dirt, having critters fall all over it.
Cows would have unique power challenges; could you train cows to dock their "headsets" for a recharge? While wi-fi might give you bandwidth, you might need to use cellular technology for the longer battery life.

Bonus points: use your cow's attached skype-phone for medical biotelemetry (body temp, pulse, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels) and send it back to a service for monitoring. Wake up the vet before a cow gets too sick. Automatically adjust the cow's feed based on general health.

Phil is the host in a public chat with the topic Skype 3.1 discussion. Anybody using version 3.0+ of Skype can create, host, moderate and promote a public chat on a website, in email, in IMs, and in Skype mood messages.

The chat threw up many bizarre observations and awful puns (i'll spare you), and a story about a chicken eating cow in India. If the cow people chat is anything to go by, public chat offers lots of possibilities.

On a more serious but equally bizarre note, was an item on the local Beeb news last week - can't find it online unfortunately so no link for now. They reported on a company that is working with algae to save the planet - they want to place large tankfuls of carbon-monoxide loving micro-critters next to every coal-burning power station in the country. They are also exporing its usage as a clean fuel that is far cheaper and more effective as a biofuel than rapeseed. These are the same, or similar microbes, to the ones which first cleaned this planet enough to sustain human life so maybe they are just the medicine we need.

Six nations - No more waiting for Johnny Injured

2007-03-11T18:38:00.000Z

After a great defeat over France by England at home in Twickenham, France lost a Grand Slam opportunity in the important year when they play host to the Rugby World Cup. After the English trouncing at Croke Park, Brian Ashton called all bets off and fielded a team today that included about 10 new players - what a risk taker. The gamble paid off in spades.

The quality of play was far from perfect - the French looked like they were digesting a large lunch and England were giving away penalties with stupid errors. But England began to flow a little, and then some more - and some of these new guys were electric. There's no more waiting for Johnny Injured, England has not one but two new number 10s who both played world class games today. Brian Ashton will have problems choosing which of these guys, Flood or Geraghty, to play. New winger, Strettle, made an impressive debut against Ireland at Croke Park - today he showed it wasn't flash in the pan - he's fast and furious and a natural. And all these new guys are young and blonde and handsome - maybe all is not lost for England and the world cup.

But tactically, England also made leaps today. Did the French lunch too large or did the English close them down? A bit of both, perhaps. The English blocked Chabal, shut him down. Known as Attila at home, Chabal proved to be the Achilles heel of France.

All of Ireland was shouting for England today. Yesterday we took the Triple Crown but today England gifted us a chance to avenge our last minute defeat by France, and steal the championship from them. England is also in with a chance, but it's a bit of a longshot. The outcome of the tournament will not be known until the last minute of the last match next weekend - what a nailbiter that will be.

Six nations - fire the ref

2007-03-11T12:30:00.000Z

Every year, the Six Nations rubgy tournament heralds an end to the gloom of winter with the promise of exciting international matches most weekends. After growing up in a household where the men and boys were obsessed by sport, I am almost allergic to it - but rugby is the exception - despite its brutality, there is nothing as gripping as a good rugby match.

This year, Ireland started out as favourites, but the pesky French stole our thunder when they beat us in the first ever "foreign game" to be played in Croke Park. In the last seconds of the match, they raced up the pitch and scored - damn them. The referee failed to notice that the start of this play was illegal and it should not have been allowed. The whole world saw it on TV, but that doesn't make a toss of difference it seems.

Yesterday, Ireland played Scotland in Edinburgh, and Wales played Italy in Rome. Despite being firm favourites, Ireland had a tough time of it, and only barely managed to hold on to win 19-18. After the game, Eddie O'Sullivan, the Ireland coach that looks like an accountant, made a statement that a Scottish player had tried to choke Ronan O'Gara and that O'Gara lost consciousness briefly. I assume there will be an investigation and the offending player will be banned.

But that incident pales into insignificance when you consider what happened at the next match of the afternoon. Over in Rome an English referee, Chris White, seemed blind to some rather nasty behaviour by members of the Italian team. We know rugby is a brutal game and none of the players are saints - they will break rules when they think they will get away with it. But in the 28th minute of the match I watched Mauro Bergamasco clinically clench his fist and punch Stephen Jones in the face. But the ref didn't notice or didn't care and while Jones left the pitch with blood streaming from a cut above his eye, the game continued - not even a penalty awarded. This was one of several infringements that the ref did not notice and, in my opinion, had a definite impact on the game and the final scoreline.

Jones returned to the pitch in the second half and he looked angry - who would blame him. It must have galled him terribly when in the closing minutes the same Bergamasco (there are two on the Italian team) scored a great try which put Italy in the lead - the man shouldn't even have been on the pitch. And to top it all, the ref finished the game by lying to the welsh players that they had time for a final line out and then blew the whistle before they could take it.

I've been looking to see what other people feel about this - and I'm surprised at how little there is online about the Six Nations. There are some nice quirky blogs but nothing substantial outside of the BBC site, where Nick Mullins, a sports commentator, is having problems keeping up with the spate of comments - 140 now and still counting. Opinions are mixed - Italian fans don't seem that bothered that the awful refereeing detracts from their victory. Welsh fans are, understandably, pretty miffed and there are some pretty strong feelings out there.

Rugby is gaining in popularity and the quality of the game is improving. But how long will it continue to do so if this sort of behaviour continues unchecked. This weekend we witnessed blatant assault (choking and punching) and the referee lied to a team in a manner that ensured they lost the game.

I'm not normally one to subscribe to ref-bashing and conspiracy theories about game fixing. Around our dinner table, I heard enough ref discussion to last me several lifetimes, but what I saw yesterday was disgraceful. Either the ref and his squad of helpers are completely incompetent or they were made an offer they couldn't refuse. Whichever proves to be the case - if we ever find out - they should all be fired and publicly humiliated. Bergamasco should never be allowed on a rugby pitch again and Italy should forfeit the match.

Multicultural to multispecies - meet the cow people

2007-03-10T22:25:00.000Z

England is the most multicultural place I have lived in and now it's becoming a home to multispecies exploration. According to the Beeb, scientists in the north of England have applied for a licence to clone human and cow embryos for the purpose of harvesting cell stems that are important in the treatment of alzeimhers, Parkinsons, and stroke victims (at least).

While I'm trying to fully absorb the notion of multispecism (or is it multiispeciesism), the news in the same week comes up with the medicine egg - where we use chickens as drug factories of the future - butt out Pfizer and Roche. This notion is based on the idea that we impregnate breeds of chickens with different immunities - and an egg a day will keep a particular illness away.

Meantime, Richard Branson, who is locked in conflict with Rupert Murdoch over media space in the UK, has my votes for winning the battle. Why? Because he's an adventurer and innovator. His latest thing is a cryogenic bank for rich guys that want to live forever. I'm not going to be a customer for that service, but I do love his guts.

And, in our last gasps on a planet we have disrespected, space is the next frontier. Adventurers will be essential in this coming exploration.

Dutch developers and eirepreneurs

2007-03-09T21:39:00.000Z

After using Skype as my main comms tool for over a year, I've got some experience. But this week, I "picked up" a buddy in a public chat - new to me. For the first time since I finished at Skype, I requested authorisation from a user after she asked a battery of interesting questions in a public chat. And we're chatting since - the internet rocks on.

My new buddy is a Clever Clogs lady from the Netherlands who is a front runner in developing mashups for Grazr. If you are a feed freak and/or interested in data pipes, Grazr and Marjo are the way to go. I like the Grazr interface and am looking forward to working with Marjo on ideas for feed filters.

In recent weeks I have Skyped a lot with Dutch people - seems to be a cradle of fun and disruption. Today, at one point, I was chatting in 4 separate IMs with Dutch geeks who don't know each other. Not sure what they put in the coffee but they seem to have great ability to turn idea into reality. I met Bart Lamot when he volunteered to write JNI connectors for Linux and Mac for the open source Java API for Skype. I met Jurrien (link to follow) on that project also - a student that brightens my days with his dedication to clean, reusable code. And then there's Ike that all Skype users love as the Paraveterinary in the Skype forums and runs a solid virtual business. Ike runs a Skype-powered virtual office service from Friesland - no better woman for the job - she's organised and she can multitask better than me.

And then there's Marjo of RSS world - who inroduced me to Grazr where I found a Grazr feed of Irish Twits - the Eirepreneurs - now is that fun or what?

Not doing one thing right!

2007-03-05T10:00:00.000Z

I've made myself a personalised Google home page and the feature I like most is being able to see the latest feeds in my Google blog reader. Which is where I came across Doing One Thing Right: Couchville, by Michael Arrington on Tech Crunch. It's a review of a TV guide service that doesn't try for bells and whistles - just does one thing right. Great - except that the review does something wrong. In the text of the article the writer to refers to Coucheville (note the additional e) including a link to http://www.coucheville.com. There is no such address.

Over at http://www.couchville.com, don't wait up for the surge in traffic - it ain't coming, except from nit-pickers like me that can't help spotting typos. We all make mistakes, but the headline which implies that a sub-editor spotted the error but didn't make corrections to the body text - that's not just a simple mistake, that's poor process. If readers are to trust online sources, writers must be consistently accurate and check sources and references.

I don't know anything about the editorial processes at Tech Crunch - maybe this is a rare case that slipped through usual checks - or maybe they rely on writers to police their own accuracy. I'm sure they will act to correct the mistake.

This trivial error (unless you are couchville, of course) reflects a general issue affecting the credibility of web content. Now that we are all self-publishers, a couple of issues are emerging which affect the value and nature of online information.

First there is the issue of accuracy: Much as we all love Wikipedia, it can be prone to manipulation and should be taken with a pinch of salt. The things we enjoy most about self-publishing - the immediacy and freedom - are also its greatest weaknesses. To coin the old adage - with freedom comes responsibility, but many bloggers don't know the simple rules of grammar and journalism - why should they?

Second, there is the issue of clarity: As social networks and globalisation take people across cultural boundaries, there is an ever-growing need for people to use simple, clear language which is easy to translate. Any designer will tell you that simple doesn't mean easy. One happy outcome is that writers must move on from the awful practice of ization - when "How will you make money?" is turned into "How will you monetize?", or "developing products" becomes "productization". A possible victim of cross-cultural communication will be the conditional tense - because words like might and should translate badly, will they disappear? I read once that native american languages have no tenses perhaps it's not a bad idea to lose a few.

Looking forward, the semantic web aims to ease data sharing between applications and communities based on the Resource Description Framework. While transparent to users, the semantic web presents a big new learning curve for writers and other content developers.

People power - why not?

2007-03-04T11:57:00.000Z

While You're at It, Why Not Generate A Little Electricity, in the Wall Street Journal, introduces some people who want to harvest human energy. It's an attractive if somewhat kooky idea that conjures up images of the matrix and what to do with our prison population, immigrants, and other social annoyances. However, when you think of the amount of energy people use at the gym, on the sports field, at night clubs - it makes sense to try and harness it.

An extreme sporty Californian persuaded an international fitness club outfit to run an experiment in a gym in Hong Kong. Cost is high and returns are low - less than 200 dollars a year for an investment of 15,000. Enviu, a group of young Dutch environmentalists, have built a dance floor that powers its own internal lighting. Here the price tag is 26K, for some measly floor lights - hmm.

But hey - what does a dance floor normally cost to build and what are the future plans? The WSJ article belittles these projects by presenting scant figures with a distinct bias - I don't think it's fair to judge these projects in simple terms of ROI - looked at as proofs of concept where valuable lessons are learned, these projects are pretty damn cheap.

And the WSJ piece also neglects to mention that the project is finished and the world's first sustainable nightclub opened to the public in Rotterdam, in October 2006.

These are small steps but, as the Enviu people say, part of the value is in making sustainability sexy and cool, not just a geeky, hippy thing. While people power is unlikely to solve all our energy needs, it can help reduce the requirement for non-sustainable resources while increasing our awareness of the direct relationship between energy and consumption.

Summer madness - London 2005

2007-03-01T16:46:00.000Z

July 2005 was a humdinger of a month in London. The city played host to Live8 and won the bid for the 2012 Olympics; meanwhile the Make Poverty History campaign made its way into the G8 summit in Scotland. Then the stories changed on 7/7. I was blogging the news as it was reported (or mis-reported) - the extracts are in sequence.

Live8, discovery and adventure
A ramble through Slough, Drimoleague and Live8
Published 05 July, 2005
The road to 2012
London wins the Olympics and Hackney will be transformed but there's something happening on the tubes
Published 07 July, 2005
7/7 and then there were seven
After confusing news reports, carnage in London and Blair leaves G8 to visit the scene
Published o7 July, 2005
Plea - release the bodies please
48 hours later and anxious relatives keep vigil at King's Cross
Published 09 July, 2005
More trouble in London
More bombs and man shot dead on the tube
Published 23 July, 2005
Pin the tail on the donkey
Why did the police get it so wrong that they pumped 5 bullets into the wrong guy?
Published 23 July, 2005
And the victim was
A 29-year-old Brazilian in the wrong place wearing the wrong clothes
Published 24 July, 2005

And the victim was

2007-03-01T16:35:00.000Z

Published 24 July, 2005

A 29 year-old Brazilian electrician - I bet he never expected to die on the floor of the tube in Stockwell. "He looked Pakistani" said the best eye-witness in the land (or so he seemed at the time) but he was Brazilian. We lived next door to Jose and Maria from Portugal for a while, in the grounds of a chateau in France. We were renting and they were the old retainers. Jose had been in France for 31 years, left there about age 20, bit of a soccer player. After 31 years he would still wear vest, shirt and at least 2 jumpers until July. By mid-July he might be seen to bare his arms, but only in a heatwave.

They speak Portuguese in Brazil and they wear lots of warm clothes when they are away from home. Maybe he didn't understand English, maybe he was cold, but why jump the barrier at the station. No money for a ticket? Illegal immigrant? Pocketful of drugs? Just scared and pure unlucky? Will we ever know?

Until recently I would have assumed that secrecy would prevail and mistakes would be covered up. During recent events the police have been remarkably candid - perhaps because they realise they have to if they are to have any credibility as guardians of our security. An innocent man was pumped full of bullets on the tube by police marksmen working on bad intelligence - nothing good about it. But at least they admitted it - that's a start.

Pin the tail on the donkey

2007-03-01T16:32:00.000Z

Published 23 July, 2005

Today the Met (London Metropolitan Police) apologised for the Stockwell shooting and admitted they got it wrong. Five bullets pumped into the wrong guy.

Why did he run, ignore calls to stop, leap over the ticket barrier? His intention was to escape his pursuers - Why? Was he deaf? Did he not understand English? Was he going about a relatively minor piece of mischief, such as carrying drugs or pirated CDs? Or was he one of London's vulnerable "care in the community" people - festering in an alternative reality in a dingy bedsit in Stockwell.

I will add the policeman that pumped 5 bullets into the chest of a "frightened rabbit" to my list of victims of this madness. He has to live with himself tomorrow and the day after. I want to know how they got it so wrong - is their intelligence so flimsy and unreliable? Are we just pinning tails on donkeys or have we got something to go on?

More trouble in London

2007-03-01T16:19:00.000Z

Published 23 July, 2005-07-23

Last Thursday it seemed to be happening again - three tubes and the number 26 bus in Hackney, just by Bethnal Green. Nobody hurt because the bombs didn't work. One theory goes that the recent police raids uncovered the bombers' stock of detonators and they had to improvise - badly it would appear.

One fanatical islamic scientist wanted for a variety of freelance projects, must speak English like a native, be of impeccable character (i.e. below the security radar) and be available at short notice. The role will involve frequent travel abroad and multiple passports will be an asset. The candidate will be working with teams of young people and strong motivational skills are essential.

I just made that up because I am trying to imagine how you recruit for these activities. Seems it's not so easy to make a bomb that works, which was just as well for Londoners at the moment. But there's little consolation to be derived from the knowledge that this week's lot of suicide bombers botched things up.

Botchers they may be but they got away! This is very scary. On the tube at Shepherd's Bush (up the road from the BBC for maximum news coverage) one man was described as lying on top of his bag while it detonated but failed to explode. He then got up, ran out of the tube and down the tracks to freedom. Off home for a nice cup of tea no doubt. Like running away after a schoolboy prank.

And where is he drinking his cup of tea - in your local caff, next door, by the coffee machine at work? He might be teaching your children or nursing your granny - he could be anywhere, anyone, he is the enemy within. He's as british as anyone else but he follows a different course - his moral map is not british. He probably went to school here, sat through the endless assemblies full of CofE moralising, preaching tolerance and inclusiveness and forgiving. This CofEness is a unique identifier of the english psyche, part of the english condition. Why is Mr. Suicide Bomber unaffected by the monotonous, repetitive power of the assembly?

Thursday was followed by Friday (as happens) and a man in a winter coat is shot dead in a tube train in Stockwell by armed policemen. One of the world's best ever eye witnesses was on the TV half an hour later, describing the scene. He was sitting on the tube at Stockwell, reading his paper, on his way to meet his boss at London Bridge (incidentally, my sister's daily route to work). A guy half trips into the tube, is pushed to the ground by 3 armed men, and "they unloaded 5 bullets into him". He described the absolute pandemonium that followed as people fled the scene. He was giving up on work and heading to the pub for a stiff scotch instead. Another aspect of the english condition - the pub is a great refuge in a crisis.

Now, London is in shock, like it hasn't been in recent weeks. People being shot dead in the tube is not British - it's something that you see on TV or in Bruce Willis movies. Five bullets seems a bit excessive, but he was wearing a big bulky jacket on a hot day and ignored calls to stop. And in the current climate, failing to stop is either extremely dumb or a sign that somebody has a lot to hide, perhaps a bomb.

I was planning a trip to London today. My sister was planning to go up west shopping today. We've both cancelled and people are cancelling all over London this weekend. Why are we scared now after taking it on the chin with stoicism 2 weeks ago, in the face of such carnage? This week's bombers failed but they got away. Will they try again? How many more of them are there? 4 bombers on a carefully orchestrated and executed mission is a major incident. 4 bombers on a botched mission could become an everday occurence - any 17 year old with a rebellious streak could take a shot at martyrdom - if it works he wins and if it doesn't he runs away. And there's plenty more where he came from. Or am I getting paranoid? If I am, I am not alone - paranoia, fear, hysteria - they are all creeping in.

Meantime, New Yorkers are subject to random searches on the subway because of the bombs in London. There's something almost peevish about this - like they are jealous of all the attention London is getting because New York should be the mother-of-all targets. Ken Livingstone ruled out such searches in London on logistical grounds. Getting to and from work in London is stressful enough as is without adding the prospect of interminable queues for searching.

However, how will people get to work? People are becoming increasingly worried about tube travel and are seeking alternatives. Friday morning's shooting was the last straw for some - it's just not cricket to have to deal with a shooting on the way to the office. Bombs are one thing, but police marksmen and dead bodies are another.

Are we about to see a revolution in London society, as people stop going to the office and work from home instead. If we're not out and about on the transport network they can't get us. Even with an endless stream of fanatics, they can't get us all in our houses, can they? This is not giving in to terrorism, in fact it pulls the rug from under it. Perhaps we should have a national work at home day to try it out and send a clear message to the enemy - we'll recognise you because you will be the one on the empty tube looking for a crowd to blow up.

I don't like talking about terrorism - it is a misused and emotive term. The notion of waging war on something as vague would be laughable except that it's true. This week, for the first time since September 11, I felt terror - the terror of wondering whether the person next to you is about to trigger a bomb. The absolute terror of realising that a faceless enemy hates you with such intensity that he will not stop until he gets you. The blinding terror of feeling completely and utterly powerless to protect yourself. All day, every day.

With every statement, the police and politicians remind us that these acts are the acts of criminals and not of a community. But the noises coming from Islamic communities do not reassure me. Pakistan may be licensing its religious schools but it is also pointing the finger firmly at Britain, saying that it needs to clean up its act. Muslims feel quite at liberty to say that as long as Britain is at war in an Islamic country she must expect what she gets. Excuse me. Why is that so? I don't agree with the Iraq war - what is legitimate about killing me? A 7 year old child has no say in the wars we wage - what is legitimate about killing them?

Why do so many people in this country lack a sense of allegiance to their country and who give religion priority over community? Why do so many people in this country think it is acceptable not to speak English, and not to mix with English people? How has this occured and how can we fix it?

Ever since Enoch Powell's infamous Rivers of Blood speech in the 60s, English society has been very reticent about discussing ethnic issues - it is dangerous territory, full of potential pitfalls for the politically correct. In France they are not nearly as sensitive and 63% of french people admit to having racist opinions. They think it is quite OK to do so. I don't. However, I do think there should be a couple of basic rules for all immigrants to any country - learn the local language and send your children to school with local children.

My mate Nina taught English on a voluntary basis to muslim women in Hackney. One of her students came to her in desperation after her husband divorced her (the immam came to tell her), took their children and left her penniless and on the verge of homelessness. And she did not have enough English to get by. Nina took her to social services and the housing department and the hospital - she was also ill due to the damp in her bedsit. There isn't a Nina living on every block and there are many women in England who are not so lucky, isolated from the host community by lack of English, completely dependent on the goodwill of sexist husbands.

In our desire to be inclusive, we have been too tolerant and turned a blind eye to sexism which came packaged with religion. In hindsight I think we are realising we have been too tolerant about a lot of things. Far too many people living here have no sense of allegiance to England; it was never a requirement. The last thing we need right now is nationalism, but it is important to be loyal to your home - this is a kind of essential social value.

Plea - recover the bodies please

2007-03-01T16:11:00.000Z

Published 09 July, 2005

I think people in England have been confused, scared and distracted since Thatcher first kicked welly. It took a pair of gobby Irish shites, a successful Olympic bid and 4 bombs to bring Britain back to its senses and restore its confidence.

The world expects wailing but instead they get calm. Public displays of emotion are not British - the way of things here in a crisis is to straighten your shoulders and make yourself useful. And people were very useful - offering help instead of running for cover.

We're back to the times of suspicion. In the 80s a mate of mine travelled to London, first time out of Ireland, and got rather drunk en route, as you do, it can be a long and emotional journey. Destination Kilburn, he got a bit dozy waiting for the tube and, in his confusion getting on the train, forgot a bag of precious music tapes - did I mention he was a musician and a mighty good spoon player?

Shortly after his arrival at base, sans music, the police were at the door and arrested the lot of them. They had carried out a controlled explosion in the tube station and were a mite annoyed - so was my mate, his precious, unique store of Irish music was dust.

My mate was no threat to anyone but himself perhaps, and left London, disillusioned, as quickly as he had come, sad lesson learnt. Being Irish and living in London in the times of the Harrod bombing, the Canary wharf bombing - you are not the most popular person in the boozer. You have to modify your tones, whisper at times, in case your accent might give offence or draw the wrong attention.

I cannot imagine how difficult it is for London's Muslim communities this week - victims like the rest of us but with the harsh, hostile glare of public suspicion hanging over them. Separated from the local community by social and political events that are not of their design or desire. Pity the parents grieving their children, and the children grieving their parents.

This vicious and lamentable assault struck at some of the centres of the Islamic community in London - in Aldgate and Edgeware Road - the former is a focal point for the poor, and the ultra-rich Arabs congregate aroung the Edgeware Road, just a stretch up the road from Park Lane and Marble Arch. Whoever did this thing did not care for poor or rich, Islamic or no.

What does this tell us about our enemy I ask. Not a lot is my non-forensic, non-police-like response - haven't got a notion. But I hope the police have. I hope the police catch these plonkers before ordinary people do. I hope they get the evidence together to stitch them up good time.

However, top priority is to recover the bodies that are still trapped - bugger the forensics. If my kid or next-door-neighbour was missing, I would care less for forensic evidence and prefer to dig in and be done with it. Are the forensic teams hampering recovery or am I just too cynical for words?

As time goes by, Kings X becomes our Ground Zero. We've always had the capacity to f**k it up ourselves, with stray cigarette stubs and the like. What blows it for me is the people/bodies are still trapped. Fix it now, please.

7/7 and then there were seven

2007-03-01T16:06:00.000Z

Published 07 July 2005-07-07

I turned on the TV and the news was bizarre - a power surge seemed to be knocking out tube trains all over London, huh? As time went on the power surge story sounded more and more ridiculous. When the bus blew up my fears were confirmed - these were bombs.

It was a number 30 bus, on its way to town from Hackney Wick. A tragic way to mark London 2012. Two people confirmed dead on the bus and there's speculation it was London's first suicide bombing.

Spent the morning trying to call people. Gradually the texts started arriving but some messages were taking hours due to mobile network congestion I assume. On 9/11 my dispersed family (including some in the states) didn't manage to complete the check in until about 1am.

Last week I walked that route in the sunshine as I wended my way to the Papageno. It must be weird there tonight. The renowned bulldog british spirit kicked in like lightening today - talk about stoicism or is it just plain ordinary shock.

And so, Tones had to leave G8 and then they were 7. Only for the afternoon, but he's still in town which won't leave much horse-trading time tonight. I'm sure Jacques likes to get an early night and George will be busy at his prayers. Can we squeeze some reality out of George by tomorrow - from a country where it is illegal to teach evolution why would they believe in global warming?

The road to 2012

2007-03-01T16:00:00.000Z

Published 07 July, 2005

What a day it was for Tones yesterday - he's on a roll and so is England. What a coup - Olympics 2012 for London, exactly what the country needs. If you're not familiar with London you are probably visualising palaces and princes and, with Princess Ann on the bid team, I think we can be assured of lots of royal waves during the event.

But forget the royals and think Hackney - the poorest borough in Britain - source I presume of the "hackney cab" and "hackneyed" conversations. It's my favourite place in London, my second home for a number of years and where I made many lifelong friends - I even met himself there.

My favourite approach to Hackney is to take the 253 bus through the windy streets of the City, via the smells, colour and chaos of Whitechapel market, and finally up Cambridge Heath Road towards Hackney. Along the Whitechapel Road you pass the Jolly Beggars pub where one of the Kray brothers is reputed to have nailed a guy's hands to the floor! The side streets were the hunting ground of Jack the Ripper and small wonder really. For centuries Whitechapel has been the first port of call for immigrants to England - a vast, seething, melting pot of cultures, ideas, languages (and potential victims for murderers and gangsters) . . . They reckon there are 252 languages spoken in London (there are fewer than 250 ISO country codes).

I like to get off the bus at Bethnal Green, the southern point of Hackney where there's a lovely Museum of Childhood (in Hackney!) if you have time on your hands. Alternatively, the Rose and Crown pub right by the bus stop can often be more tempting. To the right, the Victoria Park Road leads to one of London's finest public parks and straight on is the grime and bustle of Mare Street - main street Hackney. The far side of Victoria Park is our goal - the wasteland that is set to be transformed into a 21st century dream.

London's amazing network of canals runs through Victoria Park - you can traverse north and east London along the canal paths without seeing a car or a bus. You do, however, encounter the occasional fisherman, thousands of pounds worth of kit, ice-bag stocked with beer, large dog lounging around and mouth full of squirming worms. I kid you not. The worms wiggle more effectively if they are warm. It's an ancient Cockney tradition.

Ali, my flatmate, introduced his 4 year old son to cycling by taking him on a ride north westwards along the canal path through Islington, and King's Cross and right up to Camden Lock - the poor lad slept for a week after his ordeal. Ali was a 40+ bicycle courier - usually a young man's game but Ali had boundless energy.

If you travel north east on the canal from Victoria Park, it takes you past the Top of the Morning Pub where a pit stop could be in order. It's a pretty typical pub for the area - like many places near the park it has an air of faded gentility, a bit run down, a bit rough and ready, but noisy and lively and friendly. And they come in every imaginable size, shape, colour and sexual persuasion.

Onwards from the pub and you arrive at our destination - Hackney Wick (drop the H if you want to sound local), gateway to Hackney marshes and London 2012. Acres and acres of space lost to the dog walkers and local football clubs. They never built a tube line to Hackney - because it was too poor and now an ongoing reason for its poverty. People thought I was insane to live there because of its cruddy transport links. But if you get into life in Hackney, you only leave when you have to. And with a 38 bus running door to door from home through Holborn, Covent Garden and onto Picadilly, what need had I for a smelly tube?

With no tube Hackney is a foreign country to most Londoners. It has so many hidden secrets - the marshes, the canals, the parks, the music, the markets, the pubs and some very cool people. Hackney usually makes it to the news for bad reasons - drug crime, bad schools that sort of thing. And it has its grim side, no doubt about it. But there's a common ground in poverty and there's a "we're all in the same boat together, man" attitude that is easy and relaxed.

A bloke I knew wandered, blind-drunk, into a Supermarket by Ridley Road market one evening, filled a basket with goods including more beer, staggered outside without paying and sat down for a little rest. When he was awoken by the security man he spotted that his beers had been nicked from his basket. They immediately replaced the beers at no charge and sent him on his way! It was only when he got home he discovered he had spent no money.

Ali used to go to Tesco's in Well Street late on Saturday afternoons to buy up the goodies on knock down pricing. He witnessed an incident where a staff member on the butchery counter spotted somebody eating the goods and accosted him. The hungry customer broke into a run down the aisles, chased by a growing number of the staff. Cornered finally in the back of the crowded store, six members of staff hoisted him up on their shoulders like a corpse, transported him thus from the premises before dumping him on the pavement outside to the amazement of onlookers. I don't see that happening in Kensington.

At 8.50 this morning a power surge occured at Liverpool street station - several people injured - other stations affected - walking wounded leaving King's Cross - now described as a major incident and entire system is being shut down. Initial reports of a bomb/terrorist incident have been discounted. Must turn on the TV.

Live8, discovery and adventure

2007-03-01T15:48:00.000Z

Published 05 July, 2005

Not a minute to spare lately and still no job. Bits of jobs keeping hunger at bay but nothing worth writing home or here about. And then a call today - guess what - Stevenage again. If the Martians were using job ads as an indicator of intelligence, Stevenage would be in the A stream. Picture their consternation when they land in the "shopping centre", the ship is burnt out by the local wide boys, and they can't find the train station.

Obviously the last interview didn't work out but it got people reading and buddy Dawn has even pulled out the maps. Ian tells me his worst escape from a new town was from Swindon. My worst was a ladies (euphemism) pub outing from London to a social club in Slough for a jolly. Slough may not qualify as a new town (I don't know what the definition is) but it was new to me and what I saw lacked character and soul. Who would choose such an itinerary - down to the bizarre tastes of a mature scottish barmaid in a pub in the basement of the tower block in Hackney (map reference for Dawn: London, Hackney/Shoreditch, Downham Road off Kingsland road) where I lived at the time.

John Betjeman was from Slough and penned the poem, The Slough of Despond. Despite liking Betjeman, I never read it, couldn't make my way past the unpromising title. An Irish poet, Paul Durcan, wrote a similar/parody poem on the subject of Drimoleague (map reference for Dawn: Ireland, County Cork, West Cork). I ran an art gallery there for a while - great times, grim times.

These towns should twin and make a joint bid to attract hyperactive tourists who will benefit from the grey, featureless and depressive riches these places have to offer. We could start a whole league of depressive resorts and do a sort of exchange tourism, sending their residents on hols to new towns and Hackney and places with a bit of edge and dangerous creativity - but never any soul.

Was there soul and edge at Live8 do you think? It was not there on Saturday when Madonna practically handcuffed a beautiful, dignified African woman to her, the woman whose death's door photos as a baby sparked our generosity twenty years ago. Madonna wonders if England is ready for revolution - her every gesture towards this lovely lady spoke of control, power and was totally devoid of empathy or class. Go home Madonna please, you impress me about as much as George double U at this point.

The plusses of Live8 included Will Smith's finger-clicking cleverness and general, all-rounder, hunkability. A favourite Irish singer of mine, Brush Shiels, told me in always aims to be just a shade more entertaining than the previous act - never show them up but never be overshadowed. Dido and Yossou n'Dour did not spare their energies for Live8, hopping from London to the Eden Project and onto Paris to take the 7 second message to a new universe of listeners. Where was Neneh Cherry? How could you not want to be part of that party, singing with the songbird of Senegal.

Andy Kershaw was angry at the lack of african music on the original plan and Chris from Coldplay (who has been reading far too many of his own rave reviews, like wife Gwynneth) got straight in there, defending the motives and goals of the mighty Bob Geldhof. My thinking is that Bob Geldhof knows exactly what he wants to achieve, is not particularly concerned by Andy Kershaw's attacks which might be attributed to sour grapes, and has been working towards these plans for a long time, perhaps 20 years. However, I also think he may be wrong, a pawn to Blair, and also reading too many personal rave reviews.

I'd prefer to spend radio time any day with Andy Kershaw and the wonderful musicians he discovers and nurtures. But the purpose of Live8 was about glitz and media and spin - to make it sexy and exciting to give back some of the western comfort and wealth to the societies we raped to pay for it. Andy needs to look forward to the future of the continent that is collapsing around the culture he does such a good job at exploring and sharing. There really isn't much time for pussyfooting - we need to hold hands and overlook the little offences right now.

Tomorrow I will blog on the march to Edinburgh - not there but I lived there and know the city intimately. It will be fun.

France 2002

2007-03-01T15:00:00.000Z

I lived in rural France in 2002 and 2003. It was very French. Here are some articles I salvaged from a blog I ran while I was there.

Chateau living
Hey - I thought they had a revolution around here.
Published July 2002
Buying a house in France
An insider's guide to all the mistakes
Published July 2002
Poor diet is a crime
Research connects poor diet with criminality
Published July 2002
Racial tensions flare in Europe
As economic migrants pour into Europe, racial tensions flare
Published June 2002
Blog stream
Bloggers are running with the baton of an independent web
Published July 2002
Jaded by power
Does libertarianism hold an answer to political disillusionment and disenfranchiement?
Published September 2002

Lost on the eBay trail

2007-03-01T12:13:00.000Z

Yesterday Kev was shopping around for sailing jackets. After finding what looked like a bargain on eBay, he wanted to find the new price in the shops. But he hit a brick wall on Google when he tried to filter eBay out of the search returns. You can filter out domains from the returns, but that's not easy when you're dealing with something as sprawling and ubiquitous as eBay and it's related properties. I expect you can do some clever things with regular expressions to make your filter, but how many people have the time, knowledge or desire to do that?

Last summer eBay and Google announced that they will be cooperating internationally (whatever that means). So, it's probably not the best time to be suggesting that Google provide plug and play filters to block eBay and other Internet property magnates. I'd even go so far as to suggest that it would be a great project for Google's summer of code this year.

After years of vigorous pursuit of search engine domination, web marketeers will be outraged by the notion. By cooperating, although companies risk losing visitors, these are disgruntled users that don't want to be there. Showing consideration for internet users will enhance brand perception and enrich the Google experience. It's a matter of quantity over quality I guess.

When Kev finally found a new version of his jacket, he was able to use the Google search bar as a calculator to compare costs - so that gave him back some of the time he lost on the eBay trail.

Gathering my bits

2007-02-27T22:30:00.000Z

Yesterday, Ike pinged to say I'd shown up on her blog stats - a LiveSearch for me - sent me the link for the results. I was happy to see that Essays from Ireland still top the bill - almost a decade on. But ever-organised Ike was unimpressed by the trail of writings I've abandoned on the web.

My goal for now is to gather my scribbles, revisit some, and write some more. Until I figure out the clever nav widgets, and the templates, finding your way around here is a task. I'm working on it.

About larger goals and boundaries - step one first. This task requires me to research my web detritus and gather it back, to structure this diverse information in a useful manner, and then I can deal with the task of how I can share my learning in a cheap and cheerful way.

My ultimate goal is to participate in innovative projects to deliver best practice for sustainable enterpise and society. This blog will focus on positive ways to ...

Jaded by power

2007-02-26T17:34:00.000Z

Published September 2002

Those in power get jaded, deluded, and seduced by power itself. The hunger for absolute power and, more to the point, the abuse of power, are part of human nature.

This quote from Clint Eastwood begs the question: How can an individual in society protect him/her self against abuse of power by the institutions that are designed to manage and protect that society? On all sides, in all arenas, we find compelling evidence of the truth of Eastwood�s remark.

Elected officials

Politics in the so-called democratic countries of the west rely on electoral rigging, gerrymandering of constituencies, media spin-doctoring and manipulation, corporate donations to political groups . . . While politicians scratch their heads in supposed wonder at the apathy of the electorate, a frightening proportion of people living in the west do not vote and have virtually disenfranchised themselves.

Selected officials

So much for our elected officials, what of those who are selected, the career civil servants whose job it is to administer state services? With rare exceptions, the delivery of state services is unwieldy and unfriendly to the individual � even the handful of civil servants that aren't obsessed with promotion and career breaks find themselves tied to the bureaucratic nightmares of form-filling, rubber-stamping and paper trails.

Brown paper envelopes

In recent years Irish taxpayers have funded a spate of costly legal investigations into dishonesty in high places, including one investigation that focused specifically on collusion between politicians, planning officers and private property speculators. In these tribunals it emerged that hundreds of thousands of anonymous pounds were being passed around in brown paper envelopes. For the individual the brown paper envelope usually contains a demand for money. In the corridors of power in Ireland that same receptacle came to represent a gift of money.

The brown paper envelope is endemic, not only in Ireland, but in western society as a whole. Already victim of the consequences of immoral collusion between state (elected and selected) and private sector, the hard-earned money of the individual taxpayer is further frittered away on outing the perpetrators? Media spin doctors are paid (more tax costs) to reassure us that reform is now in hand (further tax costs). The individual is paying, time and again, to perpetuate the cycle of abuse, funding corrupt institutions and individuals to reinvent themselves every time they are caught out.

This reinvention delivers a lexicon of political correctness - words such as "openness", "accountability", "participative democracy" - the spin doctors make a fortune from coining them and training their clients to use them meaningfully. There was I, since my childhood, thinking that these concepts were cornerstones of a truly democratic society. Well, thought made a fool of me! Brown paper envelopes and double standards are the true cornerstones I fear.

The libertarian proposition

Which brings me back to Clint Eastwood, who is a self-professed libertarian. Taking its founding principles from the likes of Thomas Jefferson, a growing libertarian movement is emerging in the US. This movement sees itself as occupying a separate space in a separate dimension from the traditional left-right divide represented by political parties in the west. The left-right divide has its origin in the post-revolutionary governing assembly in France in the 1790s. To avoid violence in the assembly, monarchists were seated on the right, republicans on the left, with armed guards positioned between them.

For whatever reasons, the two-dimensional, left-right divide has dominated western political thinking since. To suggest that this concept has outlived its usefulness is a profound understatement. Do young people not vote because they are lazy or because no candidate addresses their issues, speaks with their voice? Are they apathetic, disillusioned, or downright skeptical?

The diamond model

Such is the crisis of western democracy that the people who pay for it do not believe in it but it's such a beast they can't even contemplate fixing it. Where to start? The libertarians (who need a spin doctor to work on that awful name) propose a new model for political (and social and economic) science. This model proposes four dimensions, theoretically in a diamond formation. At the top of the diamond is the libertarian and, at the opposite pole is the authoritian. To the right is the conservative who favours economic freedom and moral control. And opposite is the leftie who favours moral freedom and economic controls.

This grid is the brainchild of one David Nolan, a political science graduate of MIT, who first presented the concept in 1971. The model offers a number of opportunities for re-evaluating our political perceptions. For example, rather than placing Marxism in the left and Stalinism in the right, it places both in Authoritarian - the former to the left of the grid, the latter to the right. This process recognises the fact that both have more in common with each other than with their respective political outfielders.

Unjading the jaded

Some crucial issues emerge when you view how societies organise themselves using the diamond model. Rather than addressing fundamental questions about state control vs. freedoms, western democracies only address right-left issues. Apply some healthy skepticism and it becomes apparent that those that currently control our societies have a vested interest in and imagine the degree of political and institutional control you wish to pay for. Hey presto - maybe the self-disenfranchised (or can we call them conscientious objectors?) will find something worth voting for.

Blog stream

2007-02-26T17:23:00.000Z

Published July 2002

I was bogged down writing this story until I came across a piece by Simon Tisdall in the Guardian about linking. I thought it was going to be another of many current stories on the great internet deep linking controversy. Having almost forgotten that there was such a thing as a non-hypertext link, I was almost shocked to read about another form of linking. The linking game described in the article, puts imaginary people together linking concepts and events to arrive at some crazy conclusions. David Eyke (remember the shell suit?) links magnificently when he tells all about the illuminati.

Thinking about linking brought me to thinking about lateral thinking and Edward de Bono. He's top of the de Bono list at google, above U2. His site description says

Edward de Bono is regarded by many as the leading authority in the
world in the field of creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking

He's the daddy of lateral thinking and I think he has a pad on an island in west cork. Which might explain why his website has that ghostly gone away feeling. Back in the heady 90s he was going for it: touting for 5 million members for the Edward de Bono Creative Team - note the trade mark. He also started TOPP, a web-based political party - acronym can mean Tired Of Politics Party we're told. He had lots of specific projects on the go, including Bonto which publishes poems in a creative exercise set by de Bono. Copyright credit for each of the four line poems is Author and the Edward de Bono Creative Team. The team is the sole owner of emails on the TOPP project, which is quite a bizarre archive.

But the poems and the emails stopped in 1999. That's about the time when people started drifting from the party - ecommerce wasn't going according to plan and there was no plan b. The net was getting tacky with email spam and pop up adverts and viruses - and very cluttered. Surfing was harder work for less return and maintaining a site was costly and time-consuming.

The Napster movement kept some of the buzz alive while people shared music files with each other over the internet. The music industry fought back and it's now illegal to share your favourite sounds online. If you want to have a weep, visit the napster site - the day the music died. Be interesting to know where Don McLean stands on Napster.

Napster was silenced but they're finding it harder to stop the individual who flout the law and carry on regardless. So now the record companies are threatening to sue individuals. It seems they're going to hang out in chat rooms and newsgroups to flush these arch terrorists out. Creepy.

Today the bloggers are running with the baton of a free and independent web. In place of music, bloggers share web logs (hence blogs) of links and personal opinions. The logs generate a stream of consciousness flow of dynamic content that races around the web via a rapidly growing network of self-publishers. With the internet going bankrupt, blogging is growing at the speed of light. According to an article in The Economist, a year ago there were about 30,000 people at it, now it's estimated to be 500,000. I did the sums and they support the claim of a growth rate nearing 25% a month. Scary numbers.

Bloggers are re-inventing the web which was (maybe still is) on the brink of collapse. A vast body of knowledgable, articulate writers is creating and distributing a new channel of free dynamic content. Let's call this content the blog stream where stories flow as well as gossip, rumours, tech talk, medical talk, you name it. One recurring theme is about why we blog. Everybody describes it as addictive. Blogging is doing for the art of writing what the Harry Potter books did for the art of reading - reawakening people's delight in airing their views.

Every minute of the day, 24/7, hundreds, maybe thousands of writers are scouring the web for content and streaming it onwards, driving readers to stories through hypertext links. News sites gain traffic, but with advertising sales down, traffic doesn't translate into cash.

Big news sites are expensive to run and money is as tight there as elsewhere. Venture capital is gone, share issues are meaningless and nobody's buying advertising. The print trade has always been an economic litmus test. When times are tough printers are the first to go out of business. That being the case, those news sites that are online arms of paper publishers are under additional pressure, because sales are down across the media board.

News sites must increase revenue and they are trying different approaches. The Financial Times offers readers a mix of free and subscription material but all stories for the past week are open to all. Other newspapers require you to register and supply personal details before providing you with free access to information. This process can be adapted to gather payment information if the publisher opts to become a subscription only service. In most cases the switch to subscription brings about a sharp decrease in readership, with a limited increase in revenue, but less appeal to advertisers if they ever come back.

It goes against the grain for a publisher to turn away readers - reaching readers is their spiritual mission in life. Lose readers they will for sure, if the Danish Newspaper Association acts on its right to ban a search engine from deep linking to stories on its website. The publishing world watched last week while they took their case to the Danish courts, and won. Presumably, they intend to act on the verdict and force the search engine to point links to all pages on the site to the address of the top page. Just maybe, the search engine will prefer to remove all links, period. Either way, I guess there�ll be a lot less people reading their stories.

Continuing with the process of erasing their website, will the Danish group next turn their attention to bloggers. Like the record company police prowling in chat rooms, will Danish journalists be found lurking in the blog stream, pouncing on these dangerous criminals. So people will stop linking to them and, sooner or later, the job is done, the website is wiped from the web. Somewhere or other there's a server storing their content but it has no traffic because nobody knows they are there, or cares.

Hypertext links are the web, the core of HyperText Markup Language. A site that bans deep linking is defying the nature of HTML. At dotblog Richard Giles is running a list of sites to boycott because they are anti-deep linking. Dave Winer on Scripting News thinks it's an oxymoron to oppose deep links and is disgusted by the whole affair. He's also been blogging the Janice Ian story that's hitting the headlines. Here is Janice Ian's ripping attack on the music industry. After you read it, sign her guest book in support. I did and got a personal email in response. Now that's good marketing. I've never had an album of hers but now we're on personal terms maybe I'd like to know how she sounds.

Janis Ian isn't running a blog yet but she's ideal for it � I shall suggest it. Her opinions would be appreciated on the blog stream, where there's a strong music undercurrent. Adam Currie, a founder of MTV, runs a very active blog with a lot of music talk. Today Adam is plugging the Northsea Jazz Festival. He's prolific - probably comes from being a DJ.

Blogs are as much about reading as writing, and bloggers become increasingly well informed. I have no great interest in Microsoft's plans for the future � I resigned myself to their inevitable control some time ago - but the blogs are full of stories about Palladium. As a result, I know a lot more about it and have developed an opinion on the matter. And on the Palladium trail I discovered more interesting bloggers to get to know.

Can you remember how you communicated before email? Not only did you do less of it but you did it in a different, more formal, way. In a few years time you'll be asking yourself how you communicated before blogging and you'll find yourself to be better informed and more articulate.

Racial tensions flare in Europe

2007-02-26T17:21:00.000Z

Published June 2002

Not so long ago, Europeans migrated to the US, either legally or illegally, off in search of a better quality of life in the land of the free. With an estimated half million people entering the EU illegally every year, the tides have turned, and immigration is becoming the hottest political issue in the union. They come overland and by sea, sandwiched like beasts in container trucks, or clung to the underbellies of trains, or risking life and limb to swim it, from countries throughout Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia. The mind boggles at the social and economic conditions they leave behind, if life in a refugee camp in Europe seems preferable.

European governments seem unable to develop a coherent policy in the face of the tidal wave. In Ireland it only seems like yesterday when emmigration was the big social problem - as recently as ten years ago it was the main option for school leavers. And then overnight a refugee problem emerged and became the subject of hot media debate. In the 90s Ireland went from being one of the poorest countries in the EU to one of the richest. The massive, endemic unemployment of the previous four decades gave way to a brave new era of labour shortages in the low paid sectors: catering, agricultural workers. The new, affluent, well-educated Irish youth were not going to work in a kitchen or in the fields. The boom attracted economic immigrants from many countries but farbeit from the Irish government in its wisdom to match jobseekers to the available jobs. They were illegal so they must be maintained by the state, not allowed to work, while awaiting the lengthy and cumbersome legal procedures that would decide that the vast majority of them must be returned from whence they came. Meantime, boom time or not, in the streets of Dublin and other cities, great pockets of poverty and social deprivation continue to exist, increasingly unacceptable in the face of the flamboyant wealth in neighbouring communities. And in the classic spirit of divide and rule, the blame is laid more and more at the door of the asylum-seekers. Poverty and ignorance are fed a media diet of stories about the refugees that arrive dripping in gold, being provided with first class accommodation and not even having to work for a living.

If I were fleeing a cruel and unjust regime I'd try to get my valuables out as well - only thing between me and starvation perhaps. Many jews that were lucky enough to escape Hitler's Europe carried what wealth they could with them in the form of gold teeth and hidden diamonds. For some this secreted wealth was what bought them passage to safety. The second issue is one of accommodation. Ireland had never experienced immigration in any great numbers until the 90s. When the Irish go to London, or New York, or wherever, they will find an Irish community where they can find help and support. Irish cities didn't really have the equivalent - no Latin quarter, a tiny chinese community, no greek sector . . . As people arrived in increasing numbers the government decided to deal with the accommodation crisis by buying or leasing hotels around the countryside under a policy of "dispersal". At the same time they rescinded the right for asylum seekers to enjoy standard economic supports available until then to all as a right in Irish society. Instead of money, asylum seekers were provided with food in their accommodation and given a meagre 15 pounds per week (about 20 euro) in cash. It is difficult, if not impossible, to develop a relationship with the host community if you can't afford to spend money there - buy a newspaper, a pint of Guinness in the local, go to a football match or hear some live music - all of these things sum up the Irish experience and the immigrant groups were economically barred from participation.

In small rural towns and villages a hotel full of people that has no money to spend and can't speak the language creates a huge social imbalance. And, furthermore, the loss of the hotel as a source of tourism business is an economic blow to everybody in the community. It doesn't take long before blame for all petty crime is laid at the doors of the asylum seekers. Feeding these local fears is the emergence of an Irish national movement that has nothing to do with the traditional northern conflicts but focuses on Ireland for the Irish. A lunatic fringe issues paranoid and apocalyptic warnings about the dangers of immigration. They may not be gaining ground in the polls yet but their very presence is enough to ensure that the media bites get more and more strident.

The story in England is quite different, where racism has been a hot political topic since long before Enoch Powell's infamous Rivers of Blood speech. I've lived in the heart of the East End of London where chirpy cockneys are among the friendliest people on earth if you're white. Over 250 languages are spoken in London where racial tensions can be very high between different immigrant communities as well as with the host community. I recall my horror at the racism of one Irish woman I met who was angry because her children were not allowed to celebrate St Patricks Day at school but were expected to learn Urdu. From what I could gather, this was a fault of government policy rather than of the individual children in the school. For many years government in England went a little bit crazy about equality. Every job advert seemed to prioritise applicants from ethnic, racial or sexual minorities - which really got up the noses of the many English people, men in particular, who felt automatically barred by virtue of their birthright. This policy encouraged rather than diminished racial division - discrimination is discrimination whether you call it positive or not.

The latest from the Blair government is that they intend to build massive new holding centres for asylum seekers throughout the UK. This effective prison camps are intended to create an inseparable divide between illegal immigrants and the host community. Why any person that has any value on life and liberty would want to be incarcerated in such an environment I cannot fathom. For many of these immigrants, English is the "mother country", the country that stripped their assets during colonial times and now closes its doors to them. Many in England are appalled by these measures but their voice seems to be increasingly less effective - and they wonder why young people are turning their backs on politics!

Recently I arrived in France to witness the horror on the ground when Le Pen ousted Jospin from the second round of the presidential elections. For the next two weeks there were demonstrations and riots on the streets of the cities against Le Pen. As in Ireland and England, the issue of immigration has become a huge political football. While they worship their immigrant Zinadine Zidane they complain and protest about the drain the "sans papiers" (without papers) are on the social system. France is rightly proud of her fair and equitable education, health, and retirement system - but is becoming increasingly less generous about sharing it with others that may need help. Appealing to people's greed it is easy for cynical politicians to blame higher taxes on the weakest element of society. In the end of the day the french voters closed ranks against the extremism of Le Pen and opted to give a massive power base to a coalition of the less extreme right. It's fairly safe to assume that this new grouping will place reduced taxes high on their agenda which will place the social system under increasing pressure. In this environment it is also fair to assume that there will be increasing intolerance for any additional drains on the system - look out asylum seekers.

Over the mountains in Austria we are hearing scary stories about Hader. Perhaps the scariest is that he has successfully introduced legislation for a two-tier education system. There's one set of schools for the native-born and another for outsiders. When we arrived in France we went down to the local school and signed up for our children to start there the following Monday. From day one they went into a French classroom where they had to sink or swim. They hadn't a word of french when they started but that didn't stop communication with the other kids and they were immediately integrated in the playground. How long would it take them to get to know the locals in Hader's system?

Europe's success leads to new problems. Creating a common currency is a major step towards economic integration and increases its attraction as a destination for economic migrants. It's a fact of life that if you're a wealthy country, or federation, you are a magnet to poorer people. With a diversity of cultures and political regimes within the wider borders of the EU, developing a common imigration policy and the methods for policing such a policy is a political minefield. Within Europe different countries have traditional loyalties and relationships with a range of non-EU members. The UK has a special relationship for example with Australia and makes special provisions for Australian workers. However, Spain has no such relationship with Australia - maybe a compromise could be arranged. But if you compromise on Australia, what about all the other compromises.

This debate occurs against a backdrop where there is a drive to tear down the internal borders within the EU. If you remove customs checks at internal borders it makes for easier passage of European citizens throughout the union, but how do you spot the wandering Australian , or Nigerian, or Latvian if you don't have such border controls? I think we need to accept the right of individuals to live where they want so long as they respect the legal and social mores of that country. While we tolerated and encouraged the globalisation of corporate entities that showed no respect for our laws or institutions, we became increasingly intolerant and discouraging of the globalisation of the individual. In light of the financial scandals emerging in the US, perhaps it's a good time to take stock of our priorities and to focus more on the human rights and freedoms of ordinary people who seek a better life.

Poor diet is a crime

2007-02-26T17:19:00.001Z

Published July 2002

I listened to a report on the BBC world service (go here http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_2063000/2063117.stm for the full story) about the findings of a study carried out at Oxford University on the impact of diet on crime. The study found that when prisoners in a high security prison in Buckinghamshire where provided vitamin and mineral supplements in their diet that their reoffending rates dropped by a massive 25 per cent. The study is now being extended to the general population and it points to the possibility that crime may be less about poor parenting and more about poor diet. Makes sense when you think about it.

Over the past few months, as something of an outside/inside observor in France during the presidential and legislative elections, much of the hype that led to the rise in the right related to security and crime. Seems like the whole world is becoming paranoid and scared of the next door neighbour. Fear is fed by cynical politicians, insurance companies and people dealing in security devices. Meantime, in one of an infinite number of vox pops carried out in the South of France during the election campaigns, a market trader in Le Pen country was asked about crime and security - he smiled lazily and said "what crime?". And that's about the plain truth of it. Living here over the past couple of months I feel I've arrived in one of the safest, least menacing societies ever. No need to lock doors or windows except of course for the insurance company. No need to feel scared walking down the street or to dance around your handbag at the discotheque. No need to put your children on reins for fear somebody might whisk them away. Kevin returned to the car at the supermarket one day to find a queue of people rushing up to him to tell him that somebody had dinged the side of the car. The perpetrator of this "major offense" had stayed around and also approached him, full of apologies and offers to pay for what was a mere scratch - pas de probleme. I grant you that we live in a rural area, far from the social, economic and melting pot presssures of big cities, but instinct tells me that we are living in a country where criminals are the exception rather than the rule.

I used to assume that the high crime rates in the US were down to the gun laws - putting temptation in the way of angst people. However, there's guns a plenty where I'm living now - you can't drive down the road of a Sunday without seeing the chasseurs about their weekend sport. But they don't seem so quick to turn their guns on each other. And what's the best known secret about France - they live to eat rather than eat to live. Even Macdonalds french style is more civilized, serving real coffee, nice ice cream, salad with everything, and beer! They may get wound up but then they have a nice leisurely 2 hour meal and the worries of the world are absorbed, digested and minimised. And, as the world's biggest consumers of anti-depressants, or so I'm told, if the food doesn't do the trick, they take a pill. Beats beating up on your neighbours, or attacking the schoolyard in a fit of teenage annoyance.

So, the moral of this story - get up early enough to have some breakfast, take at least 2 hours for lunch and eat lots, and spend your evening eating - you won't have the time or energy to fall out with the world. Buy your food at the market - prod everything, smell it, savour the flavour. Then teach your children to do the same thing because, at their core, food is a hugely important part of a child's existence. They may shriek for Macdonalds and pizza and chicken nuggets - it's up to us to help them to explore the world of food, to introduce rituals such as laying the table, having multiple courses, trying new flavours, cheeses, breads . . . It's a lot cheaper than taking them to a fast food restaurant every time you're feeling tired. And, once you get into the swing of it, it strengthens family bonds and becomes a pleasure. Where I grew up they used to say the family that prays together stays together - a load of old poppycock if you ask me. I'm now discovering the french secret - the family that eats together is happier together.

Buying a house in France

2007-02-26T17:14:00.000Z

Published July 2002

When I was considering moving to France I did some online research and found a number of Websites that offered advice about the legal and financial issues. Some proved useful; others did not but, for all of this research, nothing prepared me for what I eventually encountered. Here is a personal account of our experiences, where we ignored all the prevailing advice and dived on in regardless. If we had been more careful we might have had a smoother passage but I'm not sure whether we'd ever have completed the process.

Pinning the tail on the donkey

The first decision to make is "Where do we look?". If price is your highest priority, north is cheaper than south and rural is cheaper than coastal or cities. All pretty predictable, given that it's warmer down south. If weather is your highest priority then they say you must go south of the Loire. South west is cheaper than south east but then it doesn't have the same appeal to the Eurotrash that like to see and be seen around Nice, Antibes and Cannes. The south east is also more accessible as it's on the TGV (train grand vitesse) network and you can shoot down there from London or Paris in no time. There are pockets on the atlantic coast that seem to offer exceptional value for money but then we hit lucky and mapped these against a map nuclear power installations and the mystery was explained.

Aside from price we had a second priority - access to work. Ideally I would continue teleworking from home as I've done for the past 10 years. It is notoriously difficult for a foreigner to gain the confidence of a French employer so it was important to keep our options open. So we opted for the north where prices were accessible but where we could also telecommute to London or perhaps Brussels or Amsterdam as necessary. We decided against Brittany which is rapidly going down the road of mass tourism that we wanted to leave behind us in West Cork. Eventually we cast our eyes on Mayenne, next door to Brittany, in the northern part of the Pays de la Loire region and within striking distance of Rennes, Le Mans and Nantes.

Having a look see

Our next step was to go and have a look. We booked ourselves into a gite just over the border in Brittany which is owned by an English couple with four children. These would be company for our children and I reckoned that English-speaking hosts could be very helpful in our quest. We came for 2 weeks around Halloween and spent the first week playing hookie from our responsibilities and just driving round having a ball. The weather was great, people friendly and the countryside was wonderful and, given the time of year, empty of tourists. During our second week we did the round of estate agents (immobiliers) and visited a number of properties. We saw one wonderful place which comprised two enormous buildings big enough to be the centre for a logistical/distribution business. But it would have taken several modest fortunes to do all the necessary work and I chickened out. A couple of days before we left we viewed the property we eventually bought - a house and another small house surrounding a private courtyard with a modest back garden. Here we ignored conventional advice which is not to buy the first place you see. It was affordable and we'd have enough left over to do much of the necessary renovations - the roof was in a state and the floors needed doing, as well as the usual wiring, plumbing . . . Here we ignored the second piece of conventional advice - make sure the roof is sound.

Making an offer

When we got back to Ireland I emailed the immobilier and made an offer which was about 10 per cent less than the asking price. Communication was pretty poor overall. My patchy french wasn't up to detailed negotiations over the telephone and the immobilier relied on his secretary to prepare responses to emails - delays, delays, delays. Between one thing and another, after a couple of weeks they had accepted our offer although I wasn't sure whether it was at our price. All very vague. Next thing was we had to make another visit to France to sign the Compromis de Vente (promise to buy) and pay the deposit. Language presented a further barrier when I couldn't explain to the immobilier that I needed their bank details to transfer the deposit electronically. So we ended up flying to France at the end of a November with an envelope full of cash that we paid almost 10 per cent to convert into Francs.

Signing the Compromis de Vente

The Compromis de Vente is the first of two binding legal documents that you sign before you purchase a property in France. In it you have to stipulate any conditions that will allow you pull out of the process without forfeiting your deposit, such as getting a mortgage, getting necessary planning permission etc. It is also at this point that you have to consider french inheritance laws which seem bizarre to say the least. We inserted a clause that gets us around the local inheritance laws that would give my property, after my death, not only to my children but to my nieces and nephews and grandchildren and god knows who - probably the family cat. I'm sure it's all very sensible in french eyes but I couldn't make head or tail of it. Only time will tell whether we made a mistake here - hopefully my command of french will have improved by then.

For the signing appointment we flew to Paris on Friday morning and then enjoyed a really smooth ride on the TGV from Paris to Laval. Witnessing French engineering at its best reassured me again that we were doing the right thing. We arrived in Laval with half an hour to spare and took a leisurely stroll down the town to the immobiliers office. And then it got really weird. We were ushered into a fairly small office that was soon crammed with people because, unlike anything I've ever encountered before, both the buyer and the seller have to be present. In our case there were two sellers, the two of us, the immobilier and his assistant who had a smattering of English. We were all given a copy of the Compromis de Vente which contained about 15 pages of legalese which had been rather haltingly translated - at times it was hilarious. The immobilier then had to read through each word of this document and we all had to agree the content paragraph by paragraph. Then we had to hand over all manner of personal documents - passport, bank details etc. etc. which were duly copied and added to the paperwork, and then every one of us had to initial every page of the document as well as dating and signing it in several places. I began to wish for a shorter name.

What seemed an eternity but was actually two hours later we emerged from the stuffy room and went to the pub for a drink with the sellers, a brother and sister. Wiped out from the paperwork, I still couldn't get over my surprise at looking the sellers in the eye before paying over the money. I was also a bit gobsmacked because the final price on the document was lower than we had offered - in this round the language barrier worked for us. We spent a very pleasant hour with M. Majecki, the seller, who was very pleased to discover that we were not buying a holiday home but planning to live here - commenting that we were embarking on "une grande aventure". If only we'd known just how grande it was going to be!

We arranged to meet M Majecki at the house the following morning to plan out some redivision in the garden. Before that we tried to open a bank account but, although some banks were open on Saturday morning, it was impossible to open an account until Monday when we were returning home. We spent time at the house and then met up with M Majecki and his wife and little girl for a drink - we reckoned that even the most hard-nosed of conmen wouldn't bring along the wife and child if they were planning to rip you off - so we felt more comfortable with our decision by the minute.

Also that day they lit the Christmas lights in Laval and I was smitten. It's a small city, population 55,000, built on the River Mayenne which flows into the Loire. It's a fine, proud river and it was decorated with flowing cascades of light down from the medieval castle and dotted with boats with masts all illuminated. We walked across the main bridge under a canopy of lights and I marvelled at the subtle elegance and style of the french, wow. No plastic santies or garish rudolphs but a simple enhancement of the natural beauty of the location. Everyone in the town was out promenading en famille as is the french way - over and back across the bridge and around the square before retiring to a restaurant for lots of fine food.

Monday morning we hit the bank, almost literally. Turned up with all our papers and justicatifs (proofs) to be informed that we'd need an appointment. We explained our predicament - that we were leaving that day and needed to be able to transfer money to buy the house. Finally they relented and three people devoted the next twenty minutes to completing, checking and double-checking the paperwork. Another hurdle surmounted we thought - but thought can make a fool of you as we were to learn.

The waiting game

Back in wet and windy Sherkin Island, Christmas almost upon us, we had to bide our time. It takes about three months for a house sale to be processed in France - all manner of title searching and the like is carried on by the notaire behind the scenes. The Compromis de Vente gave us a date of 28 February but we had things to do before that.

We began by emailing the mairie in the little village where we were buying. This was necessary to establish relations generally as well as to enquire about necessary planning permissions and connecting to the local sewage system. They began to send me volumes of formulaires (forms) for applying for planning permission which were intimidating to say the least. Nor did it help when the cover note said you probably don't need to do these just for your info. Did we or didn't we???

We decided we'd rent a place for a few months so that we could get essential work done on the house before moving in. The immobilier couldn't help - standard lets here are for 3 years and short term lets seem to be unheard of. Eventually we got on to Gite de France and booked ourselves into a gite. Read Chateau living for that story. We decided to travel a bit early so that we'd have time to speak to people and sort out about planning permission before the sale was completed. From what we could gather, because there was a clause about it in the Compromis de Vente, even if we waived our rights nobody could sign off on the thing without satisfying this condition. Caught between a rock and a hard place perhaps.

We went to see the mairie in mid-February who immediately provided the name of a dessinateur (turned out to be a cross between an architect and a project manager) who'd do our planning application. Another day I'll write the stories about the planning and M. Raimbaud (pronounced Rambo with a handshake to match). For now it's enough to say we threw money at the problem and it went away.

February 28 came and went and no meeting set for signing the Acte de Vente (act of sale) and the final deed. I began making phone calls to the auctioneers and M. Majecki and was told that there was a delay because the notaire (notary) lacked a paper. The notaire is a highly-qualified lawyer that oversees all property transactions in France. They are supposed to be impartial, representing buyer and seller equally. Another piece of advice we ignored was that we should have brought in our own notaire to represent our specific interests - this was definitely a mistake - impartial I don't think so. For almost two months the thing dragged on with people beginning to climb willingly behind the language barrier to avoid awkward questions. We were beginning to despair. We extended our stay at the gite to buy time but prices were climbing and we were nowhere nearer completion.

Despite communication difficulties it began to emerge that there were problems with loans on one of the properties. Unlike in Spain where you can buy a property and discover that you owe a fortune on it because of the borrowings of the previous owner, this type of behaviour cannot happen in France. The notaire could not allow us to buy the property until she had authenticated details of all monies owing against the property as well as agreement from creditors about repayment from the proceeds of sale. Nobody wanted to spell it out in detail to us because they were afraid that we would invoke our right to pull from the deal because of the delays. Finally, in desperation, I contacted the Maison d'Europe in Laval and asked for contact info for an English speaker that might be able to help us to understand what was going on. As luck would have it they put me on to somebody from my own home town who runs a language school here. He brought me along to a notaire friend of his the following week and stayed to translate. Between one notaire and another we got our answers quickly. There were 5 hypotheques against the little house which belonged to M Majecki's sister. To my disbelief I learned that it was perfectly believable that she had signed the Compromis de Vente without being aware of this. I had mistakenly believed a hypotheque to be a mortgage but no - it is a judgement. If you owe money to somebody in France and they cannot get it from you they take this information to a central administrator of debts where they investigate your assets and place a judgement against them - all this can be done without informing you. The hypotheque doesn't force you to sell these assets but merely gives the creditor first option on proceeds of sale - an insurance policy. Meantime, however, you could make an arrangement to make stage payments on your debt and might pay off 90 per cent over the course of a year. But until the debt is cleared the hypotheque shows the full amount that was originally entered. What a tangled web.

Anyway, things progressed more quickly after we consulted the second notaire and a couple of weeks later we were all gathered together, this time in the notaire's office, for another signing. Because M. Majecki's wife was part owner of the garden we now had 3 sellers assembled, as well as the immobilier who'd come to collect his fee, and a translator. Guess what, we hadn't been provided with the text of the Acte de Vente in advance, although the translator had received it weeks ago. This time the core document ran to over 20 pages which the translator tells me is the longest she ever saw, itemising in detail every penny that had been owed on the house. I felt that I was party to an incredible intrusion in somebody's privacy - I was just buying a house and didn't want to know the dull, sad story of the sellers financial difficulties. We also discovered that there was an unforeseen right of way issue that nearly brought the whole proceedings to a halt. However, we decided to go for it at the end of the day and there followed the same painstaking initialisation and signing of reams and reams of pages by all present, including the translator for some peculiar reason.

And then we all went to the pub for a celebratory drink.

And it's ours

The following morning we went to the house and collected the keys from M. Majecki. While there a couple of his friends dropped in with a bottle of Muscadet and we all had une petite verre of welcome standing around the courtyard discussing the renovations. One of the visitors was astonished to hear we wanted wooden doors and windows - pvc is your only man - too much work painting every year otherwise. This on a house which is hundreds of years old, and if you use good quality varnish it should survive more than one year.

Lessons learned

Don't be in a rush or you'll get ulcers.
Expect problems.
Get your own notaire. All the english sites recommend you find an english -peaking notaire but unless you're buying in Brittany these are rather thin on the ground.
Look for a local translator right at the start.
Speak to the mairie before you sign anything.
Everybody will tell you it's pas de probleme - don't believe them - this is an aspiration rather than a statement of fact.
Learn to love detail and paperwork.
If you can survive all of that, you can expect a warm welcome.

Chateau living

2007-02-26T17:12:00.000Z

Published July 2002

Our first home in France was a gite I booked through Gite de France. I stipulated that I wanted a house that was big enough for us (2 adults, 3 children), in the general neighbourhood of the house we were purchasing, with a telephone line. Only one property fitted the bill because phones are not regarded as a requirement for summer accommodation it seems. Picture my surprise when I arrived, tired from travelling, at a great big chateau surrounded by massive woodlands and roses. The gite was a converted stables a stones throw from the chateau, bright and airy with a massive open fireplace in the cuisine/sejour (kitchen/living room). The house was a hive of activity when we arrived, and the greeting party included Madame from the chateau who, reassuringly, spoke wonderful English. Also in the welcoming committee was the housekeeper from the chateau and the next door neighbour, Maria. As always, I was struck by the civilisation of the french - all shaking hands and wishing us welcome and showing an interest.

Maria and her husband Jose are a portuguese couple that moved to France about 30 years ago. They work on the grounds of the chateau, Maria tends the flowers, the kitchen garden, and the poultry and hunting dogs, while Jose is forever wandering about with chain saws and strimmers, cutting things down. They were the kindest of neighbours. We were hardly in the door and Maria arrived with a basket of fresh eggs "pour les enfants". Over the months Kevin developed an unusual friendship with Jose in a mixture of pigeon French and Jose's pigeon English. They had common ground in the world cup which was looming on the horizon. It rained a lot for the first 6 weeks (we arrived mid-February) and Kevin was convinced we had traded wet and windy Ireland for the wettest and windiest spot in all of mainland Europe. But the sun shone in April. Even on the most blistering hot day Jose was still to be seen clad in at least 2 jumpers.

Things did not go smoothly with the house purchase (do they ever?). The summer season was coming and the gite was booked up so we had to look for alternative accommodation. Renting in France is done on a 3-year basis which we found a bit weird but, eventually, a week before we were to become homeless, we took the plunge and answered an advert for a house in the same neck of the woods. We went into the agent's office and, after the customary formalities, drove with him to view the house - guess what, in the grounds of another chateau. While he went off to get the keys Kevin said "just tell him we'll take it". So we did - not before we had supplied about 3 thousand items of identification and "justicatifs" and the lord alone knows what. And here we are, in our second French home, surrounded by fine trees and roses, in another huge, rambling barn conversion. C'est la vie. We're on the edge of a small village that has a part-time shop, a bar/restaurant that is very good, the prerequisite communal park and fishing lake, and a mairie of course. The kids are making friends and will start school locally after the summer holidays. Don't know when and how we'll get our own house renovated but I'm in no rush - I could get quite used to the good life chez le chateau.

Up and airborne

2007-02-26T14:10:00.000Z

Published August 1996

Setting up a web site for the arts in rural Ireland

No matter how organised, imaginative and idealistic you may be, it seems there are always stumbling blocks to realising the simplest of dreams. There is a curious mentality which gets the grants, convinces the money folk, persuades the backers - this does not describe me, unfortunately. An inherited snobbery, perhaps, causes me to distance myself from the tedious demands of form-filling and small-minded, cautious penny pinchers. What masterpieces would Da Vinci have produced if he had spent his days producing business proposals? James Joyce's "Ulysses" would hardly have seen the light of day if the author had been constrained by feasibility studies. While I may not aspire to these levels of excellence, I subscribe to the view that creative endeavour has an intrinsic value that often suffers from too close an eye to the market economy.

As a returned immigrant, I chose to live in rural County Cork, relying on considerable experience of the ways and means of publishing, and the potential for remote working presented by modern technology. That was my first mistake. Technology there may be - getting your hands on it is another matter, and making it work for you is yet another hurdle.

Despite the fact that the warehouses of the world are full of mouldering Apple Macintosh computers, a seeming conspiracy prevails against the small purchaser. On my first shopping spree I went, armed with necessary financial arrangements, to a dealer or, in the euphemistic language of Mac world, an Authorised Apple Reseller.

Delivery took a couple of weeks, even though Cork is the European assembly centre for Macintosh computers. I tried to load lots of goodies from floppy disks - the disk drive didn't work! Many phone calls and a couple of afternoon long trips to the reseller, found me with a replacement computer.

Paper publishing was the game and I began to tout for business. Very soon the shoe string budget had to stretch to a fax/modem, as the nearest accessible fax machine was some miles away. These things cost a lot more here than in the USA - a 14,400 model costing me over $500. I was delighted with the immediacy of communication, despite the fact that most fax machines I was dealing with seemed to be of the hand-cranked variety.

Electricity supply in Ireland is in the hands of a monopoly, whose high-quality engineers are regularly on contract outside the country, while local supply is left in the hands of an ageing and top-heavy management. We have a notoriously dirty power supply, a situation exacerbated in rural areas by sharing lines with large farms, with regular drops and surges at milking times. A few weeks after the fax/modem arrived, down it went in a power surge, Act of God (what a helpful guy!) and we're back where we started.

Thanks to a Taurean streak of stubborness, I persisted in the face of this setback and things progressed on a one step forward, two steps backwards pace. The first major project was a fortnightly, tabloid newspaper that carried arts, literature, technology, environment and entertainment features, and comprehensive listings of music and other events.

Distributed free we developed great reader loyalty, but advertisers, our sole source of income, were slow to depart from safe (some might say boring) media. We poured every penny and ounce of energy into the project for almost a year and a half, always with the carrot of acceptance by advertisers just around the corner. The money got tighter, the advertisers remained, largely, intransigent, so we abandoned the exercise and turned our attention to the world wide web.

In the meantime, due to a small smile of fortune in the guise of a modest legacy, I upgraded equipment, adding a power macintosh, 600dpi printer a scanner to the hardware spec. The Authorised Apple Reseller couldn't arrange print samples, despite regular reminders, over a three month period. I approached an unauthorised wheeler dealer, who promised the earth and delivered computer minus ram upgrade, a hard disk weighed down with unsolicited games, extensions and unwanted clutter, corrupt scanner software and a delay on the printer. Various hiccups but the Taurean streak came to my aid again, and we got operational.

Hooking up to a service provider was easy, getting what you want from them is another story! There is fierce competition among service providers in Ireland at present and I opted for a company that offered free service until the end of the year for the payment of a small set-up fee. Enter my partner, Kevin, who had entered the world of publishing with little experience but great enthusiasm. Having mastered the niceties of cut and paste artwork and preparing photographs for the smudgy, murky world of cheap printing techniques, he was finally realising his dream of dragging us into the 1990s and a global medium. He had a little programming experience and took to the keyboard to self-learn HTML

In the meantime my education was more concerned with unlearning all of the wonderful capabilities and typographical refinements of Quark Xpress, returning to the far cruder capabilities afforded by HTML. We browsed, downloaded guides and tutorials, bookmarked, sent some email and prepared for lift off.

The few web sites based locally had virtually closed the door to advertising revenue - a curious misapprehension prevails that to advertise on the web is a one off exercise - matters such as reach, penetration and relevance haven't emerged yet. The content of these sites focused on selling Cork as a tourism destination, portraying a conventional image of 'leprechaun' Ireland.

We designed a format based on the LIST, our abandoned newspaper, focusing on the cultural wave that is surging through Ireland at present, but not ignoring some of the more obvious barriers to our emerging 'Age of Enlightenment'. Rather than seeking to fund our site through advertising, we looked to direct marketing of quality goods that are being produced in the area.

In the midst of a cultural renaissance, every bush and hill hides a creative talent, beavering away at making things, doing things. Many of these artists, writers and musicians produce extremely desirable material, but the local economy cannot sustain them. Most cannot afford to market themselves beyond the locality, where their unique vision and output is more likely to find a market. The internet is a cheap medium and we embarked on a plan to offer free access to suppliers, working on a commission basis on orders received.

A simple idea, works well for everyone, you say. Not so. More hurdles. The international banking community is no great lover of innovation, and credit card suppliers here are cautious about entering into financial agreements with us when we aren't putting major investment into stock. While home shopping may be a young child in North America, it hasn't even reached the stage of infancy here.

An Irish solution to an Irish problem emerged (i.e. work around things rather than taking them on), and we are now negotiating Associate Gallery and Store Membership for outlets with existing mail order facilities. It may not be the ideal solution - the works of the small craftworker or the self-published author can only be paid for by cheque - but it will get us up and running and, who knows, with a trading track record, the financial institutions may be more considerate to our proposals.

We prepared some test material and contacted our service provider to arrange FTP access. Despite three phone calls over a period of two weeks, when we came to launch time, the server didn't recognise us. Why? Because the webteam, who don't work on weekends, hadn't made the necessary arrangements. Spending an entire weekend on the phone to technical support, who were frequently one page ahead of us in the manual, we got our access and up we went. With a most peculiar URL address, and the discovery that two servers were in operation and we were being shunted over to the 'B server'.

This couldn't be rectified until the webteam came in on Monday. Transfer to the 'A server', which allows easier accessibility, required payment of regular fees - so much for a free service - so the cheque was paid and the order form faxed with instructions to complete necessary transfer arrangements prior to the weekend. You'll never guess, come Saturday, what do we find? The web team has gone home and the arrangements haven't been made. Here we are on Tuesday, our access is now arranged, but we can't afford to launch the site proper until the weekend.

The final, and least surmountable hurdle, is telecom charges. Living in the land of free local calls, and fast, efficient telephone lines, the scenario that exists here is, perhaps, unimaginable. Because Ireland upgraded its telecommunications so late our technology is world class, our engineers are among the best in the world. But the telecom providers are another monopoly, although European legislation is set to change this in the next few years. Like the electricity providers, the management hasn't moved forward, still operating on the basis of turning the handle, picking up the headset and waiting for the operator to answer.

Although I am less than 5 miles from Cork City local zone, I pay trunk rates to call there. Off peak charges, on weekdays, see me paying almost 10 times as much to call my service provider as people living in Cork. A cybercafe in Cork can offer commercial access to the internet cheaper than I can receive it. Only at weekends do rates fall sufficiently to allow me to go online for longer than the momentary sprints I make to collect and post email.

I contacted Telecom to see if I could negotiate reductions - it took three days to get a number for customer relations and I may as well not have bothered. Billing analyses have encouraged various employees to sympathise with my situation, recognising the anomalies, but not offering any resolution.

I emailed every politician I could find online - most of my post was returned, undelivered, something about sites being upgraded! The one response I got was from a member of the Green Party who sympathised but, basically, it's none of his business. We are due a general election here next year and I am now pinning my hopes on it becoming a platform issue - a long shot but the best I can hope for. In the meantime there are reports of frightening population shifts of businesses moving back into overcrowded cities in an effort to overcome the commercial imbalance created by telecom charges.

In the light of the bumps and ruts on the road to the superhighway, it is sometimes all too easy to lose sight of the goal. The buzz of getting pages up first day, only to realise that few, if any, would ever find them. The buckets of stories, information, ideas just waiting to be aired, only to find online time bogged down with server inadequacy. If we can survive long enough to streamline and overcome the difficulties it will be such fun and so rewarding to carry discussion of how we live, and why, to an infinite forum.

The most real concerns of people, the issues of quality of life, are global as much as parochial, and I believe we can all learn from other communities. The World Wide Web has the potential to empower and transform the lives of the meek, the humble, the disenfranchised and we will persist in our efforts to participate in that transformation.

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - August 5, 1996.

The Michael Collins story

2007-02-26T14:06:00.000Z

Published November 1996

... until the conflict of partition is overcome
the ghosts of Collins and Dev will never be laid to rest

On the day the Michael Collins movie, written and directed by Neil Jordan, premiered in Ireland, it was impossible to avoid the media hype. Since its earlier release in the U.S., the media was churning it out - the crits, good and bad, the historians, the begrudgers, they all had a go. It created as much copy on political pages as on entertainment or arts sections. The jury is still out.

What is so fascinating about Michael Collins? He was handsome, clever, at the centre of political and military intrigue - a raw country boy who was sent to Westminster to negotiate treaty terms with the might of the British Empire.

How did he find himself in this position? Did he get the best terms possible? Were there any alternatives? These are the questions that history has never answered, and that fascinated historian Neil Jordan, who spent over 12 years working to develop the film.

What we do know is that the Treaty led to a bloody Civil War that divided communities, even families, through the length and breadth of the country. We also know that it led directly, as Collins had predicted, to his death. We may never know the full truth of the period, but the film brings Collins firmly into the mainstream of historical investigation, in from the cold where he had resided for more than half a century. In 1966 Eamon de Valera, then President of Ireland, said that history would come to recognise the greatness of Collins, at his expense. The general consensus on the film is that the prediction has come true, and definitely at Dev's expense.

History is full of what might have beens, but they serve little purpose in the art (or is it science?) of historical analysis. What did occur, as a result of the Treaty, was a bloody Civil War, and an aftermath that is still felt. Growing up not far from Collins' family home, I can testify to the legacy of secrecy and division that prevailed. The politics of the new nation were dominated by Civil War divisions, and the two main political parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, developed out of Dev and Collins camps. It is only with the passing of the Dev era, in the last two decades, that Irish society has begun to move away from Treaty politics. The two main parties are still entrenched (Nora Owen, Minister for Justice is a niece of Michael Collins), but an increasingly young electorate has indicated that Civil War divisions no longer concern them.

Queen Elizabeth I put forward the theory that imperialism should be based on the principle of divide and rule. Thereby she established the world's most powerful empire. Time and again, history has shown, that divisions remain long after the imperialist departs with his booty. The bloodbath that greeted Indian Independence, the bloody and starving mess on the African Continent, the collapse of Eastern Europe, perhaps even the ongoing conflict in Northern Ireland, all speak of layers of ethnic conflict that strike at the heart of society. It is arguable that the Irish Civil War was unavoidable, given the apartheid system that was introduced in the plantation of Ulster. It is also possible that the subsequent dominance of our politics by these issues was unavoidable, a mere blip on the road to national identity. It might be argued, however, that until the conflict of partition is overcome the ghosts of Collins and Dev will never be laid to rest.

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - November 23, 1996.

Pushing the limits ... of our credibility

2007-02-26T14:02:00.000Z

Published June 1997

Push Technology, Free Speech, and the World Wide Web

Big money and big resources are being devoted to the development of server push. If you have managed to avoid the countless column inches devoted to it, server push is the means whereby information gatherers push content out to subscribers, rather than waiting for them to visit. A number of large newscasters are interested in the concept which dominates development discussion at major trade shows.

Lazy Man's Load

The push concept appeals to the busy executive, who wants up-to-date information but can't spare the browsing time to seek it out. S/he can visit a large push site, such as the Pointcast service, and subscribe to have various categories of information delivered directly to the client computer. The service has its attractions but is of limited value to users who aren't online all the time, and subscribers often report dissatisfaction with the level of useless information that travels in with key items. Like the lazy man's load, information overload can be the result of this bid to cut on browsing time.

Pushing Push

Given the hype, it is reasonable to assume that there is strong vested interest in pushing push. The technology to deliver the service is not cheap -- estimates put it as high as half a million dollars - so there must be significant promise to entice developers. Pushers can offer guarantees on circulation and usage statistics. This in turn makes their services attractive to advertisers and content generators, who will pay willingly to be carried by the service. There is also a potential market for paid subscription to push services, particularly in specialist categories. So, for commercial information providers push offers a pathway to guaranteed circulation which has, until now, been lacking on the internet. This is what the marketing wizards and the admen want - to revert to what some might regard as outmoded marketing classifications. (That is another story and another day's work).

Of, perhaps, greater concern is the appeal of push to the media moghuls. Until now, the real delight of the internet for many has been its freedom and equality. A guy with a story in Small Town, Nowheresville, armed with the basics of html, had as direct an access route to readers as Mr. Big Editor from the Global Planet Controller. The increasingly homogenous face and voice of international media was pleasantly disturbed with the onset of online communications. Now cheque book journalism has within its grasp the potential for controlling content in yet another media frontier. Whence free speech and politically unpopular opinion. Are push services poised to present another face of mainstream media, while the remainder of the web is sidelined as a limited interest alternative, with low readership and revenues? Or will we be optimistic like James Gleick, and assume that the spirit of independence that underlies the internet will overcome and bear fruit?

Side by side with push push is shove shove, with the proliferation of dynamic news pages on many smaller sites (such as my own!). This simple, cost-effective method of news publishing offers a small voice response to the roar of the giant pushers. But here, also, there are inherent dangers. I recently was drawn to a small news site which offers a ticker tape news service, nicely presented with quite a lot of up-to-date information. But one of its sources was pulled in from another site, also offering ticker tape journalism. There is a danger that we will lose sight of the source of information, in an increasingly complex route from publisher to reader.

Somebody once told me that the consummate liar cloaks his lies in a vast armature of truths. The more complex the route the information takes, the less likely it is that we will identify its source. And we know what happens with gossip, rumours and hearsay.

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - June 9, 1997.

Drom Chraoí - Trom Chraoí

2007-02-26T13:56:00.000Z

Published July 1997

A Commentary on the "Marching Season" in Northern Ireland

Heart of the Mound - Heavy Hearts

About a mile or so outside the village of Inchigeelagh is a Mass Rock, where mass was celebrated from 1640 to 1800. Picture the scene, the priest facing a pile of stones which functions as a makeshift altar, evicted from his church which has been handed over to a protestant minister, hiding like a criminal, in fear of his life, surrounded in the clearing by a gathering of loyal parishioners, many of whom hadn't been overly concerned with religious matters until their spiritual freedoms were threatened.

Religious division dominated European politics for all of the seventeenth century. The shift from the hierarchical catholic church, in favour of more "democratic" protestant denominations was reflected in a similar shift away from feudal values and autocratic monarchies. Whatever the motivation, religious fervour and puritan values took a fierce grip on the imagination - preparing the ground for the vigorous work-ethic that was so vital to industrialisation.

Although Ireland is now one of the world's most prominent catholic countries, the medieval Irish church was quite easy-going and relaxed. The early Christian settlers had adapted comfortably to Celtic spirituality, incorporating many of their feast days and celebrations into the Christian calendar. The Norman invaders were also Christian, and had integrated well with Irish society. The march of Lutheranism had little impact on this remote corner of Europe and religion remained a rather casual affair until the troubles of England and Europe were imported under the reign of the Stuarts.

Legislation was put in place in Elizabethan times requiring uniformity of religious practice, under the Church of England, however it was rarely enforced in Ireland. In the early seventeenth century there were small pockets of protestant settlers in the country, but most of the wealth and power remained in the hands of the old Catholic settlers, who remained loyal to the Crown. The young Stuart king was happy to keep military costs at a minimum and to work to enlarging the protestant interest in a piecemeal fashion. On the odd occasion a zealous administrator would move to uphold the law and priests might be expelled or churches confiscated. This is probably what happened in Inchigeelagh. However most of these actions were overturned on direct appeal by the catholic settlers to the Crown.

The Ulster Uprising, which began in 1641, changed the course of our history. Old settlers joined forces with the Irish, undermining the Stuart position which was already under attack by the puritan faction in parliament. When power went to the Cromwellians the face of Ireland was changed for ever. The Cromwellian plantations were extensive and effective and the puritan ethos came to dominate political establishments. Pockets of protestantism gave way to bastions of bigotry, and, banished from their homes, robbed of their freedom and dignity, the Irish found in their religion a rallying point for their nationalism and sense of aggrievement.

The Stuart restoration gave some respite, and catholic wealth and position were partly restored, but the impact of the Cromwellian period was profound. James II (known in Irish as Seamus a Chaca or James the S**t) began to strip protestant power in England, allying himself with the French court. This was a European war and it was inevitable that English protestants would seek the help of William of Orange, James' son-in-law, to help them in their plight.

When William arrived in Ireland he found strong support in the Cromwellian settlements and an ill-trained and ill-equipped opposition under the leadership of a weak James. The Irish had their heroes, such as Patrick Sarsfield in Limerick, but the battle was lost long before the Boyne.

The Irish had entered the seventeenth century an easy-going if somewhat harried race. They went out of it victims of some of the most repressive religious and social legislation in the world. In the course of the next century the penal laws discriminated against their every right - the right to worship, congregate, own property, to speak their language - every vestige of dignity was stripped away and the groundwork was done to ensure that the famine of the 1840s would claim more than a million lives. In these dark days people turned to a religion that hadn't figured hugely in their lives before, finding in it, perhaps, a philosophy that helped them cope with their martyrdom.

It is ironic that, by the time the famine struck, Catholicism had become so central to Irish life, that many starved to death rather than renouncing their religion for a bowl of soup. By now the penal laws had been repealed (largely because they had achieved their purpose of sinking the native population into a condition of poverty and abject misery) but many soup kitchens were opened offering famine relief on the condition that the recipients espouse the protestant faith. How so many remained adamant in the face of starvation is a mark of how deep-rooted religion had become in the Irish psyche. As a child I remember the venom in my benign grandmother's voice when telling me that a neighbouring wealthy family were "soupers", i.e. they had taken soup and renounced their faith during the famine. The same lady wasn't even born until 50 years after these occurrences, but such was the hatred in the locality that it is doubtful whether these people will ever be fully forgiven.

Southern Ireland has become increasingly secular in its outlook, particularly in the last 30 years. This may be part of the reason why we have such difficulty in coming to terms with the continuing sadness and struggle in Northern Ireland. Its divisions are rooted in the European wars of the seventeenth century and its sectarianism echoes the religious extremes of those times. The imponderables facing the peace talkers derive from centuries of mistrust and hostility and they will need more than political will to achieve a good solution.

Perhaps some divine inspiration!

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - July 13, 1997.

A confident culture sharing its treasures

2007-02-26T13:50:00.000Z

Published August 1997

Last weekend I took a casual stroll into the hidden Ireland, plunging headlong into the wellsprings of our cultural psyche. I was drawn to Inchigeelagh on a sunny Thursday morning on a reccie for some live internet coverage I was preparing for the weekend's Daniel Corkery Summer School.

I met with Joe Creedon, proprietor of the hotel and organiser of the school, and, over pots of coffee, he wove a tapestry of the colours and hues of his place, his neighbours and his history. An engaging and instinctive story-teller, his tales banished deadlines, the rhythmic words unveiling submerged memories of childhood and earlier.

I was back on Saturday, complete with computer, modem, digital camera and a journalist and photographer who were interviewing me for an Irish-American magazine. Sheila, the writer, grew up in Boston, but made frequent visits to her father's home in Longford during her youth and came to live in Dublin in 1991. As a first generation Irish-American, I was eager to see her response to Joe's stories. He spoke of the Brehon Laws, of the matriarchal tradition, of badges of respect in the community, of art and literature and the Irish language, and of course of Daniel Corkery. The writer's pen was frequently stalled by the flow of words, the fluent music of the oral tradition - still thriving in Inchigeelagh and Uibh Laoire - which had drawn Daniel Corkery to establish the first summer school in the village in the 1920s.

Daniel Corkery was a teacher, writer, dramatist, artist, and critic, whose views on Irish culture were to have a profound impact on his followers. As a primary school teacher he inspired students like sculptor Seamus Murphy and writer Frank O'Connor with his eclectic cultural vision. Writing articles for "The Leader" in Cork he began to develop themes that were recurrent in all his future writing - plays, short stories, novels and critical and academic texts. He was concerned that anglo-Irish writers such as O'Casey and Yeats were writing for an international audience, and that their work did not portray Ireland as it really was. He believed that our writers should be true to their culture, in order to establish an identity unique to Ireland.

Brought up in Cork City he had little exposure to the Irish language as a child, but he came to view the revival of the language as crucial to filling the cultural void that borrowed heavily on the English language. He feared that if the basic elements essential to national identity, especially language, were to disappear then Ireland would be seen as no different from other areas in Britain. He visited the last remaining Irish-speaking areas in the region, and became a frequent visitor to Inchigeelagh and neighbouring Ballingeary, finding in this tranquil spot people who were still closely connected with their own Irish culture.

Listening to Joe, we were transported back, from the days of local overlordship by the McCarthy clan, to the walk of tears during famine times, to his childhood when carloads of visitors would be despatched to the beach in convoy, armed with calor gas and picnic in the boot. By now Sheila was suggesting that we include sound files in our coverage of this event, to capture the magic of this consummate storyteller. That is the work of another day and, in the meantime, Joe is young and full of lore.

Sheila had to leave to travel back to Dublin, and it's a shame that she missed the sing-song that rounded off a busy weekend, where singers in the sean nos joined balladeers, tenor voices rose in arias and thoughtful american folk songs told a more distant tale - here is a confident culture, sharing its treasures and enriching itself. Daniel Corkery would have revelled in it.

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - August 10, 1997.

Negotiating terms

2007-02-26T13:44:00.000Z

Published October 1997

Dramatis Personae:

Bertie Ahern - Leader of Fianna Fáil Party and Taoiseach (Prime Minister)
Ray Burke - Fianna Fáil Party, former Minister for Foreign Affairs
Charles Haughey - Former leader of Fianna Fáil and former Taoiseach
Albert Reynolds - Former leader of Fianna Fáil and former Taoiseach
Dick Spring - Leader of the Labour Party, former Tánaiste (deputy Taoiseach)
John Bruton - Leader of Fine Gael - main opposition party - former Taoiseach
Mary Harney - Leader of Progressive Democrats - a break-away from Fianna Fáil, present Tánaiste

Last Tuesday, the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ray Burke, resigned his office and Dáil seat, as a Tribunal of Enquiry is due to investigate his financial conduct. Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, accused the media of hounding and harrassing Mr Burke, but he is more concerned with his own political survival. His minority government, Fianna Fáil, will have to win a bi-election against a backdrop of the public unravelling of the tangled legacy of his political predecessor, Charlie Haughey.

Déjà vu. In 1994 a terrier-like Albert Reynolds was ready to go get 'em at the peace talks, with lawyer, Dick Spring at his side. Their path seemed clear to being able brokers for a better Ireland, to write their names into history, our men of destiny - new celtic heroes for a new celtic age. Then Albert was uncrowned and the battle lost, and the peace process staggered, reeled and ignited.

Dick Spring remained on the chariot of state, joined by John Bruton of Fine Gael, an amiable farmer-statesman, whose party has traditionally been "softer" on the North. Basking in the dawn light of the Celtic Tiger, government trundled along at a stately if unheroic pace until the democratic machine kindly intervened. Huge swings and roundabouts swung Bertie Ahern into the hot seat, joined demurely by Mary Harney's chastened PDs.

But Bertie, the loveable gurrier, despite high personal popularity, is rattled by the past sins of his party. Bertie's possible collusion in these sins is being called into question. Serious matters indeed. Another, equally serious matter is the cause of the crisis. As with the 1994 crisis which toppled Albert Reynolds, the trail to disaster was triggered in the media, and the source of the initial leak remains a mystery. It could have come from anywhere: Dáil opponents, dissatisfied ranks within the Fianna Fáil Party; British Intelligence; a Unionist organisation. Politics is a dirty game.

There is a danger that we all lose if Bertie's fragile government collapses. He shares the same terrier-like qualifications for Treaty negotiation as Albert had (Lloyd George in an anorak). His party's presence at the peace table is a source of great reassurance for Sinn Féin negotiators. With the United Kingdom in the midst of dismantling itself, Unionist negotiators are arguing from the weakest position they have ever faced. Mo Mowlam, Northern Irish Secretary under Tony Blair's New Labour Government in Britain, a woman of steely determination, is optimistic that preliminary settlements can be reached this year.

We face a dilemma in Ireland. We all agree that those in public office should be within the law in their actions. However, present difficulties are rooted in activities of a decade and more ago. If we sweep things under the carpet negotiations can progress, but we show scant regard for democratic morality. If we pursue the moral high ground, we jeopardise what may be the best opportunity we will get for peace in Ireland.

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - October 13, 1997.

The worldwide classroom

2007-02-26T13:37:00.000Z

Published August 1997

We should be ensuring that our educational system takes full advantage of the learning potential of the new technologies

Whither education on the superhighway? The internet is a huge information resource, an infinite pool for learning, but is it being welcomed into educational institutions? I fear that, in Ireland, where there is no stated government policy on adoption of internet technologies in schools, that progress is being made in a sadly piecemeal fashion. Developments are subject to the whims and vagaries of commercial sponsorship and individual teacher enthusiasm.

This is a sorry state of affairs, where no central leadership is being given to educational establishments whose members are frequently confused and bemused in the face of rapid change. We pride ourselves on the quality of our educational system, and often hark back to our traditional self-image of the island of saints and scholars. Yet many of our educators have never sat at a computer terminal or manipulated a mouse, let alone explored the global learning resource at the end of a modem. Like many key figures in our community, too many educators are being allowed to hide their ignorance of the medium behind luddite expressions of distaste or indifference. Meanwhile the "online" world races into the next millennium with a different vision of the future, laying the foundations for new and deep social divisions.

Education is the key to the future, is the future. If we are to believe any of our own platitudes about making the world a better place for children, we should be ensuring that our educational system takes full advantage of the learning potential of the new technologies. While preparing an introductory seminar on the internet for teachers I researched a number of educational web sites. Some were exciting, some were not, but most were built for educators, not for learners.

This, perhaps, is the crux of the matter. While the world wide web is a welcome forum for educators to explore questions of policy, direction and philosophy, education has more to gain from the medium than academic discourse. The internet, in its very essence as a global information resource, is an educational tool. Its true pedagogic worth is in its ability to lead learners out from narrow physical confines, to traverse new and ever-branching paths to knowledge - true distance learning.

In the '70s a great debate raged in education on whether or not to stream. It was argued that children in low streams were discriminated against in terms of quality of teachers and facilities, and that it encouraged labelling and poor self-image. In favour of streaming were many teachers who found it difficult to raise the level of learning beyond that within the grasp of slower learners - the principle of the lowest common denominator. Related issues such as class sizes, better facilities and a review of the examination system were largely ignored - these were the given circumstances, the unchanging picture of the educational establishment. Reformers often address symptoms, not causes.

What harm - streaming may become a non-issue. In the classroom of the future, children of mixed abilities, and with varied interests will benefit from a more fluid type of learning. New technologies will liberate students to explore what inspires them, at their own pace, and teachers will be freer to spend time with students who need individual attention. There is limitless scope for collaborative, interdisciplinary projects in the worldwide classroom, fostering cultural links, team abilities and eclecticism. We learn with our children - parents know this intimately, some teachers do. The internet is a hub for life-long learning, less like going to the library, more like a window shopping trip to a shopping mall - where you can find designer info, cheap tack, plastic relaxation areas, green zones . . . the whole panoply of life - we need never be bored at school again.

In some societies the classroom of the future is very close, and many innovative Irish schools are on the road (there's even a planetarium at the community college near the remote Mizen Head). The Irish are adept communicators with a vast, dispersed community - we have lots of friends in the world to meet and greet. Our children are poised to become pioneers on an endless trail of friendship and knowledge, they should fly with our blessings.

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - August 27, 1997.

Religious persecution in Ireland

2007-02-26T13:32:00.000Z

Published December 1997

About a mile or so outside the village of Inchigeelagh is a Mass Rock, where mass was celebrated from 1640 to 1800. Picture the scene, the priest facing a pile of stones which functions as a makeshift altar, evicted from his church which has been handed over to a protestant minister, hiding like a criminal, in fear of his life, surrounded in the clearing by a gathering of loyal parishioners, many of whom hadn't been overly concerned with religious matters until their spiritual freedoms were threatened.

Religious division dominated European politics for all of the seventeenth century. The shift from the hierarchical catholic church, in favour of more "democratic" protestant denominations was reflected in a similar shift away from feudal values and autocratic monarchies. Whatever the motivation, religious fervour and puritan values took a fierce grip on the imagination - preparing the ground for the vigorous work-ethic that was so vital to industrialisation.

Although Ireland is now one of the world's most prominent catholic countries, the medieval Irish church was quite easy-going and relaxed. The early christian settlers had adapted comfortably to celtic spirituality, incorporating many of their feast days and celebrations into the Christian calendar. The Norman invaders were also Christian, and had integrated well with Irish society. The march of Lutheranism had little impact on this remote corner of Europe and religion remained a rather casual affair until the troubles of England and Europe were imported under the reign of the Stuarts.

Legislation was put in place in Elizabethan times requiring uniformity of religious practice, under the Church of England, however it was rarely enforced in Ireland. In the early seventeenth century there were small pockets of protestant settlers in the country, but most of the wealth and power remained in the hands of the old Catholic settlers, who remained loyal to the Crown. The young Stuart king was happy to keep military costs at a minimum and to work to enlarging the protestant interest in a piecemeal fashion. On the odd occasion a zealous administrator would move to uphold the law and priests might be expelled or churches confiscated.

This is probably what happened in Inchigeelagh. However most of these actions were overturned on direct appeal by the catholic settlers to the Crown.

The Ulster Uprising, which began in 1641, changed the course of our history. Old settlers joined forces with the Irish, undermining the Stuart position which was already under attack by the puritan faction in parliament. When power went to the Cromwellians the face of Ireland was changed for ever. The Cromwellian plantations were extensive and effective and the puritan ethos came to dominate political establishments. Pockets of protestantism gave way to bastions of bigotry, and, banished from their homes, robbed of their freedom and dignity, the Irish found in their religion a rallying point for their nationalism and sense of aggrievement.

The Stuart restoration gave some respite, and catholic wealth and position were partly restored, but the impact of the Cromwellian period was profound. James II (known in Irish as Seamus a Chaca or James the S**t) began to strip protestant power in England, allying himself with the French court. This was a European war and it was inevitable that English protestants would seek the help of William of Orange, James' son-in-law, to help them in their plight.

When William arrived in Ireland he found strong support in the Cromwellian settlements and an ill-trained and ill-equipped opposition under the leadership of a weak James. The Irish had their heroes, such as Patrick Sarsfield in Limerick, but the battle was lost long before the Boyne.

The Irish had entered the seventeenth century an easy-going if somewhat harried race. They went out of it victims of some of the most repressive religious and social legislation in the world. In the course of the next century the penal laws discriminated against their every right - the right to worship, congregate, own property, to speak their language - every vestige of dignity was stripped away and the groundwork was done to ensure that the famine of the 1840s would claim more than a million lives. In these dark days people turned to a religion that hadn't figured hugely in their lives before, finding in it, perhaps, a philosophy that helped them cope with their martyrdom.

It is ironic that, by the time the famine struck, catholicism had become so central to Irish life, that many starved to death rather than renouncing their religion for a bowl of soup. By now the penal laws had been repealed (largely because they had achieved their purpose of sinking the native population into a condition of poverty and abject misery) but many soup kitchens were opened offering famine relief on the condition that the recipients espouse the protestant faith. How so many remained adamant in the face of starvation is a mark of how deep-rooted religion had become in the Irish psyche. As a child I remember the venom in my benign grandmother's voice when telling me that a neighbouring wealthy family were "soupers", i.e. they had taken soup and renounced their faith during the famine. The same lady wasn't even born until 50 years after these occurrences, but such was the hatred in the locality that it is doubtful whether these people will ever be fully forgiven.

Southern Ireland has become increasingly secular in its outlook, particularly in the last 30 years. This may be part of the reason why we have such difficulty in coming to terms with the continuing sadness and struggle in Northern Ireland. Its divisions are rooted in the European wars of the seventeenth century and its sectarianism echoes the religious extremes of those times. The imponderables facing the peace talkers derive from centuries of mistrust and hostility and they will need more than political will to achieve a good solution.

Perhaps some divine inspiration!

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - December 21, 1997.

If ifs and ands

2007-02-26T13:24:00.000Z

Published February 1998

The North is on the move, there is no going back

I live in the heart of "ambush country", by the site of the Kilmichael Ambush, near Béal na mBláth. Every other corner and fork in the intricate network of local roads boasts a monument marking feats of heroism and death. Many record the military feats of West Cork's Flying Columns, who developed new and effective methods of guerilla warfare to strike at the British Army during the Irish War of Independence.

But other monuments mark the sites of later battles and skirmishes, between brother and brother, neighbour and neighbour, for West Cork was also a fierce battleground in the Irish Civil War which followed partition and independence. Civil War is not pretty and the scars run deep and long.

In my childhood, I was cushioned from this legacy. Annual commemorations in Ambush Country drew dwindling numbers of veterans, just a bunch of shuffling old men with their heads full of the past, yawn! This was the 60s and the young Irish nation wanted rock 'n' roll and mini-skirts and James Bond. TV arrived, with news of Kennedy, Viet Nam, Martin Luther King and the moon.

When the news came to be dominated by events in Northern Ireland I had greater sympathy and understanding for black america, for anti-Nam demonstrators, than for my own neighbours. Then Bloody Sunday came into the living room and I, like many in the South, was shocked out of my lethargy and ignorance. But we lacked a sense of confidence in our nationhood perhaps, finding it easier to swallow British denials than to challenge the venerable authority of Westminster.

For 20 years our media was stifled, delivering sanitised coverage of events and demonising participants, particularly the IRA. The notorious Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act banned interviews with, or photographs of, members of proscribed organisations. We could hear their words but they were disembodied, lacking in texture and context - issued by shadowy, sinister, faceless people. We saw plenty of loyalists whose organisations seemed to enjoy greater tolerance by the authorities. We learned to grin and bear Ian Paisley's posturings.

Our political growth was stunted by the "troubles", but Ireland was coming of age in many ways. In the last 20 years we have learnt confidence and tolerance. We have also lost faith in our institutions. Our priests and politicians are being dragged through the courts, accused of every imaginable abuse of power and privilege. We are trying to deal with our personal complicity, when our silences and winks and nods aided and abetted these heinous criminals. New generations of Irish people began to question our complicity in perpetuating the Northern problem.

In war-torn Northern Ireland, there emerged the sort of stalwart vision that characterises the legendary Men of Ulster. Forced to grow their own solutions while their neighbours dithered, Northerners found a certain unity in their political isolation and their desire for peace.

Down South, Section 31 was revoked and the "monsters" were given faces, and surprise, surprise, they were only human like the rest of us, "a bit off the wall, maybe, but so might you be if you grew up in a war zone". When the Cease Fire was announced, only three and a half years ago, I must admit to sharing the sense of disbelief that greeted the announcement. But disbelief gave way to a milder distrust and this turned to admiration for the voices of moderation.

Since then the peace process has had its ups and downs, on one minute, off the next. Die-hards at both extremes of the political divide threaten the fragile equilibrium, encouraged by frequent prevarication by the parties to the Peace Talks. Doom and gloom mediosos focus on renewed atrocities and talk down the Peace. But they have re-opened Bloody Sunday, and the DUP and Sinn Féin have talked.

The North is on the move, there is no going back. Britain is cutting the loyalists adrift and the South has been no great friend to the nationalists. Northerners are thrown back upon themselves and many are rising to the challenge, forcing the pace, moving on. The war of attrition on the streets of Belfast has, for the most part, become a tactical war of words in the media. This can only be a good thing. When I hear the interminable speculation - "is it on, is it off" I'm reminded of Helen Toner, a proud Ulster woman, who shared with me some typical northern wit:

If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there'd be no need for tinkers.

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - February 8, 1998.

Who's happy in Northern Ireland?

2007-02-26T13:17:00.000Z

Published April 1998

Perhaps the most significant difference is that nobody is entirely happy with the proposals

Today my optimism in the current peace process was vindicated. Despite mounting cynicism and disbelief, representatives from all sides of the political chasm in Northern Ireland burnt the midnight oil, finally shaping a compromise agreement that has been hailed as the most significant step forward on this Island since 1921.

My euphoria is tempered by awareness of the mighty task the peacemakers now face in bringing the agreement to the electorate in Northern Ireland and down here in the South - the referenda are set for May 22nd. The pull and push of extremists and diehards will be exacerbated by a cynical electorate (North and South of the border) who feel they have heard it all before. What makes this agreement different?

Perhaps the most significant difference is that nobody is entirely happy with the proposals. Parties to the agreement have been interviewed by the world's media and, almost to a person, have seemed lacklustre and cautious. This is partly due to sleep deprivation - thinking on their feet for almost 36 hours now - but there is also a sense that nobody is entirely satisfied. This is good, a positive indication of the nature and depth of compromise that has been achieved.

Speaking on Irish national TV, John Hume, prime architect of the current peace process, declared that there can be no triumphalism, no victory for any side. Victory for one would be defeat for another and lead to yet another unworkable solution. Each side has had to yield slightly more than it would prefer, but has also taken away slightly more than it could expect. The resulting agreement calls on both sides to the conflict to move forward to establishing an elementary degree of trust in one another - surely a crucial pre-requisite to developing a new vision of society on these islands.

It was disheartening, given my personal delight with the outcome, to hear interviews with groups in Northern Ireland - so many of the young people, who have known nothing but war and conflict in their lives, are sceptics. Hardly surprising perhaps, but you'd think they'd welcome a move forward, the promise of lasting peace. But then they have been lifelong witnesses of man's inhumanity to man, of his propensity towards hatred and madness. Their mistrust of politicians and gunmen will take more than a carefully drafted 67 page document to overcome.

The agreement addresses key issues such as decommissioning, equality, policing and prisoners, while presenting structural change in three strands, designed to work in total or not at all. A crucial gain for the loyalist negotiators is a commitment to amend Articles Two and Three of the Irish Constitution (these assert territorial claim to Northern Ireland), shifting emphasis from territorial sovereignty to a new concept of sovereignty of the people. In the meantime a Northern Irish Assembly will be established with all the trappings of self-government, with a brief to design and establish a number of cross border institutions with the South - a significant gain for the nationalist negotiators. Also on the agenda, in Strand Three, is the establishment of an inter-governmental conference between London, Belfast and Dublin, and also including the devolved governments of Scotland and Wales - a sort of emerging federal solution.

And here's the happy hope I have. Nationalism has caused more pain than pleasure in our world, has been the cause of so much evil and destruction. In defining our cultural worth we drift towards petty nationalism and territorial division. Federalism presents a more mature model of society, allowing for cultural diversity while sharing resources for the common good. But cultures need reassurances for them to be able to trust the greater whole, to feel sure that their contribution and needs will be given due recognition.

This is a wily and forward-thinking agreement, crafted by a unique set of people in a unique moment in our history. For it to achieve its ultimate goal of harmony and positive development, both cultures will have to see its potential. The work is only beginning for the peacemakers. Gerry Adams, like the rest of them, is not entirely happy with the agreement, but he believes that it provides the basis for development. This is all we can expect or hope for - let's hope the electorate give them a chance to bring it on.
by Triona Carey.

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - April 19, 1998.

Drumcree revisited

2007-02-26T12:55:00.000Z

Published July 1998

If the rule of law isn't upheld, the structures of peace will lose their foundations.

A year ago I wrote Dromchraoi, Tromchraoi, in response the the marching season crisis there. Despite major developments in Northern Ireland, the marching season has triggered violence in Drumcree again, sending shockwaves across Ulster.

It's misting softly on the acre - if the hunger hadn't driven people from Ireland the weather surely would have. El niño is taking its toll in Kilmichael too, grey days and more grey days. But what we need is rain, buckets of it, pouring thunderously down on the happy campers in Drumcree. An Act of God, a touch of mighty wrath, might be just what is needed to shift the campsite of righteousness opposite the Church in Drumcree.

Camping in Ireland is a precarious pleasure, murky and damp more often than not, but grand, so long as the weather holds out. Up in the field at the top of the Garvaghy Road the weather is holding fine since last Saturday, when hundreds of Orange men took up residence. They look down the hill on a Catholic community under siege. The world's media are our eyes and ears on the frontline - 800 extra troops brought into Northern Ireland

10 Catholic churches torched one night last week
Guesthouse in Carrickfergus petrol bombed on Monday last. On Tuesday they came back and burnt out guests and the family
Middle class Catholic suburb besieged by a mob, houses petrol-bombed and burnt, elderly people, young children and families driven from their homes
Shots fired at RUC, their family homes the target of petrol-bomb attacks
Family stopped and dragged from their car, which was then set alight
Seamus Mallon, Deputy Leader of the new Northern Irish Assembly, jeered by Catholic residents of the Garvaghy Road as he departs after talks with the Residents Association
Roads are closed, transport is paralysed, police helicopters hum in the heavy, summer air
People are advised to stay at home at night so the streets become eerily quiet. The unnatural peace is broken by the stomping of feet and drum-beats of an Orange March, or by the arrival of a mob bent on violence and intimidation
Every day begins with condemnation of the violence by prominent politicians, and by members of the Orange Order, who assure us that their protest is a peaceful one
To date, Thursday, July 9 the RUC report that 230 homes have been damaged, over 500 petrol bombs have exploded and nearly 2000 more recovered, 50 RUC officers have been injured, over 130 people have been arrested
Today, Thursday, July 9 the Grand Orange Order threatened that they will close down Northern Ireland by next Monday if they don't get their way
They met with Tony Blair at Downing Street this morning
Tony Blair has just issued a hardline statement that the anti-March ruling by the Parades Commission will be upheld
Martin McGuinness has been visiting the Garvaghy Road, appealing to the Orange Order to accept the democratic process for the sake of all communities in Northern Ireland

In this, the marching season, we can expect over 3,000 Orange Marches throughout Ulster, celebrating the triumph of King Billy over the native Irish over 300 years ago. Most of these marches pass off peacefully but, as Drumcree shows us, it only takes one exception to turn back time, back to the dark, medieval days when papists were papists and witches were burnt. The feudal swagger of the Orange March, righteous triumphalism, drums rallying men to arms - it only takes a couple of hotheads to turn the mood, to jeer and provoke and insult.

Trench warfare claimed millions of lives in the First World War. They are entrenched in Drumcree today. Orange Men are congregating from across Ulster, thousands mill in their encampment at the top of the Garvaghy Road. Troops and RUC are in a no-man's land of barbed wire and barricades. The Catholic community of the Garvaghy Road is under siege. Everybody's dug in, there's no way of backing down for anyone.

The fledgling Northern Irish Assembly is led by David Trimble, who carved his political career on the barricades at Drumcree. His position may be untenable and, if he goes, so will the Assembly. In its place will be chaos. Over 70 per cent of voters accepted the Northern Irish Peace Agreement, selecting peace and compromise over violence and stubborness. So much for democracy! If the rule of law isn't upheld the structures of peace will lose their foundations.

We need a big raindance, for all the moderates in Northern Ireland to call for Divine Intervention - lets have rain and gallons of it- to quench the flames of extremism and dampen rhetoric. It's time that somebody or some thing defied Orange posturing. Any time their supremacy is threatened they huff and they puff. Are they bluffing? There's only one way to find out, and it seems we are about to.

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - July 9, 1998.

The match Is off

2007-02-26T12:47:00.000Z

Published June 1999

The Irish Government refuses visas to the Yugoslav Football Team

Last week the (soccer) Football Association of Ireland (FAI) announced that the forthcoming match in Dublin, between the Irish national side and Yugoslavia, would not be broadcast into Yugoslavia. The decision was justified on the basis that the Yugoslav Football Team is closely identified with the military establishment in Belgrade, and that the match would be used there for propaganda purposes. The match is one of a number of qualifiers for next year's European Championships, in a group in which the islands of Ireland and Malta find themselves poised against Yugoslavia, Macedonia and Croatia.

This week the FAI called on the European Football Assocation, the governing body for the sport in Europe, to postpone the match due to be played in Dublin on Saturday 5th June. When they refused to do so, the Irish Government intervened at the 11th hour, refusing to issue visas to the Yugoslav team. So the match is off and, once again, the myth that politics and sport shouldn't mix has been exploded. Of course they mix - national teams aren't a whole stretch of the imagination away from national armies - when we shout for our team it's a roar for nationalism.

Nationalism is a sensitive issue in Europe at the best of times and, perhaps, never more so than now. On the one hand, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc has destabilised the continent, and old conflicts in the region have re-emerged - the same conflicts which led to the First World War and which remain unresolved to this day. On the other hand, the European Union is cementing ever-closer bonds between countries in Western Europe and is now preparing itself to absorb a number of countries from the former Eastern Bloc.

We have passed the point of no return in the European federal experiment - our structures and economies are becoming inextricably linked but we still have deep cultural divisions. The greatest challenge we face is in finding one voice when our languages and perspectives are so varied. How can the myriad of cultures survive the pull of an ever-strengthening centre? Europe is very proud of the multi-cultural diversity which reflects her rich and varied history, and allocates significant budget to cultural programmes. But how inextricably linked is our sense of cultural pride with our sense of national pride? Can one survive without the other?

Against the backdrop of this shift in identity there is a drive towards increasing centralisation of decision-making processes. No longer can we control our economic destiny in Ireland (some might say we never did!), since we entered the Single European Currency. In two years time the trusty old Punt, graced by the likes of James Joyce and Johnathon Swift, will be replaced by the sleek, shiny Euro. Our economy is stronger now than ever before but that's not to say where we'll stand next year, or the year after. If things go pop we won't have the sort of controls independent economies use to manage inflation and spending.

And it doesn't stop there. There is a campaign being waged in Ireland at present which would have us join the NATO Partnership For Peace. Ireland has always been a neutral country, and our neutrality has been as dear to us as hurling (our national game) or our national anthem. We do not have an army but, rather, a Defence Force, and we don't engage in war, we don't have foreign military bases and we don't have nuclear weapons or installations of any type. We are, however, extremely proud of our participation in UN Peacekeeping Missions for many years.

Despite assurances from Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, that we would not join NATO without holding a referendum, his present position is that the Partnership For Peace does not compromise our neutrality, so - no referendum. Given the carry on in the Balkans, the sheer scale of NATO's blundering and arrogance, they have done little to recommend themselves to the Irish electorate. To suggest that these gung-ho militarists, with their nuclear arsenals, could be useful and effective peace keepers has yet to be demonstrated.

The UN may have proven worse than useless in Bosnia but shouldn't we focus on re-structuring and strengthening its effectiveness, rather than transferring the role of world policeman to a military alliance? How can a NATO peace-keeping force have any credibility? The only reason it would be effective is because of the inherent threat that refusal to co-operate could result in aggressive intervention by NATO. Hardly a humane approach to conflict resolution! Given that NATO is the traditional enemy in the Eastern Bloc, their intervention under a peace-keeping guise would be threatening and offensive.

But, back to the game. It only seems like yesterday when Irish sports fans divided on whether Irish players should travel to South Africa on a Lions Rugby Tour. Shirley Bassey was slated for singing in Sun City. Sport and Entertainment Sanctions allow us to make political statements without injuring life. We can assert our right not to associate with unjust or cruel regimes, without actually adding to the misery of their inhabitants. It may not be sufficient in itself, but it wounds the armour of the regime and it galvanises public awareness and opinion. If we can develop a pro-active approach to conflict resolution and revitalise the UN the rest should be taken care of.

Ireland is host to many Kosovan refugees who have endured great hardship at the hands of an unjust regime, exacerbated by the interference of NATO. They have been transplanted into an alien but welcoming environment, free to rebuild their lives here. This is their home and it's only fair that we refuse an invitation to representatives of the regime which drove them here. This gesture says more than bombing missions and land mines. A civilised nation asserts its right not to associate with bullies and undesirables. Now if we could only make a similar gesture to NATO?

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - June 5, 1999.

Ireland 1996 - 1999

2007-02-26T12:16:00.000Z

"Flagwaving, greenery, harps, shamrocks, blackthorns, fairies and Celtic Twilight has nothing to do with Irish Nationhood" -- Daniel Corkery

This post links to a number of articles I wrote when living in rural Ireland in the period 1996 - 1999. They were published in a variety of places, and gathered together as Essays from Ireland by In Motion Magazine, an activism site built and managed by Nic Paget-Clark. The site has remained an unofficial archive until I decided to gather my scattered scribblings here.

The match is off
The Irish Government refuses visas to the Yugoslav football ream. A view from Ireland on Yugoslavia, the European Union and NATO.
Published June 5, 1999
Drumcree revisited
The peace process in Northern Ireland - if the rule of law isn't upheld the structures of peace will lose their foundations
Published July 9, 1998
Who's happy in Northern Ireland?
The peace process in Northern Ireland - perhaps the most significant difference is that nobody is entirely happy with the proposals
Published April 19, 1998
These islands
Avoiding the politically insensitive, but geographically correct
Published April 19, 1998
If ifs and ands
The peace process in Northern Ireland - the North is on the move, there is no going back
Published February 8, 1998
Religious persecution in Ireland
Published December 21, 1997
The worldwide classroom
Whither education on the superhighway?
Published October 27, 1997
Negotiating terms
The peace process in Northern Ireland - we face a dilemma in Ireland
Published October 13, 1997
A confident culture sharing its treasures
Published August 10, 1997
Drom chraoí - trom chraoí
A commentary on the "Marching Season" in Northern Ireland
Published July 13, 1997
Pushing the limits . . . of our credibility
Commentary on push technology, free speech and the world wide web
Published June 9, 1997
The Michael Collins story
"... until the conflict of partition is overcome the ghosts of Collins and Dev will never be laid to rest."
Published November 23, 1996
Up and airborne
Setting up a web site for the arts in rural Ireland
Published August 5, 1996

These islands

2007-02-26T12:09:00.000Z

"... avoiding the politically insensitive,
but geographically correct"

What's in a name? I shared a house with one Alesteir Zenith Sinclair, formerly known as Kenneth Webb, who changed his name by deed poll because of embarrassing confusion with Harry Webb, better known as Cliff Richard. He gave careful consideration to his new persona, selecting to incorporate the mysticism of Alesteir Crowley, with the vision of Clive Sinclair, and the lot read A-Z Sinclair - he was a courier in London.

As we are busy pulling down walls and rewriting history here, it's time we thought about names. Everybody refers to us now as "These Islands", avoiding the politically insensitive, but geographically correct, British Isles. All very well if you're sat in "These Islands" and have a notion of which islands exactly are referred to. But what of yer man in Tokyo, Beirut, Helsinki or Guam - hardly specific if he's loading up the yacht and about to set sail, is it? While many British people have probably never questioned the name, "These Islands" are teeming with people who would rather swim in the Irish Sea than speak of the British Isles.

I understand from A-Z that it is an easy matter to change your name, and there'll be grand work in it for the atlas printers. Firstly we'll have to pick a name from hundreds, possibly thousands of proposals. Run it like the Eurovision Song Contest without the songs - just the cliffhanger votes, oh bliss. Picture the scene as Terry Wogan/Pat Kenny announce 12 votes to the Pudding Islands. We could sell the rights to CNN or Sky or whoever and get a few bob into the kitty for the work of change.

Then there's the naming bash, perhaps the Millennium Party of all parties, a humdinger of an opportunity to display our wares. A fine project for a North/South body to put in place, not forgetting our pals through Strand 3 and the intergovernmental PR connections. The entertainment line-up will be astounding - and think of the drink! We've always known how to party on "These Islands", a common pleasure that has defied all the barriers between us - what better way to celebrate our new horizons?

Published in Essays from Ireland, in In Motion Magazine - April 19, 1998.

Outspacing MySpace

2007-01-05T13:00:00.000Z

In a world where every two-bit geek plans global domination by outspacing MySpace, you have to wonder how many social networks does the world need. Remember when venture capital poured good money after bad into a bottomless pit of portals. Are we witnessing another bubble in the making or do social networks have some staying power?

On GigaOM, Robert Young writes "For social networks, 2007 is about money" and continues to use the dastardly 'monetization' word not once, but three times! Let's forgive him because, this abomination aside, he makes some interesting points. The main problem is that it's really cheap to advertise on these sites - which is fine if you are MySpace with millions and millions of page views but not so good if you are a network of mummers and morris dancers with a handful of loyal fans. And it seems that social networkers don't like ads which results in a poor responses. All in all, a pretty grim prospect on the revenue front.

But there's hope lurking in the very nature of social networks - at their core they are about people, not about products. Young proposes that brand communication must include these people, use them to amplify and extend messaging - "So just don’t advertise at them, advertise with and through them." As the social network space gets cluttered and crowded, more niche networks are emerging which can provide attractive brand channels for advertisers. If social networks get the business model right, this emerging medium will take the web to new reaches.

The early web had a top down approach to content because:

With the possible exception of karaoke, the concept of a self-expressive medium was unknown.
Tools were crude.
Users lacked skills and expectations.

Self-expression got an early start in chat rooms but unless you invested some time and money in HTML skills and tools, you couldn't do much more than chat. It wasn't until blogs came along that the real fun began and internet users became an unstoppable force. Despite the worst excesses of SPAM blogs and the most saccharine sins of corporate blogs, the blogosphere holds its own as a medium for individual self-expression. As the tools have matured, so have the bloggers - to a point where they are the first place we go for breaking news and opinions, and where corporate PR campaigns ignore them at their peril.

Now tech-savvy users with fat broadband connections can express like never before to communities of people with similar interests. It's early days yet and lots of the content and network concepts clearly reflect this, but as long as there is a chance that YouTube hides the next Stephen Spielberg, social networks will engage and absorb us.

Wikipedia has a list of "significant" social networking sites that includes some 90 sites.