Ryano Stuff

Following on from my last piece of political nerdery, the recommendations of the two local electoral area committees have been published. Unfortunately the reports were posted to the committees’ web site, which appears to have been put together with Microsoft Publisher, of all things, and is not viewable on any web browser other than Internet Explorer. Direct links to the reports are below:

Dublin & Cities Electoral Area Boundary Report

Dublin City Map

Dublin County Map

Electoral Area Boundary Report (rest of the country)

In Dublin South East, the 4-seater Rathmines and 3-seater Pembroke have been merged into a single 6-seater called Pembroke-Rathmines, with the loss of a small part of Sandymount to South East Inner City, which goes from a 3-seater to a 4-seater.

There is such intense interest in this sort of report that it’s difficult to guard against leaks, so I’m pretty happy that we managed to keep a lid on it until they could be released to the public. I had a lot of calls yesterday and this morning from people looking for an early peek, as well as claims that other people had already been shown the reports, but I’m not aware of anybody having accurate information on what was in the reports before today.

One for the political nerds. The boundary commissions currently reviewing local electoral areas in Ireland have been receiving submissions from political parties and members of the public, and have now posted these submissions on their web site. In an idle moment this week I started a fairly frivolous project of mapping the various proposals which have been submitted for Dublin South East.

View Larger Map

The boundaries I’ve drawn are rather sketchy, and so far I’ve only got as far as mapping Cllr Paddy McCartan’s proposal for a super-Pembroke along the lines of the old Dublin No. 10 ward. A number of the other submissions which impinge on DSE are to do with Terenure and are rather non-specific and difficult to map.

It occurs to me that, with a few collaborators, this could be expanded to cover the whole of Dublin City. If anybody wants to contribute to this please post a comment and I’ll add you as a collaborator on Google Maps.

Every day I receive a sheaf of (electronic) press cuttings, including what I assume are the best bits of the Irish Daily Mail. Last Friday this included a column by Roslyn Dee under the carefully measured headline, “Make children cycle to school? Are they all totally insane?” It’s not available online, but the gist of it is that cycling is inelegant for adults and lethal for children.

EVER see Audrey Hepburn on a bicycle? No, me neither. Catherine Deneuve? Nope. The very notion of either of them, surely two of the most elegant women the world has ever known, getting into the gear and clambering on board a bike is a full-frontal assault on beauty.

Holly Golightly in John Gormley kit? The beautiful Deneuve freewheeling down the Champs Elysees, helmet slapped on her head, clips on her heels? Quelle horreur!

It took me several seconds to find the following images via Google Image Search:

Quelle horreur indeed! Although I must admit Catherine Deneuve seems to have been careful not to be snapped cycling on the Champs Elysees or anywhere else.

Click the photo for the full size image. From this page.

Update: Thanks to Michael Kelly, it has come to my attention that even Catherine Deneuve has been complicit in the following full-frontal assault on beauty:

I don’t know who writes the headlines for audio and video clips which appear on RTÉ’s web site, but the following link appeared today, attached to a story about the oral hearing into the Poolbeg incinerator:

Morning Ireland: Dominic Hogg, environmental consultant, says incineration is a necessary solution to waste disposal

Given that Dominic Hogg has just released a major report showing that waste policy in Ireland is far too reliant on incineration as a solution, I thought it unlikely that this was a fair reflection of his contribution on Morning Ireland.  However, on listening back to the clip, I found it was practically the opposite of what he said.  Here’s my transcript of the first minute or so of the programme:

Morning Ireland: Can we just clear up one thing, in terms of where you stand on the question of incineration, before we get your views on this.  You accept that incineration is, or is likely to be and needs to be some part of the solution to our waste management problems, in the country as a whole?

Dominic Hogg: “Needs to be” is probably not correct, because it says it’s absolutely necessary, but certainly it may have a role to play, and sometimes, I think, the debate on incineration is very dogmatic, and you’re either assumed to be vehemently anti- or vehemently pro- and there seems that there’s not much space for people in the middle, and we I suppose try to stand somewhere in the middle, calling it as we see it.

Morning Ireland: You’re not against incineration in principle?

Dominic Hogg: Not in principle, no.

So even though he specifically refused to go along with the presenter’s contention that incineration was “necessary”, this is what found its way into the headline. Misleading headlines are a commonplace in Ireland’s print media, but usually the content of the story is distorted rather than completely inverted.

I’m going to put this one down to lazy sub-editing - it’s probably too far-fetched to suggest it’s the result of an editorial bias towards incineration.

The oral hearing itself kicked off with a full morning of procedural wrangling too tedious to write about in any detail. The only trivia worth reporting was that among the attendees were both Minister for Justice Michael McDowell and Colombia Three member James Monaghan. Having said that, I’d love to have the time to follow the proceedings in full, especially the cross-examination of witnesses produced by Dublin City Council.

Bertie Ahern has hinted that the General Election will take place on a Thursday, and possibly a few weeks after the most commonly predicted date of 18th May. The folks at Irishelection.com are exercised enough to launch a petition calling for weekend voting. Many people might not remember that the last time we had polling on a Saturday was for the second Nice referendum in 2002. At the time the Government were pretty happy to admit that this timing was designed to “facilitate higher youth turnout“. What they didn’t mention, of course, was that they were operating on the assumption that a higher youth turnout would favour the ‘Yes’ vote they were promoting.

Like anybody else, I love to say I told you so, so I refer back to what I said to a special session of the National Forum on Europe on “Young people and the EU” in October 2002:

The Taoiseach’s commitment to youth participation in democracy would be demonstrated if he had weekend voting for future elections, Mr Ryan Meade of the Green Party told the forum.

For years, requests for weekend voting had fallen on deaf ears, he said, and one could only assume that this was because the Government was “not keen to see the results of greater youth participation in this context”.

At least, that’s how I was quoted in the Irish Times (subscription required), I can’t remember if I phrased it any better or worse than that. The next poll, the local and European elections, were held in 2004 on a Friday (much of the rest of Europe voted over the weekend), and now we’re back to Thursday elections. Obviously Bertie is not in a mood to “facilitate higher youth turnout” this year.

Speaking personally, the most backed date of Friday 18th May wouldn’t suit me at all, but neither would any delay. How about Saturday 12th May?

This weekend I will be at the Green Party National Convention in Galway, contributing to the party’s Convention web log. I’m hoping to provide some commentary from behind the scenes, as well as covering the various speeches, debates and motions as they happen.

Proper bloggers have been invited to attend also. I can’t help but think of this classic Tom Tomorrow strip from 2004:

Dublin City Council has put public WiFi for Dublin back on the agenda, and it doesn’t surprise me to learn that IBEC are agin it:

“In effect Dublin City Council would be diverting public funds to put existing WiFi operators out of business, causing redundancies, and it could have an overall negative impact on the broadband market through what boils down to below cost selling.”

This is the sort of response I predicted in some comments I left on John Carroll’s blog back in July. To quote myself:

Switching on a citywide hotspot would be an admirable public service by the City Council, but it would bring them into immediate conflict with existing commercial interests, i.e. broadband and WiFi access providers like eircom, BT and BitBuzz. These companies would view any free or even cut-price access as unfair competition with their own offerings. This is almost certainly what lies at the root of the City Manager’s reluctance to push this one forward.

IBEC’s claims of prospective redundancies (which I don’t take seriously) should be set against the overall competitive advantage Dublin would gain as a city blanketed with cheap wifi. However in this case protecting the interests of existing players has weighed more heavily on IBEC’s mind than achieving an overall improvement in the economic environment in the city.

The City Council’s service wouldn’t compete with commercial broadband, but it’s true that it might result in loss of business for commercial providers of wifi hotspots. However there are still plenty of furrows for these providers to plough, and it would actually be of benefit if they were to concentrate on switching on hotspots in trickier locations than the city centre.

I am not without sympathy for the hotspot providers (one of the founders of Bitbuzz is a friend and former colleague of mine), but it seems to me that they are reaping the benefit of an artificial WiFi shortage in the city. If the whole city can be turned on cheaply, why should consumers be forced to pay high hourly rates and mess about with vouchers every time they want to get online in the city centre? Why should we have to find a cafe or bar to work in when WiFi can be provided in other public spaces?

IBEC “urges the Council to meet with industry to discuss their proposals and find a sustainable way forward”. I don’t doubt that their idea of a “sustainable way forward” is one in which the profits of their members are sustained. If the Council doesn’t agree to cut them in for a taste, I fully expect that at least one operator will threaten legal action in order to stop it going ahead. Such are the difficulties faced by anyone trying to provide a new public service in today’s ideological climate.

I love to hear about the new and exciting ways in which the Internet and related technologies are going to transform our political system forever. I’m directly involved in such efforts myself, fiddling about with a number of projects whose aim is to apply the web to politics or vice versa. However I can’t bring myself to believe the predictions of those who tell us that we’re entering into an era of web-based democracy. From Karlin Lillington’s recent piece in The Irish Times titled “Web-based politics and democracy for the 21st century” (subscription required):

In the past in Ireland, air and print- time for politicians and parties was highly controlled around elections and the domain of the established media. However, that is all going to change. New technologies and services enable all sorts of small guerilla actions by individuals who can, anonymously if they wish, post unflattering or flattering material on a candidate onto a blog, a picture site or a video site. Likewise, expect candidates and parties themselves to use such tactics, probably anonymously of course, but not always.

I expect this is true, although I’m not sure if the impact of such activity, and of the other examples of “web-based politics” provided by Lillington, will be significant enough to justify her closing line:

Politicians and political parties, welcome to 21st-century web-based democracy. This is your official wake-up call.

I have a very simple theory about the role which the Internet and related technology will play in the next election. I’ve been sharing it with anyone who will listen for the past couple of years, so I may as well spell it out here. In summary, there is a small but increasing cohort of voters who will use the web sites of candidates as their main point of reference in deciding where to allocate their votes. That’s it.

You’ll note that my theory doesn’t mention blogging, the disruptive influence of the citizen media, guerrilla YouTube videos, or reinventing politics for the Internet age. In other words, it’s not a very sexy theory. But I believe it to be valid. There are a lot of voters out there for whom the web is the first point-of-contact when shopping, researching, or just browsing for fun stuff, and I expect many of them will take the same approach when deciding on where to direct their votes. They will expect each candidate’s web site to clearly lay out the candidate’s position on the main issues of concern, to demonstrate a track record of activity on these issues, and to generally convey the impression that the candidate is worthy of their vote.

Some voters may be influenced by what they read about candidates, parties, and policies on blogs and online discussion forums. Having hung around politics.ie for a few years now, I’ve seen a few minor examples of posters changing certain political opinions after engaging in online debate. Here’s a thread on which you can find a couple of examples. However, the vast majority of people who enage in debate on these sites are already politically committed, and in many cases are out-and-out party hacks. In my view this is not a medium through which to secure the support of floating voters.

It seems to me that blogs, podcasts, videos etc. will have a negligible impact on the outcome of the election. This doesn’t mean that candidates shouldn’t make use of them, indeed I think they can go a long way towards conveying the messages I refer to above. However no web-savvy voter is going to be swayed purely by the fact that a candidate has managed to embed a grainy YouTube clip on their site. Judging by the YouTube efforts of candidates to date, it seems more likely that they’re opening themselves up to derision from web-savvy voters rather than winning them over. Candidates should be looking to enhance their core messages with a certain amount of online enagement, but shouldn’t expect that votes will be won purely on displays on technological mastery.

In light of all of the above, I have decided it would be a useful public service to identify instances of hyperbole on this issue as I encounter them. Any articles I discover will be linked here with the tag “Hypewatch”, and I would encourage anyone who wants to contribute to this effort to use the same tag. I’m not suggesting that everything so tagged is completely over-the-top, just that it contains predictions which have yet to be tested in the white heat of an election campaign. In this way we can return to the issue after the election and assess which predictions held true, and which turned out to be, well, premature.

Last week I helped Eamon Ryan get up and running with a quick wordpress.com web log to post updates from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, currently underway in Nairobi. He’s taken to it pretty quickly, with at least one post per day so far: Eamon Ryan’s Blog

Joe McCarthy has published a web site with a wealth of information on two issues close to my heart: electronic voting and incineration. Aptly named fiasco.ie, it contains documents compiled from Joe’s freedom of information requests on eVoting, and extracts from his submission to An Bord Pleanála on the proposed incinerator at Poolbeg.

It all makes for interesting reading. And if that whets your appetite, you can read the submission I drafted for John Gormley on the incinerator.

This group has been set up to “accelerate the provision of safe (off road) cycling routes in Fingal“. They have also called for “the development of a national cycle route strategy, and the establishment of SUSTRANS in the Republic.”

Their focus seems to be very much on creating safe cycling routes for children in particular, in order to encourage more young people to start cycling. While I’m very much in favour of both safety and encouraging children to start cycling, I’m dubious about the off-road focus. The group would see their campaign as being complementary to campaigns for urban commuter cyclists, such as the Dublin Cycling Campaign, but in a sense campaigning for off-road routes is a tacit concession that the roads cannot be made safe for cycling. I believe campaigners should continue to focus on making existing roads safe for cycling, and challenging the notion that roads should be designed for motorised traffic alone.

Having said that, cycling campaigners cannot ignore the fact that in the current environment families will pragmatically decide that the roads are simply not for them. It’s hard to argue that parents should expose their children to perceived risks for the sake of safer roads in the future. Commuter cycling campaigns need to make some sort of common cause with groups like this, otherwise we will fall victim to the ever-effective “divide and rule” tactic. There is no easier excuse for lack of political action than “these people can’t even decide what they want”.

Further discussion: The group have a post on the cycle path debate and David Healy has made a good contribution to another post on the site. There is also a boards.ie discussion.

This is something I’ve wanted to see in a newspaper for ages - a feature on visiting far-flung parts of the globe without stepping on a plane. The Guardian sent three journalists via train, bus and boat from London to three different destinations: Thailand, Cairo and Ibiza. Although I’m not usually a big fan of travel writing, I found each of the stories fascinating, perhaps because the political context gives them an extra edge. For the most part, these travelogues are a serious attempt to get to grips with a post-aviation world.

Predictably, in all cases the rail option works out significantly more expensive than the equivalent journey by air.  However the journalists all travelled by first class rail for at least part of their journeys and some of the cost was accounted for by hotel stays made necessary by the nature of the trips.  A rough calculation of the carbon emissions attributable to the journeys showed a clear advantage over air travel, except in one case where the writer took a very roundabout route, mostly by bus. The other significant factor is the greatly increased travel time - in the case of the trip to Thailand, the writer spent the best part of a month travelling across Russia, China and Vietnam.

If we do get serious about aviation and climate change, will journeys like this become the new long-haul holidays?  Is there any prospect that rail fares will come down in the same way that air fares have over the past decade?  Will projects such as a tunnel between Spain and Morocco become feasible? Will high-speed trains allow us to reach further afield without devoting fortnights to travelling?

Reading these accounts makes me think that a new golden age of rail travel might be one positive outcome from the changes that climate change will force on us.  However they also make it clear that rail travel is currently very much the poor relation in holiday-making terms: you have to be exceptionally committed and rather wealthy to use rail as your long-haul option.

Of course in Ireland, embarking on any sort of rail journey to Europe or beyond involves first getting off the island. I priced a ferry journey between Dublin and Holyhead at €29, with a standard train fare from Holyhead to London costing about €100 (£65). These days it would be difficult to pay more than that for an air fare. It’s not crazy money, but you would be giving up a whole day travelling.

There’s also a page on the Guardian’s Travelog site where you can discuss the issues: Is it realistic to give up flying?

Update: Ciarán Cuffe has posted about his experience of a low-carbon long weekend in Paris.

It’s been quite a while since I last posted but I suppose I’ve just been waiting for an excuse. I had a letter published in yesterday’s Irish Times which seems as good an excuse as any.

The background is a column by John Waters, “Beware the unelected busybodies” (subscription required), which contained the usual vitriol directed at the “chinless wonders” of An Taisce. The column drew the following letter of support from Liam Aylward MEP:

A Chara, - I would like to lend my full support to John Waters’s column on An Taisce’s negative role in blocking once-off rural housing developments.

People living in rural Ireland should have the right to build a home on their own land. An Taisce’s efforts to thwart this process at every turn is denying people the basic right to house their own families.

The people working in An Taisce have no democratic mandate, yet the policies they pursue have a very serious impact on the political direction that local authorities take when it comes to the granting or otherwise of planning permission for once-off houses in our country.

Ireland at present also has an ever-increasing population. We need policies which ensure that we can house our people in both urban and rural parts of Ireland.

If An Taisce has its way, then all progress will be blocked and Irish people who own their own lands will be powerless to build houses for their own families into the future. The power of An Taisce must be reined back.- Is mise,

LIAM AYLWARD MEP, Hugginstown, Co Kilkenny.

I was moved to fire off the following response, which was deemed worthy of publication for some reason:

Madam, - Liam Aylward MEP, as a representative of the main Government party, should be aware that “the political direction that local authorities take when it comes to the granting or otherwise of planning permission for once-off houses in our country” is set not by An Taisce, but by the Government and the local authorities themselves.

An Taisce’s only role is to highlight to planners cases where proposed developments would be contrary to these policies.

Mr Aylward says that An Taisce’s power “must be reined back”, but An Taisce has no powers either to set policy or to enforce policy - these are functions of Government.

I am not a member of An Taisce but I know a scapegoating exercise when I see one. - Yours, etc,

RYAN MEADE

Florian Müller of the No Software Patents! campaign has posted an article claiming that Ireland is pushing for software patents because we are economically dependent on Microsoft and other US software companies:

Given his obvious bias, Irishman Charlie McCreevy should never have been entrusted with the control over the process on the software patent directive. Unfortunately, in his role as recently appointed EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, he is the most powerful man in the process. That man is a Microsoft vassal. Bill Gates’ wish is McCreevy’s command. We are not talking about an impartial politician but about someone who even vowed in a speech in the European Parliament that he would vigorously represent certain interests. If he is not stopped, then he will abuse the power of his office to wreak havoc to 24 EU member countries only to do what he thinks is good for one country — his own.

Those accusations may sound quite strong but they are based upon facts. Let’s look at the way things work in Ireland for those U.S. software companies like Microsoft.

(more…)

An Bord Pleanála has reversed Dublin City Council’s decision to grant permission for 92 apartments on Scully’s Field in Milltown. This is excellent news, and I’m particularly pleased that permission was refused on the substantive issue of the zoning of the site. The reasons given by the Board are below:

1. The site of the proposed development is located in an area zoned ‘Z9′ in the current Dublin City Development Plan, where it is an objective of the planning authority to preserve, provide and improve recreational amenity and open space. This zoning objective is considered reasonable. The site of the proposed development is also adjoining similarly zoned lands. Having regard to the scale of the proposed residential development, it is considered that the proposed development would contravene materially the zoning objective for the site and would, therefore, be contrary to the proper planning and sustainable development of the area.
2. It is considered that the scale of the proposed development would intrude significantly into the open character and appearance of the site and the setting to the River Dodder thereby detracting from its natural and organic character and unique natural amenity. The proposed development would, therefore, seriously injure the visual amenities of the area and be contrary to the proper planning and sustainable development of the area.

The Board is still considering an appeal in respect of a related application for 18 apartments on the same site, but as this is interdependent with the larger application it seems unlikely to go ahead.