A thread on Apple’s support discussions site throws out all sorts of theories, and documents users’ attempts to get answers from Apple on the problem. Some posters put it down to the general shoddiness of treatment of Irish customers (no movie rentals or TV shows from iTunes after 2 years), others to some difficulties with the Irish censors. Responses from Apple staff indicated that developers had simply decided not to release their games in Ireland for some reason. This theory was quickly discounted:

So Apple expect us to believe that every games developer in the world decided to not make their games available in Ireland? Sounds more like a default excuse to me. “We dont want to look into the problem, so we’ll just blame the developers”

Somebody even wrote to the Irish Film Censor’s to confirm that they don’t have anything to do with the matter. Somebody else emailed one of the game developers, Pangea Software, who responded as follows:

Something has been wrong with the Ireland store since Thursday because only 1 game is showing up. There should be 200 games. Apple knows about the problem, but it looks like it still isnt’ fixed yet. Hopefully they’ll have all the games up there soon.

So it’s Apple’s problem after all, but they don’t seem to be in a hurry to fix it. Tomorrow will be one week since the store went live, and I can’t imagine the fix is technically complex.

In the meantime we have to make do with Mr. Shuffle, which doesn’t look like it’s worth €2.39 to me. However, I couldn’t resist posting a sarcastic review to iTunes. It probably won’t show up, so the text is below:

The one and only

I’m a huge fan of this app because it’s quite simply the only game worth buying from the App Store if you live in Ireland. In fact, it’s the only game you can buy from the App Store if you live in Ireland. Apple quite rightly feel that we Irish need time to get to grips with the complexities of Mr. Shuffle before we can be expected to deal with the likes of Super Monkey Ball.

Update: They posted my review! They obviously don’t read these things too carefully. And the games are finally starting to trickle in: Mr. Shuffle has been joined by MotionX Poker, Platinum Solitaire, SuperPong and Bubble Bash.

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.

My fiance dropped DEAD after seeing me RAPED

Locked up and sent to an orphanage on our dream holiday

My sister killed our mum and buried her in the woods

A happy family until my husband FORGOT our baby

In case you think I just caught it on a bad week, these are some of the headlines from the previous week’s edition (also on display):

Enjoy the weekend… You’ll be DEAD on Monday

My eyes EXPLODED while I was SHOPPING

Stabbed 80 times and dumped in a bath of bleach

Quite a pick me up.

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.

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:

Update: Yes, it was just an unruly plug-in. All fixed now.

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.

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?

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

“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.