The historic setting of St Patrick’s Hall as a backdrop to the Queen’s speech made me think of Garret last night. As the results of the Lisbon Treaty were called out to assembled politicos in St Patrick’s Hall of Dublin Castle, I gatecrashed the gig (thanks to ye know who ye are), and got to interview Garret briefly. Here’s the footage! Yes, it’s raw.

And when I got talking to him, the established media saw he was open to giving comment and they circled around him asking him questions as well.

Oh and here’s Garret, Dick Roche and Conor Lenihan celebrating the Yes result! Snatches of MaryLou in there as well.

What a gentleman! And what a loss to us all Garret RIP.

The past week has been a traumatic one for the Irish electorate. People feel misled and betrayed.

The Green Party believes three things must be done in the coming two months to safeguard the future prosperity and independence of the Irish people.

These are:

• Producing a credible four-year plan to show we can make our Budgets balance by 2014.
• Delivering a Budget for 2011.
• Securing funding support from the EU and IMF which will respect vital Irish interests and restore stability to the Euro area.

We have always said that our involvement in government would only continue as long as it was for the benefit of the Irish people. Leaving the country without a government while these matters are unresolved would be very damaging and would breach our duty of care.

But we have now reached a point where the Irish people need political certainty to take them beyond the coming two months. So, we believe it is time to fix a date for a general election in the second half of January 2011.

We made our decision last Saturday after a long series of meetings.

Since entering government in June 2007, we in the Green Party have worked to fix and reform the economy. It has been difficult.  We have taken tough decisions and put the national interest first.

We cannot go back and reverse the property bubble and the reckless banking which we consistently spoke opposed. Nor can we control the market turmoil which has afflicted the Euro area.

We have taken extensive measures to recognise the losses and stabilise our banking system. However, it is now clear we need further measures to give market confidence about our banks and public finances.

We are now discussing ways of restoring stability to the banking system with the support of our European colleagues and the IMF.  We have to ensure that the terms of any such support are in the interests of the Irish people and the wider Euro area. The timeframe for achieving a four-year plan, Budget 2011 and a good outcome from IMF/EU talks is very short. These matters must at this stage take priority ahead of everything else.

Despite our difficulties and disappointments, I believe we can get out of this situation. We must all work together to ensure the best outcome for everyone.

You kind of get the feeling that Varadkar is frustrated. Right? More and more, Labour are upping on the polls. Be it having an articulate leader in Gilmore or even, as Labour have been so often accused – not articulating how they can achieve Budget savings without cutting back on essential services facing the chop under our current masters, Varadkar has to feel peeved. After backing the wrong horse during the heave, are we just witnessing Varadkar scrambling for scraps by engaging in solo runs?

Varadkar and Burton are constituency mates. The number of Dail seats in the next election is rising from 3 to 4. Dublin West’s remaining TD is Brian Lenihan. Neo-Liberal-hating Socialist Party leader, Joe Higgins has stated his intention to run next time around. Perhaps, it’s another grubby turf war. How unseemly.

This morning, the Israeli Defence Forces stormed a group of boats holding aid. The flotilla – so named by the aid workers activists- was stormed in international waters.

We’re still caught in a media free-for-all where propaganda from both sides is vying for attention.

There are things we know and things we don’t know. Unless you are on-board one of the ships and viewing the scene from an independent POV, you really don’t know what really happened and you don’t know in what order it happened.

You don’t know of the allegations that aid workers activists fired on the IDF. You don’t know if the flotilla carried weapons. You don’t know if the IDF really did take ever step possible to warn the flotilla before boarding and how they did it. You don’t know if the IDF had a shoot to kill order.

A thousand editorials are being written today for a thousand newspapers tomorrow on the storming but there are still so many Don’t Knows. Michael Martin is meeting the Israeli ambassador this afternoon and we can expect the Irish government to respond within hours. Can Don’t Knows really be dispelled so fast?

Hannigan tweeted with aplomb how the army had to step in and save the day!

Let’s talk about one – election.ie. She’s been on hiatus too.

Truth be told, I had a brush with news recently. And for as much as the idea of constantly reading and writing is second nature to me, the experience changed my opinion on where election.ie should go. In some subtle ways thematically and in other ways structurally and editorially.

In wanting to carve out election.ie’s own voice, I fell into a trap of wanting to publish rather than looking at balls of the subject and prodding it a little. I need to get the mantra of not trying to get everything right and just concentrate on a few of the right things. I want to fully bake the election.ie idea and build out a refresh before our next General Election.

The way the British General Election has been covered online also changed my views. Channel 4 news did an excellent job on Twitter, Grandma Beeb was ever dependable on stats and well, Sky were just Sky but with the best iPhone app and HD to check out Adam Boulton’s engorged pores.

So, election.ie will be back soon. I’ll post some of my pol stuff here in the meantime. More to come.

Same guy?

[All in the shadow of last night's Leviathan egg-drubbing of Frank Fahey and Dan Boyle. The one that got away!]

Scarf – Lucinda Creighton

Hello – Brendan Halligan, Joe and Emer Costello

Tricolour

Yes Balloons

Read the interpretations of treaty by the Referendum Commission and make up your own mind. The Referendum Commission is an independent voice charged with explaining referenda to the public.

Judge Frank  Clarke of the Referendum Commission has been answering queries on the treaty on Morning Ireland over the past couple of weeks. If you’d rather listen than read, do check out the segments.

On Monday night I went to the Cóir public meeting in prep for the Lisbon Treaty at the Skylon Hotel. Highjink City! Video and audio from the Cóir public meeting.

And last night I popped along to the Feminist Open Forum debate on the Lisbon Treaty at the Central Hotel. Debating at the evening were Senator Deirdre deBurca, Joan Burton, Patricia McKenna and Mary Lou MacDonald. Video from the Feminist Open Forum debate.

In some ways the evenings were chalk and cheese. Looking back, I would have loved to see some of the women at last night’s debate ask questions at the Cóir meeting. It was interesting to contrast the views of audience. Some of the older members that spoke were Euro-skeptic, the younger ones leaned more towards the Yes side. Both groups with more than a little reasoning on their positions – much more than the takeaway menu that was served by Cóir!

I’ll be popping along to more Lisbon events in the coming weeks. If you hear of any interesting events, why not pop me a mail.

It is proposed that the County and City Enterprise Boards, the Business Innovation Centres, the Western Development Commission and the enterprise functions of Údarás na Gaeltachta, Shannon Development, Bord Iascaigh Mhara, LEADER and Teagasc, as well as sector-specific agencies such as the Irish Film Board, should be merged within a re-constituted Enterprise Ireland. The streamlined agency should also lead to major savings in overall administration costs including staff numbers. The Group considers that the new enterprise body should operate a regional office network based upon the nine Gateways identified in the National Spatial Strategy, leading to savings in local office accommodation costs. Savings in overseas office costs would also arise.

What’s even more interesting is the proposal for restructuring the public sector’s own ICT spend in an effort to make savings.

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) represents a particular sub-set of activities for which shared services solutions should be actively explored. Approximately 1,300 staff work in ICT in the civil service at an estimated cost of €65m a year. In addition, the civil service spends just under €200m a year on external ICT resources (consultancies, contractors and external service providers) and on ICT support and maintenance services. Substantial additional costs are incurred on hardware, software, telecommunications and training.

In outline, the Group has identified that greater sharing of ICT facilities and services, commensurate with improvements in the skills and knowledge of ICT staff and recruitment of ICT specialists from the market, can lead to a considerable reduction in the current costs of ICT provision. The Group notes that the Government has instructed a 50% reduction in the use of external ICT resources and the development of plans by each public body to increase their ICT self-sufficiency.

That equates to another drop of €100m. A lot of organic business for Irish SMEs, right?

This at the same time as a recommendation to outsource departmental tasks?

Activities that generally match these criteria typically include payroll, data entry, payments / claims processing, accounts payable and accounts receivable processing; however, the scope of outsourcing can in principle be much broader than this, encompassing every field of activity or business function for which outputs can be specified, and be subject to monitoring as regards quality and delivery. In transferring such operations to an external service provider, the primary focus is on achieving cost savings without loss of quality. The reworking of processes required to transfer to the outsourced operation should also result in better control of standardised processes.

Given the super-sharing of resources and the new spider-web of management structures needed to manage the sharing, are we really getting value for money?

I spent the weekend at the RDS stalking anyone that’d look at me twice. The exciting thing at the counts is how immersive the experience is. It swallows you whole. Racing between tallies. Watching the watchers. Eagle-eying the counters. Getting jumped on by shithead photographers that’d as easily set a granny on fire as they’d knock you down. Seeing losing candidates look like they’ve eaten broken glass. I’ll be posting some thoughts over at Election.ie.

Many thanks to everyone that dropped by the Count Day Liveblog over the weekend. You made the Liveblog work. Your texts, pictures, comments, live updates – every scrap of information meant that we were mostly on the ball and way ahead of mainstream media in turnaround times. Special thanks go to Cian, Suzy, Mark and Damien.

Does your local, byelection or Euro candidate have cutouts? Have you tried to borrow one? Send me your pictures: alexia<at>golez<dot>net.

Paschal Donoghue and George Lee on the launch of their posters. Nabbed from the Fine Gael site. Can you caption?

So there’s a small kerfuffle and I see pro cameras pointing a certain direction. A man is orchestrating the scene. He tells the piper to get into shot. A picture of loads of red-cladded fans surrounding him is taken.

After it dies down a little I approach. A little chit-chat and photo ask later, I get it taken with him. Hello, Enda Kenny!

Qik from outside The Stag’s Head, Dublin.

At the Ireland Get Growing launch. By Ciaran Finn via The Greens. Released under CC Attributed No Derivs Licence.

Sitting in the Blogger room (Kings Lake Room) in the Citywest Hotel at the Fine Gael Ard Fheis. A cloud of media taxonomy has descended onto the hotel. RTÉ have two rooms, the print media one, the broadcast media one and ‘Bloggers’ the last. Who’s here: Suzy, Cian, Squid, Gerard and Stephen.

For updates, check out the liveblog.

]]> http://golez.net/2009/04/04/at-the-fine-gael-ard-fheis-today/feed/ 1 http://golez.net/2009/03/30/micandidate-blogger-launch-the-videos/ http://golez.net/2009/03/30/micandidate-blogger-launch-the-videos/#comments Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:33:07 +0000 Alexia http://golez.net/?p=3326 Captured most of the Q&A session in the blogger launch for MiCandidate. Features Suzy, Cian of Irish Election, Mark and Darragh asking questions. There were so many more questions to ask!

Conor Casby’s nude of Bertie entitled “In his Bertie suit” from the frontpage of the Sunday Tribune, March 29th 2009.

And lo the public spoke on Picturegate and it trended on Twitter like a mofo…

The biggest lesson that RTÉ and Fianna Fáil have learned throughout this whole debacle, is that nothing is immutable on the web. Suzy traced the backtracking of RTÉ’s editorial voice on its website. Damien recorded and published the ‘missing’ report. The online has muscle memory. An attempt to quash satire from the RTÉ avenue, will just encourage it to move to many more outlets. New caricatures, thousands of new words on the incident and even tshirts.

Conspiracy theorists are already spinning that this is diversionary tactic. Who knows why it happened. Was it Cowen biting his lip in disgust and sharp disappointment or was it a way to divert attention from the fact that the arse of our economy is hanging out? Nobody likes to do sums with someone over the shoulder. Likewise, with people that have to do them over and over again, attempting to get them right.

RTÉ’s action to fall on the sword of its editorial decision to air the report and publish the story on its website is incredibly disturbing. Will the Fianna Fáil Powers That Be be contacting every media outlet that has reported on the item and/or showed the paintings to demand an apology?

Just where is the line between ‘disrespecting’ a politician (or the Office of a Taoiseach) and reporting on satire or topics that make them uncomfortable? Disrespect is such a loose charge. Where will the next case of disrespect break out? And will this move set a dangerous precedent on where the media report?

Still angry? You could send you thoughts to…

• RTÉ on: complaints@rte.ie
• Irish Times on: lettersed@irishtimes.com
• Irish Examiner on: letters@examiner.ie
• Irish Independent on: independent.letters@independent.ie

Remember if you are writing to a newspaper, to include your name, address and a contact number for verification.

Alternatively, you could just ask the man himself. Course, you could be waiting for a reply. But sure in the these halycon Obamified days, isn’t transparency and a direct discourse with the people a founding tenet of the political machine?

Or perhaps you’d prefer to follow Fústar’s makey-doey approach. Much more fun.

These words keep coming to mind..

What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully? Had you come to me in friendship, then this scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day. And that by chance if an honest man such as yourself should make enemies, then they would become my enemies. And then they would fear you.

Dermot Morgan must be spinning in his grave. Where have all the satirists in RTÉ gone? All on breakfast radio doing shit Roy Keane and Daniel pisstakes?

This apology raises so many questions on RTÉ as well as disappointment on their apology.

Forgot to thank John Handelaar for uploading the apology. Thanks!

Update!

Is that PictureGate, we see? Suzy is watching the edits to the RTE.ie news article on the paintings. Interesting changes. Interesting bind the editors are in. Are the Fianna Fáil Powers That Be really that pissed about satirical paintings and their coverage? Surely, the smart thing would have been to ignore the whole thing. Nothing about the management of this is smart, though.

May be an oldie, but worth it