ICTU says “Get up, stand up”.

Today I received some paper for recycling in the post. It has gone the way of all political advertising that I receive. I  took it upon myself to let him know my response by contacting him through his website unionconnect.ie.

Mr Begg, You saw fit to send me a letter and some stickers in the post. I, therefore assume the right of reply. During the 19 years I spent at work I was a union member and spent a period as a shop steward. My father was secretary of his union and advocated membership all his life. That tradition, that assumption that unions have a role to play that is always honest is trashed by years of compliance with IBEC and FF. You must bare your responsibility for the current crisis. You were perfectly happy to see builders at work, competitiveness eroded. For ICTU saw only the short-term gain and the money in members pockets. A curse on all your houses for you have failed us all. I can [not] believe you as I can [not] believe IBEC or politicians. You too have become a “vested interest group” and as such must be treated with suspicion. You failed to get up or stand up for future generations. You were short-sighted and you represent short-sighted people. And yet you, like your fellow travellers, seem incapable of acknowledging your part and as a result are doomed to repeat the mistakes. Your’s

This nonsense from Mr. Begg is symptomatic of the problems we face as a nation. It is further typified by the behaviour of management in CIE with regard to the fraud and theft that they are now attempting to cover up. These all belong to the same class of people who do not seem to realise that the game is up. We know what you have been up too. We know that Ireland has been governed and managed at all levels of society by individuals who represented vested interests and even as they fool themselves into believing that they are legitimate interests, the failure to recognise the interconnectedness of the society as a whole should be a source of shame to them all.

The reality is that if you gain someone somewhere else is loosing. Whether its a cleaner from Latvia or a farmer in Uganda or a factory worker in China, all services must be paid for by someone somewhere. We make a choice. ICTU oversees incompetent teachers at all levels in the system refusing to set any kind of standards. Surely it is not reasonable to give the same levels of protection to the incompetent and the lazy as to the honest and willing. The INO protects restricted practices that increase the workload of those fellow union members trying to make a broken system work. Unions protect the abusers of the workplace. We all know that civil servants treat sick days as annual leave days. It has always been thus and unions have not only sanctioned that but supported that.

Mr. Begg you have lost your way because in your heart you know you have become part of the problem. I had hoped that you were returning to your roots by fighting for the rights of migrant workers abused by Irish employers but now I wonder. Now you are back with your mates, shouting and screaming stupid slogans: “What do we want? blah, blah”. I remember it well. Student marches back in the 70’s. But I was young and innocent. I did not realise that our nation, our people do not see themselves as one nation, one people. They see only narrow sectional interest.

I’ll “get up, stand up” when you cease to protect and expel members from your unions that abuse the common good. I’ll support a political party when it acts in the interest of the common good and not for political advantage. Another generation is lost as we struggle to come of age, to mature sufficiently to recognise that what we do unto others we do unto ourselves. For we are a community, interconnected in ways we have yet to accept but which are easily understood. Will you watch as the planet burns? Still waving your banners in pursuit of the farthings and the hapennies. I suspect you will for in order to keep your job and maintain your position you too, like Ahern and Cowan and the bankers and the employers, you too must hear no evil, see no evil and thereby pretend you are not the devils sidekick.

The Pleasures And Sorrows Of Work

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain DeBotton is an absolute joy to read. I love language and this is language at its best. The imagery is powerful and evocative. The photographs are really wonderful. And behind it all are stories of real peoples lives. People who live quiet ordinary but necessary lives upon which we all depend in one way or another. We live in a society that suggests that live must be in some way special and that each of us should be hankering after being the best that we can be. The reality is that this planet is populated by ordinary people doing ordinary things, day in and day out. And that is the way it is and that is OK. That we have been fooled into believing it should be otherwise is due to manipulation by those vested interests who seek to take advantage by creating dissatisfaction. They manipulate the genuine desire to improve the circumstances of our lives in order that such desires are distorted into their quest for wealth, status and power.

There is a balance to be struck and this book examines where that balance might be. For example:

Yet in reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all those with a take on the future of the potato crisp, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

Our era is perverse in passing off an exception as a rule. The statistical probabilities of successfully rerouting commercial reality were laid bare for me by a wry venture capitalist who had come to the fair with few expectations, save for having the opportunity to spend a day away from his office. Of the two thousand business plans he received a year, he said, he immediately threw out 1,950, scrutinised fifty more closely and ended up investing in ten. Within five years, out of those ten enterprises, four would be bankrupt, another four would be stuck in what was termed a ‘graveyard cycle’ of low profits and a mere two would be generating the significant returns which keep his industry afloat. Here was a vision of success guaranteed to disappoint 99.9 percent of its subscribers.

Then again, there was a certain heroic beauty in the exuberant destruction of both capital and hope entailed by the entrepreneurs’ activities. Money patiently accumulated through decades of unreemarkable work would, in a rush of optimism inspired by a flattering business plan, be handed over to a momentarily convincing chief executive, who would hasten to set the pyre alight in a brief, brilliant and largely inconsequential blaze.

Don’t you just love it? The current financial crisis epitomises this idea so completely when today we hear talk of reducing the minimum wage. What is not spoken of is the reality that many of the jobs created during the Celtic Tiger were unsustainable even when they were created. They were subsidised by borrowed money which will ultimately be repaid by the state. They were job schemes designed to shorten dole queues rather than invest in education. What price the €2.95 latte now when you ad in the interest we will have to repay over the next ten or twenty years? Tens of thousands left school with probably a Junior Cert and many without basic literary and numeracy skills because FF could not see the big picture. And now they want us to look to them to provide the SMART economy. Stupid people cannot deliver SMART.

Another wonderfully expressed image from DeBotton during a visit to a firm of accountants:

The employees proceed upstairs without looking around them. To feel at home in the office is not to notice the strange silver statue in the lobby and to forget how alien the place felt on the first day. The start of work means the end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires. The accountant’s ten thousand possibilities have been reduced to an agreeable handful. She has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other  people – and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her – that she is a Business Unit Senior Manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe. How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate, in the loneliness of the early hours, all that one might have been and now never will be. She has a meeting scheduled with a team from an insurance brokerage in half an hour, leaving her time to buy a muffin and coffee from the cafeteria. The start of the day in the office has burnt off nostalgia as the sun evaporates a coat of dew. Life is no longer mysterious, sad, haunting, touching, confusing 0r melancholy; it is a practical stage for clear-eyed action.

This image is particularly apt to me as I face into returning to full time education after some thirty years and to what could be loosely termed a “job” with it’s nine to five routine. I admit I did feel a sense of relief when I received the CAO offer a few weeks back. At least now I had a label. I was more then “a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe”. I could now nestle secure in  “the assumptions of colleagues”. I could now answer that “What do you do” question with “I am a student”. Safe from the barely suppressed moral outrage of the working classes for a few years at least. Except for the fact that one should really only study at night while holding down a day job. Otherwise you’re just lazy.

And the ultimate question:

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has’ the edge over even the finest biscuit.

But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good and it seems that making a perfectly formed stripey chocolate circle which helps to fill an impatient stomach in the long morning hours between nine o’clock and noon may deserve its own secure, if microscopic, place in the pantheon of innovations designed to alleviate the burdens of existence.’

The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningfull, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives and half a dozen different manufacturing sites. An endeavour endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.

It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children’s books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers. They are shopkeepers, builders, cooks or farmers – people whose labour can easily be linked to the visible betterment of human life. As creatures innately aware of balance and proportion, we cannot help but sense that something is awry in a job title like ‘Brand Supervision Coordinator, Sweet Biscuits’ and that whatever the logic and perspicacity of Vilfredo Pareto’s arguments, another principle to which no one has yet given a convincing name has here been ignored and subtler human laws violated.

Tell it like it is. Oh and by the way “perspicacity” means Acuteness of perception, discernment, or understanding. I looked it up. Don’t you just love it?

The Secret History of the World

This book by Jonathan Black has left me wondering and I’m not sure what I’m wondering about really. I read it quite quickly which is a fair indication that I enjoyed the reading itself and also that it presented no particular difficulties. That it was accessible as it were but yet I am wondering. Coming towards the end of the book I marked a series of paragraphs that I hope will illustrate my point.

Madame Blavatsky wrote that among the Carbonari – the revolutionary precursors and pioneers of Garibaldi – there was more than one Freemason deeply versed in occult science and Rosicrucianism. Garibaldi himself was a 33rd degree Freemason and Grand Master of Italian Freemasonry.

In Hungary Louis Kossuth, and in South America Simoll Bolivar, Francisco de Miranda, Venustiano Carranza, Benito Juarez and Fidel Castro, all fought for freedom.

Today in the USA there are some 13,000 lodges, and in 2001 it was estimated that there were some seven million Freemason worldwide.

What has the fact that Bolivar and Castro fought for freedom got to do with the Freemasons? Yet by sandwiching this between a reference made by Blavatsky in the late 1800’s and a statistic about the number of lodges in 2001 Black is implying something that he provides no evidence for. And this problem runs throughout the book. Implications made without any supporting evidence at all. Not even any footnotes, just again the implication that the extensive list of “key sources” will provide all the supporting evidence we might require. Black knows well that none of his readers will trawl through his list and I expect he is banking on that.

I must declare an interest. I am a student of the Arcane School whose courses are based on the books of Alice Bailey. Alice Bailey’s books are channelled from The Tibetan and because of this are specifically excluded from consideration by Black in his book. That’s fine and indeed reasonable to a degree but doesn’t seem to prevent Black claiming certain historic individuals were reincarnations of various masters.

On page 515 he sticks in a reference to Lorna Byrne, which I found on Lorna’s website and which led me to The Secret History. Here again we have an idea being presented, something else is just dumped in and then something else is connected to it by implication.

Rilke is using heightened, poetic language, but he seems to be confirming that these deeper laws can only be discerned if we shut out everything else and concentrate on them over a long time with our subtlest and most intense powers of discernment.

IN THE COURSE OF WRITING this book, I have met the young Irish mystic Lorna Byrne. She hasn’t read any of the literature that lies behind this book,… …… Hers is an alternative method of perception, a way of apprehending the parallel dimension that moves things around in our own.

IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, ANCIENT creatures began to stir in the depths of the earth, to slouch towards the appointed place. Imprisoned since the first War in Heaven, the consciousness­eaters were on the move again.

So Rilke, Lorna Byrne and the first War in Heaven are all linked together in some way which the author considers not to require explanation. I’m really not sure what is going on in this book. It is sloppy and may be an edited version of a much larger body of work which has been attacked by an editor who did not have Blacks level of knowledge. Black says that “THIS BOOK HAS ACCUMULATED EVIDENCE to show that through­out history highly intelligent people have immersed themselves in esoteric philosophy.” I’m not convinced. I will accept that these people have had access to inspiration derived from higher planes of experience but to imply that secret societies were passing on techniques from which such inspiration was derived is pushing it.

A far simplier explanation is that bright, intelligent people sought out other bright intelligent people with whom they could have interesting conversations over coffee, over dinner or over a bottle of wine. What we would today call hot-housing. The conclusions they reached may well have being inspired but in order to make use of inspiration you need to have created a fertile ground within which the seeds can grow. Given the nature of the societies within which they lived and the protectionist nature of the church authorities secrecy may well have made sense. Look what happened to Galileo.

Leaving all that aside and making good use of a highlighter there are some useful ideas contained in this book. The central one for me is that we cannot make the assumption that previous generations perceived the reality as we do. I would apply this idea to the recent past. As we pour boiling oil on those whose behaviour is laid bare by the Ryan Report we need to balance our anger with an understanding of the value system that existed in Ireland at the time. The 20th century saw the extermination of 6 million Jews. It saw the massacre at Nanking. It saw the more recent atrocities of the Yugoslav war and the killing fields of Cambodia. To the people who carried out this actions it somehow made sense. We assume individuals are evil at our peril and enable ourselves to ignore the conditions from which such behaviour arises. Behavioural Psychology has much to offer by way of explanation.

Black offers the following:

How to recognize Satan? Or any false prophet? Or any false, pur­portedly spiritual teaching? False teaching usually has little or no moral dimension, the benefits of reawakening the chakras, for example, being recommended merely in terms of selfish ‘personal growth’. True spiritual teaching puts love of others and love of humanity at its heart – intelligent love, freely given.
Beware, too, of teaching that doesn’t invite questioning, or tolerate ‘ mockery. It is telling you, in effect, that God wants you to be stupid.

Here is a very important message to readers of this book. Here is much food for thought. If your education system does not promote questioning of those in authority, watch out. If your media is getting dumber and dumber, watch out. If everything is based on feeling comfortable and not upsetting people, watch out. If your beliefs cannot support others disbelief, watch out. THERE’S EVIL ABOUT.

The Return of the Economic Naturalist

Robert H Frank is a journalist and academic who writes a regular column for The New York Times. This book is up to the minute having been published in 2009 and including some of his articles up to November 2008. It is very accessible stuff and even includes alternative explanations of American terms for the Anglophile reader. The material is all the more interesting because it deals with much of the Bush years from an economic perspective and which we can now view with the benefit of hindsight and in the midst of the results of Bush type free-market neo-liberal thinking.

The basic premise behind much of his thinking is that a consequence of trickle down economics is the debt incurred by middle income earners as they aspire to match the consumption of their higher earning neighbours. Frank sets the context with his own experience.

As a young man, I served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. The one room house I lived in had no plumbing or electricity, and its thatched roof leaked during heavy rains. At no time, however, did I feel it was unsatisfactory in any way. Yet I could not live in that same house in the United States, even in the poorest neighbourhood, without experiencing a profound sense of humiliation. If I had to go into debt to escape that experience, I certainly would.

And I understand what he means. Today, once again my car has had to be towed to the garage and it had to be towed home last Friday evening. If I could get it fixed I would but it has an electrical fault that no one can find never mind fix. Every so often the on-board computer looses the key security code and just stops the engine. Is it a source of humiliation for me? Yes, it is. No matter how much I tell myself that this is not my fault I feel a sense of inadequacy at my inability to resolve the situation and that inability is paraded publically each time the car has to be towed.

The problem is that having taken out a five year loan on the car I am in a negative equity situation as it is not saleable in its present state. Mind you it’s scary how many people have no problem foisting the car on some poor sucker willing to buy it, faults and all. But am I willing to take on additional debt, scrap the car and get a different one? Going into further debt to offset the sense of public humiliation would work but would result in a profound sense of failure internally. Maybe I could live with the less public version. In any case I need to do the sums and compare the ongoing maintenance costs with the cost of the additional debt (assuming I can secure additional finance). Mind you the question may become academic as my NCT is due in August.

Another theme threaded through this book is the attention we need to pay to behavioural economics in the future. Frank suggests that

[Republican Senator] Gramm and Greenspan were like many other traditional economists in their uncritical enthusiasm for Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand – the idea that unfettered market forces will guide self-interested individuals to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Had they taken an active interest in the behavioural economics revolution, a lot of misery could have been averted.

Basically, behavioural economics tells us that people respond to the context of their financial lives emotionally and very often irrationally. What our mammies and daddies, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbours think of us plays a much larger part in our financial decisions then any cost-benefit analysis we might attempt to do. Our perceived status within our social group weighs heavily on us. As Frank says

The problem is that many people have difficulty weighing the trade-off between immediate benefits and future costs. when confronted with easy credit access, some inevitably borrow more than they can reasonably expect to repay. Once they get in over their heads, they borrow more, if the law permits. It was thus all but certain that million’s of society’s most economically vulnerable members would borrow them selves into bankruptcy if confronted with easy credit access. If we are unhappy about that, our only recourse is to change the rules.

The reality is that those who voted FF in the last general election were perfectly happy with the rules as they were. One hundred percent mortgages and deposits borrowed from other lenders. Sowing and reaping come to mind.

Frank does make many interesting suggestions regarding taxation in this book so there are ideas as to how best to balance the burden/services books. He describes the Americans as being tax adverse which I think could also be applied to the Irish. We have not quite got the connection between the quality of services and infrastructure available to a people and the amount of taxes they pay. That connection was lost way back in the seventies when local rates were abolished in pursuit of one party government. Yes, another FF idea. History may well show that the advent of the PD’s did even greater damage then would have been done had FF being able to keep this more extreme economic element within its ranks. We support extremism of any sort at our peril.

In any event The Return of the Economic Naturalist is a good and informative read. I’ll certainly be looking out for more of this authors thinking in the future.

Preventing The Future – Tom Garvin

This was the last of my Christmas books and boy did it inform my mind regarding the recent Ryan Report. If you want to gain some insights into the why and how of what happened, read this book. Plenty of little yellow page markers and passages underlined in my copy. There is an excellent introduction which outlines the basis for Garvins’ book. His “starting point” is the work of Mancur Olsen as Garvin attempts to answer the question which is the object of this book: why was Ireland so poor for so long? This introduction is of itself sufficient reason to read this book. It explains the principle tool used by the vested interests within the Irish state to ensure those interests were protected.

to pursue one’s own material interest while disregarding an alleged collective, communal or general national interest can be declared by the culture to be immoral, anti-national, a betrayal of one’s comrades, political ‘idiocy’ in the classical Greek sense, evidence of a gross lack of ’spirituality’, selfishness or thievishness. Such idealogical declarations and finger-pointings can suit the private interests as well as the public purposes of elites striving to keep their followers in line.

I have observed and been subject to such tactics in many and probably in all groupings and not just politics. Although one must remember Gerry Collins’ in 1991: “Don’t burst the party!” with tears in his eyes designed to induce the maximum of guilt. I have heard the same type of rhetoric used in Scouting and Guiding (“Think about the young people!”) as someone sought to defend the status quo and ensure that nobody in authority gets upset.

But let me return to my yellow page markers. For starters:

The Fianna Fail government was tired in 1947, and the harsh winter of that year did not help. The same men who had stormed into office as Young Turks in 1932 held office and, in the eyes of many people, had become increasingly complacent in office. During the war years, it seemed that many ministers were immune from the privations which other people had to endure.

Does that sound familiar or what? In addition Garvin asserts that in 1948

the Fianna Fail monopoly of power was over. In sixteen years, the party had woven a web of connections, influence, multiple monopolies and bureaucratic and ecclesiastical alliances that amounted to a kind of large mutual benefit society for powerful institutions and individuals.

So why are we surprised that some sixty years later we find ourselves in exactly the same position. But then it is probably understandable when one accepts the place the belief in loyalty to the leader plays within Fianna Fail. Dev was the leader and it seems that a façade of allegiance to his, what I assume were honestly held, beliefs was in place and we get an insight into that belief form an interview he gave to the Manchester Guardian in 1927.

The journalist queried, ‘ … suppose your expert advisers tell you that by insisting on the use of our own resources you can indeed support a larger population, but only at a lower standard of living, would you [as prime minister] face that?’ De Valera had replied:
You say ‘lower’ when you ought to say a less costly standard of living. I think it quite possible that a less costly standard of living is desirable, and that it would prove, in fact, to be a higher standard of living. I am not satisfied that the standard of living and the mode of living in Western Europe is a right or proper one …

So here we have an insight into Dev’s thinking that we would all be better off with less. While I would be the first to agree with him, I’d prefer to use persuasion so that people might exercise enlightened choice rather than relying on deliberate neglect as a means achieving my aims. But it appears that within government it was the practice to say one thing and do quite another. As in cherish the children and at the same time subject them to systematic abuse.

But for another dose of deja vue Garvin tells us

… it does seem that it takes a sometimes scary economic downturn to force economically rational decisions injurious to the interests of political elites through the Irish governmental decision-making system. Such a pattern of decision-making was certainly evident in the late 1950’s and again in the late 1980s; veto groups were forced to remove their vetoes when it was put to them that a general collapse of some sort might occur.

Garvin’s analysis leads him to consider that

faith in the modern world seems to be liable to be poisoned by an overly intimate relationship between Church and state and, more generally, by an intimate relationship between ecclesiastical organisations and political power.

An analysis I would have to agree with and which seems to have been recently evidenced by former Taoiseach Ahern’s opinion that those seeking a larger financial atonement was required from the Irish congregations responsible for the abuse outlined in the Ryan Report as “anti-clerical”. It is also to be noted that the same Mr Ahern was once an employee of the individual negotiating with Dr Woods TD on the sweet deal they subsequently achieved. A “web of connections” indeed. [I've stopped using the term 'Bertie' which suggests that this man was some kind of benign cuddly figure in Irish life.] But thankfully the web is under some strain, at least in relation to the Roman Catholic Church and Garvin comments.

Ireland is becoming declericalised; the laws and rules of behaviour laid down by priests for laypeople to conform to came to be defied and afterwards simply increasingly ignored, which, from the Church’s point of view, was worse.

Garvin offers some hope by saying that “A focus on ideas suggests, rather, the possibility that human agency can defy the constraints of political and social structures and create new political possibilities.” It’s just that it seems to take so damm long. Mind you when you have deliberately set out to prevent any ideas other than approved ones seeing the light of day through censorship and the threat of being socially ostracised, it is not surprising that it takes so long. We need only look to the former USSR and to China.

Fianna Fail cannot do The Smart Economy

I know I tend to go on about how crap Fianna Fail are as a government and as a political party but I really do believe that FF voters and party members represent the lowest common denominator of Irish society. I want to move on from what they represent to the next stage of development which is represented by individuals acting in cooperation towards a common societal goal. Fianna Fail is incapable of doing this simply because in order to become a member of this group called Fianna Fail you have to think a certain way and you have to have a certain value system. You have to believe that loyalty to the “Leader” is of value in some way. You have to demonstrate this by associating yourself with the power conferrers within the party. You cannot, a la Mr McGuinness, speak independently or think out loud or criticise those in power.

The classic image of the Fianna Failer is the group of morons squashed behind party hack or journalist at the yearly party conference. Being seen with the ONE is to be special by association. Ability is not an issue. This was made abundantly clear the other week when Brian Cowen reassured us all that ability was not a prerequisite for cabinet. The actual selection demonstrated that family connections were what counted. He of course being a classic representative of such a dynasty so why would he think any other way. And considering power by association to be of value is it any wonder that association with others in power is so important to them. Today’s resignations from the banks were forced upon the government and must be making them sick to their stomachs for if it can happen to the heads of banks it can happen to them. If heads of banks can be forced to resign because of the mess they made of the banking system how much more responsibility lies with the government that was supposed to oversee their activities. This goes against the whole FF belief system of power for powers sake, power as an end in itself.

This piece was sparked by a lecture I was watching on TED by Charles Leadbeater on innovation. In the lecture he says that the idea that the innovation and creativity is fostered by gathering special people in special places with special stuff is outdated and wrong. He says that it is in the interaction between interested parties that produces innovation and he makes the case for fostering the amateur professional. These are people who through their interest in some particular area of activity over many years have gained a degree of expertise in that area of activity as consumers. He cites examples such as the Mountain Bike.

What I get from this is that in order to truly foster innovation you need to have a level playing field ensuring everybody who wants to can get involved. He asks the question “How do we organise ourselves without organisation?” and he says that this is now possible. But if there are no organisations, no quangos, there are no leaders of organisations and nobody to have your photograph taken with.  Such a world does not compute with members of Fianna Fail. It is beyond their ability to comprehend. They simply cannot understand that people might not be too impressed by individuals in positions of authority.

I am reminded of the day my local county councilor brought Michael Martin TD to my door. For him the object of the exercise was to shake his hand and to be impressed by his association with Minister Martin. I wasn’t and wanted to talk about the party’s lack of response to the graft of people like Charles Haughey and Liam Lawlor. Not having quite reached my door, Mr Martin heard what I said and simply turned his back and walked away. This is the caliber of the men selected for government. Men who cannot see their way to even argue their position with the people they expect to vote for them. If you are not impressed by people in positions of power they dismiss you.

There is no place in the Fianna fail lexicon for educating young people to think for themselves. There is no place in their thinking for indepentant thinking and analysis. For that would expose them for who and what they are, exponents of the power game which may have had its place in the early part of the 20th century but lets be honest it has reached its nadir in Big Brother. The 21st century requires an ability to think creatively and that means in ways that change things. That also means that what your father, brother or uncle did twenty years ago is his victory, his honour and to his credit, not yours. Fianna Fail blew the opportunity presented by the Celtic Tiger and they must pay the price for that and spend time on the opposition benches. They might also seek to reinvent themselves as a political party that sees service to society as a source of pride rather than association with the blood letting of civil war.

Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom

Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom by Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta is certainly a very interesting read. The subtitle ads clarity to the unusual title: How online social networking will transform your life, work and the world. I found it particularly interesting because of the ages of my children or should I say my young adults. (I wish someone would come up with a term for ones adult children.)

Cosy consensus on tax – Sarah Carey

I’ve been thinking about Sarah carey’ piece in yesterdays IT. It seemed significant when I read it first but I couldn’t quite figure out why. So I did a search on Sarah just to see if this was jumping on to some kind of bandwagon which was the way it felt. Anyway I came across a discussion on thepropertypin.com which is really good and goes through many of the thoughts that were going through my own mind over the last 24hrs.

So does the article contribute anything to the overall discussion?

In The Blood – Irish horse racing

I’m sitting here watching this programme in disbelief at the arrogance of the people being interviewed. It is painfully obvious that these people epitomise all that was wrong with the Celtic Tiger years. They created for themselves a male dominated world divorced from the reality of what was really going on around them as more and more people got themselves further and further into debt that they would never earn enough to repay.

One of the interviewees even had the gall to say that there was no place for women at Cheltenham.

Special Occasion Speech – The World is Flat

This is not in fact a Special Occasion Speech given by a Toastmaster but it does serve as a very useful learning tool to see all the right bits in action. The talk is by  Thomas Friedman and is about his book The World is Flat. Quite apart from the actual content of this talk there is a lot to be gained from simply observing the speakers themselves and that’s why I have put this post in my Toastmasters category.

Firstly there is the introduction to the speaker which is an excellent example of a Special Occasion Speech – project 2 which involves speaking in praise of some individual, living or dead.