EUbike

Now that the Irish EU Presidency is coming to an end, it is time to lift the veil on one of its most potent instruments of success, the EUbike.

You may have thought, in your innocence, that the Presidency logo was simply a pretty celtic picture for putting on notepaper and thick reports.

Not a bit of it. The "logo" was actually derived from the design of the Irish Presidential EUbike. This EU bike has many uses.

It is used for training chairpersons for the inevitable bumpy ride they will get at the negotiating table.

It is invaluable during the pre-Presidency tour of capitals, where the Taoiseach and other ministers ride from the airport into town, enabling them to identify with the people and at the same time draw attention to the then forthcoming Irish presidency.

Turned upside down (no, not that again) it can be used for winding wool for Aran sweaters which are expected to sell out, or dare I say it, be given away to unsuspecting foreign dignitaries, during the Presidency. Any leftovers can be disposed of under cover of The Gathering.

We really have a lot to thank Bertie for. It was his denigration of the undemocratic peann luaidhe that made us appreciate all the more our inheritance from our Victorian forebears. This comprised, in general, objects which were fixable rather than disposable and which relied on crude manpower (main d'oevre) rather than all this newfangled labour saving petrol/electricity driven stuff. It also turned out that this inheritance was eco-friendly and far healthier.

So thank you Bertie for the motivation.

As far as the technical design is concerned, the celtic pattern concept was originally intoduced into the 1996 Irish Presidency logo by Ruairi Quinn, at the beginning of the Celtic Tiger, and, while not quite as bumpy as the present logo, it still had its rise and fall. But that was then and this is now and things have got a lot bumpier along the way.

Eternal Vigilance

As everyone (ie the few) who reads my blog knows, I am obsessed with the upside down flying of flags, and in particular the EU flag.

I wish people would stop feeding my obsession.

The above photo of the EU flag flying upside down outside the European Parliament was carried without comment in yesterday's online edition of the Irish Independent.

Of the European institutions themselves, that now makes two, the European Commission and the European Parliament, not to mention the French and Hungarian embassies in Dublin and a few others like Sinn Féin and TG4.

Or do I smell Photoshop here and does it matter?

Eternal vigilance is the price of rightwayupness.

Austerity Bites

This is the birdtable I see when I look out the kitchen window. The wife got it way back to give the birds a place to dine safe from marauding cats and other wildlife. When I see all the birdseed gone, it reminds me to go and put out some more. Pigeons, robins, tits and the like all vie with each other for space there. And even the pigeons, the biggest of the birds to come to dinner, often end up fighting among themselves and pushing one another out into the air.

So I'm inclined to keep an eye on it, both for entertainment and to attend to my duties as Maître d'.

When I looked out this morning I saw what looked like a lump of poo (above) that would do a large rabbit credit. What, in God's name, I wondered, had been in and left its calling card? So out I went to investigate.



It turned out, however, that the intruder was still there and doing his best to consume the avian vittles. Clearly austerity was biting so hard that it was even affecting the slugs on the ground. This guy had climbed all the way up the Empire State building for a bite of breakfast.

First time I'd ever seen the like.

Not a very merry bellwether, methinks.

Schrödinger's Profits

Famine victims outside the IFSC

We are told that Ireland is not a tax haven. Nevertheless it is claimed that Apple pay a derisory rate of tax on vast profits, and that this is, in some way, facilitated by their locating in Ireland.

They do have thousands of real jobs located in Ireland and they do pay 12% tax on local profits, but the trick is, I gather, that their intellectual property profits are not considered located in the USA by the authorities there, nor in Ireland, by the authorites here. In other words the companies (or their subsidiaries) are tax resident in neither location. So from a tax point of view these profits don't exist. At least for as long as they stay where they aren't.

I did a post on my Irish language blog almost seven years ago to the day, in which I argued that Ireland was prostituting its sovereignty in helping USA multinationals avoid taxes. I pointed out that we were stealing from our fellow EU members tax bases and I also drew attention to a plea from Christian Aid to abandon these gimmicks as they were also robbing developing countries of much needed revenue and development.

At the time I was just thinking of the nominal tax rates, and I was aware that the effective tax rate in some of our EU neighbours was well below their nominal rates. But the stark case of Apple above, raised in a USA Senate Committee hearing, has alerted me to a much deeper issue, intellectual property profits. This is much more complex than the simple nominal tax rate competition and it does appear to put us in the same basket as the tax havens, whatever we choose to call ourselves.

Having said that, I find it almost impossible at the moment to get a proper fix on what is going on and on how important the incorporation in Ireland of a foreign multinational or its subsidiary is to its ability to minimise its tax liability worldwide.

Professor John FitzGerald, of the ESRI, has made the point that many major USA multinationals, located in Ireland, have real economic activity located here and the economy, and in particular employment, is highly dependent on these real, tax-paying, activities.

He fears that reaction to what is perceived as the trickier end of our package, the facilitation of "tax invisible" profits, could lead to a sweeping away of the genuine economic activity located here. And that would be a disaster.

Over to you Enda.

The Mercy of God

Note the blue car parked across the entry lane to the carpark. Yes it is parked. But that is not where the owner parked it when they left to do their shopping.

It was originally parked among the other cars in the picture. But the combination of a slight slope and handbrake failure (failure to engage it in the first place or failure of the actual handbrake itself) meant that the car reversed itself out onto the entrance roadway. Clearly the car had not been parked in gear, but the steering had locked, and, when the car did move, nobody was injured and there was no damage to property. Had the steering not locked it would have crashed into the restaurant opposite the shops. The mercy of God.

I observed the driver's shock and incredulity when they came across their car on the way back to where they had originally parked it.

The Google satellite mock-up below shows the unmanned car's trajectory.


Never a dull moment in my village.

In Brief

In a public televised debate, Mick Wallace, TD, said that the Garda should not have any discretion in the matter of issuing/cancelling penalty points.

The Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter, reminded Deputy Wallace that he had benefitted from Garda discretion himself when caught using a mobile phone while driving.

The question was, where did the Minister get this information which was not in the public domain and was he entitled to use it in public.

It has emerged that the Minister got the information from the Garda Commissioner in the course of a briefing on the matter of penalty points. The Commissioner claims he was alerting the Minister about it in case Deputy Wallace referred to it in the course of debate.

Deputy Wallace did not refer to it and initially could not even remember the incident.

While I hold no candle for Deputy Wallace, whose behaviour has been disgaceful, I do not see how the Minister could be entitled to use such information in public, and were he to do so in the heat of debate he should at least apologise, and not just to Mick Wallace, but to the Irish people for a totally inappropriate use of information, fed to him as Minister for Justice, in a debate with a political opponent.

Apparently the debate was not hot and the Minister has no intention of recognising the gravity of what he has done. He has now apologised to Mick Wallace, if the latter was offended. That is not really the point and he has stoutly defended his action, dragging in spurious reference to the public interest and the public's entitlement to be made aware of where Deputy Wallace was coming from.

He has shown a complete inability to appreciate the seriousness of what he has done. This is surprising for a very experienced lawyer. One can only conclude that his stubborn stance comes from ego and arrogance.

Hardly surprising in one who is an aggressive supporter of the Israeli Government which is pursuing manifestly illegal and genocidal policies towards the Palestinians.

Clearly he should not just consider his position but should go, and stop undermining the credibility of others who feel obliged to jump to his defence.

My interest, however, is also in the Commissioner having supplied the Minister with this personal information. Did he know his Minister well enough to realise that it would be used sooner or later, and if not, why not.

I can recall, in my own public service career, being accused by a Minister of briefing him with partisan information. As far as I was concerned, at the time, the information was certainly partisan, but not in the domestic party political sense that the Minister thought. It was specifically designed to counter misleading British propaganda and I had every hope that the Minister would use it in the debate for which I was briefing him.


The current controversy, though, sounds like a different kettle of fish entirely.

Next time you're using your
mobile phone at a traffic light.

ASPER

There are always new Government Departments coming on stream these days. This is the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. It has been split off from the original Department of Finance for a variety of practical, political and personal reasons which it is not necessary to go into here.

My immediate interest here is the logo. Clearly a new logo was required. In recent times, Government Departments and some State bodies have tried to use variations on the harp. I suppose you could say that this retains a sense of consistency across Government but there are clearly limits to the number of variations you can come up with before the thing becomes unrecognisable. Or should I just say limits to the imagination.

Anyway that unstable looking thing above is, I assume, a variation on the harp, though Brian Boru might not quite know what to do with it should he encounter it on a dark night.

That thought provoked me into wondering what else it might be if it was let out on its own, and my thoughts are below. Additional thoughts are welcome. My imagination is limited, or my mind boggled, or I'm just too plain tired to carry on any further.


Before I leave you, I should explain that the new Department likes to be popularly (if that is the appropriate adverb) known as PER and its blog is As PER and ASPER in Latin is rough or harsh, so I'll leave you to mull over that one.

ReactionsA former colleague with a deep understanding of the national psyche and of the present cataclysm suggests:

Two redundant motorway junctions plus ten intermediate entrances to ghost estates.

Cui Bono

I have in the past been accused of being related to Bono. Fortunately I was able to disprove this claim, at least to my own satisfaction.

However, in disproving it I ended up chasing his people and mine and so I may know a little more about his background than some of his fans.

While following up another angle, the other day, I came across what appears to be an interview Bono gave to Lynne Kelleher, in 2006 and which appeared in the Irish Mirror. It reminded me that journalists should really be very careful about what they write.

She tells us how Bono's parents' mixed marriage put him off organised churches. She goes on

He said he felt his late Protestant father, Bob, was excluded from the family on Sundays when he and his brother would go to mass with his Catholic mother Iris.

While his parents did come from two rival Christian camps, it was actually the other way round. Bob was the Catholic and Iris the Protestant. [But see third comment below]

Both Bob and Iris lived on the Dublin Artisans Dwellings Company Estate at Aughrim St. My relations, who are also from that estate, told me that Iris was a looker, but because she was a Protestant the lads were told to stay away from her. Bob Hewson clearly paid no attention to that advice.

Bono's parents, Bob & Iris on their first marriage (5/8/1950)
Click image for a larger version

I imagine the mixed marriage did cause some grief in the respective families. Bob and Iris were first married in the Church of Ireland in Drumcondra on 19 August 1950, where the witnesses were from the Rankin (Protestant) side only. The couple settled in Haroldville Avenue in Dolphins Barn, where they were persuaded (quite likely by the local curate, Father Muleady) to remarry in the Catholic Church, which they did on 28 December 1950. The witnesses at this marriage consisted of one Hewson (Thomas Leo) and Father Muleady's housekeeper.


The two marriages of Bono's parents
Click image for a larger version
In his biography of Bono (2005), Mick Wall tells us about the wedding in the Protestant church in Drumcondra, and goes on to say that their union would "some years later, be blessed by a Catholic Priest". What he doesn't tell us is that this "blessing" was in fact a full marriage and so notified to the State by Father Muleady. I have been trying to find a word in the English language to describe this phenomenon, so far without success.

When his own turn came, Bono married in the beautiful All Saints Church of Ireland in Raheny.


All Saints Church, Raheny
I have titled this post Cui Bono, not very original I'll admit. The meaning is a question Who gains?. It seems to me that the winner here is Father Muleady, by a mile.

Real Dubs

In this year of the GATHERING the people of Cork have decided to issue their own passport. In spite of an initial hiccup towards the end of last year they have produced a very acceptable document.

I really don't see any reason why the Dubs should be left behind in the local patriotic stakes. The document illustrated above is my contribution.

You will notice that it is only available to those real Dubs who were born between the two canals, so please don't go distributing it to others.

Mind you, given that the three main maternity hospitals are situated within the canals you'd have to be a real culchie not to be entitled to one of these.

Enjoy.

[Department of Foreign Affairs please copy]

Cracked or What?

What you see above purports to be a Google Street View^© cat. In its photomapping of the world's towns and cities Google Street View has picked up many strange phenomena but it appears this cat is not one of them.


This is the osriginal photo and it comes from Ottowa, Canada. But never mind, we're never short of true examples nearer home.


This is a Google Street View of Hawkins Street, Dublin, from Burgh Quay. The tall building in the centre of the picture, on the site of the old Theatre Royal, is the headquarters of the Government Department of Health.

The Minister for Health, Dr. James Reilly TD, has been afflicted with all sorts of problems since he took office. He has been accused of rowing back on various pre-election promises and, most recently, his Minister of State resigned, citing difficulties with the way the Minister was running the show, and particularly the role played by old style lobbying in influencing the location of health centres. There is also the implication that Reilly's gruff style fell far short of the collegial model needed for the smooth running of the ministerial team, not to mention the two party coalition Cabinet.


Some may feel that these disagreements are in large part down to a conflict of personalities and styles, but Google Street View reveals that there are more serious structural problems involved here. The very building itself is clearly in a state of unresolved internal conflict which threatens to tear it apart.

From an aesthetic point of view this would be no great harm as it is one of those 1960s type office bloxes that shot up all over Dublin at the first whiff of 20th Century economic progress. Some might simply put it down to The Curse of the Royal, a magnificent theatre which had been part of the city's lifeblood for yonks.

I first noticed this particular flaw in the building when researching my Dr. "Who" Reilly cartoon some weeks ago. The resulting cartoon is below.


[Note: (11/5/2013)  In the original of this post yesterday I took the cat to be genuine but was uneasy at not being able to see the patchlines. When I went to try and source it I discovered it had been tricked. I have amended the post accordingly. I also found that Google Street View had already (7/5/2013) acknowledged this on its fun page. ]

Update 13/9/2013
Just to add a positive note. A colleague has drawn my attention to the Google Street View Performance below. It comes from Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland. You can click on the coordinates here, invoke the little Street View Man and drive past, or just enjoy the strip below.

Click image for larger version

Hayes Cross

This is the Hayes Cross at the centre of Raheny Village. It commemorates Margaret Hayes who became a doctor, went to India as a missionary, and died shortly afterwards. You can read about her here.

It was moved around the village between various locations before finding its final resting place here at the centre of the village.

It has just been cleaned and is now much more eye catching as a result.

The Midas Touch

I have reported elsewhere on the making and screening of the incredible documentary Lorg na gcos: Súil Siar ar Mise Éire from Midas Productions.

The film looked back on the making and success of the original Mise Éire on the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of that film. It was also a tribute to George Morrison who made Mise Éire and the Midas team were very lucky that he was still around and willing to take part in this retrospective. The result was stunning.

After its broadcast on TG4 (28/12/12) the film was entered for a number of awards. By far the most pestigious of these, from an international point of view, was the International FOCAL Awards, the finals of which took place in London last week.

The film won the award in its category Best Use of Footage in an Arts Production The photo above shows Cleona and Colm proudly accepting the award.

The film is also entered for the Gradam Cumarsáide in this year's Oireachtas, and we will then see if the home adjudicators are as discerning as those at the heart of our former empire.

I have to declare an interest here, before someone else does it for me. I have a bit part in the film. But it wasn't that which moved me to tears at the screening. My own small involvement with the making of the film only served to impress me with the creativity and professionalism of the team and of the fantastic use they made of what material was available to them.

This, I'm sure, more than anything else is what carried the day for them at the FOCAL awards.

The Friendly Reaper

I was browsing in my local library the other day when the above volume caught my eye. It was big; it was thick; and the pages had that golden edging that you frequently get on bibles in church. What, I wondered, was it?


On closer inspection it had the intriguing title "Éire mar ba mhian le Domhnall Ó Lubhlaí" or, I suppose, "The Ireland Danny Lovely would like to see". Danny has long been known in Irish language circles for his Irish language colleges (Coláiste na bhFiann), a sort of Irish language bootcamp, and for his espousal of the "Modh Díreach" or the Direct Method of language teaching which avoids use of the mother tongue as opposed to the Translation Method which doesn't.

So I decided to have a look see.

I had to prise some of the pages apart to separate their gold edging, which suggested that I may have been the first person to actually look through all the pages.

It is an odd book in many ways. It is big at over a thousand thick A4 size pages. It is very heavy and it is not clear that the binding will withstand the intensive use that is meant to be made of the book in teaching the language. It has no ISBN number and no address is given for the publisher. In fact Google can't find the publisher whose name is listed as "Foilsitheoirí an Aithréimithe".

While I personally favour the Direct Method and realise that this requires a fair amount of illustration in the book, I really thought the layout (including multiple giant fonts) and language conjured up the image of a disturbed and obsessional mind.


Of course, I may be reading this book (published in 2011) with an unfair degree of retrospection, because allegations which were floating around some years ago have now resurfaced in the public domain, and a full scale Garda review is now under way into Danny's alleged sexual abuse of young persons over many years.


The above is one of the many colour illustrations in the book. At least it grabs your attention. Whether it is also autobiographical is a matter that the author is no longer in a position to clarify.


A certain inconsistency in his view of women is manifested in the above illustration, one of many low grade black and white drawings in the book. While the "girl" is purported on one page to be nice and on another to be beautiful, my own view is that she is neither and is very reminiscent of the Duchess of Windsor (Wallis Simpson) or even a once upon a time lady from Corca Dorcha.


Cailín deas crúite na bó is all very well but the image suffers from the retrospection I mentioned above.


This purports to be a "person" taking an oath to make us free. The author's view of person in this context is clearly a military person, not surprising given the author's own background.


Click for larger image
God knows how many young boys may have been abused over the years. The extract above is from Danny's introduction to the book where he reminisces on events and amusing incidents creating a sort of family album in words. I'm sure many of those mentioned in this introduction won't thank him for it. The above extract refers to Liam Ó Maolaodha, and I have no hesitation in reproducing it as Liam has come forward with allegations against Danny.


And finally, above, what might have been the end of the story were it not for the benign intervention of the Grim Reaper. Danny died in March 2013.

All the illustrations are from the book

Who stole my chicken?

It is, admittedly, a readymade dinner. Simple fare you might think. But you'd be wrong. There are layers of complexity behind this apparently simple quick dinner item.

In the first place, the relationship between the name of the dish and the actual contents/ingredients is not straightforward. The bird in the title is nowhere to be seen in the list of ingredients.

So where has the chicken gone. Has it simply crossed the road in the meantime.

A closer look at the title reveals that this dish is not as simple as you might have first thought. You might have thought it was vol-au-vents, particularly as that is preciseley what they looked like.

But you'd have been wrong. It's vol-au-vots, which, in the best French circles, means a spate of thefts of people's pets. So, if the chicken saw the title, it's no wonder he crossed the road, pronto. So would I have in his place.

However, if you are thinking of buying one of these, be reassured. When it comes out of the oven or the microwave the chicken is actually back inside.

So if he really crossed the road, he did it to save himself for you.

That surely merits a Légion d'honneur at least.

Do they award those things posthumously?

And to fowl?

Mayday