Foinse Nua

I had intended on a long detailed post about this but I don’t have the time and don’t want to skip it altogether.

In brief, taithníonn sé go mór liom. Tá an béim athraithe ón sean-Fhoinse go nuachtáin níos oiriúnaí dóibh siúd atá ag foghlaim an teanga – nó ag déanamh iarracht í a fhoghlaim.

It seems much brighter – maybe fresher is the word for it. Also like the little foclóir on most of the news stories.

Unrelated, really, but I didn’t realise Mary McAleese had put that effort into learning the language. I know I’ve previously complained here about Bertie Ahern never bothering in his gazillion years as Taoiseach so it’s nice to see someone do it and do it right.

Now, the question becomes, will the Indo let you subscribe to ‘just the Wednesday issue, thanks’?

Brian and the Bank Bosses

So now the €500,000 reduced payment will be his “base salary”????

Think we know what that means.

Stunningly effective way of making the Irish people feel just a little bit more like we’re being shafted by a select group of increasingly rich suit-wearers. Someone give that man a(nother) bonus…

 

The Hand of Gaulle

It’s incredibly difficult to take the positives out of last night’s match or to imagine how the Irish team can be consoled.

Having said that, there are positives there to see. For starters, they did us proud – they did us more than proud. They outplayed Goliath on their home turf and ran themselves ragged for two hours. More than that, they didn’t let us down with how they reacted to “the incident”. They talked about feeling sickened, they were honest about how gutted they were, but there was nothing for their mammies to be embarrassed about. Heads held high, as was deserved.

Johnny Giles and Ronnie Whelan both made comments to the effect that handballs happen all the time and that if one of our lads had done the same we wouldn’t be complaining. I’m not sure, but I like to hope we at least wouldn’t be proud of ourselves. As Liam Brady said, it’s a bad day for the sport of soccer, when not one French player has the honour or honesty to admit what has happened.

It’s not an inconsequential match, and maybe the stakes being high is how they will justify this to themselves. How do you justify that to the seven year old fans watching their hero cheat their way to the World Cup? And how do you stand straight-faced at your opening match of that tournament and pretend you deserve to be there?

May they never live it down.

The lads didn’t just behave well, they played brilliantly – they lived up to expectations we had long since stopped holding for them. It is soul destroying that they have to come home to this rainy day with such heavy hearts.

I hope they get the welcome they deserve.

The guy who knows where Obama’s light saber is

David Plouffe was on the Daily Show last night – or more accurately, the day before, but it was shown this side of the pond last night.

It has to have been one of the best Daily Show episodes in the last two years of my constant watching. The first half’s skit on the reporting of “Election Day 2009″ had me crying laughing, and then they matched it with an interview with Mr Plouffe.

I don’t care that his name sounds silly. I want to subscribe to this guy’s newsletter. In fact I want to volunteer to distribute it to a wide and varied audience. He didn’t just plug his book, or his candidate, or his president. He completely outflanked Jon Stewart. It was, as the man said, awesome.

The book was being bought anyway, but I may also need to find some way of be coming an official disciple.

And my plans to link to clips of the show just got killed. Stupid Irelandness. Go google it.

Sharon Commins

There’s a lovely letter about Sharon Commins in today’s Irish Times.

There’s also an article in the Independent about how much Sharon has been looking forward to Eggs Benedict but hasn’t had the chance to eat them yet.

Putting these two together has led me to wonder, how has some brunchery/chef not hand delivered a plate of Eggs Benedict and a bottle of champagne to the woman?

I don’t even mean for PR – it would be better to do it as a gesture and nothing else – but after 106 days in captivity she wanted rest, Eggs Benedict, and champagne.

If I was a better chef I’d bring them to her myself.

No more crosaire, for now

A letter in today’s Irish Times reminded me of the need to blog about my lack of blogging.

I’ve been feeling a lot of guilt about the lack of updates, and in particular the lack of Crosaire-solvage(?) in recent days and weeks.

The sad fact is that the daily Crosaire puzzle is no longer available free from the Irish Times website. I would happily join the Crossword Club (if only for the lovely leaderboard!) for the tiny sum of €35 per annum but the fact is that in my current state of being constantly busy I don’t have the time for either crossword.

So for the moment I must postpone my crusade to conquer Crosaire. Which is quite sad, since I was just about getting somewhere.

Monday

Now that it’s all blissfully over, I’m really hoping that Monday’s Irish Times has a lovely big explanation piece.

As in, “We said yes, what does this actually mean/change/cause”.

That would make me happy.

The day that’s in it

I’m a bit stunned that the Indo have an open appeal for a yes vote on the front page. But that’s besides the point.

From the time I first started playing tennis, aged about 3, my dad would always tell me that the only thing more important than losing gracefully was winning gracefully. So if you get wiped off a court, you thank your opponent, shake hands, thank the umpire, and walk off the court with your head held high. If you’re the one doing the wiping? You thank your opponent, shake hands, thank the umpire, and walk off the court with your head held the same height – no higher.

So tomorrow, or whenever, we get the result of today’s vote, I would love to believe that our elected representatives will conduct themselves accordingly.

Ganley has lost his credibility, in my eyes at least, because the last time he lost a vote he said he wouldn’t come back. Anything he says after the result, either way, is meaningless.

SF and Cóir and whoever else would be doing themselves a favour if they didn’t get too noisy at a win, or a loss.

But the rest of the spectrum of parties and groupings who are pushing for a Yes?

If they don’t get their way, they would want to step away, accept the result, and show a bit of respect for the fact that we would rather not be asked again in 2010. Most importantly, I would love to see a response to a No vote that didn’t turn into an assumption that the electorate didn’t understand, or a tirade against those campaigning for a No.

If, however, they get their Yes vote – at last – they would be doing themselves a service to take it with a bit of grace.

Celebrate, by all means. But don’t make it about how illegitimate organisations have been proven wrong. Don’t make it about the idiot electorate copping on to themselves. Don’t – for the love of Spaghetti Monsters everywhere – do not kid yourselves that you ran a great campaign.

Accept it, enjoy it, say all of the above in private if you absolutely must.

But please,  either way, let’s not have a week of “told you so” headlines.

Human on the inside?

I have a bit of an addiction to the guardian’s many galleries.

Today’s gallery of Sarah Brown images threw up this one.

The Taoiseach, looking.. like a decent bloke who is genuinely upset by the death of someone he respected and maybe liked.

Not a side we see very often, is all…

Returning to Lisbon

It’s a very bad sign when a political geek can’t be bothered blogging for three weeks of the month leading up to a rather important referendum vote.

Admittedly I did take a week’s holidays but that’s no excuse.

The fact is I couldn’t motivate myself to join in. I had nothing to say, or maybe nothing worth saying. But today, just for fun, and because it’s about time to get back into it, I’m going to try to summarise the many thoughts that have swirled around my brain of late.

First and foremost – until this Friday, Aer Lingus are running a special on flights to Lisbon. Is that intended as a joke? I can’t decide. I keep laughing when I see the ad. I do quite want to visit Lisbon at some point – if only to break the nasty association with both the referendum and the campaign – but not this week. Whether joking or not, the ad certainly isn’t an accident, which means it fits nicely on the wall of weird that this campaign has become.

From the beginning of the campaign one thing has been very obvious. Nothing – nothing – has been learnt since the last time. The Ireland for Europe posters, in particular, make me want to throw tomatoes and shake somebody until they cry. The words “It’s simple, dot dot dot” don’t make me think a complex document is an easy decision. It makes me think the person who designed that poster is actively and deliberately patronising everyone reading it.

Next are the We Belong posters. I quite liked them when I first saw them, at least until someone pointed out that they don’t say “yes” or “no” on them. Which brings me to the second problem with the latest campaigns – there’s such effort being put into avoiding the obvious mistakes made last time (like, for instance, trying to bully or intimidate people into agreeing with you) that this particular campaign has taken an excessively safe route that leaves no room for argument or persuasion.

The biggest issue, though, is that every ‘Yes’ speaker I have heard so far has said something to the effect of “If we don’t vote Yes, we’re royally ****ed”.

That argument means nothing to me.

That’s not quite true actually. That argument makes me go looking for reasons to vote No because I resent the apparent incapacity of so many (so very, very many) different groups to give good, positive reasons for voting yes. I’m not saying that some people aren’t at least trying it. Off the top of my head, the Green Party poster (Good for Women, Employees, Environment etc.) at least makes some effort to show the positives.

If the essential argument (beyond “Just Do It“) is that Europe has been good for Ireland, and will continue to be good to Ireland, as long as we stick with it, then surely the role of the Yes side should be to explain what that “good” has been?

The worst is that most of those campaigns have websites that give a variety of real reasons for voting yes – but none of that is coming across in media interviews.

In contrast to the apparently more legitimate Yes campaigns, the No side have learnt from last time. They have learnt that they can put anything they want on a poster, and some people will believe them. So we have a stream of frankly ridiculous statements, some of which have been on unusually shaped and fairly striking posters, and a percentage of people are going to believe those statements.

I want to vote Yes – but the fact that the majority of Yes campaigners have seen fit to combat the No campaign by actively and deliberately playing the player, not the ball (or in this case ‘utterly spurious claim’), is profoundly off-putting.

Ganley’s return to the fold was a mistake, I think, because he has undermined his own credibility in a way that nobody else now needs to. Having said that, Libertas have returned with much more effective messages and posters than many of those who’ve been at it for months.

If Cóir, Sinn Féin, Patricia McKenna’s crew and whoever else are all illegitimate organisations who have no democratic mandate for their arguments, then why do our democratically elected representatives need to spend so much time questioning their legitimacy?

Worry about your own campaign. Worry about the fact that every time you say “but we have to” you lose a little bit more credibility. Worry that your European counterparts are most likely sitting in their own parliaments pondering the stupidity of yet another Lisbon campaign going down the tubes because yet again there is no clear reason being given that can cut through all the distractions.

One final thought. Generation Yes have been fairly visible throughout the campaign and their use of a ‘Choose Life‘ poster is effective (I do hope they got the rights to use it?). However, on a personal level, I’m actively offended by one of the last lines in their poster:

“Choose doing something positive with your vote, helping find a solution instead of bitching about the problems to your mates in the pub”

That sentence, for me, is the embodiment of what’s wrong with all of the Yes campaigns. Vote Yes, because it’s somehow a less valid decision to vote no. Vote Yes, because otherwise you’re a bitchy little idiot whose opinion doesn’t matter and shouldn’t count.

Reading that sentence, I can see what was intended, but I have absolutely no idea why someone didn’t see the problem with it.

Just to be clear, I have every intention of voting yes. I want to vote yes. I have half a dozen reasons for voting yes, most of which appear nowhere on any of the literature or websites of the groups that I have or haven’t mentioned.

I just wish they’d all stop making it so bloody hard to do.