Gav Reilly » Ireland

Some thoughts on the push for a European referendum

Gav — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:30:11 +0000

[Edited, 7:11pm]

So this morning we learned that the Dáil’s technical group is to use a little-known clause in the Constitution – Article 27 – by getting together enough Oireachtas signatures to petition the President to put the new EU treaty to the people.

First, a quick look over the rules:

The petition must be signed by one third of the members of the Dáil, and a majority of the members of the Seanad
Their signatures are then verified in a manner provided by law
The petition is furnished with “a statement of the particularground or grounds on which the request is based”
The petition and statement are sent to the President within four days after the Oireachtas has finished its consideration of the Bill.
The President must convene the Council of State to consider the petition and give his response within 10 days of the Bill being passed by the Oireachtas
If he deems it necessary, he will refuse to sign the Bill until either a referendum is held, or a general election is called and the Dáil reconvenes
If it’s not deemed necessary, he signs it within 11 days of the Oireachtas passing it.

Now, some thoughts:

This is such an unexpected and unprecedented development that the law outlining how the signatures are verified dates from 1944!
Although the petition doesn’t need to be presented until four days after it’s passed by the Oireachtas, the organisers will need to be wary of the possibility of a petition for early signature: the reason there is a four-day window is because the Constitution says the President only signs a bill between five and seven days after the Oireachtas passes it. This is pushed forward in the case of a motion for early signature – meaning that, if he was so minded, the President could accede to the motion for early signature and sign the Act into law before the petition picks up the necessary signatures. Also, given the political urgency around getting this treaty ratified as soon as practicable,
This is a separate clause to Article 26 under which the President can refer a Bill to the Supreme Court, and adds a degree of discretion to the President that they rarely have otherwise. Article 27 is quite clear in that even if the Supreme Court is being asked to rule on its constitutionality (though only under Article 26, and not in a private claim) and it deems a referendum not to be necessary, the President can still fire ahead and order the referendum anyway. This is in line with the President’s role as the guardian of the Constitution, and his need to protect the spirit of its intentions as well as the letter of the law.
Parliamentary arithmetic means the government is never in danger when it’s trying to legislate, but in this case the margins are wafer-thin. Let’s have a look at the breakdown of both houses:

Dail:

Fine Gael 74 (plus one defector, Denis Naughten)
Labour 35 (plus three defectors, Willie Penrose, Tommy Broughan and Patrick Nulty)
Fianna Fáil 19
Sinn Féin 14
United Left Alliance 5
Non-ULA from the technical group 11
Other independents 3

Seanad:

Fine Gael: 19
Labour: 12
Fianna Fáil: 14
Sinn Féin: 3
Independent university senators: 5
Independent Taoiseach’s nominees: 7

Let’s first deal with the Dáil, which has 166 members, meaning 56 is the magic number.

The Technical Group, which has engineered this campaign, has 16. Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil have both asked for a referendum. Add all of those together and we’re on 49. There are seven other people not subject to the whip: the four government defectors, and the three independents who aren’t members of the technical group.
It is questionable whether Messrs Naughten, Penrose, Nulty and Broughan will want to burn further bridges with their parliamentary parties – though perhaps all will be mindful that their former parties may face FF-style backlashes in the next election. Either way, the circumstances of each may mean that at least one of the four might be reluctant to jump.
Then we turn to the other three: Lowry, Grealish and Healy-Rae. The former pair, and the latter’s father, were among the independents on whom the previous government relied for its mandate. While the reasons that they did not join the Technical Group have never been explained, it is not because the government bought their votes: all three have voted against the government in the past months with no apparent sanction. Here, though, we have an unusual situation: in effect, if the government wants to ensure it doesn’t get pushed into a referendum, it could strike a deal with the three – who are known to be happy to strike deals – to secure their complicity.
So yes – even though the government has a massive majority in the Dáil, with at least 109 votes, it could have to secure the support of Michael Lowry, Noel Grealish and Michael Healy-Rae in order to ensure it doesn’t get dragged into a campaign it clearly doesn’t want, and could well lose.

Now, to the equally interesting Seanad…

Ordinarily, the Seanad is a mere rubber-stamp for government legislation: the Constitutional power of the Taoiseach to nominate 11 members means the majority is rarely in doubt.
This time, Enda Kenny nominated 11 members – four of whom had been picked by his Tánaiste, Eamon Gilmore – but only four of them took party whips. Seven of those members are, in theory at least, independent – those seven have even formed their own technical group to put forward private motions. They may have been appointed there by a benevolent government but they do not answer to it.
This means that the government’s benches have 31 members – enough for a majority. Given the usually sub-total attendance in the Seanad, and the regular agreement of the university and independent senators to the government proposals, the majority is rarely questioned.
Here, however, the nomination of seven independents means there is something to be played for. Again, assuming that FF and SF in the Seanad assent to the petition, we have 17 signatures. Add the five university members, who have no political loyalties one way or the other, and we have 22. (A side note at this point: it is relatively rare that university panels elect people who are running, in effect, as members of a political party. How thankful Labour must now be that its Seanad leader, Ivana Bacik, got elected in Trinity College…)
Now we turn to the Taoiseach’s independents. They are likely, but not guaranteed, to act as one on this. This presents difficulties for some members: take Jillian van Turnhout, who is independent and often critical of the government, but whose husband is the Fine Gael constituency chair in Dublin South. Take also Martin McAleese, who had been reluctant to say anything out loud in the Seanad while his wife was the President. Take Marie Louise O’Donnell and Eamonn Coghlan, who attended FG pre-election events and who are open supporters of the party, though not members of it. Can van Turnhout be persuaded to cause political difficulty for her husband’s party? Can McAleese be persuaded to take an active role in convincing his wife’s successor to take an active political stance? Will O’Donnell and Coghlan end longstanding associations with their favoured party? All are questions to be answered.
Even if the independent group signs up, we now stand at 29 – and we need two more people from the government benches to cross over. Are there liberally-minded members on the government side who are willing to break ranks? Bear in mind that many Senators will have been dreading the day, later this year, when they were asked to approve a referendum abolishing the Seanad. A couple may have been prepared to break ranks at that point: turkeys, remember, are not in the habit of voting for Christmas. Perhaps some of them have a genuine belief that the Seanad is worth saving: could they be convinced that backing a referendum campaign could help to turn public support in favour of keeping the upper house? Will two of them be willing to bring forward their inevitable dissent and sign the petition now?

And that, ladies and gents, is why politics is Ireland’s favourite sport.

Update, 7:11pm: Two points I forgot to make earlier:

The rules of a referendum change if it’s been called under Article 27. Even if the No side wins, the Constitution imposes a quorum: the volume of No votes must be more than one third of the total electorate. That means the referendum needs a turnout of well over 60% if the referendum is to be defeated.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall of the Council of State meetings. The former presidents were Labour and Fianna Fáil nominees – the latter being married to a potential signatory of the petition – and there are two former FG taoisigh to FF’s three. The possibility of political motivations in the room should not be discounted: if there are members motivated by their party’s goals, the meetings could be fun…

Too much of a good thing

Gav — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:01:07 +0000

SO, MY FIRST real blog post in well over a year. I won’t make the usual ill-fated apology about trying to do more in future – variety is the spice of life, etc etc – but instead want to put across an observation about the current lie of the Irish political land.

The presidential election has been and gone, and frankly there is little left to say other than to wish Michael D the very best for his impending tenure. He’s been given a pretty hefty mandate – the largest that any person has ever won in Irish electoral history; only on six occasions (all of them referenda) have the people voted in larger numbers for a common end – and my personal hope is that he does his best to use it. It has always struck me as a political curiosity that the President (mandate 1,007,104 votes, from voters in 43 constituencies) could be politically neutered by a Taoiseach (mandate 17,472 votes, from only one constituency); it would be a personal hope that the cabinet might keep the new President’s electoral standing in mind if he should give them a subtle nudge towards a particular social goal.

Anyway, specifically I wanted to make a note on the aftermath of the two constitutional referenda from last week, and the potential impact that the fallout might have on the government’s plans to make inroads on the one place that almost everyone wants it to succeed: political reform.

MY LIVING MEMORY doesn’t extend to very many of them, but I’d wager not since 1919 has a Dáil election centred so much on the need for political reform as the 2011 general election did. The two ultimately successful parties wanted reform so wholesale as to scrap a house of parliament; almost everyone was I agreement that we have too many TDs, and that the legislature’s oversight of the executive needed beefing up. And so, the Programme for Government made several commitments: to hold a constitutional convention, to cut the number of TDs, to ‘make government more accountable’ and so on. A figure of which little was made at the time, but of which more has been made in the last few days, was that the government would hold up to a dozen referenda on amendments to the Constitution over the course of its term – a gesture of bringing about some long-term reforms to the document from which all Irish political power is derived.

The 29th and 30th Amendments to the Constitution were the first attempts to set about on that – the former proposal being intended, through government eyes at least, to bring the judiciary in line with the rest of the public sector; the latter an attempt to allow Oireachtas committees gain the right to cause a public spectacle by bringing pantomime villains to account in the face of live TV and popularly elected scrutiny.

In hindsight it was, perhaps, a little short-sighted to try and hold both ballots on the same day as the Presidential election – the sheer volume of candidates meant it was simply easier for the media to build a narrative around personalities and not abstract concepts – and ministers seemed to admit to this error afterward. Complaining that the public discourse on each measure had been too limited (fatally so in the case of the latter), the government argued that the late emergence of a concentrated ‘No’ campaign on Oireachtas Inquiries served only to confuse voters, leaving a Yes side with too little time to form cohesive responses.

It is certainly fair to acknowledge that the theatre of the presidential election left little time for the imagination to be caught by the referendum on Oireachtas Inquiries. Take away the obvious first example – of an inquiry, led by TDs and Senators, into the banking scandal – and it became even more difficult to try and captivate the public. The government might imply that a longer campaign could have given it time to counter the negative press – or that delaying the referendum and holding it early in 2012, alongside the ballot on Children’s Rights, may have been more wise – but the outcome is the outcome: the public voted, in its wisdom, to reject the proposal. The 30th Amendment to the Constitution will never be made.

LAST SATURDAY AFTERNOON I was in Dublin Castle to cover the counts for TheJournal.ie as Brendan Howlin, the minister in charge of the 30th Amendment, arrived to join the celebrations for Michael D Higgins’ impending victory. I, and some other bystanding hacks, wandered over to listen to him speaking with Higgins’ manager, Joe Costello. Eventually, we interrupted their chat to ask about Howlin’s comment – specifically that “three out of four ain’t bad” – and asked if he had thrown in the towel on the referendum, before an official result had been declared but after nationwide tallies indicated it would fail. Specifically, I asked, would the government be taking another stab at passing a similar referendum?

“It’s going to be very difficult to have the sort of parliament that this Government is committed to having – and that is an Oireachtas that holds the Executive to account robustly, that seeks after truth, that ensures it’s done efficiently and effectively – without powers that are close to or analogous to the ones we proposed,” he replied.

Assuming that the government doesn’t ‘do a Lisbon’ and ask the public to vote again on precisely the same issue, the next chance that the government will probably have to push through some kind of reform is as part of the Constitutional Convention. And this, I believe, is where it may have a problem. Even if the Constitutional Convention – which the government has already hinted will be formulated so as to put it beyond the immediate control of the cabinet – is to recommend a similar empowerment of Oireachtas committees, it may risk throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater.

The logic that the referendum on Oireachtas Inquiries was beaten simply because of public reluctance – whether educated or not – is sound. But what, then, comes of the Constitutional Convention which will be proposing political reforms on a scale never before seen in modern Irish history?

I HAVE SOME small experience in constitutional reforms. Back in my UCD Students’ Union days we tried a similar project, appointing a select group of class reps to a group which was then asked to examine each point of the Union’s constitution, on a clause-by-clause basis, and to write a more ‘modern’ replacement. The same project had been tried on pretty much an annual basis for the preceding years, each time failing to get the job done through a combination of disagreements, time constraints and simple inertia. Eventually, in our year, a small core of full-time officers (and a barrister) had to sit in a small room and do the job ourselves – giving the document the once-over it had badly needed for a few years. (Our full document – presented to the membership of the Union as a whole, rather than a collection of amendments – was passed with 85% approval.)

Admittedly, his experience is pretty parochial, and would bear almost no resemblance to the work of a Constitutional Convention which would have far higher stakes at play. The reason I mention it is because our success was bittersweet: in order to ensure that the new constitution was adopted, we needed to play it safe. We omitted proposals like the abolition of the unpopular and toothless Women’s Officer position, simply because including them would be tantamount to painting a giant bullseye on the ballot paper. A certain core of voters would oppose the document because of the abolition; another chunk would oppose another, others would find another matter to vote No on… addressing more controversial had the genuine potential to derail the vital reform needed elsewhere in the document.

THERE MIGHT BE a lesson to learn from this: if the Constitutional Convention does its job properly, it’s going to come up with a similarly revitalised document – potentially scrapping the Seanad, reforming the courts, cutting the numbers of TDs, enshrining the rights of children, addressing the constitutional role of the family, adjusting the Preamble to remove its reference to God, tackling the thorny question of abortion… there will be any number of reforms. Putting these to the public in a single document – and in a single vote – is a recipe for disaster. The current constitution was put in a similar fashion in 1936 and only just managed to get ratified (56.5%). Asking Ireland of 2011 to consider a multitude of major reforms at once will obliterate all of them, irrespective of the public’s real thoughts on individual ideas.

The alternative to putting the changes as a single document is to put each of the changes as an exclusive proposal – a tactic which could lead to ten (or more!) referenda being held all at once. Not only would that end in logistical and political chaos, but it would go directly at odds with the lesson that governments were taught with Nice I, Lisbon I and on the 30th Amendment: the public is reluctant by nature, and needs to be significantly pacified before it votes Yes to anything. Having complained last week that the sideshow of a Presidential election gave it no chance to fight a good fight on the Oireachtas Inquiries referendum, it would be suicidal of the government to walk itself into another PR battle it has already found impossible to win.

This is also not to mention the damage that such a saturated debate could have: if it is true that the Irish public suffered by a deficit of debate and critique on the two referenda just past, throwing together a dozen major reforms (assuming each gets past the Oireachtas in the first place) and putting their entire fate in one question is going to lead to an even lesser debate, and one that could do irreparable harm to the trust held by the public in its representatives. That trust is a magic ingredient: a secret glue that keeps society together. One is reluctant to consider the implications of an anarchic solvent being introduced to this cocktail.

The only compromise might be to get the Convention to identify a dozen discreet proposals for reform, but then put the ballots in stages – perhaps three or four at a time. This could feasibly ensure that the public gets a chance to debate each proposal on its merits, and to ensure that each is accorded the substantive debate it deserves – but to follow such a staggered path has two implications. Firstly, given the timing cycle that goes into a referendum, it could take well over two years for all the changes to be sequentially put to the people. That’s two years of having our politicians sidetracked from the business of running the country, binding them to participate in weighty debates about the direction of the state. Given the pressures – not least the financial ones – currently on the table, this isn’t quite how we want our leaders to be deployed.

The second problem is the fact that after a marathon of referendums and other elections, there’s simply going to be a level of voter fatigue. Asking the public to vote on 12 referenda in two years leads not only to disinterested voters, but to a disinterested media. If the whole point of constitutional reform is to cast a critical eye upon ourselves and decide where we want to change, then whichever ballots come last in the pecking order will suffer from public and media apathy, compounded by the fact that the votes will be coming several years after they are proposed.

And that’s not all. Let’s say, for example, that of the twelve referenda arising from the convention, the first two are rejected – a real possibility given our recent form as voters. What government then wants to stand over the work of an autonomous body? And devote two years of willpower and political capital to finishing the project – particularly when it might be out of office before the job is done? And what chance is there of encouraging the public to take each subsequent vote on its merits when it may already have deemed the convention’s work to be toxic?

MICHAEL D HIGGINS will be inaugurated next Friday, November 11, 2011. On that date in 1947, Winston Churchill stood on the opposition side of the dispatch box in the House of Commons and noted; “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

It’s funny how often history has a habit of repeating itself.

Addendum: Just throwing in a quick plug for my other blog, Agenda.ie – a daily guide to the events of Leinster House, including video streams of everything as it happens. It’s also on Facebook – where you can also watch the Oireachtas streams – and on Twitter.

If you’re annoyed at how RTÉ cut off Vincent Browne’s questions:

Gav — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 21:56:58 +0000

Watch TV3′s special edition of Tonight with Vincent Browne at 10:30pm, instead of The Week in Politics. They’ll be airing the video, including the censored questions.
Email complaints@rte.ie.
Contact the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (which has incorporated the function of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission):
- info@bai.ie / complaints@bai.ie
- Write to:
  - The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland
    2 – 5 Warrington Place
    Dublin 2
- Telephone: (+353) (0)1 644 1200

Update: From RTÉ’s own website:

RTÉ is obliged under Section 39 (1) of the Broadcasting Act 2009 to ensure that

(a) all news broadcast . is reported and presented in an objective and impartial manner and without any expression of the broadcaster’s own views

(b) the broadcast treatment of current affairs, including matters which are either of public controversy or the subject of current public debate is fair to all interests concerned and that the broadcast matter is presented in an objective and impartial manner and without any expression of his or her own views, except that should it prove impracticable in relation to a single broadcast to apply this paragraph, two or more related broadcasts may be considered as a whole, if the broadcasts are transmitted within a reasonable period of each other

On that Irish Times editorial, and ‘sovereignty’

Gav — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 23:48:00 +0000

A quick note – which will only make sense if you’ve read Madam Editor’s piece from Thursday morning, channeling Yeats: Was It For This?.

It’s obviously an emotive issue – especially in Ireland – when the loss of sovereignty is threatened. As I was corresponding with an American colleague earlier, trying to give him some sense of context as to why Ireland takes its self-governance more than most, I found it difficult to construct even a single paragraph without having to reference Ireland’s chequered relationship with Britain.

However, the editorial – eloquent and on-the-button as it was – overlooked one salient point: the very concept that Ireland had supposedly retained its sovereignty up until now.

The point was this: why is having to borrow money from overseas sources considered a loss of sovereignty, when such borrowing is what the government – any government – does every time it has a budget deficit?

If Ireland has lost its sovereignty by having to invite the IMF in, it’s not (directly) the fault of the incumbent government, nor is it because of the scale of the loans we’ll get – even if they hit €100bn, it’s only doubling the national debt we already have.

It’s because bankers got greedy and stranded us up the proverbial creek – and that’s both the long and the short of it.

How AIB’s gym fees more than double the amount it’ll make from increasing mortgage interest rates

Gav — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 10:07:03 +0000

The front page of today’s Irish Examiner reports that AIB still offers to cover €2,500 per year in gym or golf club expenses on the part of its employees.

AIB is offering to pay employees’ golf club fees and leisure club memberships worth millions of euro every year despite being crippled with debt and facing massive job losses and a likely state takeover.

The crisis-ridden bank confirmed the generous staff perks scheme on the same day it raised interest rates for hard-pressed mortgage holders by half a percent – and just days after it announced record losses of €2 billion for the first half of the year. The interest rate hike will affect approximately 50,000 customers who hold standard variable mortgages. [more]

The piece goes on to say that the scheme is offered to each of the bank’s 12,500 employees in Ireland, as well as the 2,500 it employs in Britain. Up to €2,500, it says, is offered to each employee.

Meanwhile, the bank increased its variable mortgage interest rate from 2.75% to 3.25% yesterday, which will (it is reported) hit about 50,000 mortgage holders with a monthly repayments increase of about €27.

So this morning, after seeing the Examiner‘s lead, I decided to crunch some figures.

In the results it filed in March, for the year ending 31 December 2009, AIB said it had a residential mortgage book valued at about €27.1bn. In layman’s terms, that means that homeowners in Ireland collectively hold mortgages, from AIB, to the tune of €27,100,000,000.

How much of this €27.1bn is lent at a variable rate? Well, that depends on who you ask. This morning’s Irish Times estimates that about 30% of the bank’s mortgages are lent at a variable rate (thanks to Aaron Quigley for alerting me), while Karl Deeter from Irish Mortgage Brokers suggested to me that the variable portfolio amounts to about 20% of the total.

This is where it gets interesting. Yesterday’s Irish Times posited that the 0.5% increase in the interest rate would result in the monthly repayment increasing by €26.96 for every €100,000 outstanding on a borrower’s mortgage.

[Update, 2pm: I've crunched more numbers using slightly more mathematical formulae than those in the comments or, presumably, those used by The Irish Times. Using the c = (r / (1 − (1 + r) ^− N))P formula the monthly repayment works out at €26.96 for every €100,000 outstanding on a 30-year mortgage. The post previously stated an increase of €26.82.]

So, if 30% of AIB’s mortgages are lent at a variable rate (€8.13bn), then AIB stands to make an extra €2,191.848 a month from the increased interest rate – that’s €26.17 million a year. If as Karl suggests the rate is closer to 20% (€5.42bn), it will make €1,461,232 extra per month, or €17.44 a year.

Now let’s go back to the gym membership scheme. Though it’s unlikely, let’s suggest – as well most employees might want to – that every single employee claims their €2,500, there’s a chance that AIB is faced with 15,000 bills for €2,500 every year. That’s €37,500,000 a year for AIB employees to go to the gym or the golf club.

So, if 20% of AIB’s mortgages are at a variable rate, then the amount by which AIB is hitting mortgage holders – the vast majority of whom, we can guess, are in negative equity – doesn’t even cover half of its bill for sending its employees to the gym or golf club.

Let me repeat that. AIB is increasing its mortgage interest rates, when potentially more than double the amount it will make is being offered to send its employees to the gym every year.

It will take at the very least 17.10 months, and at most 25.66 months, for the increased mortgage rates to cover AIB’s annual cost for the scheme.

This is the bank that got a €3.5bn recapitalisation bailout from the taxpayer last year, will probably need another one to the same amount this year (according to JP Morgan, anyway) and which has been able to offload billions in loans to NAMA that it otherwise would probably never be able to get back.

Seating plan for Dáil Éireann

Gav — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:53:18 +0000

Update, January 25, 2011: This post has now been superseded by a similar site I’ve built elsewhere, called Who Sits Where?, and which can be found at www.whositswhere.info.

The post below links to the seating as of December 2, 2010, to account for the new seating arrangements on the opposition benches following the election of Pearse Doherty. This arrangement was superseded on January 25, 2011, when the Green Party moved to the opposition benches.

After watching a few electronic votes in the Dáil last week and being a little stumped as to why certain dots in the middle of the opposition half of the chamber were consistently showing up in green and not red, I went looking around for a copy of the Dáil’s seating plan.

I wasn’t able to find one anywhere online so emailed the clerk of the Dáil’s office looking to see if they could help; I got an email back this morning from Gina Long in the Clerk’s office (thanks, Gina) with a copy of the seating plan, and a list of who sits in which seat.

Given the amount of people who were keen to get a hold of a copy of this when I went looking around on Twitter last week I’m throwing up the copy here for public reference. The chart and accompanying lists can be referenced when looking at the electronic voting display on Dáil broadcasts.

The seating plan was supplied in .dwg format so I’m uploading a .jpg copy here for the sake of easy access; the list of seats comes in two formats, one sorted by seat number and the other sorted by each TD’s surname in alphabetical order.

Official seating plan of Dáil Éireann as used for electronic voting (JPG image)
List of Dáil seats and who sits in them, sorted alphanumerically by seat number (PDF format)
List of Dáil seats and who sits in them, sorted alphabetically by TD’s surname (PDF format)

Bloody Sunday, in numbers

Gav — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:27:31 +0000

They say that numbers give a more distant perspective on things.

13 – the number of people who died on January 30, 1972 when they were shot British Army forces attempting to contain a Republican civil rights march in Derry.

14 – the number of people who ultimately died as a result of the Army shootings: John Johnston (59), an innocent passer-by, died in mid-June from injuries sustained after he was shot in the leg and left shoulder.

10 - the number of printed volumes of the findings of Saville's inquiry.

79 - the number of days between the shootings and the publication of the Widgery Tribunal findings.

90 – the number of witnesses whose testimony was heard by Widgery.

21,053 – the number of words in Widgery’s publication, including appendices.

9,417 – the number of days between the publication of the Widgery findings and Tony Blair’s announcement of a new enquiry, to be headed by Lord Mark Saville.

4,519 – the number of days between Blair’s announcement and the publication of Lord Saville’s report.

435 – the number of days of ‘Main Hearings’ held by the Saville Inquiry, which also held two days of preliminary hearings, two days of anonymous hearings, and five days of interlocutory hearings.

2,500 – the approximate number of statements received by Saville’s inquiry.

922 – the number of witnesses whose testimony was heard by Saville – over ten times the number called by Widgery.

30 million – the approximate number of words of testimony given to the Saville inquiry.

1,965 - the time, in days, taken by Saville and his team to prepare their full written report after the last day of hearings.

5,000+ – the number of pages in the printed edition of Lord Saville’s findings, split across ten volumes.

£190.3m - the costs incurred by the Saville Inquiry up to February 2010, including £15m in temporarily relocating to London to hear evidence from former soldiers who couldn’t travel to Derry over security concerns.

14,016 – the number of days between Bloody Sunday and the publication of the Saville Inquiry’s findings.

3,507 – the number of other people killed during The Troubles between 1969 and 2001.

So that’s blogging dead, then

Gav — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:14:36 +0000

Like a lot of Irish bloggy types I’ve been keeping an eye on the discussion over at Twenty Major‘s blog where a guest post by Una Mullally (formerly UnaRocks) has triggered a massive, and predictably sometimes overtly personal, discussion about whether the “Irish blogosphere” is over the hill.

As with most discussions, there’s good points to be made on both sides – even if both sides can get a bit grouchy and see a personal insult where there isn’t one to be seen – but feeling that I made a pig’s ear of my comment on the piece and wanting to address another point that isn’t being addressed in the comments, I thought I’d have my tuppence here. I’ll start by rewording my original comment and maybe going from there – the probably length of this post has led me to post it here rather than leave another thesis in the comments on the original.

Overall I think Una’s is a interesting piece and includes a few desperately-needed home truths – the fact that it’s provoked more than a few endorsements from commenters who are happy that Una has called the bluff of some circlejerky types where bloggers produce bad content but are encouraged to do more because of the backslappingthey get is a testament to this.

However, I think the comment left by Joe hits the nail quite squarely on the head: the notion of a ‘blogosphere’ is in itself a very cliquey phenomenon. Nobody refers to newspapers or broadcasters as existing in their own semi-autonomous platform and blogging shouldn’t be thought of in that way either. The problem with perpetuating this concept – that the ‘blogosphere’ is an independent platform where the values of what’s worth reading are somehow skewed from the rest of the world – only ends up endorsing this chasm of quality.

Personally I’d be uncomfortable with declaring Irish blogging being ‘over’ – as I wrote my comment on the piece, I noticed Suzy’s post revealing that Bertie Ahern’s book earnings have been declared tax-free, a piece that deserves to be picked up by the mainstream media because of its sheer newsworthyness. Blogs are only relevant as news sources if bloggers notice this kind of thing before a paid professional journalist can do it, and Suzy in one swoop has managed to proof that there’s life in the young dog yet. Likewise what the lads over at TheStory are doing in pointing out the abuse of public spending by certain people, and the attention they’re getting from other people for doing so.

There’s a world of difference between blogging being ‘over’ and the staple figures of early Irish blogging – Twenty, Rick, Una herself, Blogorrah – all moving on or finding their lifestyles changing as lifestyles inevitably do. For someone like myself who’s dabbled in it for about three-and-a-half years, the demise of Blogorrah or Twenty’s retirement were akin to a longrunning TV show being cancelled or the death of an elder statesman. Of course it changes the landscape a bit when a respected senior contributor disappears, but TV wasn’t dead when Gay Byrne quit the Late Late Show, nor was soap opera declared defunct when Brookside was cancelled.

Ireland exists in an unusual and somewhat perverse circumstance, where because of the everyone-knows-everyone-sure-isn’t-it-a-small-world culture we have in real life on this island, some people have an instinct to only read content that’s written by Irish people. This would be akin to people making a principled point in ignoring British TV or newspapers – it’s just too small a pool for many people of real impact to make any significant following.

Una comments that Ireland’s blogosphere has never been as vibrant as those of other countries to begin with, because

There’s no Gawker, no Perez, no Huffington.

I think if Ireland was bigger, there most certainly would be all of those sites – we’re a very gossipy race in Ireland. The problem is that for there to be an Irish Gawker or a Perez, we would need there to be an enormous talent pool of Irish celebrities to ensure a reasonable turnover of content, where there simply isn’t. An Irish Gawker would be an electronic form of the Sindo Life magazine – God saves us all. There’s no HuffPo or Guido-type character because Irish politics is nepotistic, petty and severely underresourced. Too little happens and when it happens it happens on a scale that’s of very little use to anyone. What’s more, if Ireland had a HuffPo or a Politico – and maybe that’s what Mark Little’s new venture might ultimately produce – there’d be very few people to read it, because with a population as small as Ireland’s, not only would current affairs coverage have limited appeal to begin with, but the nature of Ireland’s tech infrastructure means that there’s still only a limited proportion of people who actually have the means to read it. We often forget in Ireland how few people outside of the Pale and the other major cities have a decent internet connection; your average active citizen in Donegal, Roscommon or Clare might be very interested in the content of a Politico but simply doesn’t have a decent connection to read it. (They might have dial-up but they’re not going to use dial-up to check a site or an RSS reader every couple of hours without paying through the nose for it.)

Ireland is simply too small for this kind of stuff: it’s why we don’t have a Guardian or a real political spectrum of print media; why we don’t have any major domestic professional sports; and it’s why we have a constant chip on our shoulders about people telling us what we do is insignificant.

Blogging won’t ever be ‘over’. Bloggers just eventually do other things, just as journalists and broadcasters and people with any kind of hobby. There is no small irony that Una’s post was published on the blog of someone who has quit blogging before, by a former blogger themselves.

Una’s remark that 98% of blog content is rubbish is probably true, but that’s the same with most media. I used to read the Irish Independent but got bored of its constant editorialising. I now read The Irish Times but not on a daily basis, because I wish it would be more honest about its blatant pro-Labour agenda. The only paper I read regularly now is the Guardian because I admire its design and the resources it affords its writers, but even still I still largely read online so as to filter out a lot of what I consider crap (I had no interest in its Copenhagen coverage, and on the iPhone app I’d selected only content relating to football, other sport, media and technology to appear on the home screen because the rest doesn’t concern me). Perhaps it’s ironic that this isn’t an Irish medium but such is the world that all media, including blogs, now live in. Ireland’s Sunday papers are all quite poor too; the Sunday Times is too full of irrelevant Britspeak, the Sindo is only ever one nude Amanda Brunker picture away from exploding in a ball of its own semen, and Una’s own Tribune appears to be unable to decide what it wants to be, other than a permanent Government-basher (aside from the unfortunate fact that with dropping circulation, it has to keep cutting its pagination to stay alive). But again, TV isn’t dead; radio isn’t dead; journalism isn’t dead (it’s newspapers that are dying, not journalism itself).

One other point that Una made in her post that hasn’t been dissected in some way – and one that relates most personally to me, as someone with airs of trying to get a foot in the door of a paying job in some kind of media – was this:

Many seem to use blogging as their first stepping stone for getting on in other forms of media. Because of this, blogging will always be seen as rung number one on the media ladder, unless you work for the Irish Times or something and you’re dragged by the scruff of your neck into blogville. I think it’s only unfair in exceptions to describe blogging as anything else. The Irish blogsphere is populated by wannabes using a blog to broadcast themselves in the hope of latching on to other gigs, branding themselves as if their opinions or writing or indeed their ‘selves’ as a product is worth branding, and publicising various projects/work/whatever they’re undertaking outside of their blog. Why would anyone want to read that?

Student journalists and people like me are constantly being told that in order to set ourselves apart from the crowd in the quest to get recognised as a worthy contributor and picked up by ‘the mainstream’, we need to be jacks of all trades – we need to be able to produce copy, to edit it, to cut video, to record and treat audio, and to understand the platforms that all of this content uses. Essentially, we’re told we need to master all media, and the way to do this without being part of the bigger entities is to be users of the ‘new media’, of which blogging is the archetype. It might seem cheap, but for people in my shoes we’re expected to blog, and certainly don’t seem to be entertained for very long if we don’t.

I suspect that Una might be overstating it a little, but there certainly are a lot of Irish bloggers who want to latch onto other gigs and who brand themselves as being an entity. UnaRocks herself was one (albeit one that Una herself admits she got tired of, and one that she has abandoned by changing her Twitter username) and admitted in her final post that her online presence got her some gigs that her journalistic one wouldn’t have; Twenty is another, and was given a book deal for his work. Mulley is one too; he’s now able to make a full-time living out of it, and all credit to him. But again, that’s no different to other media.

What’s the difference between the ‘brand’ of Twenty Major and of Fintan O’Toole, or Vincent Browne, or Charlie Brooker or Richard Littlejohn or Terry Wogan or Pat Kenny or Ryan Tubridy or Gerry Ryan or Jeremy Clarkson or Perez Hilton – or, indeed, Una Mullally? There isn’t one – these are all people who make their living out of being a name, a brand themselves that people want to read. This is the nature of all columnists; they’re given the platform to write pretty much whatever they like, and the mere placement of their byline or headshot beside it is what gives it its prestige. There are people who read their output who wouldn’t read anything else in the platform in which it’s presented – Brooker readers who aren’t Guardian readers; Littlejohn readers who might never buy a copy of The Sun; and people (like me) who read O’Toole and Browne on irishtimes.com and Una’s column on Tribune.ie without buying the paper it’s printed in.

Blogging, therefore, shouldn’t be bastardised or stigmatised because there are people who trade and present themselves as being an entity of esteem, or a brand that people should be attentive to. It’s the basis of all media to have names that people will be attracted to, and that’s what keeps the world going around. Not only is it the prescribed mode for someone like me if I want to be taken on board, but seeing names like O’Toole and Browne is some of the reason people keep picking up the Irish Times, and seeing names like Mullally is one of the reasons people keep buying the Tribune, and keep Una employed and living in a swanky city-centre apartment with a turret.

That’s damn close to the lifestyle I’d like – so what’s an aspiring wordsmith to do?

Downtown in the… city?

Gav — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 10:05:59 +0000

A piece published in today’s Kilkenny People on the perpetual debate about whether Kilkenny is a city or not. It’s lucky that this place is such a hurling stronghold; I’ll be needing a few helmets today with the stoning I’m bound to get.

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It’s a debate that has plagued Kilkenny for decades, and a bone of contention that follows city natives wherever they go. It’s the classic clash of history versus the modern era; of sentiment versus realism; of past versus present.

And still the question burns: is Kilkenny really a city?

Those with a firm convinction will point to a few historical truths: Kilkenny was given a formal Royal charter declaring its city status in 1609, having notably celebrated the 400th anniversary of this date in the year just passing.

Others will, with justification, refer to the Confederate era – when for eight years, between 1641 and Cromwell’s arrival in 1649, Kilkenny was the nation’s capital. After all, who has ever heard of a ‘capital town’?

Looking beyond this, some would suggest that the charter conferred in 1207 by William Marshal, the first Earl of Pembroke – issued as constuction got underway on both St Canice’s Cathedral, the ancestral fulcrum on the town, and Kilkenny Castle – gave the town its city status. Though Marshal’s charter used the word ‘town’, it’s a matter of some debate whether the term ‘city’ was in wide usage in Ireland at the time. Proponents argue that, were the term ‘city’ applied at the time, Kilkenny would have easily merited it.

History, though is one matter; one could argue with the same veracity that Tara, in Meath, should merit city status having been the royal seat of Ireland in past millennia. The modern truth is a seperate matter.

So: where to start? A quick browse on every youngster’s favourite source for wholesale academic plagiarism – Wikipedia – leaves a confusing impact. “Kilkenny is described as a city”, it opens, before later continuing that the 2006 Census showed “the ‘Aggregate Town Area’ to have a population of 30,942″, but saying in the very next breath that this year “the ‘City of Kilkenny’ or ‘Kilkenny City’ celebrated its 400th since the granting of city status in 1609.”

It transpires, though, that even Wikipedia has been the site of some hostile debates on the subject. A quick glance at the ‘Discussion’ page – where users are asked to discuss significant amendments to articles before they are put in place – shows a long and sustained argument about whether the undeniable truth of Kilkenny’s one-time cityhood should be considered applicable in the modern age. So: very little help there.

How about elsewhere on the internet? A quick browse leads to a thread on a tourism website where the administrator has asked the simple question: ‘Is Kilkenny a city’?

Input, as one might expect, is once again divided. “Would you all just stop this ridiculous nonsense?” appeals Drina. “It’s not called the Medieval City and the Marble City for nothing, you know! Kilkenny is a city.”

“Hell no, it’s not a city,” counters Orla. “It’s the towniest town I’ve ever seen, and I should know because I live in the TOWN centre!”

Even with the natives, alas, no resolution. One contributor, Michael, sums it up best: “I grew up on High Street and was always aware that I lived in Ye Faire City… but we always met our friends ‘on the town’ or ‘down the town’ and we spent a lot of our free time walking up and down the town, in our …city?”

Seemingly, the internet will offer no consensus, and we must visit more formal legislation to resolve this conundrum.

Enter the Local Government Act 2001, which lists Ireland’s towns and cities, but declines to offer any clarification of how they are identified. The cities are: Cork, Dublin, Galway, Limerick and Waterford – and absolutely no mention of Kilkenny, which is listed formally as a ‘Borough’ – some sort of offspring limbo, dangling between the statuses of ‘city’ and ‘town’, along with its illegitimate siblings Clonmel, Drogheda, Sligo and Wexford.

It seems the strictest definition of Kilkenny’s status is interrelated to the status of counties. Cultural identity and GAA teams might lead us to forget, but there aren’t 32 counties in Ireland any more, there are significantly more. Dublin is considered a city because its territory does not fall within the remit of a County Council – the areas outside Dublin City are administered by the County Councils of Fingal, South Dublin, or the ineloquently-titled Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. Similarly, the area of Cork City is outside of the jurisdiction of Cork County Council. Not so with the local authorities of towns and boroughs, whose jurisdiction is complementary to that of the County Councils.

All of this, however, is coloured by a declaration early in the Act. The section that outlines the areas governed, and terms of reference, of the country’s City Councils, “is without prejudice to the continued use of the description city in relation to Kilkenny, to the extent that that description was used before the establishment day and is not otherwise inconsistent with this Act.”

Aha! So Kilkenny can be referred to as a city, but not in a way that portrays it as actually being one.

Glad we cleared that one up, then…

Seanad reform: Fixed terms?

Gav — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:55:21 +0000

Chatting to a friend this morning about the general laying of the political land – including that story about the Donegal County Council annual budget* – we ended up on the thorny issue of parliamentary reform and stumbled across the idea that while a fixed-term parliament (à la the United States) might not be a perfect system, the possibility of having one of two houses sit in fixed terms while the other sit to a maximum length was floated briefly.

In Ireland this would mean that while the Dáil would still sit to its maximum five-year term and be dissolved whenever necessary, while the Seanad would have a fixed term – it was suggested four years, so as to avoid the chance that it might end up running almost perfectly parallel to the Dáil and to stop it becoming as anonymous as the European Parliament (not of course that the Seanad is more relevant than EuroParl currently is).

It struck me as being a pretty good idea – instead of having the American system where either house could be swung by a single election, when polling for either house came around we’d have a fair bit of jostling to win public support. While the Seanad’s current inability to stop most Bills from passing outright would likely not be moved, surely we’d be a step farther away from the us-versus-you attitude that destroys so many parliaments?

What do you think – as part of a greater Seanad reform, wouldn’t a fixed term independent of all other bodies (the Dáil, local councils, the European Parliament) be a good idea?

* As an aside, if FF are part of an alliance in Donegal County Council that can elect a Mayor, why did they need to rush through a Budget vote when presumably their alliance was going to win it?