Gavan Reilly

Another one bites the dust. It might have a little more gravitas and invoke a little more patriotic sadness amongst the Irish community worldwide – particularly because Setanta pioneered ex-pat sports delivery to the global diaspora and its international arm continue to retain the worldwide rights to broadcast the GAA All-Ireland Championships on an international basis – but another fringe satellite channel has aimed too high, shot for the moon and failed to land amongst the stars.

Setanta was a wonderfully noble concept. Other satellite channels assumed they could grab the viewers in the hundreds of thousands and make a killing from premium phone lines. Setanta went for the bigger fish: why not try to get hold of the Premier League rights, or emerging fry like UFC?

There’s little to be said of Setanta’s life but thousands of miles of newsprint about the reasons it failed. The financial climate of course played its part, but realistically it came down to numbers. Setanta may only have gotten 69% of the customer base it needed to break even, but it still enticed 1.3m households to say, “yes, this is something I want to buy into”, and that’s no mean feat. What it may mean, though, is that Sky have simply become too big to compete with.

ESPN have swooped in to snap up the Premier League rights, arranging a standalone channel that’ll appear on the Sky platform (among others) and making a point of avoiding Setanta’s model of selling their own subscriptions. Whether the channel will be a pay-per-view effort like the short-lived PremPlus or whether Sky will have to pay ESPN to carry the channel, it’ll face a big uphill challenge trying to crack a monopoly that just keeps on growing and growing.

Will we miss it though? Well, it depends on what you got out of the channel. If you watched it for UFC, it’ll be on Bravo (probably) so things will live on just as they were. If you watched it for more innovative programming like Football Matters, hosted by the actually pretty great James Richardson, you’ll be hoping that some other channel takes back the not-so-groundbreaking-but-still-great formula of taking one fan from each club and putting them all in a room to talk to each other – it’s like Big Brother’s Big Mouth for sane people.

If, though, you watched it for the Premier League, will you miss it? Realistically, probably not. There was something parculiarly vacuous about Setanta’s Premiership coverage. The analysis was equally as bland and braindead as Sky’s (Jamie Redknapp saying Ronaldo is a “quality” player, versus Steve McManaman saying Ronaldo is a “great” player – spot the ball difference) but the actual match coverage seemed void and limp; even simple thinks like the volume of the crowd noise made the broadcasts pub-unfriendly and ultimately every match, no matter how high the Premier League stakes may have been, seemed like a token international friendly with nothing happening on screen, nothing happening in studio, and nothing happening in the subscriptions department.

I’ll miss Setanta, but only for the David versus Goliath notion that it was a pair of Irish lads who started off renting a pub in London to show an Ireland match in Italia 90, versus News Corp, BSkyB, Rupert Murdoch and Jamie fucking Redknapp. The understated approach hasn’t worked; now let’s see just how wrong ESPN get it in judging the tone that sports in Britain sits best in.

Anyway. That’s that, this is how it unfolded (via the self-adulating method of my own Twitter account), and this is how Setanta Sports News wrapped up, a mere 112 minutes after the company slipped away.

PS – credit for the title of this post goes to the hilariously funny Football365 Twitter account, @f365.

First of all, let none of what I say take away from the fact that Oasis were simply awesome, and are still effortlessly brilliant at the top of their game. So musically, Slane was fine.

I had never been to Slane before, a shameful fact for a concert-going Meathman, and despite having had tickets to see Oasis at four various intervals before – Lansdowne Roads, Witnnesses, etc – and only making it to one of those gigs, an epic at The Point in December 2005, when the tickets came up this time I simply had to go. An open air gig with 80,000 other people, seeing perhaps my favourite band of all time… what could go wrong?

Organisationally, Slane 2009 was an absolute shambles.

That’s what I said at 3am, and I don’t feel much better now, even after getting about 10 hours of sleep.

If you’ve ever been to open-air gigs in Marlay Park or the Phoenix Park, or (as I’m told) at Oxegen, you’ll be familiar with the general modus operandi of Dublin Bus. They park all their vehicles in one field, which is clearly signposted and displayed on the way out of the venue. If you want one of said buses, you walk into the field, buy a ticket if you need to, and go to the nearest available bus. Once this bus is full, it drives away, and thus the volume of bus traffic on the roads is economised as much as possible.

Now Slane, I should concede, isn’t in the middle of a larger urban area, and so it doesn’t have a vast array of public transport that you can take there anyway. It’s a rural setting, with rural roads prepared only for everyday rural traffic. Country roads aren’t meant to carry 80,000 people but that’s not Slane’s fault and they shouldn’t be blamed for it.

Where Slane and MCD need to take blame, though, is for not making the best of the bad hand the setting deals them. Instead of the tried-and-tested Dublin Bus formula mentioned above – which, incidentally, are all venues or festivals operated by MCD, so they can’t claim not to have any organisational experience or capability – what happens in Slane is sheer amateurism. Buses dropping people mid-road on the way down is acceptable; with the human traffic and the width of the roads it is simply impractical to do any better. But on the way out, instead of the usual formula, buses – and I don’t blame Dublin Bus or Bus Éireann here, I blame MCD and the Gardaí – are simply parked on the sides of the same narrow road, and set off on the road back to Dublin when full.

The problem here, of course, and the problem Ciara and I fell into, is that because we made a point of walking quickly as soon as the gig finished, and getting into one of the first Bus Éireann vehicles – a bus we were shepherded into by the staff on duty, we ended up trapped behind other parked buses further, hemmed in by human traffic, and sardined in with nowhere to go. Instead of sending us further down the road so as to keep the road as empty as possible, the organisers made a bad situation worse. Why not rent a road and have all the buses sitting in it, keeping the road as empty as possible? It wouldn’t be difficult, expensive or resource-heavy. Send the Bus Éireann travellers one way, the Dublin Bus users in another, and keep the road empty of all traffic except for the filled-up buses. Don’t put us all in one direction and then handicap those of us who get out early by making us the last ones to hit the open road. The music finished just before 11; after the long walk (again, not the venue’s fault) back to the bus, we boarded our vehicle at 11.40pm and the engine revved up only five minutes later. Great, we thought, we might be back in Dublin before 1.

Sadly, inevitably, we ended up moving about 500m within the first two hours, another 2km in the following, and only hit the M2 back to Dublin at about 3. We arrived on Bachelor’s Walk at 4.05pm, nearly four and a half hours after we boarded, on a bus largely desperate to find a toilet and universally hungry, pissed off that they now couldn’t get a taxi or Nitelink home (4am is taxi blackout territory; it’s when everyone’s getting home from nightclubs), and wondering if they’d ever bother going to Slane again. Walking home, we made it in the door at 4.50am, six hours after the music had finished. This would be acceptable if we’d lived somewhere rural and had to accept a long trudge home, but not when we live in Dublin City Centre with the best public transport coverage anywhere in the country.

Just in case you think I managed to get particularly unlucky, or am turning crackpot at my Bus Éireann cabin fever, do a Twitter Search for “Slane bus”.

And another thing – I understand that without limits, people – and especially Irish people – go a little mad with their alcohol. But when you’re dealing with 80,000 people and you only have three bars, going beyond the usual four-pints-per-person rule and only giving each person two drinks at a time, and causing such a backlog that people end up queueing to get into a queue for drinks, is bad management.

Overall, Slane isn’t a bad musical venue. It’s not a brilliant one, but it’s forged itself a tradition and set a new standard for open-air concerts in Ireland in the 25 years since its first gig. There’s only been three gigs there in the last six summers, though, and one has to wonder whether it’s either that Slane have gotten out of practice, or whether Ireland has just gotten used to better treatment at its concerts. I can’t help thinking, though, that Slane would be a much better gig if there were 20,000 fewer people at it. Causing people to double up in queues for drinks, hindering the flow of human traffic pretty much everywhere in the venue, is simply bad practice. Not having any system organised for buses, though, is just plain stupidity.

Oasis were brilliant, but if another gig comes up at Slane and I can’t be sure that I’ll get home before it turns bright again, or if I have to spend four and a half hours on a bus with no toilet and no food, and end up on Twitter in bed at 5am like I did below, I might vote with my feet and spend €85 on a ticket for something else. And it might just be me, but with online petitions springing up today complaining about the length of queues and everything else, I might not be the only one.

Wow, a post I’ve had sitting in my Drafts folder since late December, and an argument that I’m now finding the right time to articulate as best I’d like to.

It seems that the more we woke up from our election hangover over the last ten days, and analysed to death what the results might mean if they were to trigger a general election (and with a Dáil majority of six, why the Government would ask the country to kick it out would be beyond me), and the Sunday Tribune interestingly, but ultimately academically, wonders just how many seats Fianna Fáil would have lost if it had been a general election. All of a sudden, the opposition parties are asked not to consider, but to rule out, the prospect of coalition with Fianna Fáil.

[Edit, 11.44am: I’ve just uploaded a spreadsheet with the hypothetical results as outlined by the Tribune last Sunday. Click here to download – it’s an Excel 2003 file inside a zip folder.]

In all honestly, it’s a fallacy to claim that the Irish Civil War ended in 1923. The two main political parties that arose from the great conflict over the Anglo-Irish Treaty (as an aside, it’s odd how the words ‘Anglo-Irish’ so consistent stirs up such vitriol in the Irish public…) still thrive; Fianna Fáil, founded on the basis of opposition to Ireland’s wilful accession to the Commonwealth, only recently postponed plans to move into Northern Ireland or merge with the SDLP, while Fine Gael, the party that held together in support of Michael Collins as he took on the imperial and negotiative might of the British, rides the wave of public sympathy like never before. But one has to wonder, aside from the merit of their continuing sparring, whether there was even much point to their falling-out in the first place. It’s universally acknowledged that, fully aware Britain would not concede full republic status to Ireland, de Valera pawned Michael Collins off with the task instead, thus abdicating responsibility for the inevitable failure. Surely, then, such a problem could easily have been forseen? Either Ireland would have to take the first step towards independence or get nothing at all. Was there even much basis to get all hot-and-bothered in the first place about the fact Ireland didn’t score the impossible victory it craved? The Civil War was simply an inevitable one: neither side would ever have been happy. In fact, to this day, neither has been. Even Dev’s opinion changed over time: he later regretted the opposition to the Treaty in the first place, the very reason he had founded the Fianna Fáil party. It is a cruel irony that 86 years after the end of the Civil War, Britain’s best-case-scenario – that of a cruelly divided Irish state too busy bickering within itself to achieve real progress – lives on, in spite of a national identity that too often defines itself as being Anything But Britain.

There is a great democratic argument for a Grand Coalition, and that’s without surmising that Ireland might soon find itself just as Germany did in 2005 – with no obvious power bloc and the inevitable need for the two main parties to get over their differences in order to govern. In the last General Election, 68.8% of voters chose either of the two main parties. That’s an overwhelming majority ably described as “most people”. The time before, it was 65% – again, a safe majority. Yet, “most people” didn’t vote for Fianna Fáil in 2007 – just 41.6% of people chose to do so. Similarly, 69.1% of people chose not to give their first preference to a Fine Gael candidate. In fact, since their collective existence, there has never been an Irish general election where the parties didn’t collectively accrue at least 65% of the vote, while neither party has ever broken through the 50% barrier to claim an absolute majority of the will of the people.

Thus, these two parties cannot individually claim to have ever represented Ireland’s true will – but a Grand Coalition can, and always could. If the notion of democracy is that the people are ruled according to their will, what could be more democratic than fixing a Government that would never have enjoyed less than 65% of the electorate’s mandate?

Furthermore, let’s take a step backward and just examine Ireland’s political landscape for a moment. Are Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael really all that incompatable? Are they even any different at all? What are their differing policies? Fianna Fáil’s main policy seems to be ‘We endorse any Government involving Fianna Fáil”. Fine Gael’s is ‘We endorse any Government that doesn’t involve Fianna Fáil.’ Since the parties stopped confronting their only real differences – the aforementioned Civil War – on a daily basis, their only difference has been internal culture, and the differing degrees to which the internal turf wars end up with blood being spilt. Say what you like about Fianna Fáil’s notoriously brutal conventions and the internal schism between Haughey and Colley, but you don’t hear about their parliamentary meetings ending in walkouts and blazing rows; whereas Fine Gael’s… well… The end point is that there’s no reason for the parties not to get along – they have no ideological bases from which to join, they occupy the same one. Both are centrist, right-leaning, neo-liberal parties. All they argue about is administration – use this system here, cut those quangoes there. Why not get them into a room to define a programme for Government? A Tallaght Accord for the new millennium?

It’s a sad state of affairs that in that most noble of bloodsports, politics, Ireland can’t claim to have a truly functioning democracy. Every few years we bounce along to the ballots, enthused by plans of great legacy or real social change, and end up replacing one centre-right, introverted party with another, only noticing some real change when Labour aren’t tagging along as the junior partners. Let’s get a Grand Coalition going, then let’s make Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael realise that there are no differences between them; that there is no reason why they shouldn’t shack up and become the single party they were always meant to be. God willing, they’d get it together, and then we might experience something akin to the birth of the PDs, but three- or four-fold: the Grand Fragmentation into a few different blocs, all of whom share an actual political opinion or ideology. We might finally rescue ourselves and have a political scene that uses the same colours, and opinions, and ideals, and debates as everyone else. The chance to elect a Socialist, a Liberal, or a Conservative government, and experience the unique joys and pains of each.

But no. On we trundle, periodically giving Tweedledum a time-out while Tweedledee gets a run off the subs bench, hoping to impress the bosses and win a starting spot for the next match, only to be told that we’re not picking a Government on form, but rather by moderate rotation. Maybe thinking of politics as Ireland’s favourite bloodsport isn’t all that far removed; but maybe we ought to be investigating ourselves for match-fixing on a gigantic scale.

Maybe things might change. Maybe when we next bounce along to the polls, being flooded with promises of how we’re going to ride the next economic wave in a more socially responsible way, we’ll return a combination of TDs that mean a grand coalition is the only way a government can survive. If Fine Gael’s group in the European Parliament is willing to convalesce with the group Fianna Fáil are trying to get into, why can’t they do the same domestically? Maybe next time things might change.

Maybe, just maybe.

In a slightly-scheduled interruption to regular service, a quick plug for the missus‘s new social venture.

Dublin Twook Club is, well, on the face of it, mostly self-explanatory. It’s based in Dublin – well, actually, specifically in @119leesonstreet – and it’s a book club, organised over Twitter! Thus, Twook Club! (I had suggested ‘Page 119’ but someone had taken the Twitter username.)

It’s a fun, social, and informal monthly get-together to gather round with a drink or two and chat about, well, books, plus inevitably whatever else is tickling your fancy now. Monthly meet-ups will be in our gaff, the aforementioned 119, and co-ordinated through the @DublinTwookClub Twitter account and through the blog Ciara’s set up for the purpose, at http://dublintwookclub.wordpress.com/ (where hopefully I’ll have some sort of sign-up mechanism later on).

Importantly, though, we’re not restricting this to Twitter users, so we’d appreciate if you’d spread the word – just click http://short.ie/TwookClubRT to retweet the message. There’s honestly no limit to the membership so tell anyone who might be interested.

So… go get started. Tweet your suggestions on what the first book we cover should be to the @DublinTwookClub Twitter account, and keep an eye on the DublinTwookClub blog – and of course the Twitter – for more details.

…or does adult society have a nasty habit of forgetting how life was when it was in its youth?

Just saw a poll on Breaking News.ie.

A study has revealed that homophobic bullying is widespread among teenagers. Have you experienced this?

Show me a teenager or young adult who hasn’t and I’ll show you an emphatic liar.

“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders, and love chatter in places of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”

A quote not from last year, or last week, but by Socrates. Thousands of years ago. Maybe we’d do well to remember that society isn’t fucked, it’s just repetitive.