Category Archives: Misc

This evening.

Seanad Eireann,

Earlier…

Minister for Children, Equality, Disability Integration and Youth Roderic O’Gorman (centre) at Dublin castle this morning

This afternoon.

Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman is to apologise in the Dail later to the upwards of 20,000 people who were affected by illegal birth registrations.

However…

….via RTE News:

Documents released to RTÉ News under Freedom of Information, show that a series of meetings on the redress scheme have taken place between Mr O’Gorman and leaders of the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland as well as religious congregations.

However, agreement has not yet been reached.

The Government cannot compel contributions, but it is requesting orders to help pay for some of the cost of the €800 million redress scheme.

The six religious orders are the Bon Secours sisters, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, Sisters of St John of God, Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Sisters of Mercy and the Daughters of Charity as well as a Catholic lay organisation, the Legion of Mary.

The issue of eliciting contributions from religious orders has proved controversial following a 2002 deal which limited the amount to €128 million.

The Residential Institutions Redress Scheme from that time has cost at least €1.25 billion.

No agreement on religious orders’ redress contribution in mother-and-baby home scheme (RTE)

Previously: “The Church Would Never Had Been Coming Up With €1.5 Billion”

Sasko Lazarov/RollingNews

Above from left: Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin TD; Minister for Finance, Paschal Donohoe TD; and Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Michael McGrath at Dublin Castle earlier

This afternoon.

Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Michael McGrath has has said the taxpayer will pay 70% of extra inflation costs on public building projects.

Via RTÉ News:

Mr McGrath said that the cost of transporting building materials are rising and there are also ongoing delays in delivering these materials.

He warned that some building work might never be finished if the State did not intervene to address soaring costs.

In the interests of safeguarding public building projects, a new framework will be drawn up to “share the financial burden” with the State to complete the works.

Under this scheme, the State will pay up to 70% of the additional costs caused by inflation.

The minister said that the cost of this intervention is likely to run to €30 million to €40m for the first three months of this year.

Good times.

Govt to pay 70% of inflation costs on public building projects (RTE)

Sasko Lazarov/Rollingnews

This afternoon.

Bono’s 40-chapter (!) memoir called Surrenderis due out on November 1.

Bono sez:

“When I started to write this book, I was hoping to draw in detail what I’d previously only sketched in songs. The people, places, and possibilities in my life. Surrender is a word freighted with meaning for me.

“Growing up in Ireland in the seventies with my fists up (musically speaking), it was not a natural concept. A word I only circled until I gathered my thoughts for the book. I am still grappling with this most humbling of commands. In the band, in my marriage, in my faith, in my life as an activist. Surrender is the story of one pilgrim’s lack of progress. . . With a fair amount of fun along the way.”

Surrender By Bono

Late Late Show host Ryan Tubridy (left) and architect Dermot Bannon, presenter of RTÉ’s Room to Improve in 2017

Get a room.

Via Frank Armstrong in Cassandra Voices (full article at link below):

In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being Czech author Milan Kundera explains that kitsch is an aesthetic ideal ‘in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist’. This he argues, ‘is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.’ The Montrose cultural bubble has long served a crucial political purpose: denying shit while everyone acts as though it does not exist.

…Through no fault of his own, the feel good factor of Dermot Bannon’s show obscures the suffering associated with an enduring and arguably preventable housing crisis, and also, more broadly, provides an insight into how the Irish overreaction to Covid-19 occurred; which has done incalculable damage to the lives of children especially.

It seems that our best, and perhaps only, response in Ireland to these traumas is comedy, but this has clear pitfalls.

…..Room To Improve is devoted to the improvement of private dwellings in the possession of a shrinking middle class still transfixed by the ups and downs of the Irish property market. It is instructive that according to Daft at the start of May, 2022 there are just over one thousand properties available to rent in all of Ireland at a point when the Irish government has just committed to welcoming tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine. Is it any wonder so many people are disinclined to have children.

…In essence Room to Improve translates into: how can someone increase the market value of their property. The lurking presence of the celebrity quantity surveyor ensures that any project is seen in terms of adding financial value to the holding.

It is particularly tone deaf as we reach another high-water mark in an ongoing housing crisis. Missing on RTÉ is serious engagement with the corruption of a planning process, which lies behind enduring inequalities and sprawl, or the financial structures that embed generational inequalities, and permit a creeping dominance of transnational capitalism.

It is not that housing dysfunction is denied on RTÉ – that we are lied to as such – it is that the issues are almost completely ignored amidst the day-to-day mixture of light entertainment and vox pop nonsense that are their mainstays. Room to Improve is a form of kitsch because it denies the shitstorm going on in the society around it.

…It also appears that RTÉ’s longstanding tendency to bury shitness – which is also evident in legacy print media – led to the catastrophic handling of Covid-19 in Ireland…

…It will be many years before we come to terms with what happened during Covid-19 around the world, and confront the traumas, especially to children, of living through lockdowns. It is instructive that despite having the youngest population in the EU, Irish children were subjected to the longest school closures. Simply blaming teaching unions ignores how teachers were subjected to relentless fear messaging that made them reluctant to do their jobs, despite international data from early on showing that their concerns were generally misguided.

Yet for RTÉ ‘The deadly virus’ of COVID-19 seemed to arrive as a godsend – and an advertising windfall, or so-called Covid bounce. A slavish devotion allowed the channel to almost completely ignore all other difficult news for the best part of a year-and-a-half. The daily totals of cases and deaths, uncritically conveyed, became the staple of every radio and television news bulletin and headline on their website.

Then, almost overnight, the issue vanished from sight, without any kind of meaningful post-mortem or reflection on the damage inflicted on the patchwork of communities that make up our society.

It gives way to relentless coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – thick on spectacle and almost devoid of critical analysis. Images of wasted buildings now bury discussion of other stories [more at link below]

RTE Kitsch: Room to Improve (Frank Armstrong, Cassandra Voices)

RollingNews

This afternoon.

Sinn Fein president Mary Louy McDonald described the proposed ownership structure as “convoluted and messy” and contended that it enabled the Saint Vincent’s Hospital Group to use the value of the land as “leverage” for future financial transactions.

The Sinn Féin leader said the leasing agreement for 299 years “does not amount to public ownership”.

In reply, the Taoiseach Micheál Martin said that suggesting a 299 year lease does not equate to State ownership is “being dishonest”, adding: “There is only so much nonsense that can be accommodated here.”

He added:

“It’s not our land, never was our land, it’s a gift essentially at a tenner a year for 300 years…”

Sinn Féin calls for State ownership of new national maternity hospital land (RTE)

RollingNews

Only 10% of the headliners for TradFest Temple Bar 2022, are women and only 15% of headliners at the Doolin Folk Festival are women

This afternoon.

FairPlé analysed the line-ups of 16 festivals and concluded that, on average, women make up only 24.9% of the performers.

They write:

FairPlé is making a direct call out to all promoters, festival organisers and event programmers to make substantive gender balance a priority. There are plenty of amazing women, non-binary and gender-fluid artistes out there, but we are not getting to see or hear all of them. Details of many musicians can be found in our directory.

We are calling on festival funders and sponsors to take a proactive approach to the gender balance of the events you are supporting. At a minimum, all public funding should be conditional upon monitoring and reporting on gender balance of all aspects of the funded events.

Anyone?

The Festival Line-up Challenge (FairPlé)

Dr Ronan Glynn, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Department of Health will leave his post at the end of the month

Hmm.

This afternoon.

More as we get it.

Dr Ronan Glynn resigns as Deputy CMO (RTE)

Meanwhile…

Dr Tony Holohan, CMO, and Dr Ronan Glynn, deputy CMO, in 2020

…Social Democrats Health Spokesperson Róisín Shortall said:

“Questions must now be asked of the Health Minister about the departure of the two most senior people tasked with leading the public health response to Covid-19. The Department of Health is chiefly to blame for Dr. Tony Holohan’s proposed secondment to Trinity College being abandoned.

“Is that controversy also at the root of Dr Glynn’s decision to leave the public service?

“There have now been a number of high profile resignations during Health Minster Stephen Donnelly’s tenure in office. The two individuals tasked with implementing Sláintecare, Sláintecare executive director and Department of Health assistant secretary Laura Magahy and Chairman of the Sláintecare Implementation Advisory Committee Tom Keane, resigned last year because of resistance within the HSE and the Department of Health to implementing the plan.

“Meanwhile, Dr Tony Holohan and HSE chief operations officer Ann O’Connor also tendered their resignations recently. Given the exodus of high level staff from the Department of Health and the health service, questions must now be asked of the Minister leading that Department.

“We have heard a lot recently about lessons being learned within the Department. Is the Minister satisfied that staff are properly supported, or are there further lessons the Minister needs to learn about retaining highly qualified people in their hugely important roles?”

RollingNews


What you may need to know.

1.  Just ‘dropped;

2. The first teaser trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water (also known as Avatar 2), the second film in James Cameron‘s Avatar franchise, following Avatar (2009).

3. Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Stephen Lang, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore, Dileep Rao, CCH Pounder, and Matt Gerald all reprise their roles from the original film, with Sigourney Weaver returning in a ‘different role[.

4. New cast members include Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Edie Falco, Brendan Cowell, Michelle Yeoh, Jemaine Clement, Oona Chaplin, Vin Diesel, and CJ Jones.

5. The addition of three more sequels (to the first one) and the necessity to develop new technology in order to film performance capture scenes underwater, a feat never accomplished before, led to significant delays to allow the crew more time to work on the writing, preproduction, and visual effects.

6. Preliminary shooting for the film started in Manhattan Beach, California, on August 15, 2017, followed by principal photography simultaneously with Avatar 3 in New Zealand on September 25, 2017; filming concluded in late September 2020, after over three years of shooting, despite production being interrupted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

7. The film’s cinema release has been subject to eight delays, with the latest occurring on July 23, 2020; it is currently planned for a release on December 16, 2022, with the following three sequels to be released, respectively, on December 20, 2024, December 18, 2026 and December 22, 2028.

Andy’s verdict:CGI Tuesday!

Release: December 16, 2022.