Lorraine Hall, Fine Gael Local Election candidate in Dun Laoghaire.
Ken writes:
Lorraine works as a lobbyist for IBEC and is campaign lead for the Alcohol and Beverage Federation of Ireland (ABFI). As we all know, anti-social behaviour and excessive alcohol consumption go hand-in-hand…
Hic.
This afternoon.
Project Arts Centre, Temple Bar, Dublin 2
To mark the one-year anniversary of the referendum vote in favour of repealing the Eighth Amendment, a gathering of pro-choice volunteers met outside the project Arts Centre organised by the former Co-Directors of Together for Yes, Ailbhe Smyth (red Jacket), Orla O’Connor (glasses), and Gráinne Griffin (Red Dress).
Roz Purcell
On The Late Late Show.
Sarah Whiteacre writes:
Following 30 years in Toronto, tenor Colm Wilkinson is back on home soil and joins host Ryan Tubridy to take a look back at his glistening career, as well as treating us to a song.
After weeks of canvassing and debate, the RTÉ/TG4 Exit Poll results will be announced live in studio following the close of polls by David McCullagh and Páidí Ó Lionaird…
Author and influencer Roz Purcell spent years basing her self-worth on how much she weighed, but it took her sister Rachel to be diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukaemia for her outlook to change. Roz and Rachel join Ryan to discuss the events that led to this realisation…
Following his retirement from club and international football back in March, former Ireland player Jonathan Walters joins Ryan to chat about how the death of his mother at a young age had such an influence on his career…
Inter-county referee David Gough is the only openly gay referee working with the GAA, and David joins Ryan to discuss what it was like to come out in the sporting world…
Music will be from The Coronas and Ryan will be chatting with Danny from the band about their new single and upcoming tour of Ireland.
The Late Late Show, on RTÉ One tomorrow at 9.35pm.
This afternoon.
Government Buildings, Dublin 2.
King Carl XVI Gustaf with Leo Varadkar in the Taoiseach’s office on the second day of the king’s state visit to Ireland.
Before talks began, King Carl assembled the coffee table from a deceptively small flat pack.
Earlier: Hurley Gurdy
Fanship never ends.
Ahead of The Spice Girls concert at Croke Park tomorrow, Anthony Delaney discusses his enduring love for the all-girl group. Anthony is featured among 5 short documentaries on Irish Spice Girl Superfans available now on the RTÉ Player.
Watch docs here
Thanks Claire McQuaid
Clockwise from top left: Áine Kerr, Mark Hennessy, Kate Shanahan and Ian Kehoe
This morning.
On RTÉ’s Today with Seán O’Rourke.
There was a segment on the future of news following on from the news that 17 of 20 positions at The Times Ireland edition – which is owned by News International which also owns The Sunday Times and The Irish Sun – will be made redundant.
It’s being reported that the journalists who will be chosen for the three positions will be required to produce four to six news or politics stories a day for the online edition that will remain.
On the panel was Irish Times news editor Mark Hennessy, COO of Kinzen and former Irish Independent journalist and former head of journalism partnerships at Facebook Áine Kerr, former editor of the Sunday Business Post Ian Kehoe, and Head of Journalism and Senior Lecturer at Technological University Dublin Kate Shanahan.
From the discussion…
Áine Kerr said:
“We are coming out of this moment of ‘move fast’ and ‘break things’ and during that moment of the last 15-20 years, platforms built algorithms, based on emotion, based on click bait and for newsrooms to keep up with that and find their audience on these platforms, they had to build faster content everywhere.
“And what has happened is that people are overwhelmed. They’ve had enough and people are saying ‘less is more’ and that’s the future of journalism. It’s going to mean quality, leaner but slow news.”
She later added:
“I think you have to accept that the adverting model, as we know it, is broken. And people are clearly saying that. One in 10 people are blocking advertisements online. 66% of Americans are saying ‘we feel overwhelmed’. Something like one in 10 users are changing their privacy settings because they’re saying ‘I don’t want to be tracked across the internet by these advertisers’ so we have to rethink the models here.”
She also said:
“We, as journalists, tend to obsess on the supply of our journalism and not think about the demand. And amplifying why is journalism important. And there is a moment here where we have to listen to people and see the research that’s shown us that the millennial generation will pay for news.
“There’s been a green shoot in the US from 4% to 17% in the space of a year. The Netflix, Spotify generation are paying for news.”
“…they are saying very clearly – we want a transparent journalism, we want to understand how the sausage is made, we want to see local journalism, we want to see diversity in your newsrooms so that people see themselves represented in it.
“They want to see a people-powered journalism – that you go out to the community and say: what is happening, what should we be covering?…”
Mark Hennessy said:
“You [Mr O’Rourke] said earlier that nobody is increasing circulation. I would point out to you that The Irish Times’ circulation revenue increased by 2% last year…we look at print and digital together…and our digital revenues are increasing at a rate which is higher than our print circulation losses. So it depends on the product which a publisher puts forward.”
Asked how many people are working in The Irish Times now, when it’s circulation is around 60,000 compared to when it was double that, Mr Hennessy said:
“I think the figures today are around 200 and the figures previously would have been around 250 but I’m open to correction on that.”
Mr Hennessy also told the show that he returned to The Irish Times in Dublin after working in London in September 2015.
He said he spent a lot of time working in courts and that, over the 18 months prior to his move back to Dublin, England lost a third of its court reporters.
He said:
“The public, not the press, the public needs people in councils, at inquests, at trials, at all of the issues of public administration. This isn’t the plea for our existence. If media isn’t wanted by people, people will go off and do something else. That’s not the issue at hand.
“[Thomas] Jefferson said, faced with between the choice of a free government or a free press, he would take a free press.”
Mr Hennessy later added:
“Print will always exist in our working lifetimes. The audience is going to change…”
Mr Kehoe said:
“When I was editing the Business Post you were hit with trying to maintain your print sales and grow digital sales and cut costs, it’s quite an uncompelling job proposition but that’s what most newspaper editors are asked to do – it’s kind of those three things.
“…If you look at the advertising trajectory, people are pulling money out of the printed paper but that money isn’t going into the online product. Google and Facebook and a couple of the other social media giants are mopping up about 95% of all the online adverting revenue in Ireland…
“So RTE, The Irish Times, The Sunday Business Post – they’re all competing for that 5% of that, call it mainstream non-social media advertising revenue.”
In respect of reports that three journalists at Times Ireland website will be required to produce four to six articles a day, he said:
“This is my biggest concern about journalism. It’s people having to fill a newspaper – sitting at their desk, just rewriting press releases as quick as they can and putting it online. So people aren’t thinking about what a story actually means.
“They’re in a race against everybody else to get it up online without actually sitting back and saying ‘well, what’s the import and the importance of this story?’
“Could you get five or six stories out of a journalist on a given day. Absolutely. Will they be any good? Probably not.”
Mr Hennessy responded to the latter point made by Mr Kehoe saying:
“There’s no value in that. I mean if that is the future of the business, we may as well go home. We went in, very deliberately, in terms of quality online. OK you get the occasional whimsical piece online but we don’t do cat videos or we might have done it once but I don’t think we’ve done it anymore.”
“...If you look at our highest figures, they’ve all been for really serious work.”
Mr Kehoe later called for the VAT rate on newspapers to be dropped to 0% – something which has been campaigned for by Newsbrands Ireland.
Kate Shanahan said:
“I think one problem newspapers have, and all media have is losing that relationship and Ian referred to it. If you’re out, sitting at your desk, rewriting press releases, getting the odd quote from a politician, you are not doing good journalism.
“You’re not on the streets, you’re not hearing what’s happening around the country.
“I was down in Kerry last weekend, I’m reading all the local newspapers – which I absolutely love, the local newspapers down there – and I’m telling you, I’m reading them and I’m going: I’m not getting this from the Dublin media. We’re not there.”
Meanwhile, earlier in the segment, as they were talking about the Times Ireland edition job losses, Mr Kehoe said:
“The tabloids across the News International portfolio had been struggling a little bit over the last two or three years and, you know, no one is really going to say ‘we’re going to take massive costs out of the Sun’ but so it was kind of low-hanging fruit to look at Ireland and say ‘well, look, has it made the traction we would have hoped?’. Perhaps not. ‘Is it going in the right direction?’ Maybe. ‘Can we get some easy savings there without really impacting on anyone in Britain or anyone in the tabloid market?'”
It should be noted around 13 people working in sub-editing and art desk roles were very recently made redundant in The Irish Sun.
Previously: Best Of Times, Worst Of Times
Listen back in full here
Behold: the Bentley Bentayga Bengala (it just trips off the tongue, doesn’t it?) – a limited edition, steroidal version of the Bentayga SUV from Spanish tweak-house Bengala Automotive Design SL.
For buyers who regard the stock Bentayga as a little too refined for rallying, this version (of which only 15 will be made, ensuring exclusivity) is further enhanced with a massive front guard and LED light-bar, flared fenders and all-terrain tyres on bespoke wheels with running boards and side exhausts.
From top: Fine Gael Td Maria Bailey; Eamonn Kelly
It is likely that the swinging TD fell backwards off the child’s swing onto the back of her head, since if she had fallen forwards from the swing she would most certainly have fallen on her face.
Attractive and all as this picture may be to some, it is almost certain that she simply fell backwards off the swing, because during the fall she also apparently hurt her back and hip, which indicates a backward fall, most likely occuring within mere moments of having taken her seat.
Representatives for the hotel contend that the swinging TD allegedly had both hands full, meaning, we can only suppose, that she was not in a position to hold onto the swing to keep her balance, and simply believed that she could sit on the swing, hands free without holding on, and trust to her safety on what is essentially a moveable seat dangling from strings. The very epitome of instability. A bit like a Labour seat.
So, with no hands, the Fine Gael TD, proud representative of a party who are sternly against litigation culture, allegedly sat onto the swing, the seat of which presumably moved forward under the weight of her TD seat, causing the TD to flip backwards onto her head as earlier described, unable, it would seem, at the first sense of danger, to grab on to anything, since her hands were otherwise occupied; though it is not clear from reports what exactly was occupying her hands, since to state exactly what she might have been holding could prejudice the case, I guess.
It might well have been a smart phone in one hand, or a handbag, or even an envelope, with something similar or different in the other hand, though what that something else might have been in the TD’s hand on “a night out”, no one is brave enough to conjecture.
Whatever was occupying the TD’s hands, causing her to flip backwards off the swing like a latter-day Nadia Comaneci, seems, in all reports, to be a secondary consideration to the fact that she was able to flip backwards off the swing at all.
That there were no safeguards in place to prevent a TD on a night out from flipping accidentally backwards onto her head.
Surely, in a civilized country that boasts a propensity to generously service landlords while leaving 10,000 people homeless, some form of protection could be provided to ensure that TDs on a night out be minded at all times and in all eventualities.
From this perspective the TD’s legal representatives implied that there should be supervisors posted next to swings to prevent such accidents ever happening, as presumably there should also be supervisors posted around all the coasts of Ireland, especially the cliffs, to prevent people falling off the country, particularly people on nights out, with their hands full.
But whatever about the implications of public service supervisors posted like guardian angels all over Ireland, the upshot of the swing tragedy was that the TD, once sufficiently recovered from her somewhat ungracious backflip, and with her TD wits regained, decided to sue the hotel for…well, for €60,000 actually, or two-thirds of a TD’s salary, or €10,000 more than a TD’s pension, or roughly 5 times the amount of the state old-age pension.
One spokesperson speculated that the negligence claim may have been the result of a fit of pique when the TD caught someone laughing as she lay bundled in a heap on her head in a classic Irish Yoga position. This theory certainly has legs.
Eamonn Kelly is a freelance journalist,
Yesterday: Losing Her Seat
Free tonight?
The Wedding Present begin their Irish tour tonight in Cork’s Cyprus Avenue to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their seminal ‘Bizarro’ album, which they’ll be playing in full.
Although singer Dave Gedge is the only surviving member of the Leeds-formed group from 1989, the Weddoes remain one of the best live bands on the planet.
The tour continues on Friday night in Limerick Dolan’s Warehouse; Saturday in Dublin Academy; and Sunday in Belfast Empire Music Hall.
Meanwhile, there’s a special one-off screening of ‘Something Left Behind’ – a new documentary about the band’s 1987 masterpiece ‘George Best’ – in Dublin’s IFI cinema on Saturday afternoon at 4.30pm.
Nick says: See you in the moshpit (air guitar optional).
