image

The elected members of Dublin City Council should be wary of being influenced by computer-generated images of how College Green might look if proposed changes in traffic management are implemented.

The image [above]  in your newspaper (“City council says College Green changes need to be agreed by Christmas”, September 17th) gives a fish-eye view of College Green that exaggerates the open space, reduces the height of the buildings and shrinks the size of the buses.

This is a ploy that was widely used in the past by car manufacturers but is now mainly used by property developers. It should never be used as a basis for solving traffic problems.
Louis O’Flaherty,
Santry,
Dublin 9.

FIGHT!

College Green traffic management plan (Irish Times)

Pic: Dublin City Council

9032827290393724

Julien Mercille hi res

From top: Taoiseach Enda Kenny with disability campaigners last week; Tanaiste Joan Burton and former Labour minister Ruairi Quinn; Dr Julien Mercille

Cold coffee for disability activists and foodbanks for all.

When delusion becomes policy.

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

School has only just started, so let’s begin this column with three exam questions:

Question 1: How many hours has Joan Burton been held up in her car in Jobstown last November?

Answer: By now, the whole nation knows that it’s two hours, thanks to endless media repetition.

In contrast, I would expect few people to know the answers to the next two questions, given the lack of coverage of the issues.

Question 2: How many people suffer from food poverty in the country?

Answer: 10% in 2010, or 450,000—it is virtually certain that it has increased significantly since then (I haven’t seen a more recent figure).

Question 3: By what amount have services to people with disabilities been cut under austerity?

Answer: 10%, or €160 million.

Last week, two events made me wonder if Labour and Fine Gael leaders know the answers to Questions 2 and 3. There seems to be a good amount of delusion within government ranks, as officials close their eyes on the mess they have created.

First, Joan Burton opened a central food bank to meet “growing demand for food assistance” because the years of recession and austerity are still affecting the country.

The food bank is operated by Crosscare, which is the social support agency of the Catholic Church in Dublin. It expects to provide 750 tonnes of food within the next three months to 70 charities and community food banks in and around the city.

Joan Burton said she was “very pleased” to support this strategy, which she thinks is a “great form of community effort”. In other words, she thinks it’s great that so many people in the country are now compelled to get their food from the Church because they can’t afford it.

The trade unions Unite and Mandate recently produced a report on food poverty in Ireland. (Food poverty is defined as missing a meal in the last two weeks due to lack of money; or being unable to afford a meal with meat or vegetarian equivalent every other day; or being unable to afford a roast or vegetarian equivalent once a week).

The 10% facing food poverty don’t even include the homeless, asylum seekers and Travellers, groups that tend to be more vulnerable to it. The report says that food poverty today is not a result of crop failure or weather-related problems—it’s a result of a policy of austerity.

Second, disability activists stood outside Government Buildings for 72 hours, including cold nights. They wanted to highlight the cuts to disability services. There are 600,000 people with disabilities in Ireland.

They talked to Enda Kenny and said they were disappointed that nothing came out of the meeting. Actually, the main outcome was a session of photos that Kenny might use to show he is listening to the country. He also gave a coffee to one of the protesters, as if this was supposed to show compassion.

The Irish media reported briefly on this. But imagine if the situation had happened in an “enemy state”. Say disability activists were camping outside government buildings in Russia and Vladimir Putin gave one of them a coffee to attempt to look good in front of the cameras. I bet the Western media would be there denouncing the “heartless tyrant” who “lets his own people rot in the streets” while refusing to tax a little bit more Russian oligarchs to provide adequate services for the disabled.

The level of delusion seems to be particularly high within the Labour Party. In the Sunday Business Post, Pat Leahy conducted an insightful interview with Joan Burton.

She stated that when they go to the polls, Irish people will give credit to Labour for—wait for it—“protecting welfare, mitigating austerity, promoting job creation, effecting social change”. Wow.

This reminds me of the “Big Lie” technique in propaganda, in which a politician tells a lie so big that people believe it because no one would think that someone would be impudent enough to distort the truth to such an extent.

Meanwhile, it was reported that an “emotional” Ruairí Quinn, speaking at Labour’s think-in last week, boasted that because Labour didn’t “believe in capitalism, we know how to fucking manage it”.

This appears to be another Big Lie, of the emotional variety perhaps. Hasn’t Labour gone out of its way to demonstrate to the troika and the world how much it believes in savage capitalism and how good it is at implementing it?

In any case, opinion polls indicate that the party will be close to wiped out in the forthcoming elections. Hopefully, that will wake up a few.

Julien Mercille is a lecturer at UCD. His book Deepening Neoliberalism, Austerity, and Crisis: Europe’s Treasure Ireland is out now. Twitter: @JulienMercille

144web

From left: Dr Tom Collins, chair of the Dublin Institute of Technology, and Dr Manfred Schewe, from University College Cork

A new Public Water Forum has been established under the Water Services Act 2013, chaired by Dr Tom Collins, of DIT.

The forum – through the Commission for Energy Regulation – is now recruiting 32 members, 20 of whom will be selected from the public, both Irish Water customers and those who don’t wish to register with Irish Water.

The Irish Independent is reporting that the members won’t be paid and that Dr Collins has waived a proposed fee of  €10,000 per year.

The forum is expected to meet between four and six times a year.

Dr Collins spoke to Rachael English on RTÉ One’s Morning Ireland this morning about what the forum is and what it can and cannot do.

Rachael English: “Members are being sought for a forum, to monitor the activities of one of the country’s most beleaguered companies, Irish Water. The public water forum will advise the Minister for the Environment, Irish Water and the Commission for Energy Regulation, on issues affecting consumers. Dr Tom Collins will chair the forum and he is here, good morning. What will this forum do and what sort of powers will it have?”

Dr Tom Collins:  “What it will do is it will provide a vehicle, a place and a process whereby people from different views regarding the management of water and assemble and share their views and arrive at a level of awareness, a level of consensus on all kinds of issues that are a priority and how they should be addressed. It’s power will be the power that’s usually associated with any watchdog. It will have both, in a sense, biting powers and barking powers. The bite will arrive from a memorandum of understanding which people will sign both with Irish Water and the Commission for Energy Regulation which will codify how we expect those two bodies to react to our proposals and our submissions. And the bark, of course, will require both bodies to explain to the public, if they choose not to accept our submissions.”

English: “But you won’t have any formal powers as such. You won’t be able to compel Irish Water to do anything. Or will you?”

Collins: “No it’s not  a compellability entity in that sense. It’s much more about arriving at a level of public debate, a level of public consensus, informing the public and informing the Government and the two organisations that have specific remit in this area as to what are the dominant issues amongst consumers.”

English: “So how do you go about then ensuring that your advice is taken on board,  that you don’t just become a talking shop?”

Collins: “We will publish any reports as standard, we will  specify and codify what the specifics or our proposals and submissions were and we will audit the extent to which the submissions were accepted or rejected as the case may be.”

English: “Will the forum have any role in deciding pricing or will this just be about water quality and the like?”

Collins: “No, pricing I think will be the dominant issue at, certainly, the early stage. It is clearly the issue that preoccupies I would say the public mind at the moment. So it will certainly focus on it. But my expectation, and of course I don’t want to preempt the work of the forum – my job is to facilitate the issues – my expectation is that it will focus, once the price issue is resolved and however way that happens, on issues to do with quality with public health, with the level of service, on investment priorities and I also think on issues like conservation, water is a finite, scarce and vulnerable source and we are probably the only species, as humans, we can destroy it not just for ourselves but for the wider eco system.”

Listen back in full here

Launch of the Recruitment Process for the Public Water Forum (Commission for Energy Regulation)

Bill boycotters will be invited to join Irish Water consumer forum (Independent.ie)

Pic: Léargas

mark-dennehy

Mark Dennehy

The proposals for firearms ownership in Ireland was published on Friday.

How much bang for our buck?

Firearms expert Mark Dennehy writes:

This story started with proposed changes to the existing firearms legislation last November and which wound up in front of the Joint Oireachtas Committee in January this year and which saw dodgy statistics, some seriously dodgy reporting and some truly epic unintentionally comic gaffes.  the Minister for Justice  [Frances Fitzgerald] on Friday published her intended policies for firearms legislation and they look pretty decent to most of us.

In short, what’s going to happen is this:

A new civilian body, the Firearms Assessment and Appeals Authority, will be created. It will act as a way to appeal licence refusals outside of a courtroom by having an independent expert look over the application decision.

The courts will remain an option; but this should save on a lot of hassle, stop a lot of court time being wasted by misinterpretations of the Firearms Act caused by a lack of training budgets and save Garda man hours for better uses.

Semi-automatic centerfire rifles will no longer be licencable. Those who have licences for them now can apply to keep the licences based on having a good reason to keep them. This will require a new Firearms Bill to be put before the Oireachtas, we’ve not seen that Bill yet.

The Minister has already signed a Statutory Instrument that clears up some confusion over licencing smallbore pistols for target shooting, which should help settle several court cases pretty much immediately. It’s not perfect (revolvers seem to be a bit badly considered in it) but it’s a lot better than what went before and it’s a lot easier to administer.

The Gardai will establish a centralised licensing system for restricted firearms, which will make things far more consistent for those classes of firearms. This will also require a new Firearms Bill.

The Garda Inspectorate will review the administration of firearms licensing. This could lead to firearms licencing being devolved to a civil service function, as is already done everywhere else in the EU. That way, we would have experts managing licencing while the Gardai are freed up from managing a sport to do other far more important things (though they would probably still be responsible for vetting the actual applicant). Again, that would also require a new Firearms Bill.

There will be no changes whatsoever to the licensing of shotguns and the vast majority of rifles which make up 99% of licensed firearms in Ireland.

Lastly and probably most importantly, the Firearms Consultative Panel, a body that brings together all the stakeholders from the Minister to the Sports Council to the Gardai to the various national governing bodies of sport, will be reestablished.

This means that in the future, problems like this will be dealt with in regular, unsexy, scheduled, minuted meetings like any other branch of bureaucracy. No more table-pounding, no more court cases, no more electioneering, just boring, dull, unsexy, effective, mundane laws that everyone can understand and read in one place, with an official communications channel to cope with everything from new legislation to product recall notices. And we can all get back to actually training and competing and winning matches and enjoying our sport.

Not everything in there is positive. Lots of folks shoot perfectly safely with semi-auto rifles and this is not the news they wanted to wake up to today.

And personally I look forward to the idea of a Firearms Bill being debated in the pre-election silly season on the floor of the Dáil by Deputies [Finian] McGrath and [Michael] Healy-Rae in the same way I look forward to having all my teeth pulled without anaesthetic — and I will bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets right now that that particular circus is not going to produce trouble-free legislation because grandstanding on legislation for technically complex areas is a recipe for disaster.

But on the whole, this is good news – the Minister has taken just about every decent idea that was thrown at her and has run with them and also opened up a permanent line of communication to stop problems like this coming up in the future. I’m kind of in shock about that to be honest…

Pic: Mark Dennehy

Broadsheet.ie