Frank McDonald, former Environment Correspondent for The Irish Times
This morning’s Irish Times Letters
Oh.
This morning.
ESB writes:
If that’s not an Irish Times decision to publish an ad hominem attack on Frank because of bad blood, what is? Can you imagine if Una Mullally was targeted like that?
Anyone?
Before and after: Proposed changes to Kildare Street Hotel, 47-49 Kildare Street, Dublin 2; letter of objection to the plans by Frank McDonald
Further to the lodgement of a planning application to Dublin City Council – by Ternary Ltd, controlled by the family of businessman Larry Goodman – to demolish a terrace of Georgian houses on Kildare Street, Dublin 2…
Journalist and author Frank McDonald has written to the council (above) setting out his objection to the plan.
Previously: Some Front
Via Frank McDonald
Baby seagulls fed by their mother in Dublin city centre in June
We’ve taken away the herrings from herring gulls, and most of the other fish in the sea, then built on their nesting sites.
We have in fact destroyed their environment. So the gulls have had to come inshore to feed and nest.
Being a raucous and dirty bunch ourselves, we congregate in large numbers, make lots of noise to advertise our presence (particularly in Temple Bar!) and leave lots of “food” (waste) lying around on the ground, in bins and in landfill sites.
We also, conveniently for the gulls, carry it around in our hands as we walk, and lay it out on rugs and tables. The only way to reduce seagull populations in cities is to conduct a major cull of waste bins and outlaw eating outdoors, particularly while on the move.
In other countries, Japan for instance, there are no public waste bins, and eating on the street is considered particularly uncouth.
It is patronising to say that Bird Watch Ireland “has yet to catch up with the fact that […] they have become pests”.
Its role is to protect birds, not humans. Nor are herring gulls “oversized”. Many will die from starvation from a stomach full of plastic, thrown away by humans.
We need to stop the environmental destruction caused by our lifestyles and stop blaming gulls for a problem they didn’t cause.
Elaine Mullan,
Portlaw,
Co Waterford.
FIGHT!
Seagulls in Dublin (Irish Times letters page)
Related: Why it is time for a cull of seagulls in Dublin (Frank McDonald, The Irish Times)
Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly
Further to the planned diminution of apartment sizes.
…The new guidelines published by the Department of the Environment propose lower standards in terms of floor areas, ceiling heights, storage, lifts, daylight, private and communal amenity space, indeed every aspect of apartment design.
They also preclude local authorities from “specifying conflicting standards in their statutory development plans” – in other words, aiming higher. If the Minister wanted to give the Construction Industry Federation a Christmas gift, this couldn’t be better.
Mr Kelly has denied that his intervention will result in return to the “shoe-box living” of the past. According to him, it’s all about “delivering good, high-quality affordable housing in sufficient numbers to meet growing demand” and this, in turn, should help to reduce rents by increasing the overall supply of apartments. But there can be little doubt that apartment design is to be dumbed-down, in the interests of the marketplace.
Veteran environment journalist Frank McDonald
Dumbing down apartment design (Frank McDonald, The Irish Times)
Yesterday: A Game Of Inches
(Rollingnews)
You’ve come to the right place.
Dr Julian Mercille (top), UCD lecturer and author of The Media and the Irish Economic Crisis: A Political Economy; Dan O’Brien (2nd pic), former Irish Times economics editor, now with the Irish Independent, Andrea Martin (bottom second right), media lawyer, and Frank McDonald (bottom right), Environment Editor of the Irish Times appeared on Tonight With Vincent Browne last night.
Under discussion?
The role of the media in the property crash/financial crisis.
Gulp
Vincent Browne: “Going back to the media itself, the fact that the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, the Examiner, the Sunday Business Post and the Sunday Tribune and the other Sunday newspapers all were making substantial, were getting substantial revenues from the property sector. And all of them ran property views that were laudatory of all the properties that went on sale, which of course was a nonsense. That must have contributed substantially to the property boom.”
Dan O’Brien: “Ok, I’ll put it like this, media organisations…You ran..you set up a news magazine I think in 2004 that coincided with the boom, if someone came to you and said ‘we want to advertise a legal product, your commercial department says ‘yeah, well, fine, there’s nothing illegal there, we’ll just take in the advertising’. The commercial people in a media organisation…”
Browne: “But that’s not what happened. That is not just what happened. They didn’t just take in the advertising, they ran supposedly independent editorial features on the property sector that lauded the properties that were being advertised.”
O’Brien: “That’s all part of the kind of.., you know, when you’re advertising something. But in terms of the hard coverage of, of what went on then, I honestly don’t think that journalistic…you know, RTÉ ran its future shock show, Frank’s paper ran the UCD economist [Morgan Kelly], David McWilliams was writing in the Irish Independent. So there were people. So the idea that everybody shut down…”
Browne: “Nobody said everybody. This is…I’m just making the point that journalists abandoned their independence in writing about property at a time when large advertising…”
O’Brien: “Well most journalists weren’t writing about property.”
Andrea Martin: “There’s something we need to be aware of here and that is that we need to distinguish between print media and the TV media. The print media is beholden to the commercial interests, to keep the paper afloat. TV and broadcast media is regulated in a way that requires it to be fair and impartial and objective. If less, even this station is subject to that requirement, regardless of the fact that it’s beholden to its advertisers.”
Browne: “Completely meaningless.”
Martin: “But no, what this, what this means is..I’ll tell you why it’s meaningful. There were people, there were commentators within the sector, there was George Lee who produced an excellent series in 2006, predicting exactly what was going to happen.
Browne: “Once, right yeah, OK.”
Martin: “He did.”
Browne: “These were once-off..”
Martin: “Eddie Hobbs, Eddie Hobbs was saying there was going to be no such thing as a soft landing. What happened was is that there is a media consensus, a media and political unholy alliance that made these people out to be eccentrics, sidelined them, dismissed them and that is what caused that problem.”
Julian Mercille: “It was the same. If anything, TV was worse than the press. I did a study, the paper you [Vincent] referred to. Prime Time had 700 shows between 2000 and 2007, about 1% of those shows talked about the housing bubble and most of them were saying that there was no housing bubble. So TV was the same as the Press, if not worse. It’s not any different.”
Martin: “It can be held to account. I’m not saying that TV is better otherwise, what I am saying is that there were, there’s a different between print media and TV, and there ought to be. Also there were voices and they were completely sidelined.”Continue reading →
Frank McDonald (above), Irish Times Environment Correspondent, and Fine Gael junior Minister Alan Kelly on last night’s Frontline on RTE 1.
Pat Kenny: “Frank, you have written about [Environment Minister] Phil Hogan and what he did with five separate inquiries that were actually under way, into planning, which were then suspended.”
Frank McDonald: “Well, I mean, I think that that was a very serious matter. John Gormley, the former minister for the environment, had received detailed complaints and I know in the case of Carlow County Council they were very detailed indeed, of planning irregularities. And I’m not talking, we’re not talking about corruption here, we’re just talking about bizarre decision making and you know really shocking messing about.”
