Bad Movies and Trash TV

UK TV service Channel 4's founding chief executive has got involved in the debate about whether the broadcaster has strayed too far from its public service remit, accusing it of having an "obsession" with sex and bad behaviour.

In an article for 'Prospect' magazine, Sir Jeremy Isaacs cites programmes such as 'Designer Vaginas', 'The World's Biggest Penis' and the forthcoming 'Wank Week', as evidence of the channel's decline.

He lambasts the broadcaster for allowing Peaches Geldof to host a show about Islam and argues that 'Big Brother' has declined from an innovative social experiment to the embodiment of "a mildly prurient voyeurism." In its early days, Channel 4 offered "a quiet seriousness that today has mostly disappeared", writes Sir Jeremy.

"Today, commercial ambitions are taking Channel 4 down different paths."

Sir Jeremy's words are seen as an echo of the case put forward in the MacTaggart Lecture at Edinburgh three months ago, when, in a reference to public handouts to the broadcasters, the outgoing ITV chief executive Charles Allen described Channel 4 as "behaving like a 25-year-old still living at home. Dipping into mum's purse, even when it's got a fat pay cheque in its back pocket."

Complaints about Channel 4's proclivity for graphic sexual content date back to 1987 when, after replacing Sir Jeremy as chief executive, Michael Grade earned the soubriquet of "pornographer-in-chief."

Channel 4 is seeking the support of media regulator Ofcom and the UK Government for funding of an expected £100m (€148m) gap it claims will open up in its finances as the UK switches from analogue to digital TV by 2012, the fierce debate about its public service remit has intensified.

Channel 4's prime marketing concept is the appeal to a 16-to 34-year-old audience, says Sir Jeremy, who was chief executive from its launch in 1982 until 1987.

"This has some strange consequences - a series explaining Islam, for example, is entrusted to Peaches Geldof. There's an obsession with adolescent transgression and sex. Gordon Ramsay is hired to make a series called The F Word; Designer Vaginas is followed by The World's Biggest Penis. This autumn, we heard about 'Wank Week'."

Sir Jeremy believes Channel 4's commercial success "sits oddly" with its public service obligations - the channel receives free broadcasting spectrum in return for those obligations.

Both Hollywood movies and the standard of television are a hit-and-miss affair these times and it's mostly a miss with audiences just cheesed off with what's on offer.

Last week, FT film critic Nigel Andrews wrote that years ago the screenwriter William Goldman, whose career was once paved with gold (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men) but who learned like many in the movie biz that cracks appear quickly in paving, penned a proverb about filmmaking that became famous: "Nobody knows anything." It was simple, brisk, brilliant; it was almost impossible to disprove. Industry observers have reached for the proverb again and again. They reached for it more than ever this year. It may become a bumper sticker in LA by Christmas.

What can an entertainment industry do when nearly all the indicators in the latest summer contradict the indicators from the previous one? In 2005, sequels and prequels were peppy at the box office and helped prop up the business. This year they tanked (again excepting Pirates 2 and, to a smaller degree, X-Men 3).

Maybe they have found another hit in the latest flavour of the month Borat, but I think not.

David Ansen in Newsweek wrote that the Three Stooges and Molière. Joan Rivers, who's not exactly a spring chicken, thinks that Sacha Baron Cohen—the invisible man who plays Borat—is "exactly where comedy should be now. Comedy is there to break open the box that holds the untouchable and the unsayable. It's about making you face the things you don't want to face, and the easiest way to face it is through humor. I hate to get serious, but that's why I love this stuff with Borat. Break the next barrier down! That's the joy of comedy."

Baron Cohen's creation, Borat Sagdiyev, takes us to the comic edge. Borat, for the many who have never seen him on HBO's "Da Ali G Show," is a disarmingly enthusiastic, viciously anti-Semitic, sexist, homophobic, horny and unhousebroken fiction-al journalist from Kazakhstan. (It's a real country: just ask its government, which has mounted an outraged PR campaign to counteract Borat's slurs on its national honor.)

In the largely unscripted film "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," the faux TV journalist travels to America, accompanied by his producer Azamat (Ken Davitian), to make a documentary. As director Larry Charles's camera captures real-life encounters with unsuspecting Americans (making this an almost-documentary comedy about the making of a fake documentary), it soon becomes clear that the ultimate joke is not on Borat, but on us. With its cavalcade of drunken frat boys, well-mannered racists and a gun dealer who doesn't bat an eye when Borat asks him what would be the best gun for shooting a Jew (he recommends a 9mm or a Glock automatic), "Borat" paints a portrait of the American subconscious that would give you nightmares—if you weren't laughing so hard.

Cohen should have stuck to television rather than this faux Michael Moore effort that is funny in parts but maybe an Irishman should have misgivings at a reprise of the scenario where we were sneered at as having "pigs in the parlour" and now it's the turn of the Kazakahs.

I recall seeing a wartime Pathé newsreel, which had a shot of De Valera and the narrator said: Take a hard luck at this man... and then there were some shots of our then "backward" neutral country with one shot showing an old woman herding pigs.

Trash TV

What is striking about television, is how little originality exists.

Any programme maker that comes up with a popular format, is certain that within a short spell, there will be multiple clones.

So, the viewer ends up with a multiplicity of 'me too' property, holiday and cooking programmes.

BBC 2's Dragon's Den where successful business folk listen to pitches for venture capital from a spectrum of inventors and sundry, is compelling viewing and a lesson for wannabes trying to raise funding from bright people with a low boredom threshold.

There's already a clone with some variation and there are bound to be more. Think how many programmes were spawned by Big Brother.

How much the presence of a TV crew has on what is supposed to be real life situation, varies but it is always a factor?

One of the UK channels runs a series with the dubious title: One Year to Pay off Your Mortgage, on UK people who head off to foreign climes to make a killing from property.

One case involved two women who hoped to make £250,000 profit from the restoration of 3 run down properties in a Spanish village.

Such a programme has a familiar format - starting with high hopes, then the difficulties pile up and eventually the boat sails into the harbour.

The viewer is simply treated as a fool.

The producers don't waste time and money on dud projects and the presence of a TV crew helps to iron out some wrinkles big and small.

In this particular Spanish case, a refusal of a mortgage, led to a quest to the provincial capital that was successful. Curiously, the lender was never named nor was there footage of the lender's premises or the process.

And an alluring message from the programme makers for the intrepid and suckers alike: All together their five properties have been valued at a staggering £577,000. Their total outlay for the project was just £329,000, so if they sell them all tomorrow they will make an enormous profit of £248,000 in less than a year. That’s an incredible potential profit and would be enough to pay off their mortgages in the UK.

Incredible it may well be and as a template for people who believe that the Spanish are all plonkers, why not take a punt?

Channel 4 gives Ireland a 14th place in its 20 Best Places to Make Money. It says that surging demand has not abated and, whilst you’ll have to spend more to get your property in the first place (average prices are around £170,000), you could still more than treble your money in 10 years.

Tony Robinson did a programme following EasyJet customers through the airport process and it was easy to see that the airline's staff were very restrained to the provocation of some disgruntled customers who were taking advantage of the cameras.

Telebasura

Trash television can be popular.

Graham Keeley of the London Times writes of a transsexual who had a brief brush with fame as the lover of some D-list celebrities is quizzed about her glory days and her silicon-enhanced bust. At one point, her obviously distressed mother is wheeled on as a surprise guest to recount how they had not spoken for years.

Keeley writes: Welcome to a typical night on Spain’s telebasura, or “tele-rubbish”. The word sum ups a phenomenon whose popularity has become the stuff of television executives’ dreams and an advertising goldmine. In a country where the television or caja tonta (silly box) is on for an average of three hours a day in every home, there are 18 telebasura programmes on weekly, nine with shows every day.

They feature a diet of matadors’ ex-lovers recounting stories about their lurid love-lives, or minor celebrities telling how they fell from grace at the hands of drugs, alcohol or a deceitful lover. Typically, a panel of “journalists” will shout questions along with the audience until it is hard to know who is talking or what they are saying.

Keeley writes: On Crónicas Marcianas (Martian Chronicles), the most famous of these programmes, the show would usually finish with guests stripping off. Today, the most popular programme, Aqui hay tomate, is watched by at least five million people every day of the week — a 26 per cent audience share. It is closely followed by Salsa rosa, whose audience share on Saturday nights is 25 per cent, as three million fans tune in.

For the moguls of Spain’s private television channels who pioneered telebasura, the phenomenon’s success has encouraged them to expand the format with more programmes of a similar ilk.Anxious not to miss out on advertising revenues, the state-owned RTVE channel now has five programmes in this vein, which capture 5.5 million viewers each week. Of the big private channels, Antena 3 produces two programmes and Telecinco five. They can charge advertisers premium rates and advertising breaks can last up to five minutes to ensure that they make the most cash from each programme.

Rosa Villacastín, a journalist who specialises in this form of tabloid television, believes that the secret is simple. “People are sick of politics or the economy and they have had enough of their own problems,” she says.

“With these programmes, they are in charge of how much they watch and can turn off the television whenever they want.”

Rosario Lacalle, whose book The Television Viewer examines the phenomenon, believes that Spaniards love trash TV because it gives them a chance to taste lives very different from their own: “This is a very Spanish phenomenon, unknown in any other country, in which we see the testimony of those who aspire to be famous, who go from programme to programme,” she says.

The background to telebasura lies in the huge burst of competition that started when commercial television, independent of the State, finally hit the screens in Spain in 1989, with Antena 3.

After years of repression and censorship under the dictatorship of General Franco, and no doubt inspired by the popularity of American downmarket talk shows and Italy’s distinctive tabloid TV, the cut-throat competition between channels led producers to look for the obvious lure: sex. Soft porn shows like A Day is a Day — a chat show that ended with a striptease artist — were typical, but when this lost its thrill, audiences turned to other attractions.

The ratings war has been fought mainly by importing low-budget Latin American soap operas and mixing them with locally produced variety shows and sitcoms. Yet it is the talk shows that have proved the most successful.

Politicians have successively promised to improve the standard of television and wean Spaniards off telebasura, but the financial success of these programmes to the television channels has proved difficult to resist.

The channels have important allegiances to both the ruling Socialist Party and the main opposition right-wing Popular Party. José María Aznar, the former Prime Minister — who failed to honour promises to take action — said: “This is about people who you don’t know, or you don’t know where they come from, telling their misery, insulting each other in the worst way and showing every kind of intimacy.”

Jubilation on Bush woes but how many frankly give a damn about Iraq or Darfur?

President George Bush meeting on Thursday, Nov 09, 2006 with speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Party Whip, Congressman Steny Hoyer .

Anti-Bush folk beyond America's shores feasted happily on schadenfreude last week, following George Bush's "thumpin" in the mid-term elections, that was perceived to be a repudiation of US policy in Iraq.

Delight that the world's only superpower has been contained in Iraq, does not of course mean that many of those anti-Bush people care about the people of Iraq or for that matter, the millions of victims in Darfur, West Sudan. The Chinese Government has replaced Western firms in running Sudan's oil industry and the genocidel killing of hundreds of thousands of African Muslims by their Arab brethren, is a matter of indifference to most of the Western media, those who make loud noises about Iraq and the Arab world.

In Europe, an American angle is usually necessary to fire up interest in foreign issues while China gets a free pass.

It's an ill wind that blows no good and Iraq has been good for the book industry. The latest addition to the genre, is from RTÉ journalist Richard Downes. He spent some weeks in Iraq and I lived 5 years in the region. That of course does not imply that either of our views are any more credible.

Without an invasion in 2003, UN sanctions would not have been removed while Saddam and his family remained in power. The sanctions resulted in many Iraqi deaths and a UN oil-for-food programme that became operational in the 1990's, was manipulated by Saddam and became a honeypot for thieves in many countries.

No US administration of either major party would have supported the removal of the sanctions regime, while Saddam remained in power.

The alternative to an invasion, was far from a pretty scenario either.

The "something-must-be-done brigade"

In The Financial Times in November 2005, John Lloyd wrote that the forward march of the "something-must-be-done brigade" has certainly faltered. The phrase is Douglas Hurd’s, used when he was UK foreign secretary in the early 1990s, about the demands of human rights campaigners, journalists and opposition politicians that western states must intervene to stop the slaughter in Bosnia.

On the opposite side of the fence were advocates of realpolitik who argued that a state requires security and retains interests and that any effort to impose a different politics on states of whose politics one disapproves is, as Henry Kissinger put it, international relations as social work.
Lloyd writes that governments of large states with diverse interests have largely agreed with the Kissinger option: idealism has been confined to smaller states, such as Sweden, the country that has long played the role of Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, forever hopeful of the world’s capacity for goodness. Britain has moved towards idealism under Tony Blair who has argued that "acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter".

The intervention of American forces ended the genocide in Bosnia and the murderous campaign against Muslims in the Serbian province of Kosovo ended when NATO, under the leadership of the US and the UK intervened. Lloyd says that the interventions of the 1990s and "noughties" in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and in smaller ways in Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Congo and Sudan, have rarely been without large bloodshed - and not one has been unambiguously successful...Those who always saw these ventures as sins against realpolitik are grimly confirmed in their views.

Lloyd asks what of the liberals and leftists who were the generals, the officers or even the foot soldiers in the something-must-be-done brigade?

"When push came to shove, most have melted away, without, it seems, a backward glance at the ideals they once espoused. This is most true in the case of Iraq," Lloyd says. "The sheer bloodiness of the country and the revelation to the British in Basra, as well as to the Americans elsewhere, that a large part of the active population hates them, have amplified the calls made to get out, last week at the Labour Party conference, against the leadership, the week before at the Liberal Party conference, by the leadership," Lloyd adds.

Lloyd says that it is a sad spectacle that liberals and leftists who spent decades demanding that something must be done to end all sorts of repressions and foreign horrors, and denouncing theirs and other governments for refusing to end them, now denounce the British and US governments for having removed one of the great monsters of the late 20th century because blood was shed (and is still being shed) in the course of it.

This isn’t debate about the manner of waging war: it is a smug, I-told-you-so (or I didn’t tell you but I am now) blast against apparent failure - usually oblivious to the consequences of that failure, especially on the ideals and practice that liberals and leftists claim to have espoused.

Irish commentator Vincent Browne for example who opposed US intervention in Iraq, in the past lamented the failure to stop genocide in Africa while he has both supported and opposed the American led NATO military action in the Balkans, in the 1990's (Browne supported US military action to stop a war in 1995 that had resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 people; He opposed US led action against Serbs in Kosovo, in 1998).

The late UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, supported NATO action in Kosovo in 1998, which did not have UN approval because of the threat of a Russian veto. Cook opposed intervention in Iraq, because it did not have UN approval.

People who support the legitimate right of the Palestinian people to a state, can be oblivious to the dramatic improvement in the lot of the Kurds of Iraq.

The people of Kurdistan who are the largest ethnic group in the world without a state, have been treated badly for many decades by Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

As media commentators in the West agonise about the impact of Iraq and Palestine on disaffected Muslim youth who have been weaned on a very narrow view of the world, there is seldom a reference to how Muslims have for long mistreated fellow Muslims in Kurdistan. Then there's Darfur, which is hardly on the curricula of the madrasas. The infidels are a more useful target than focusing on ethnically Arab Muslims driving ethnically African Muslims, off their land.

Iraq

Thomas Cushman - "George Orwell once noted in a famous epigraph, “Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist.”

The American writer on human rights Thomas Cushman, in his introduction to a collection of essays titled A Matter of Principle - Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, says that the for most of the authors, the liberal internationalist case for the war was not made strongly enough by the Bush administration or at least as strongly as the argument for anticipatory self-defense, which turned out to be empirically ungrounded. What is striking about these essays is the willingness of each author to voice pointed criticism of the Bush administration and its practices (as Christopher Hitchens wryly notes in his contribution, "I write as one who could not easily name a mistake that the Bush administration has failed to make").

Cushman writes: Yet at the same time the authors also offer pointed critiques of the liberal-left opposition to the war, much of which is contradictory, reductionistic, logically flawed, or excessively emotional, and irrational. Even the most sober and reflective critics of the war occupied a stage that also displayed demonstrators toting placards of Bush with a Hitler mustache, waving Iraqi and Cuban flags, and passing out copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Ironically, many of the authors in the volume point out that the antiwar position was, in fact, something of a conservative one in that it aimed to preserve a regime of intolerable cruelty in order to preserve the deeply flawed system of international law that gives both tyrants and democratically elected leaders equal seats at the table of international justice.

Indeed, as Daniel Kofman notes in his contribution here, it is odd that many leftists, who have built careers on challenging the unrestrained sovereignty of states and state power, would find themselves arguing in favor of the current system that supports and guarantees the power of sovereign despots and the inviolability of their states, even in extreme cases such as Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, or Saddam Hussein.

Had there been no war, Saddam Hussein would still be in power rather than preparing for his trial for crimes against humanity. He would still be tormenting, torturing, and killing his own subjects, destabilizing the Middle East, and giving succor to international terrorists who are the avowed enemies of liberal democracy.

What is striking about the antiwar movement is the way in which the global left has turned against the United States rather than gross violators of human rights such as Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the war has been the pretext for a global revival of anti-Americanism, much of it well grounded, but much of it a rehearsal of a more fundamental twentieth century proclivity of the left to vent its rage primarily at the "empire" rather than the various despots who have wreaked havoc on the global stage.

Indeed, such tyrants figured out very early on that they could always gain a certain advantage by articulating critiques of the bugbear of American empire (witness, for instance, the enthrallment of the left wing in America with Fidel Castro, who is the personification of resistance to the United States).

Lesson for Darfur

Thomas Cushman writes that it is clearly the case that current practices of international law and international organizations have failed rather glaringly to deal with tyrants. One has only to think of UN indifference to the plight of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo and its current ineptitude with regard to events in Congo and Sudan to see that the current structure of dealing with illiberal despots with liberal principles of law, negotiation, and accommodation is deeply flawed. The flaw consists in allowing illiberal despots the luxury of treatment according to Enlightenment ideals of toleration. If you treat an illiberal tyrant liberally, you can count on rendering him a distinct advantage.

As recently as last Friday, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour warned that unless the Sudanese Government curbs and disarms militias in West Darfur there could be more attacks like those around the Jebel Moon area that left over 50 civilians dead and thousands displaced late last month.

The High Commissioner reported that over the past month, West Darfur has witnessed increased movements and consolidation of armed militias, especially in the northern and south-western part of the state. At the same time, there are increased reports of the distribution of weapons to these groups in Geneina and outlying areas."I am deeply concerned that if the Government of Sudan does not take control of the militias, disarm them, and put an end to the proliferation of arms, the militias will continue to launch attacks on civilians, as they did on 29 October in an area south and west of Jebel Moon", Ms. Arbour said.In a 3 November report on the attacks, the High Commissioner called on Sudan's Government of National Unity to fulfill its responsibility to protect civilians and implement its commitments to disarm militias. She reiterated that recommendation today.

UN Security Council veto power China is assisting the government of Sudan to develop its oil industry. A December 2004 a report in The Washington Post said: On this parched and dusty African plain, China's largest energy company is pumping crude oil, sending it 1,000 miles upcountry through a Chinese-made pipeline to the Red Sea, where tankers wait to ferry it to China's industrial cities. Chinese laborers based in a camp of prefabricated sheds work the wells and lay highways across the flats to make way for heavy machinery...Sudan is China's largest overseas oil project.

China is Sudan's largest supplier of arms, according to a former Sudan government minister. Chinese-made tanks, fighter planes, bombers, helicopters, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades have intensified Sudan's two-decade-old north-south civil war. A cease-fire is in effect and a peace agreement is expected to be signed by year-end. But the fighting in Sudan's Darfur region rages on, as government-backed Arab militias push African tribes off their land.

In Myanmar (Burma), a country like North Korea, that is stuck in a fifty-year old time warp, China has made an agreement with the military dictators who control the country, to develop its oil and gas industry. A week after hundreds of people were gunned down in Uzbekistan, President Islam Karimov was warmly welcomed in Beijing. The access of the US to a military base in Uzbekistan has been withdrawn because of Washington's criticism of Uzbekistan human rights record.

China is extending its alliances without evident criticism from the many who would virulently criticise American missteps.

So the authorities in Khartoum are hardly worried about their campaign in Darfur, given China's veto in the UN Security Council and besides, does the rest of the world give a damn?

Download Professor Cushman's Introductory Chapter in A Matter of Principle - Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq (pdf format).

Reform Irish Style: Take action only in Response to a CRISIS...sorry...a DIRE CRISIS

Reform Irish style follows a familiar pattern and we had a regular reprise on Tuesday when sweeping changes in the structure of An Garda Síochána, involving the employment of civilians at all levels in the force from senior management to clerical grades, were proposed in two expert reports.

On Wednesday, we had a return to business as-usual when it was reported that Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea had given the go-ahead to a multi-million euro publicity campaign that will begin in January to inform people about the Government's emergency plans for disasters.

It of course has nothing got to do with the up-coming election and it may also be incidental that O'Dea himself may feature in the publicity.

We would have a nirvana in this country if publicity campaigns were matched by real action and reform. The upcoming publicity campaign will shovel money into PR but will it be matched by a non-partisan international assessment of the emergency plans?

As to the Garda reports, the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, welcomed the recommendations and promised to implement them as quickly as possible.

The reports from the Garda Síochána Inspectorate, headed by former Boston police chief, Kathleen O'Toole, and the Garda Síochána Advisory Group, chaired by Senator Maurice Hayes, were published on Tuesday.

For years, evidence of the need for reform was staring McDowell and predecessors of different parties in the face but nothing was done.

The Morris Tribunal was needed to highlight the need for reform of Garda structures when it was so obvious that such a huge organisation was in dire need of people with credible management competence.

Today, it was reported that taxpayers have paid out up to €7.3m so far to cover the legal costs for the Justice Minister Michael McDowell and Gardaí at the Morris Tribunal.

But the McBrearty family, whose campaign to clear their name led to the setting up of the tribunal in the first place, remain without legal representation because of the State's continued refusal to award their costs on the same basis.

The tribunal was set up four years ago to investigate allegations of corruption in the Donegal Division of An Garda Siochana.

At its centre is a claim by the Raphoe-based nightclub owners, that Gardaí attempted to frame Frank McBrearty junior and his cousin Mark McConnell for the murder of a local cattle dealer Richie Barron, which turned out to be a hit and run.

Billions were shoveled into a health service black hole in recent times and the penny eventually dropped only when Mary Harney took charge of the Department of Health, when it dawned that the existing ramshackle system of health boards and professional vested interests, had to be challenged.

World Reports Record

Mary Harney's predecessor as Health Minister, former school teacher Micheál Martin, must hold the record for the number of consultant reports that any minister in the world has requested in the space of 4 years - at 145, he always had a cure for insomnia, at hand.

Martin spent more on a library of reports and reviews during his tenure than any minister in the history of the State.

The bill for 115 of 145 reports commissioned by the Minister in the Department, where he spent four years, was outlined in a parliamentary answer to Fine Gael TD Seymour Crawford in 2004. It was €30m.

Martin also likely holds the world record for pre-announcing the launch of a website that earned consultants Accenture €3 million but the website was never launched!

Publicity Campaign on the Government's emergency plans for disasters

The Irish Independent reported in March 2002 that long-awaited iodine tablets for every family in the country - to cope with radioactive fallout, and pledged after the September 11 US attacks - would be distributed to every household later that month.

An information leaflet outlining the Government's nuclear emergency plan would also be distributed to all households "over the coming weeks ... but will not include full details of what to do in a nuclear attack."

The Indo said that distribution of the leaflet was the first phase of an information campaign on nuclear safety initially promised in October 2001.

At the time, Junior Minister with responsibility for nuclear safety Joe Jacobs told RTE radio that information booklets would be sent to every home in the country by the beginning of November.

"The Department of Public Enterprise will operate a call centre from Monday until Easter, and a comprehensive booklet detailing the main features of the national plan for nuclear emergencies will also be available by phoning 1890-44-33-22," the newspaper reported.

Five years later, a multi-million euro publicity campaign will begin in January to inform people about the Government's emergency plans for disasters.

The three-year initiative will produce and distribute a DVD or handbook to explain specific responses by relevant Government departments to catastrophes like terrorist attacks or nuclear accidents.

The Defence Department has sought interested bidders for the contract on behalf of the Office of Emergency Planning (OEP).

Defence Minister Willie O'Dea brought the proposals to the weekly Cabinet meeting on October 17th and they were approved. "The contract is to plan and deliver a Public Information and Awareness Campaign on Emergency Planning in Ireland over a three-year period.

"The period will start from when the contract is signed," a spokesman for the OEP said.

Earlier this year, the OEP carried out preliminary research to identify the concerns and questions of the general public regarding potential emergencies, such as a nuclear accident at Sellafield or a major terrorist attack.

Applications from public relations firms from across the EU will also be considered as the tender notice appeared in the EU Journal.

"The task will be to gather information from all the Government departments on emergency plans in place and present this information in an accessible format to inform and reassure householders.

"We basically want to let people know what plans are out there," added the OEP spokesman.

Remember that story about graffiti in a toilet with the question : What to do in a nuclear war??

Picture the Yes Minister scene with a ministerial flunkey proposing a painless form of actionless action.

Bingo! Let's have a publicity campaign!

So much for the Ministry for Disasters...

On Thursday Nov 9th, plans for a Greater Dublin Transportation Board were announced to oversee some form of integration to the transport network in Dublin and sorrounding counties. It was provided for in the 2002 Government programme and as with Michael McDowell's Privacy Bill, it will likely be part of a raft of shambolic legislation that will be shouted through the Oireachtas just before the General Election next summer.

The busy bees will conventiently run out of time.

So much for time management...let's commission another consultants' report!!

Spare a thought in passing, for our overworked, underpaid legislators!

The Government Parties are simply ticking off a list of so-called commitments. Just await the avalanche of announcements and cobbled together Bills in the coming six months.

Implementation, control, management and targets are a different story. Oh sorry...I forgot about benchmarking. So there must be targets. Ministers got 2 benchmarking payments - one as TDs and the other as Minister.

There were no targets, of course.

The joke line was that private sector workers without occupational pensions, were OVERPAID compared with public servants.

It could be used in a comedy routine but it's a serious issue and when the property boom subsides, today's politicians will be in clover on their gold-plated pensions as people will look back and wonder at the opportunities that were foregone during a time of unprecedented prosperity, to put reforms and structures in place for more challenging times.

Property or tulip mania, has never provided a foundation for a permanent prosperity.

Read the section on Sham Benchmarking here. Even public service pensioners were part of the bonanza.

Delay of at least 2 years expected in Response to initial report of Institutional Abuse at Dublin Nursing Home

On Friday Nov. 10th, the report on deaths at the Leas Cross nursing home in north Dublin - which found shocking deficits in the care provided to elderly residents - was published and passed on to the Garda Síochána.

The author of the report, consultant geriatrician Prof Des O'Neill, said in his review that his overall findings "are consistent with a finding of institutional abuse".

Prof O'Neill found staffing levels at the home to be deficient. He also identified failures in the regulatory process, criticised those in management for not taking complaints seriously and said "there is scant evidence that the Department of Health has taken cognisance of the huge concerns internationally over the quality of care provided to older people in long-term care".

"With a few honourable exceptions there has been a systematic failure by Government, health boards and professional bodies to address the issue of appropriate quality of care for older people with the highest levels of health and social needs in Irish society," his report added.

Aidan Browne, director of Primary, Community and Continuing Care with the HSE, said all recommendations in the report would be taken on board. Asked what actions would be taken against staff to ensure they were held accountable, he said: "If you read the report and you read the submissions, there is no evidence that people actually did anything wrong. The evidence is that the combination of factors came together that resulted in a wrong outcome."

Passing the buck is the most glaring characteristic of Irish public governance.

Simply, nobody has to take responsibility and there is more benchmarking payola in the pipeline!

In its submission, the Department of Health said that some criticisms of it by Prof O'Neill were made out of context and were not backed up by any evidence. And a former senior health service executive described parts of the report as "biased and inaccurate".

Minister for Health Mary Harney described the report's findings as "deeply upsetting" and promised legislation to allow for the setting up of an independent inspection regime for all nursing homes.

She said she wanted to see the legislation through the Oireachtas "hopefully before Easter of next year".

Hopefully before Easter 2007?

Before that, Bertie plans a referendum on an amendment to the Constitution to protect children - another example of painless actionless action.

So the busy bee TDs will have a six weeks break in the meantime and there's no embarrassment that it will have taken at least 2 years for the Government to respond to an urgent crisis.

When Ministers simply work part-time on issues of Government, should we be surprised at the glacial speed and the lack of ideas or interest in promoting reform?

Last week, apart from Iraq, an incompetent and corrupt Republican Party, was rejected by Americans after 12 years when it had failed to match promises of reform with results.

Here, much of a comatose electorate, expects results but it eventually gives a collective shrug of the shoulders, when there isn't delivery.

What can happen when the finger is ultimately taken out to tackle urgent issues?

Last week employers' body IBEC, released an analysis of insurance claims and settlements which shows a significant fall in the number of personal injury compensation claims in recent years.

Some of the facts are:

• The number of employee insurance claims in recent years indicates a downward trend in claims against business by a much as 40% in real terms (from almost 12,000 claims per year in the period to 2002 to around 7,000 per year in the last three years - IIF Factfile)
• Court writs in personal injury claims on average 33,000 per year up to 2004 were down to 4,000 in 2005
• Insurance costs also show a significant decline with room for further improvement
• The Personal Injuries Assessment Board (PIAB) process will handle on average 25,000 cases per annum including motor and public liability cases, and deliver assessments in nine months in respect of over 7,000 cases or an average of 200 per week. Maximum deliver costs are €1,350 per case.
• Many cases are now being settled up front either directly between the parties or following enquiry to PIAB (6000 cases in the two year period to September 2006) and during the PIAB process ( 9,000 cases in the same period)

IBEC Assistant Director Tony Briscoe said: “The success of the PIAB as an alternative means of resolving compensation cases, together with the measures provided in the Civil Liability and Courts Act 2004 to deter fraud and exaggerated claims, means the compensation environment has changed significantly in recent years. People need no longer be forced into costly legal battles, but can settle claims directly or have them assessed by the PIAB."

“From the information available it is clear more and more claims are being settled earlier and in greater volumes than before (claims took on average three to four years under the old system).Of the enquiries to PIAB, one in six is resolved without the need for assessment process and a further one in four prior to the PIAB making an award.

In many instances claims are settled without any recourse to PIAB, which is the intention of the Civil Liability and Courts Act whereby any claimant is required to notify the other party of their intention to purse compensation within two months of the incident. To get the full picture we need more details on the stages at which claims are resolved. It is most likely that the existence of the PIAB, while not directly involved in all cases, contributed towards having genuine claims settled quicker, with huge savings to the parties involved,” he said.

Briscoe nevertheless said that there is concern amongst employers that the measures provided in the Civil Liability and Courts Act of 2004, which deal with fraudulent and exaggerated claims are not being applied as intended in some cases. “There are cases where evidence of exaggerated claims is not taken into account by the courts as we would have expected. This could encourage exaggerated and fraudulent claims. The courts have vital role in ensuring that when a person exaggerates a claim, the full penalties set out in legislation are applied,” he concluded.

Nimby Syndrome in Ballsbridge, South Dublin?

On Tuesday evening, property developer Seán Dunne, who in 2005 spent €380m acquiring seven acres of land in Ballsbridge, South Dublin, from the Jurys Doyle hotel group, presented plans to construct a 37-storey building on the sites of the Berkley Court and Jurys hotels.

Dunne outlined to a private meeting, including local politicians, the plans for a mixed use scheme which would incorporate residential, retail and office use. He hopes to construct 600 apartments in the development.

Dunne can only build a residential development on the site under its current zoning. Dunne who built his current home in 2002 on Shrewbury Road, Ballsbridge, just a half mile away from the hotel sites, was reported last month by The Sunday Business Post to have bought Walford on the road for €58 million - the most expensive house in the country. The newspaper said that a planning application erected outside the Edwardian mansion at 24 Shrewsbury Road in Dublin 4 last month, sought permission to demolish the house and replace it with a new house, with a swimming pool and staff quarters. 

The Carlow-born developer is reported to want to build a private road at the rear of the house and two three-storey four-bedroom houses at the back of the seven-bedroom Edwardian house, which stands on 1.8 acres. However, the Sunday Times reported that Dunne denied that he is the so-called "mystery" owner.

On Tuesday morning at the High Court, Shrewsbury Road resident Seán Dunne and a neighbour who is a solicitor, sought to overturn the granting of planning permission for a development of seven apartments adjoining their homes. The proposed development is on the former site of the Chester Beatty library at 20 Shrewsbury Road. Among the objections reported to have been raised to the proposed development is that the developer, O'Malley Construction Co Ltd, has not specified how it will conform with the requirements of the planning acts for social and affordable housing, Mr Justice Brian McGovern was told.

The social and affordable housing scheme is a joke of a system. Under Part V of the Planning and Development Act, 2002, up to 20% of a development must be given over to social and affordable housing. If not, under changes introduced in 2002, land or cash must be handed over in lieu. Journalist Jane Suiter says that in reality, this is a moving target. Different councils have varying targets and policies.

According to Hubert Fitzpatrick of the Irish Homebuilders Association, far more flexibility needs to be delivered. It's basically another tax on the first time house buyer as developers generally pay cash in lieu to the local councils. As with the land development bonanza, the plonkers are the ones who have to pay at the end of the line. Outlining the case before the High Court, Hugh O'Neill SC, for Dunne and solicitor Stephen MacKenzie, said the planned development is for seven apartments in a two/three-storey building over basement on the site at Shrewsbury Road of the former Chester Beatty library, which relocated to Dublin Castle in 1999. O'Neill was contending the decisions of An Bord Pleanála in 2004 and 2005 upholding the decision of Dublin City Council to grant permission for the development breached a number of planning regulations, including requirements relating to posting site notices for proposed development. The nature and extent of the proposed development was not properly described, counsel argued. 

The initial application failed to state that the proposed development involved the demolition of two habitable houses on the site, which had been used by curators of the library. Shrewsbury Road is in a residential conservation area and special consideration had to be taken when assessing any proposed developments in the area, O'Neill said. An Bord Pleanála has denied the claims. Seán Dunne likely knows more than most people how beset the Irish planning system is with Nimbyism (NIMBY - Not In My Back Yard)*.

The newspaper reports today on the case may not cover all the objections of substance in the case. 

However, on the day that Dunne presented his more than €1 billion development plans for the hotel sites, just more than a stone's throw away, the objection to the development doesn't progress Irish planning that is already a "worst case scenario" case study being used by the European Environment Agency.

*Nimby Syndrome in Mayo as CAP cheques are put in post for Rossport Gas Protesters

The Minister for Good News

Micheál Martin TD, Minister for Enterprise, Trade & Employment

We had another example today of Minister for Enterprise, Trade & Employment Micheál Martin TD in the business of good news with the announcement that Merck Sharp & Dohme (Ireland) Ltd, US drugs firm Merck & Co., planned to establish a Formulation R&D and Manufacturing Facility at its plant in Ballydine with the support of IDA Ireland, and create 120 jobs over three years.

The Minister's Department made another announcement that he officially opened software company QUMAS’s new Research and Development Centre at Cleve Business Park, Cork, in his constituency and announced a further major R&D investment of €4.4m by the company, with support from Enterprise Ireland. The investment will allow for the expansion of the R&D department and will lead to the creation of 40 new high-value jobs, 26 of which are dedicated R&D roles, over the next two years at the company’s Cork headquarters.

In the constituency of East Cork, which Martin's Junior Minister Michael Ahern represents, the current operators of the former Youghal Carpets plant, announced 86 job cuts today.

Neither minister made an official comment on the news.

Last week, there was no press release from the Department on the 2,000 job redundancies in October, bringing the total to 19,533 in the year to date.

Junior Minister Michael Ahern who is known as Minister for Trade and Commerce is not averse to issuing press statements and usually tries to spin the export figures, which have fallen since 2001 and in the current year, are just keeping track with inflation.

It was reported last month that exports in the 12 months to July 2006 were up 3%.

“Irish exporters are continuing to perform well in a difficult trading environment caused by the global economic slowdown and rising oil prices,“ Minister said in a press statement.

However, there was no global economic slowdown in the first seven months of the year.

The International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook expects an important increase in global Gross Domestic Product this year.

The twice-yearly report predicts global economic growth of 5.1 percent in 2006—an upward revision of 30 basis points from the April 2006 projections –and 4.9 percent next year. If the predictions are accurate, “this would be the strongest four-year period of global expansion since the early 1970s,” the report notes.

Aer Lingus and one board member with anything of worth to win or lose

Politicians are not the only practitioners of the art of spin and while the well-paid advisers to Aer Lingus would be expected to view the opening bid price from Ryanair as inadequate, the choice of the adjective "derisory" for the offer is quite bizarre.

Derisory - meaning: incongruous; inviting ridicule - absurd, cockeyed, idiotic, laughable, ludicrous, nonsensical, preposterous, ridiculous - for an offer price of €2.80 that was 27.3% above the recommended IPO price made by the same folk, two weeks before!

It's no surprise that there would have been a discount in the IPO price to reduce risk and ensure success given what US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might term known unknowns.

So presumably to get beyond the zone of the laughable or ridiculous, the bid price two weeks after the IPO should have been say 100% on the IPO price of €2.20 i.e €4.40 rather than a jump of 27.3%.

In truth, the guns-for-hire would laugh up their sleeves if they were on the other side of the fence.

It's all part of the game and nobody really has to seriously defend the issue.

John Sharman, Chairman of Aer Lingus said today: Our product offering is differentiated from our peers. It is superior to Ryanair’s and passengers prefer to fly with Aer Lingus.

Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary said last August: This year Ryanair will carry 42 million passengers across its network. This is five times more than the annual, 8m traffic of Aer Lingus. Ryanair also carries 50% more passengers than Aer Lingus to/from Ireland. The Irish people have voted with their feet and made Ryanair Ireland’s number one airline. In the process Aer Lingus has been displaced as Ireland’s national airline and now survives as just a distant number 2.

In 2007, Ryanair will deliver 9m passengers through Dublin airport, sustaining 9,000 jobs in Dublin and generating a tourist spend of €2.5bn.

Both cannot be right. Maybe Sharman means if the price is right but that challenge lies ahead.

Aer Lingus Chief Executive Dermot Mannion's remark that it would be inconceivable that the board of Aer Lingus would approve any offer from Ryanair is also bizarre in more ways than one.

Mannion is the one potential big loser from a successful bid. He would be out of a job after 15 months.

The rest of the board would potentially lose some travel freebies and fees. Unlike most boards, there is no member of the board who has the prospect of a big killing from the Ryanair bid.

There simply is no real ownership interest on the board but there are strong voices of vested interest, including the political interest in the North Dublin area .

Aer Lingus now calls itself “Low Fares, Way Better” while Ryanair terms itself "Ireland's national airline."

Aer Lingus said today that since 2001, unit costs have fallen by 47% and the total operating cost base has fallen by 40%. In the same period, staff productivity has more than doubled. Aer Lingus is committed to driving more unit cost efficiencies out of the business.

There was no mention of Willie Walsh former Aer Lingus Chief Executive who is now Chief Executive of British Airways.

Walsh was earlier airbrushed out of the Aer Lingus story when Taoiseach Bertie Ahern pandered to the trade unions when he accused Walsh and two other former senior managers at the airline of having tried to "steal the assets" of Aer Lingus.

Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny compared the "perverse" attack on Walsh with Ahern's "fawning and facilitating" attitude towards Gerry Adams.

He called on Ahern to withdraw his remarks immediately, saying they were a "gross abuse" of parliamentary privilege, while Labour's Pat Rabbitte called them "extraordinary, outrageous and defamatory".

"The perverse nature of the Taoiseach's astonishing approach to two high-profile individuals in Irish public life is astonishing," said Kenny.

"It is worth considering the contrast between the Taoiseach's attitude to a man that is generally regarded to have saved the national airline from extinction, and his attitude to the leader of a political party with continuing links with organised crime and a history of paramilitary violence. Willie Walsh gets accused of attempting to steal a national asset. Gerry Adams gets a spare set of keys for St Luke's (the Taoiseach's constituency office) despite events like the Robert McCartney murder and the robbery of the Northern Bank.

One turns a loss-making company around, and is defamed; the other leads a movement that stole €32m and is embraced by the Taoiseach," said Kenny.

He added: "Of course, the real problem is Willie Walsh totally outclassed this Government with his ability, leadership and vision."

"Willie Walsh's remarkable instinct for solving problems and getting things done showed the Government up. In terms of Irish business, Willie Walsh is not just one of our best exports, he is one of our worst losses."

It's a funny world. Everyone now sees the virtue of aviation competition but without EU airline deregulation and Ryanair, what arguments would the same people use to defend a vested interest?

It shouldn't be too hard to guess, because we've still plenty of vested interests left.

Noel Dempsey - a rare Irish politician who challenges vested interests

A complete ban on drift-netting for salmon, as well as angling curbs on more than 30 rivers, will be put in place within weeks, following the Irish Cabinet's decision on Thursday to accept recommendations to save stocks.

Ministers accepted proposals from Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources Noel Dempsey with little disagreement, at yesterday morning's Cabinet meeting.

However, Minister for Rural, Community and Gaeltacht Affairs Éamon Ó Cuív and Minister for Agriculture and Food Mary Coughlan favoured a voluntary buyout of the 800 drift-net licences, over a compulsory ban.

Minister Noel Dempsey is a rare Irish politician because he is willing to stand up to vested interests. He deserves praise because the default option of the typical Irish politician, is to sail with the wind.

Noel Dempsey has stood his ground against the Nimbies in Rossport. His latest decision to put general interest above vested interest shows that he is a rare politician of courage and consequence.

While the depletion of salmon stocks in Irish coastal waters is a European issue, it is part of a bigger threat to fish species on a global scale.

A report in the New York Times says that if fishing around the world continues at its present pace, more and more species will vanish, marine ecosystems will unravel and there will be “global collapse” of all species currently fished, possibly as soon as midcentury, fisheries experts and ecologists are predicting.

The scientists, who are to report their findings on Friday in the journal Science, say it is not too late to turn the situation around. As long as marine ecosystems are still biologically diverse, they can recover quickly once overfishing and other threats are reduced, the researchers say.

But they add that there must be quick, large-scale action to protect remaining diversity, including establishment of marine reserves and “no take” zones, along with restrictions on particularly destructive fishing practices.

The researchers drew their conclusion after analyzing dozens of studies and fishing data collected by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization and other sources. They acknowledge that much of what they are reporting amounts to correlation, rather than proven cause and effect.

And the data from the Fishing and Agricultural Organization have come under criticism from researchers who doubt the reliability of some nations’ reporting practices, said Boris Worm, a fisheries expert at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, who led the work.
Still, he said in an interview, “there is not a piece of evidence” that contradicts the dire conclusions.

Jane Lubchenco, a fisheries expert at Oregon State University who had no connection with the work, called the report “compelling.”

“It’s a meta analysis and there are challenges in interpreting those,” she said in an interview, referring to the technique of analyzing a host of previous studies. “But when you get the same patterns over and over and over, that tells you something.”

Twelve scientists from the United States, Canada, Sweden and Panama contributed to the work.
“We extracted all data on fish and invertebrate catches from 1950 to 2003 within all 64 large marine ecosystems worldwide,” they wrote. “Collectively, these areas produced 83 percent of global fisheries yields over the past 50 years.”

In an interview, Dr. Worm said, “We looked at absolutely everything — all the fish, shellfish, invertebrates, everything that people consume that comes from the ocean, all of it, globally.”

According to the New York Times, the researchers found that 29 percent of species had already been fished so heavily or were so affected by pollution or habitat loss that they were down to 10 percent of previous levels, a situation the scientists called collapse.

This loss of biodiversity seems to restrict the ability of marine ecosystems as a whole to recover from overfishing, Dr. Worm said. That results in an acceleration of environmental decay and further loss of fish, with potentially serious consequences to people and economies dependant on them.

Dr. Worm said he analyzed the data for the first time on his laptop while he was overseeing a roomful of students taking an exam. What he saw, he said, was “just a smooth line going down.” And when he extrapolated the data into the future “to see where it ends at 100 percent collapse, you arrive at 2048.”

“The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I said, ‘This cannot be true,’ ” he recalled. So he ran the data through his computer again. And then he did calculations by hand. The results were the same.

“I don’t have a crystal ball and I don’t know what the future will bring, but this is a clear trend,” he said. “There is an end in sight, and it is within our lifetimes.”

Little Miss Sunshine and CEOs

People who view success by how much money they accumulate, may sometimes even use other yardsticks of achievement and a viewing of the current popular indie movie Little Miss Sunshine, could even bring some down to earth.

In the Financial Times on Tuesday, columnist Stefan Stern focused on a modern totem of success- the CEO's mouth watering heist (this should of course be distinguished from the returns made by successful entrepreneurs. There is often a blurring of the distinction but there is a huge difference between a person who may have risked all and an individual who has climbed the greasy pole in a company that was established by someone else, maybe decades ago).


Stern says that something has happened as far as attitudes to immense wealth are concerned. In 1987 Oliver Stone caricatured the “greed is good” instincts of notorious Wall Street figures in the shape of the corporate raider, Gordon Gekko. Perhaps Fox should consider re-releasing the film – except that now it might be seen not so much as satire but as an instructional video.

The triumphant march of capitalism, which began stutteringly with the fall of communism in 1989, is now reaching top speed in spite of corporate scandals and the volatility of equity and commodity markets. Its victory was saluted enthusiastically by Lester Thurow, a professor at the Sloan school of management at MIT, in his 1999 book, Building Wealth.

Stern says that here he accurately described the underlying ethos that has made possible the monster pay packages of today. “Wealth ultimately is the way the score is kept in capitalism,” he wrote. “Wealth has always been important in the personal pecking order but it has become increasingly the only dimension by which personal worth is measured. It is the only game to play if you want to prove your mettle. It is the big leagues. If you do not play there, by definition you are second rate.”

Are vast CEO salaries simply a question of supply and demand? Boards and shareholders want the best available person to lead the organisation and, perhaps, hardly anyone will be up to the job. Those who are can command a high price.

In a fascinating recent podcast, Wayne Guay, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, explains why CEO pay has reached such extraordinary levels. He is unimpressed by the data that reveal the gap between CEO pay and that of ordinary employees – like comparing “a carpenter to a computer programmer”, he says. (Remind me, what did that nice young carpenter from Nazareth say about the rich and the Kingdom of Heaven?)

Supercharged salaries seem to be the product of a self-perpetuating system. Pay consultants advise their clients on the latest schemes to reward performance, headhunters push up the asking price for “talent” while non-executive directors sit on each other’s pay review boards. It all looks a bit cosy. But this is merely the logical outcome of a world where, as Prof Thurow explains, anyone with any sense is trying to earn as much as possible as quickly as possible.

Income inequality is beginning to worry people on all points of the political spectrum. Pay for ordinary workers in the developed world seems to be standing still while their leaders continue to make hay. But can one executive really claim so much credit, and be so disproportionately rewarded, for the results achieved by a huge multinational corporation? That is doubtful at best.
Stern says that we should ask the super-rich CEO the same searing question that was put to Senator Joe McCarthy by special counsel Joseph Welch at the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Little Miss Sunshine

The Hoover family is a dysfunctional one that lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The grandfather Edwin Hoover (Alan Arkin) has been ejected from a nursing home because of his taste for heroin and his anti-social attitude including a lot of swearing. His son Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a deluded motivational speaker who divides the world into two groups - winners and losers. He doesn't realise which group he belongs in, but his wife, Sheryl (Toni Collette) does. She's supporting him while he tries to get a book published about the nine steps to success and it's driving her demented.

Their 15-year-old son Dwayne (Paul Dano) is pissed off with life and is a fan of the nineteenth century German philospher Friedrich Nietzsche; he hasn't spoken in nine months. When Sheryl brings her brother Frank (Steve Carell) home from the hospital to recuperate after an attempted suicide, the brooding brother, has to share a room with Dwayne who writes on his notepad: "Welcome to hell."

Seven-year old Olive (Abigail Breslin), wants to be a winner to please her Dad and that means winning a beauty contest. When Olive discovers that due to a disqualified finalist who was caught with diet pills, she has got a place in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant in Redondo Beach, California, she rocks the house with her joy. This spurs the Hoover family to pile into their rundown VW bus and make the 700-mile trek from Albuquerque, weathering a series of increasingly complicated hindrances along the way.

Plain looking Olive, amidst the sculpted daughters of pushy parents, creates a sensation with a routine that she picked up from her grandfather and the family's experience may not be the ideal path to the American dream, but there is the moral that failure to be number one at your goal doesn't make you a failure. That finding the joy in what you do and who you are is what makes you a winner.

Dail Eireann - Overpaid Legislators and an Indifferent Public

Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Irish Parliament has been in session for the past month and there are about six weeks to go before our over-worked parliamentarians will head off for a six-week break.

Apart from the row in early October, that ensued following an Irish Times report that the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern availed of the financial help from some business friends when Minister for Finance in the early 1990's, the Dáil could still be on a recess given the impact it has been having in recent weeks.

Groucho Marx remarked after attending a cricket game in the UK, "if you suffer from insomnia after this, you really need to see your analyst."

Proceedings are often so boring because there simply are so few good parliamentary performers. Beyond, Pat Rabbitte and Joe Higgins, who comes to mind?

The late Fine Gael TD John Kelly was unmatched and it's rare generally to find people like Tony Blair and David Cameron who can speak impressively without notes for more than 15 minutes.

A politician does not have to be a Cicero and anyone worth their salt should only depend on notes in a debate. The only exceptions should be in relation to technical issues.

In the old days, apart from the emphasis on debating in school, politicians were also able to hone their skills on the stump with the help of hecklers.

In the 1950 election, the Republican governor of California Earl Warren began a speech:

I'm very happy to welcome such a dense crowd here tonight...

A heckler interrupted:

You ain't that lucky Governor. We're not all dense.

A T.D. or aspiring one, should be expected to put forward challenging ideas, defying conventional wisdom where appropriate and addressing issues of public policy beyond a forthcoming election. However, it is a rarity to behold such evidence.

The limited talent on the backbenches can also be seen when up to 30 senior and junior ministers are selected.

How many of the current crop would be selected in an open competition to run a significant business?

This is an important issue because when ministers are expected to sign-of on big public sector projects for example, it's pretty blatant that even some of the more obvious questions are not asked.

The typical existing or aspiring T.D. who cannot articulate a challenging idea, finds refuge in an expression of support for party policy but ask what will likely follow the ending of the current CAP system for farmers in 2013 or when the foreign manufacturing sector or construction industry will contract, there is nothing to be said.

Then there are the one-issue independent candidates who are vacuous beyond their pet local hospital or whatever got them elected.

Politicians have a varying mix of self interest and common interest. Self interest is undoubtedly the principal issue and that in itself is not a bad thing. Given that each T.D costs the taxpayer directly about €250,000, we should expect a higher standard from them.

HIGHER PAY - BETTER REPRESENTATIVES??

The pay of members of the Australian Federal Parliament - the House of Representatives - is €72,000 per annum compared with our typical backbencher who is on €96,000.

The pay of TDs could even be trebled from the current level, and the quality of representatives would hardly change.

Overpaid Legislators: 30% Special Pay Awards including Sham Benchmarking and Pay up 119% since 1997 - Average Weekly Industrial Earnings up 60%

Ireland has 166 members (TDs) in the lower parliament chamber Dáil Éireann who represent some 4.2 million people. With one TD for every 25,000 persons, the people are over-represented in parliament, and their representatives are, by international comparison, overpaid as national legislators.

However, following the latest census of population, Ireland may even get more.

Joseph O'Malley, Political Correspondent of the Sunday Independent recently wrote that IreIand has far more TDs than Britain has MPs: four times as many in proportional terms. The TD in Leinster House is now better paid than his or her counterpart at Westminster.

The TD also enjoys superior pension benefits, and for a much lower pension contribution: 6 per cent of a TD's salary, while the MP pays 10 per cent.

O'Malley says that for the TD, the transformation from being underpaid to being overpaid represents a remarkable turnaround in a short time. The TDs, however, are not complaining. Within a decade, few sectors of society have done better in pay terms than the political class at Leinster House.

In 1997, the Westminster member was paid a quarter more than the TD, who then earned €44,067. Nine years later the TD/MP pay gap has not just been closed, it has been reversed.

Today, the Dáil deputy earns €96,650 and the MP earns 11 per cent less, at €87,132.

O'Malley writes: Few can seriously dispute that the TD has less onerous national responsibilities than his British counterpart. The Dail sits less often than the Commons, and parliamentary life is much less demanding in Leinster House than at Westminster. Never mind that Britain's population is 15 times larger. And its economy is 11 times the size of the Irish economy. The TD represents fewer people in a much smaller country. Nevertheless, Dail deputies are now paid more than MPs to do a less challenging job.

The key to the current high salary status of TDs has been the conjunction of some remarkable series of developments on the pay front.

First, in 1999 the Buckley pay review awarded TDs a special pay increase of some 18 per cent. Buckley also recommended that Dáil deputies' pay should be linked to that of a principal officer in the civil service. Second, in 2002 the benchmarking review recommended a 12 per cent pay rise for principal officers. And because TDs were linked to principal officers, they also benefited from that award.

Since 1997, the 30 per cent from the special pay awards, when added to the normal partnership pay rises, has meant that the pay of Dail deputies has more than doubled. It is up 119 per cent, or twice as rapidly as the average industrial wage.

Stephen Collins in The Irish Times reported last July that politicians received their fourth pay rise in a year at the beginning of June, bringing the basic salary of a TD to €96,560 before special allowances and expenses are taken into account.For the Taoiseach and his Ministers, it was the sixth pay rise over the past 12 months. Mr Ahern's salary is now €258,730 a year, including his TD's salary, while the Tánaiste earns €222,256 and other members of the Cabinet get €204,020.

Each Government minister has got 2 benchmarking awards, even though everyone knows that the system has been an absolute scam.

A comparable country to Ireland, such as New Zealand, which is similar in population size (4.1m) and economic scale and performance to Ireland, manages with 120 MPs, one chamber, and no upper house. Indeed in 1999, in a non-binding referendum, the New Zealand people voted to reduce the number of MPs to 99: some 84 per cent voted in favour. Even more remarkable: the Kiwi MP is paid just €56,730, under two thirds the Irish rate.

Joseph O'Malley in The Sunday Independent, says that a contribution of only 6 per cent of salary entitles TDs to a full pension after just 20 years, based on half their final salary, and with a lump sum payment of one and a half times that salary. But what the TD pays for his pension bears no relation to the real economic cost of providing his retirement benefits. The taxpayer pays that extra, unquantified, cost.

In a damning indictment of the current wide gap between many of the governed and their legislators, O'Malley writes: Many private sector companies are closing their defined benefit (final salary) schemes to new entrants, while others raise contributions to close the funding deficit, which the law passed by the Oireachtas requires. Remarkably, however, little echo of this great debate on pensions can be heard in the national parliament.

To cap it all, part-time local councillors are seeking public occupational pensions even though most private sector workers beyond the foreign-owned sector and large Irish-owned companies, such as banks and public companies, have none!!

The Sunday Independent has reported that thirteen Government ministers have benefited from tax breaks, averaging almost €5,000 each on second homes in the capital, just weeks after the Taoiseach's brother Noel Ahern, said property speculators should be "taxed out of existence".

The break designed exclusively for members of the Government, allows ministers to claim relief on second homes and for overnight accommodation in Dublin. Latest figures reveal that 13 ministers availed of the perk, claiming €63,477 between them.

Messenger Boys and Girls

In a paper presented at a Central Bank conference last September, Dr. Frank Barry of University College Dublin, highlighted issues such as the "structural flaws that give zoned land an artificial scarcity value and that continue to offer strong incentives for corruption. The failure to tackle these issues seems ascribable, in part at least, to the failure to introduce international best-practice measures with respect to the financing of the political process. The failure to address cost and time overruns in infrastructural provision over the boom period represents a further weakness in Irish governance."

On the latter, Dr. Barry said that Ireland’s single transferable vote (STV) electoral system is usually blamed for the brokerage style of politics practiced in Ireland. Political scientists have accorded it a key role in generating “…the heavy emphasis on constituency casework, faction-fighting between candidates from the same party (and) a focus on constituency and localist matters in election campaigns and parliamentary work”.

"The current system certainly appears frequently to lock Irish politicians, competing against each other within the same constituency, into a type of prisoners’ dilemma," Barry said.

A number of countries, and not just those new to parliamentary democracy, have changed their electoral systems in recent times. Most – including Italy, Japan and New Zealand for example – have switched to “mixed systems” of the German type, which combine national lists (where political parties offer lists of the most capable people willing to serve) alongside constituency representation. This would dilute the stranglehold of localism on the system and allow governments to devote more attention to difficult longer-term issues.

The final report of the Constitution Review Group (1996) chaired by Dr T.K. Whitaker cautioned that the present PR-STV has had popular support and should not be changed without careful advance assessment of the possible effects. If a change were to be made, it went on however, “…the introduction of a PR-list or AMS (the additional member system, referred to above as the mixed system) would satisfy more of the relevant criteria than a move to a non-PR system” such as that of the UK, an option already rejected by the Irish electorate in the referendums of 1959 and 1968.

When will conservative Ireland be ready to embrace change?

Where are the leaders with a vision to set the foundations and structures for an Ireland that has changed radically from the one that existed when our current system of governance evolved?

Actor Michael J. Fox and stem-cell research

Michael J. Fox on YouTube

Jim Nichols in the US The Nation magazine, writes that conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, who admitted an addiction to pain killers in 2003, is not just making an issue of Michael J. Fox's campaign ads for Democratic candidates who support stem-cell research. "He is making it the issue of a fall campaign that gets stranger by the day."

For the better part of three hours each day this week, the radio ranter has been "Swift Boating the television and film star for daring to do what Limbaugh -- who freely admits that he is an entertainer -- does every day.

In Limbaugh's warped assessment of the political process, it's fine for him to try and influence the votes of Americans. But woe be it to anyone else who attempts to do so.

Since Fox began speaking up in favor of candidates who support science over superstition, the television and film star who suffers from Parkinson's disease has been accused by Limbaugh of "exaggerating the effects of the disease" in campaign commercials in which he points out that Democratic candidates for the Congress and governorships in the battleground states of Missouri, Maryland, Illinois, Wisconsin and now Iowa favor a serious approach to stem-cell research while their Republican opponents do not.

Limbaugh was relentless in his assault on Fox. "He's moving all around and shaking and it's purely an act," the conservative commentator says. "This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn't take his medication or he's acting." After it was pointed out to Limbaugh be everyone, literally everyone, who knows anything about Parkinson's disease, Limbaugh declared, "Now people are telling me they have seen Michael J. Fox in interviews and he does appear the same way in the interviews as he does in this commercial. All right then, I stand corrected. . . . So I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong, and I will apologize to Michael J. Fox, if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act."

Nichols writes that that should have been the end of it.

But Limbaugh wasn't backing off. His new theme became: "Michael J. Fox is allowing his illness to be exploited and in the process is shilling for a Democratic politician."

One problem with that line of attack is that Fox was the one who volunteered to make the ads, with the express purpose of helping voters see beyond the spin and recognize the stark choices that they will be making on November 7. Another problem is that, two years ago, Fox cut an ad supporting a top Republican, Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Arlen Specter, who supports embryonic stem-cell research. But the biggest problem is with Limbaugh's emphasis on the Fox's physical appearance, as opposed to what the actor is saying in the ads? Why blather on and on about whether Fox, an actor, might be acting?

Because it is easier to criticize the way that Michael J. Fox looks than it is to criticize the content of his message.

Fox's ads are fact-based. They reference the voting records, public statements and policy initiatives of the Democratic and Republican candidates he is talking about.

That being the case, beating up on the "Back to the Future" actor would not seem like a smart political strategy. And it certainly is not going to help Limbaugh soften his image as a partisan hitman who knows a little too much about what it means to be on or off particular medications.

So why are Limbaugh and other readers of Republican talking points continuing to accuse Fox of "acting" sick, and of lying his own disease and about the role that stem-cell research may play in the search for treatments and a cure? Why devote so much time and energy to attacking one ailing actor and one set of commercials? It has a lot to do with the powerful lobby that is opposing serious stem-cell research.

Unspoken in much of the debate over this issue is the real reason why candidates such as U.S. Senator Jim Talent, the embattled Republican incumbent who is the target of Fox's criticism in Missouri, and U.S. Representative Mark Green (news, bio, voting record), the Republican gubernatorial candidate who is mentioned in Fox's ads in Wisconsin, so vehemently oppose embryonic stem-cell research.

It is not because they think the research is unnecessary -- no one who has heard from top scientists and groups advocating on behalf of the sick and suffering, as both Talent and Green have, would take such a stand. Rather, it is because Talent, Green and other politicians who are campaigning not just against their Democratic opponents but against scientific inquiry want to maintain the support of the groups that oppose serious stem-cell research: the powerful and influential anti-choice political action committees that in each election cycle spend millions of dollars in questionable cash to support candidates who are willing to echo their faith-based opposition to research that could identify treatments and perhaps even cures for for life-threatening illnesses such as Parkinson's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, Type I or Juvenile Diabetes, Duchenne' Dystrophy, and spinal chord injuries.

Groups that oppose reproductive rights are central players in our politics because they have established networks that serve as some of the most effective hidden conduits for special-interest money that is used to pay for crude attack campaigns against mainstream candidates.

They also mobilize voters on behalf of contenders who cynically embrace the ugliest forms of anti-scientific dogma to make the rounds since the evolution deniers ginned up the 1926 Scopes trial on evolution. For this reason, the antiabortion machine gets what it wants when it wants it.

Nichols say that politicians who align themselves with antichoice groups are willing to attack anyone who challenges them -- and for good reason. In states across the country, so-called "Right-to-Life" and "Pro-Life" groups spend freely on behalf of the candidates they back. And much of that spending goes essentially undetected, as the groups often do not give money directly to candidates but instead run "issue ads" and mount independent-expenditure campaigns.

Republican politicians like Talent and Green fully understand that, without the behind-the-scenes work of antiabortion groups -- most of which flies under the radar of the media and campaign-finance regulators -- they could not possibly win. And Limbaugh, whose stated goal is to maintain Republican hegemony, is perhaps even more aware of the fact than the candidates he is working so feverishly to elect. That's why the radio personality is on a personal crusade against Fox. That's also why Limbaugh has been willing to stick to his outlandish claims about the actor, even while acknowledging that he's gotten the facts wrong.

Jim Nichols writes that like the Republican politicians who are scrambling to smear Fox, Limbaugh is doing the bidding of one of the most powerful behind-the-scenes political forces in America -- a force that is essential to Republican prospects. And he is not going to let a little thing like the truth make him back off.

Politics is a cynical game. But, sometimes, the cynicism becomes so extreme that the word "unconscionable" doesn't quite seem to capture the ugliness of it all.

Rush Limbaugh announced on his radio program in October 2003, that he is addicted to pain medication and that he was checking himself into a treatment center immediately.

"You know I have always tried to be honest with you and open about my life," the conservative commentator said in a statement on his nationally syndicated radio show.

"I need to tell you today that part of what you have heard and read is correct. I am addicted to prescription pain medication."

Law enforcement sources said that Limbaugh's name had come up during an investigation into a black market drug ring in Palm Beach County, Florida. The sources said that authorities were looking into the illegal sale of the prescription drugs OxyContin and hydrocodone.

Limbaugh, who has a residence in Palm Beach County, was named by sources as a possible buyer.

Roger Friedman of Fox News says that since 2001, according to federal records, the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research has raised an astonishing $80 million for research. Unlike most celebrity charities, the Fox Foundation has a Web site that even links to its most recent federal tax filing, and the filing is current.

This is an amazing achievement, considering how young the foundation is. Fox has turned his illness into something incredibly positive; the group even runs in the black, meaning its income is greater than its expenses. Last year the group finished with $7 million in the bank after giving away $17 million.

Response Ad to Michael J. Fox on YouTube

Patricia Heaton — who won an Emmy for her work on "Everyone Loves Raymond" — is taking sides in the stem-cell research debate.

She’s put herself on the opposite side of Michael J. Fox, the much-beloved actor who’s been battling Parkinson’s disease since 1991 and is a firm supporter of embryonic stem-cell research.

Heaton is now appearing in a commercial intended to persuade Missouri voters to vote against Amendment 2 on their ballot.

Fox, in his own commercial, urges voters to support the measure and Democrat Claire McCaskill, who is running for U.S. Senate against the incumbent, Jim Talent, a Republican who opposes embryonic stem-cell research.

Many scientists believe stem cell research could lead to cures for Parkinson’s and many other illnesses. Amendment 2 would constitutionally protect any embryonic stem cell research in Missouri that falls within federal law.

Michael J. Fox was born Michael Andrew Fox in 1961 to parents William and Phyllis in Edmonton, the capital of the Canadian province of Alberta. (He later adopted the "J" as an homage to legendary character actor Michael J. Pollard.) Fox, a self-described "Army brat," moved several times during his childhood along with his parents, brother, and three sisters. The Foxes finally planted roots in Burnaby, British Columbia (a suburb of Vancouver), when William

Fox retired from the Canadian Armed Forces in 1971.Like most Canadian kids, Fox loved hockey and dreamed of a career in the National Hockey League. In his teens, his interests expanded. He began experimenting with creative writing and art and played guitar in a succession of rock-and-roll garage bands before ultimately realizing his affinity for acting. Fox debuted as a professional actor at 15, co-starring in the sitcom Leo and Me on Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) with future Tony Award-winner Brent Carver.

Over the next three years, he juggled local theater and TV work, and landed a few roles in American TV movies shooting in Canada. When he was 18, Fox moved to Los Angeles. He had a series of bit parts, including one in CBS' short-lived (yet critically acclaimed) Alex Haley/Norman Lear series Palmerstown USA, before winning the role of lovable conservative Alex P. Keaton on NBC's enormously popular Family Ties (1982-89). During Fox's seven years on Ties, he earned three Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe, making him one of the country's most prominent young actors.

Though he would not share the news with the public for another seven years, Fox was diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson's disease in 1991. Upon disclosing his condition in 1998, he committed himself to the campaign for increased Parkinson's research.The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, which he launched in year 2000, and its efforts to raise much-needed research funding for and awareness about Parkinson's disease.

Fox wholeheartedly believes that if there is a concentrated effort from the Parkinson's community, elected representatives in Washington, DC, and (most importantly) the general public, researchers can pinpoint the cause of Parkinson's and uncover a cure within our lifetime.

Parkinson's disease is a chronic, progressive disorder of the central nervous system that belongs to a group of conditions called motor system disorders. Parkinson's is the direct result of the loss of cells in a section of the brain called the substantia nigra. Those cells produce dopamine, a chemical messenger responsible for transmitting signals within the brain. Loss of dopamine causes critical nerve cells in the brain, or neurons, to fire out of control, leaving patients unable to direct or control their movement in a normal manner.Parkinson's disease has been known since ancient times. An English doctor, James Parkinson, first described it extensively in 1817; the thoroughness of his analysis is such that researchers and clinicians are still urged to read his original notes on the condition.