200 Words

Brian Cowen says he has a plan.

It says a lot about perceptions of the current leadership that my first reaction to that headline, in today’s Irish Independent, was a shrug.

It wasn’t even that enthusiastic a shrug. More of a half completed slouch, really.

My second reaction was to ponder headline puns. Brian Cylon, anybody?

Or perhaps ‘All this has happened before, all this will happen again’, to paraphrase Alan Dukes’ comparison of the situation the taoiseach finds himself in with the illfated 25th Dáil led by Charles Haughey.

Levity aside, I have no idea what Biffo has in mind for his ‘plan to rescue the economy and save the country.’

But it would be nice to live in a country where there was a sense that those in charge knew what they were doing.

Even better, to learn that the taoiseach and his inner cabinet had a plan all along, and knew where we were heading.

Maybe they did, and the last few months’ missteps are simply a failure to communicate.

Sure, it’s a ret-con, but it might calm the punters’ nerves to know there was a steady hand at the tiller.

Either way, here’s to the future.

It’s old news at this stage, but in the hours after the US election results came in, several news outlets reported that Fianna Fáil would look to the lessons that could be learned from Barack Obama’s campaign.

But while media reports concentrated on the glossy finish to the campaign, with it’s use of blogs, twitters and mobile phone updates, one ’senior source’ in Fianna Fáil revealed the true lesson the party learned.

‘What we’ll be trying to adopt is a larger number of donors giving smaller amounts, rather than small numbers giving large amounts,’ the source told the Irish Independent.

This is good news.

I have no doubt that Irish political parties will do their best to use new technology to get the vote out. Equally, I have no doubt their efforts will be cringeworthy, full of bland blogs and dull press releases.

But if the parties can truly raise money from voters, and reduce their reliance on corporate donations, that can only be good for democracy.

Voters with a stake, who put their money where their mouth is, are more likely to cast a ballot.

And politicians depending on that support are likelier to respond to what voters’ concerns.

Shortly after the smoking ban was introduced in Ireland, a local newspaper in Donegal reported a sighting of several footballers from a local amateur football team, standing outside a hotel enjoying their cigarettes together.

The punchline: the footballers were in Edinburgh, where they’d travelled to take part in a soccer tournament.

Several such urban legends have done the rounds since the smoking ban. According to one, an observer realised the ban had been taken to heart on Good Friday when he came across a group of punters puffing away outside a pub. They were happy to ignore the Good Friday ban on alcohol sales, but went outside for their smokes.

The ban also gave us a new word, smirting, a portmanteaux word created from smoking and flirting.

Last weekend, I came across a new cultural change since the smoking ban.

Until recently, cigarettes were provided on trays for the smokers at Donegal wakes, along with the regular cups of tea and sandwiches for all the mourners.

It’s an old tradition. In times gone by, clay pipes were provided at wakes.

But last weekend, the trays laid out for the mourners held only hard boiled sweets, and the smokers went outside.

The Lisbon treaty is officially back in the news.

An Irish Times poll today shows a change in ‘public attitudes since June with 43 per cent now saying they would vote Yes, 39 per cent No and 18 per cent having no opinion.’

But the pro-treaty side shouldn’t celebrate just quite yet. the Irish Times explains that ‘people were asked how they would vote if the treaty was modified to allow Ireland to retain an EU commissioner and other Irish concerns on neutrality, abortion and taxation were clarified in special declarations.’

Or to put it another way, would you buy something if it was actually something else?

Well yes, I’m sure you might, but you’d want to see what it was first.

So far, all the government have is agreement from a section of the electorate that they’d vote with a treaty that addressed their particular trigger issues.

How those voters actually go on polling day will depend on what formula the government agrees with the rest of the EU - and how well their spin machine works to sell it once they get home.

And of course, how the government raises the tricky issue of a second treaty vote.

Have you noticed your mailbox is a lot less full recently?

Perhaps you’re not receiving quite so many offers for fifteen minute college degrees, prescription medicine, or suspiciously cheap software?

It’s not just your imagination. Worldwide spam fell by sixty percent since Tuesday, when American regulators moved to shut down a rogue ISP in California.

The shutdown came after researchers tracking spam were able to show that McColo Corporation was involved in spamming and other criminal activity.

The company has been linked to Russian criminal gangs, and to botnets, which hijack the computers of unwary users.

A botnet is believed to be responsible for an attack with manipulated the share price of United Airlines in September.

The holiday won’t last though. One expert predicts the unwanted clutter in your email inbox will return to normal levels by Christmas.

And there are unlikely to be any charges or criminal convictions as a result of the shutdown, as many of those involved are not based in the USA.

Still, it’s nice to know that it is possible to tackle spam.

Maybe an international effort is something the G20 leaders might devote five minutes to after they’ve sorted out the world financial crisis.

Brian Cowen must be wondering where it all went wrong.

Support for his government and party have slumped to a record low, according a TNS MRBI opinion poll to be published in the Irish Times tomorrow.

The polls confirms findings in a Red C poll commissioned by the Sunday Business Post a couple of weeks ago.

Fine Gael is confirmed in a seven point lead over Fianna Fáil, according to the TNS/MRBI poll in tomorrow morning’s Irish Times.

The governing party is down to just 27%.

Meanwhile Fine Gael enjoys the heady heights of 34% support.

Minor parties are unchanged, what swings there are, are within the margin of error.

But what should worry Fine Gael (and Labour, if they are hoping to become junior coalition partners) is the 7% rise in support for independents, more than double their previous score.

Those independent voters are just the people an alternative government should appeal to.

Some of them may well migrate to Fine Gael, since there’s a good chance that some of them would until last week have been classified as Progressive Democrat supporters.

But others won’t.

And those voters will make the difference between stable government and reliance on independents.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about free and open source software, so I thought I should mention the programme I’ve been using recently.

According to it’s website, Celtx, (I keep wanting to pronounce it keltix) is ‘the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production software’.

I can’t say for sure if that’s the case, but for what I needed - functional software to produce an industry formatted screenplay - it’s just the ticket, and unlike the market leader, Final Draft, it won’t set you back $169.

Writing a screenplay has been quite a learning process. There’s a rough rule of thumb to keep in mind, one page of text equals one minute of screen time. For a typical feature length film, that means you have about ninety pages. One hour of television is sixty pages, less commercials.

When you’re confined to twelve point Courier, that’s not a lot of words.

Writing to such a tight format, I learned a lot in the past few weeks about paring my prose to a minimum. Forget two hundred words, try compressing one hundred and fifty thousand words into twenty thousand.

I’ve been at it a while now, and I’m still overshooting the mark.

Free speech can be a bugger sometimes.

In 1987, Ray Crotty went to court to stop the government ratifying the Single European Act, a European treaty without a referendum.

Crotty won, and the government had to hold a referendum.

Fast forward eight years to the McKenna judgement. This time, the courts told the government it couldn’t use public funds to argue one side of the toss.

The Coughlan judgement, a few years later, held that broadcasters - and specifically RTE - must give equal time to both sides of an argument during referendum debates.

Which brings us to Willie O’Reilly, head of the Independent Broadcasters Association, who appeared today before the Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution to call the Coughlan judgement a ‘crank’s charter‘.

These days, any unelected yokel can get in front of a microphone and argue his side.

Worse again, the electorate was actually won over by their arguments during the Lisbon referendum campaign.

Whether the arguments were valid or not is another day’s work. For now though, the problem for the political mainstream isn’t that the messenger has to air views they don’t like. It’s that their own arguments aren’t persuasive.

But shooting the messenger is easier.

What a busy news day it’s been. The PDs are no more, so Mary Harney finds herself… well, exactly where she was before her party disbanded, at the heart of power in the cabinet as minster for health.

The annual hand wringing over the meaning of Armistic Day continues, a bit louder this year thanks to the 90th anniversary, as Irish academics and commentators contemplate the meaning of the War, poppy, imperialism, nationalism, and how to commemorate without celebrating.

The victims of past wars were in the news in more ways than one. From Wicklow comes the news that human remains have been found by the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, set up to find the bodies of people who were ‘disappeared’ during the Troubles.

Meanwhile another murder in Limerick leads to calls for the introduction of internment, emergency powers, and the prosecution of criminals under the Offences Against the State Act for being members of illegal organisation.

One outraged politician went on Newstalk to explain how the juryless trials he had in mind would work.

‘This is no diplock court,’ he explained. ‘This is three judges.’

Well, quite. It worked so well last time, didn’t it?

At the end of the day, it comes as no surprise to find that there are cliched phases that tick us off no end.

Though each of our personal choices of are fairly unique, a team of researchers at Oxford university has tweaked a few statistics and compiled a top ten list of the word combinations that irk the majority of us.

I personally would never use such hackneyed constructions, of course.

At this moment in time I can safely say, without fear of contradiction, that I believe in original language to express original thoughts.

And with all due respect to those who may disagree, I would exhort all of you to protest loudly when language is cheapened buy lazy construction.

‘Absolutely!’ I hear you say.

It’s a nightmare trying to stay original of course. The trouble with common experessions is that they are so terribly, well, common.

In short, while I know I shouldn’t of gone off the handle the last time a tired cliche trotted wearily past my ears, I too sometimes find it hard to restrain myself.

Let’s face of us, none of us can stay cool, calm and collected 24/7.

After all, it’s not rocket science.