Angeldubba

  We’re very careful in our organisations these days. Due diligence and corporate governance, policies for correct behaviour in this and that, qualifications scrutinised, codes of conduct, background checks. And yet … Over in that London the talk is all of sleaze and how the current government is trying to escape scrutiny, and, basically  do what it likes to the benefit of those it likes . In Bulgaria and Romania vaccination numbers are critically low because, basically, the population doesn’t trust governments with a history of corruption. These are only a few examples.   Here in Ireland, the land of saints and scholars, we never have these problems! Although a  decade of tribunals into planning backhanders, dodgy meat sales, contaminated blood and other issues might persuade you differently.   Certainly Dublin is in the ha’penny place compared to London. It’s common knowledge that lucrative contracts for services associated with the fight against Covid went to...

I’ve been saying this for years – but you probably won’t yawn in recognition, as I’m under the radar, and don’t put every thought or wish on an internet platform.  But isn’t this the solution? What is needed is a government with the cojones to read the riot act to Mark Zuckerberg, and an appetite for shutting down a multi-billion dollar monster with literally billions of friends. Does such a government exist? Is it the US? China would no doubt be delighted, given its track record  in suppressing internet sites . But licensing is a different matter. Licensing is a way of making sure that industries which have most intense effect on people’s lives are acting at least partly in the interests of the customers. An example in architecture would be that fire safety is part of the considerations of the building design. In the US, home of Facebook, licensed industries include architecture, financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals. A quick look at that short list indicates the...

Nothing! Except you have to be dreaming, or living in Utopia, and Ryanair ain’t flying there yet. But this is the cheery British prime minister’s upbeat prediction for his country in the future. Boris Johnson really wants us all to think of him as the new Winston Churchill. Or rather, he wants the jolly old Brits who cherish Rule Britannia and that mostly-pink map of the world to think of him as WC reincarnated. These are the people who gave him his 80-seat majority in the British lower house of Parliament. Possibly the attack on Ivor Roberts-Jones’s wonderful statue of Winnie opposite the House of Commons in London, which happenedin June 2020, might have given him a brief pause, but only the briefest. Does Johnson’s attention focus on anything for more than goldfish-memory time, apart from the great endeavour of Making Boris Great Again, and Again, and Again … ? Waspish it sounds and waspish it is, after suffering through the insult which was BoJo’s comedy routine at the Conservative ...

  How’s re-entry going, in your work and life? I spoke to a young woman in the beauty     business at the weekend. She was off work for five months, due to Covid, and the other five people who share her house (!) all worked in hospitality (!!) and somehow survived Ireland’s stringent lockdown. That’s all but a memory now, unless your business was ruined by it, which I fervently hope is not the case. Travel is becoming a reality again. It seems half of Ireland has flown to Portugal in the past few weeks, and I hear of people planning to revive their Christmas shopping jaunt to New York (why? All that way for stuff that is either wildly expensive or junk.) Australia announced that its borders are reopening , so all the Aussies stuck in other parts of the world for the past 18 months can finally go home, and those trapped in the homeland can get back to their actual places of residence. Being something of an Eeyore, I’d expected that air fares would be astronomical once flyi...

Anna Kenny called it. She was always on the ball. A young sub-editor training on new technology in the basement of the old Irish Times building in Dublin, she said to those with her in the room, “Someone’s flown in to the Twin Towers in New York.” What? There were about 10 of us, led by me, getting familiar with the new direct-publishing technology that the flagship Irish broadsheet was adopting, learning new tricks. It was a Tuesday afternoon in September, a mild day. When Anna commented, it took a while to compute. What was that about? I said, “Do you mean, like that guy Mathias Rust in Moscow?” Rust was the German teenager who, as a late Cold War stunt, had flown a single-engine Cessna into  Red Square in 1987. It was strange, and we were busy, so I turned back to what we were doing, puzzling over the future. But then Anna, legitimately reading news sites to use stories in our exercises, said: “There’s another one.” And we saw the first images. It’s a strange feeling, your ...

Pattern-making and coincidence-spotting are two harmless, enjoyable and meaningless parts of life, work or play. Or are they meaningless? While not possessed of meaning themselves, they can give meaning to our practices.  Lucky numbers, for example: our family number is 22, and every time I raise my eyes to look at a sporting match on television, the first player I ever notice is the one in jersey 22. Is this some mysterious force at work, or just my brain is primed for the lucky digits? My daughter chose as her wedding date October 10 last year – 10-10-20. Two numbers become one, with a nod  to the Spice Girls . (Setting aside a pandemic and a wedding that nearly fitted in a phone box, it was indeed a lucky and meaningful day.) Our brains are wired to spot patterns. Perhaps this is why we attribute some higher or greater meaning when small events in everyday life seem to have rhythm or completeness.   There is something about regularity, about patterns, symmetry or recur...

Facebook last week broke a new record in massiveness, when it became a trillion dollar company. It wasn’t the first, but the youngest, at only 17 years old to be so luscious. Notably, the other four companies that have hit this level are also new tech giants – Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (the artist formerly recognised as Google) and Microsoft. To make it more concrete, here is a trillion in numerals: 1,000,000,000,000.  A number and twelve zeroes, almost inconceivable to process mentally, especially when compared with your pay packet (I presume). It was a brief moment, as Facebook’s share price jumped after a  favourable court judgment .   I’m a coin when it comes to Facebook (ie two sides). Professionally, I’ve spent a decade or more warning students about the potential evils of this supposed vehicle for communication that in fact sucks the juices out of all who use it, at least in commercial terms. But on a personal level it is so darned handy and pleasurable to keep ...

I wouldn’t for a minute sink to prurient discussion of the troubles that have befallen Britain’s Minister for Health (make that ex-minister). But Matt Hancock’s resignation after images of him passionately embracing his “special adviser” do bring up the question of what counts as sackable behaviour, in any work context.   The hapless Hancock did not have a stellar reputation during his two years in the job. Mind you, being health minister at any time is a difficult post (former Irish health minister Brian Cowen once described his department as “Angola”, and he didn’t mean everyone spoke Portuguese). Being health minister during the Covid-19 pandemic, facing unprecedented challenges, would have tested the greatest mettle. Nobody suggested that Hancock had that quality, and if you are a follower of Dominic Cummings you would be familiar with his recent denunciation  and  claims that Hancock should have been sacked  for up to twenty specific failings because of his...

  Think it through     In many work situations, as in the non-work arena we call “life”, it’s important to look at a problem from the four points of the compass. The best way to make a change is not to charge, full steam ahead, with one simple idea. Annoyingly, there are many facets to most events, just as there are to people.   This simple-minded enthusiasm was demonstrated by the Irish government’s declaration that outdoor dining would be allowed, post-harsh-lockdown, from June 7 2021. Cue hundreds if not  thousands of businesses buying lightweight chairs  and tables, marquee canvas roofs, all-weather pods, and migrating their offering on to the street. It’s been a very positive development, bringing that sort of liveliness and spirit we think of as “Continental” all over the country. (And former Justice Minister and barrister, Michael McDowell , tried without success to introduce  in the early noughties.)   Luckily the weather has been good too...

  Someone comes to your door or rings you up saying they're from the “Irish Research Agency”. (Substitute the appropriate country for where you live.) But they're not, they're from a political party which wants your vote. It's a lie.  If the Russians were doing it, ref the infamous Internet Research Agency, there'd be skin and fur flying. Vlad, this means war. But in Ireland  the revelation that all political parties  , except Labour and the tiny ones, employed this sleazy tactic to gauge attitudes before an election seems to have burst into a void. How  shocking is it that the political parties sent people out posing as pollsters? Are we horrified by this? Am I getting (more) hysterical in my old age? These frauds had fake identity material for their mythical research company issued by the people who want votes, want to run the country. Maybe I just haven't noticed or been exposed to the level of outrage which should be felt. But it does make me wonder if ...

  No, it’s not gobbledegook. Not any more than these columns usually are, that is.   For I have concerns (noun) about (preposition) the word, “concerning” (when used as an adjective). Because it’s taken over from our old friend “worrying”. It received a tremendous fillip in the pandemic when serious-faced officials everywhere in the English-speaking world were finding that the latest numbers/variant/crowds were concerning.   Concerning became a cliché, a go-to word to end a sentence that the speaker appeared to believe made them sound serious and responsible. It is concerning. We are all concentrating on this problem. It is of concern. OK, but isn’t it rather more than that? In short, worrying?   Worrying got thrown on the refuse pile of words-we-don’t-think-are-cool-enough. It happened some years ago when “gave” fell under the bus while “gifted” rode high in the polls. “I gifted my husband some socks for his birthday.” (I did actually write to the newspapers about t...

  Imagine a world without the BBC. None of those TV channels, radio programmes, podcasts, top reporting, imaginative takes on topics, off-centre approaches …   But it’s just what certain parties are aiming for. The BBC-haters of late seem to comprise Rupert Murdoch, the Johnson government, and the Royal family, in the wake of the fuss over  Martin Bashir and the famous Diana interview  of 1995.   Granted that Bashir used some trickery to get access to the Princess, but the story is much more complex than “and the interview led to her death”. That is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who observed the events of those years and Diana’s desperately unhappy and dreadfully public marriage. Television veteran Esther Rantzen told Andrew Marr that it could hardly be argued that Princess Diana had not wanted a famous opportunity to tell her side of the story to a sympathetic public via a respectful interviewer. “She said what she wanted to say.”And it is reported th...

  Are you old enough to have been influenced by Stephen Covey’s   The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People?   It was big in the ‘90s. If so, you have something in common with a beleaguered band of young Syrians, the subject of an extraordinary recent book. They were residents of Daraya, a small town on the outskirts of Damascus, brought to ruin after battles with, and bombardment by, the regime of Bashar al-Assad. And Covey’s self-help book became one of the most popular volumes in the library they salvaged from the devastated town, lovingly created and maintained in the basement of a wrecked building. The story is told by French-Iranian journalist Delphine Minoui, who I first heard interviewed on Sean Moncrieff’s programme on Irish radio. She wrote  The Book Collectors of Dar aya  to tell this inspiring story, after many surely difficult Zoom sessions and WhatsApp messages with the librarians of Daraya. I won’t go into the story in too much detail here – tha...

Doing a masters’ some years back, I met a fellow Australian who mysteriously described himself as “working for a long-established multi-national corporation”. When pressed, he eventually revealed that he meant the Catholic Church – he was a priest in civvies. That corporation has been buffeted by storm waves in recent decades, mostly through its own severe failings. But now, like all the Christian churches, the pandemic has it propelled headlong to fight for its survival. Closed churches and bans on weddings and baptisms initiated a habit of staying away. According to the Spectator magazine, a leaked Church of England document in Britain showed it expects membership and congregations to be 20 per cent lower after lockdown. This is on top of a 40 per cent decline in congregations over the past 30 years, stated  in an internal report  for the CofE. In Germany, major Christian churches were seeing a  quarter of a million people  a year leaving even before the pandemic s...

What should have happened when Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, saw there  was no chair for her  at a summit with two important men? Evidently, somebody, indeed everybody there, should have shouted “We need another chair” and some flunky rushed off to get one. Maybe fancy gilt chairs were in short supply, but they could have found something, surely, and one of the men should have sat on it. Then all would have been equal. Von der Leyen’s retreat to the adjoining sofa was a pragmatic acceptance of defeat, but it was a mistake. And so was her detailed speech about the matter in the European Parliament last week. “The status of women is the status of democracy,” she declared, before going on to complain about her treatment in Turkey. “I cannot find any justification of how I was treated in the European treaties” she said, standing at the podium before MEPs, before adding that she had not seen any shortage of chairs in previous photographs of all-male me...

  Today, some pungent   advice to the Irish Health Minister   from a well-known communications expert: halve your media appearances.   A nation chuckled – the politician in question is in a first-time ministry, obviously keen as mustard to make his mark, but during the Covid nightmare has made some increasingly bizarre interventions, including last week’s when he suggested that the tortured vaccine rollout in Ireland be turned on its head by prioritizing the 30s age group. This reversed the previous wisdom that older age cohorts should get the vaccines first. Ah dear. The minister was “spoken to” by the Taoiseach, our prime minister. “Ah, Stephen, could I see you in my office for a few minutes?”    Setting aside the political embarrassment, the advice to be less visible brought up one of the conundrums of the online-all-the-time era: when do people get sick of you? Kim Kardashian’s legions of fans seem to want her all the time. I learnt yesterday that even ...

  Apparently the accountants of London are not keen on returning to the office, according to the Financial Times . But maybe they should be doing everything they can to hang on to those jobs, which could be susceptible to automation. One of the very firms whose workers wish to cling to home-working post-pandemic, PwC, found that nearly 40 percent of workers it surveyed globally believe the job they do will be obsolete within five years. Four in 10 people saying “my job is gone”! That’s pretty terrifying, isn’t it? And six in 10 believe automation is putting their jobs at risk. What strikes me is how soon this gloomy forecast is expected to come true. Isn’t it more normal to put off the day of reckoning? We all know we’re going to die, but even when the clock has ticked to a point where each year brings a greater likelihood, it remains an impossible event. So why are people all over the world – 32,500 workers in 19 countries – shrugging their shoulders and saying “I’m gone”. All the...

  STEM courses, as you know, are those in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and maths. Dropout rates in STEM are very high, and that’s across the board and across the world. But why? The Irish Times has reported dropout rates of 80 per cent in some of the rural third-level colleges. The European Union has a  whole program  set up to combat this attrition. In the US it’s been a matter of concern for years, one study showing that “ a total of 48 per cent of bachelor’s degree students …who entered STEM fields between 2003 and 2009 had left these fields by spring 2009”.* My simple answer to why: the courses are boring and hard. But surely they’re not THAT boring, with modern techniques and awareness of student attention spans. So is this because “the computers” are “the bank” of the 21 st  century? Whereas your mammy in the 1950s, 60s, even 70s, might have wished for you a nice safe job in the bank, are the contemporary parents seeing the same security ...

  Irish country doctor Gerard Waters has, effectively, been struck off the medical register because he will not administer Covid-19 vaccines to his patients. The Irish Medical Council held a hearing and suspended the County Kildare physician,   according to The Irish Times .     Dr Waters is not exactly a Covid denier, but takes issue with how the disease has been handled by Irish officialdom. He also disagrees with the deployment of   messenger RNA vaccines , which are those made by  Pfizer and Moderna.   I’m pro-vaccine, across the board, a position heightened in the pandemic by the lack of any other options to restore society to normal economic functioning. But is the medical profession really a fascist mini-state with no room for individual beliefs? These professionals subscribe to the Hippocratic dictum (not actually the Hippocratic Oath, but we won’t go into the niceties here) to “do no harm”. And here is a mature person — the doctor is 71 — who ...