A Political Glimpse from Ireland

There’s No One As Irish As Barack Obama

All credit goes to Shaw for finding this video; I would imagine it was aired on one of RTE’s Saturday night programs:

The New Look

I decided to go with a theme change today, for a while the greyness of the previous theme has bothered me to a certain extent. This new theme is one of the many free WordPress themes that exist out there and I believe it symbolizes the ‘green’ Ireland to a certain extent. There are some problems though, certain features within the previous theme need to be recoded to this theme so I hope everyone will bear with me while I make these changes that I have no record of Anyway leave a comment and let me know what you think about these changes. On a side note, the blog will be turning 7 months old in 10 days so here are some arbitrary stats so far:

1. 170 posts, 2 drafts
2. 13 categories
3. 678 tags
4. 662 comments
5. 512 spam comments
6. 15 widgets

Ireland In Love With Alcohol

Most people my age often associate Ireland with alcohol and the Irish as having livers of Iron. I can attest to the latter as being quite true thinking back to a Christmas party at work where my fellow co-workers had consumed double the amount of beer I had and were feeling no effects at all. Through my work and following the news, I have discovered recently that there is a mini crisis brewing all around Ireland. This crisis refers to the mass closure of pubs around the country and even in Dublin because it is cheaper to purchase your alcohol in a store rather than at a pub.

For example, the cost of a pint these in Ireland today will set you back on average €4 which is $6 using the current exchange rate. You can buy a pint of beer in Lidl ( Kind of like Wal-mart) for €1:

So when you can get alcohol cheaply in a Wal-Mart like store, what is the point of driving to a pub? There is no point hence some people feel that Ireland is losing some of its charm because of these recent closures. At the same time there are others who welcome this trend because it is far safer to drink at home then drive a distance to a pub then probably drive back home drunk. Drinking is still a major social problem in Ireland with the population drinking on average 13.5 liters in 2003 compared to the USA’s 8.4.  These figures are 5 years old but I have little reason to believe they have significantly deviated in 2008.

The government has tried to fix the alcohol problem with a range of public service messages while taxing alcohol higher than any other country in Europe in 2007. In 2007, the government also collected 2.2 billion euro from alcohol taxes yet this money had not been used productively to raise awareness of alcohol and its associated problems in Ireland.  This lack of awareness has to led to a relatively steady increase of alcohol related hospital discharges:

Between 1995 and 2004 there were 139,962 alcohol-related hospital discharges. Males accounted for 75% (105,184) and women for 25% (34,778) of discharges. The number of discharges increased by 92% between 1995 and 2002. The number of alcohol-related discharges peaked in 2002, and had decreased slightly (by 2%) by 2004…

The Irish Government recently passed the Intoxicating Liquor Act of 2008 which was intended to prevent the misuse of alcohol in society however if you examine the various clauses in the bill, you will find them lacking any realistic means to accomplish this task.  For example the closure of off-licenses (Grocery stores that can sell alcohol) at 10pm is very unlikely to affect alcohol consumption because most people would have purchased their alcohol for the evening much earlier or or will now do so under the new law. This new bill is another waste of time by the Irish Government and does little to address an age old issue in Ireland that needs to be fixed.

The Libson Fallout

Many politicians, pundits and critics could not have predicted the fallout from the Irish rejection of the Lisbon Treaty on June 12th . After the results were announced, there were literally moments of silence where the entire of Europe sat still in confusion about what to do next. The next EU President Nicolas Sarkozy is forced to pick up the pieces however who is to blame is the silent question on many people’s minds.

I personally blame the Irish Government for the lack of money put into an effort to inform the citizenry about the crux of the treaty and what it meant for all the people of Ireland, just not the people in Dublin. I wrote about the scene  before the proposed referendum on June 11th and true to my prediction, the people of Ireland voted no.  If the Government and the EU had poured enough money into informing every single person in Ireland, I would safely take the bet that the majority of the people would have voted yes.

Part of the problem was the state-funded media channel RTE was ambiguous as ever about explaining what the Lisbon Treaty meant for Ireland. We have the folks over at the Wise Up Journal contending that RTE was trying to sell the treaty to the people of Ireland:

For an organisation that promotes itself as fair, balanced and owned by the Irish People, a question we must ask is, are RTE really fair and balanced, or is that just a marketing campaign designed to hide the fact that most of the coverage is distorted and one sided?

Then we have the Fine Gael MEP Mr. Mitchell stating that the RTE coverage was unfair and even called for an investigation into the role of the State broadcaster in its coverage of the Lisbon Treaty. I believe RTE fell into the typical media role of trying to provide both sides of the story but in doing so, it confused a lot of the people that were trying to figure out what the treaty was about. RTE should not be blamed for this but having watched RTE on a few occasions, I believe they lack transparency in terms of which side of the political divide they lean towards.

I still support the Lisbon Treaty but I feel a little sorry for President Sarkozy who is going to have a very hard time at the helm of the EU and France in trying to figure out what to do next, certainly blaming Ireland isn’t going to work but hopefully he won’t stress out too much…

Given The Price Of Gas

The Bush Administration will continue to push for a lifting on the ban of offshore drilling today which will likely only sate the American appetite for oil for 2.5 years at the most. The problem is that the President has only proposed a short-term measure with no thoughts about what is going to happen after we exhaust those oil supplies? I am not against lifting the ban however it should be lifted with intention to keep the price of oil stable while the Government invests greater resources into alternative energy sources. For the moment I would like to draw your attention to two sites that I found during my research on gas prices. The first is gasbuddy.com where you can put in your relevant location data and they will tell you where the cheapest price of gas is in your local area. The second site is pumps.ie which operates similarly to gasbuddy.com with the exception that Ireland is not that big hence there are relatively few choices to choose from:

GasBuddy.com

Pumps.ie