A couple of things have been going through my mind. On one front, I think the traditional newspaper is dead meat. I don’t think any Irish newspaper has a sufficiently coherent product to make it in the online world; so most of my Irish news now comes from the RTE website. It’s largely devoid of comment, although I have no doubt that the editing has some bias through in if only because people are human.

I have a lot of responses to this. On the one front, I suspect that some judicious organising of google news and my feedreader (which is currently feedly) would serve me a customised news/opinion experience that would blow every newspaper out of the water. I do know that I’ll have to do a certain amount of messing to set it up but I am tempted to do so.

I’m also tempted to start writing myself again. I know that this site is very different to the old windsandbreezes site, some of which is on the Wayback machine but the Wayback machine is currently down so I can’t link to it. I may set up a separate site to handle those things although frankly my internet-fu is pretty dreary since wnb died a year ago.

When I say I’m tempted to start writing, I mean to write articles. Part of this is because to be honest, a lot of what I read is – at best – quite average. I know I used to be better. Linked in with that, I did wonder about the possibility of doing a collaborative one off newspaper…but I’m concerned about the checks and balances in terms of legal requirements given that Ireland is what it is with respect to libel legislation so I don’t know what the feasibility of a one off Anti-Sindo might be.

The internet is full of interesting projects. Mark Little is working on one at the moment, Gavin Sheridan and Mark Coughlan have one, and there are other interesting pieces around all the time. I can’t help feeling this could be leveraged in some way to make the old media completely irrelevant except for the death notices and the crossword. There is a market out there for opinion and interactive discussion. I really question whether the Irish media has worked this out at all.

Fine Gael need to hang their heads in shame. If they had the guts to give us someone other than Enda Kenny as a complete loser leader, I might not have to write this.

In an effort to reduce payroll costs, it argues for the reduction in the number of city and county managers from 34 to 24; directors of service from 240 to 190; and the number of senior and middle managers by at least 15 per cent. This change would in effect mean that some local authority managers would be in charge of two councils.

Mr O’Loughlin said this proposal had the greatest scope to generate savings and could lead to better local governance.

Could lead to better local governance. Could?

Could is not anywhere close enough to being good enough. Before looking at the savings you look at the processes. Here they just want to save money. It could lead to better local governance but I’ll be frank. I doubt it. ONe of the big issues we have with local governance in Ireland is the lack of accountability.

The sentence could as easily read “could lead to chaos as two different local authorities slug it out for favour”. Frankly I see more chance of that given what happened (not) the National Spatial Strategy.

He told RTÉ Radio that some of the changes could be implemented quickly as some county and city managers were on fixed term contracts and because the Croke Park agreement allows for deployment of personnel elsewhere in the public service.

So how much do we save on payroll given that some of them were due to go anyway and we’ll still be paying the others as we shift them around, right?

The group has also recommended that tolling charges be extended from motorways to national roads. It has argued this would be consistent with Government policy on the environment by incentivising road users to use other transport. It would also allow a stream of revenue for local councils to invest in local roads.

I suspect most of the group live in Dublin. What other transport are they suggesting? Bus? Train? Public transport in Dublin is woefully inadequate. Do they not know that it even in itself is worse than public transport everywhere else. Do they not realise how people’s time is money? Do they not know that if you don’t live in Dublin or Cork, this is frankly almost impossible?

While the group has said the distribution of the tolling booths should be equitable, placing them on national roads as well as motorways would be seen as controversial and politically unpopular.

How will they measure equitable? The M50 toll does not act as a deterrent; it acts as a cash cow.

Mr O’Loughlin said the new tolls could be used to fund infrastructure developments on local and national roads and could prove to be good for the environment.

Again, if they are funding roads, how are they good for the environment? He cannot have both his cake and eat it here. Either it deters road usage (in which case why build more?) or it screws people who have not much choice in whether you use the road or not.

The group found the number of senior managers in Dublin and Cork cities was noticeably high compared to other local authority areas.

The population served is noticeably high also.

____

Local governance in Ireland needs to be looked at. This is not looking at local governance. Far too much could and very little would in this.

• started another lacy cardigan and am on row 4.
• washed 3 towels and 2 swimsuits
• sorted out the swimming drawer
• tidied the boot of the car and made room, sort of, for the kite equipment.
• tried on my harness. ugh. Put the IKSA tag on it. I am now ready for kitesurfing. Let us have some SSE winds please, at say, 4pm, weekdays. Let me get up at 7am so as to be at work early enough to get out to exploit those SSE winds before the boys arrive.
• started watching Dolmen DVD box set.
• Stopped watching Dolmen DVD box set after murder number 1 and the family fight but before the good looking Parisian detective arrived. Realised the script was even worse than I remember.
• went swimming at 8.30 this morning. Will be going swimming again at around 6.30 and this time I will do the 500m.
• Replaced the godawful chocolate yoghurt that I bought yesterday, thinking it was hazelnut yoghurt.
• Ate dinner and breakfast at reasonable times.

So far, today I have not played either Angry Birds or Bejewelled. I intend, however, to do the swimming lark again.

The worst experience was the packing of the car. In theory, the idea is that I get the kitesurfing gear into the boot of the car so that I am ready to roack and roll. I own a Fiesta. I know from past experience that the packing of the car is a precision event  because I own a Fiesta. In fact, I own a Fiesta and I like things to be tidy. Which is why typically, I pack stuff into plastic boxes, tidily. This is probably not the most effective use of space. Also, the board doesn’t fit into the boot of the car either so that usually travels in the passenger seat, belted into place. My kiteboard is nothing if not safely boarded in.

I have a couple of friends who drive cars like Opel Vectras and Ford Mondeos. In fact, I have friends who drive vans as well but we’ll skip them. I envy them. They have big boots in their cars. I don’t need all that boot space for shopping in Brown Thomas. I am entertaining the purchase of a Ford Focus, however, to get the kite gear into the carboot along with the swimming gear, the climbing gear and the photography gear. Because right now, if I learned nothing today, I learned that it didn’t get any easier between last year and this year. Bah.

Anyway, amongst the items which caught my attention during the week was this article cribbing about Abby Sunderland. Actually, it was more whinging about Abby’s parents than Abby herself. If you haven’t heard of Abby Sunderland, that’s fine. It was hardly the biggest news story all week. Abby Sunderland is 16 years old and a solo round the world sailor. She went missing. She was found alive.

The article annoyed me on several levels because the general gist of it was that you shouldn’t really allow teenagers to do anything they want to do until you can’t actually stop them at the age of 18. Abby Sunderland is 16 but she’s obviously a competent sailor. She wouldn’t have gotten as far as she did otherwise. But her life is not worth more because she’s 16 rather than, say 19. I think the worst thing you can do to someone who has a dream like that and the competence to achieve it is to try and stop them just in case anything might go wrong because the same things might go wrong when they’re 30 as well as when they are 16.

There was no purpose whatsoever to her voyage.

Dea Birkett couldn’t see any purpose to the girl’s voyage which is fine. Dea doesn’t have to do the trip if she doesn’t want to. But Abby Sunderland wanted to do it and that is a pretty good reason for doing it in the first place.

Abby gave the same cliched reason for doing something so daft that we’ve all heard uttered tearfully a thousand times by teenage TV contestants: “I want to live my dream.”

Dissing people’s dreams is the height of arrogance and ignorance. I’m never going to sail around the world. I don’t want to. But I would fully support anyone who wanted to do something regardless of how sane or how crazy if they had the wherewithal and skills to do it regardless of what age they are because sometimes, they have a better understanding of where they are in their lives than some journalist in the UK who clearly is happier playing with rules and living by them rather than looking to herself and what she’d like to achieve.

Where the first item I scanned was one of the knives. It told me to wait for the assistant. Knives, you see, along with corkscrews I subsequently learned, are restricted items and you have to be over 21 to buy them. So I had to wait for him to come along and allow me to buy the knives.

Which he duly did, reckoning that I was probably over 21 (you bet, unfortunately) (and have you noticed they are all looking like 16 or 17 lately, the 21 year olds?) Anyway.

I then scanned the 3 magazine holder yokes. And then swiped my card, which the machine decided it wasn’t going to read the chip on. And so I had to “wait for the assistant again”.

Really I should probably have queued behind the one with 2 trolleys and an armful of other stuff.

However, the An Post documentation made noise about value limits of [less than the value of the camera] so I rang them and asked, look what’s the story here. Camera worth X, no indication of the cost of additional insurance. After leaving me on hold for ages, and calling DHL themselves, they reckoned it would be okay but that I needed to call DHL Customer service or some such to get a premium quote.

So I called DHL where I wound up on hold for ages again, while they had a consultation, and eventually informed me that yeah, the insurance would cost about 1% of the value of the shipment and yes, when I got to An Post, they would certainly be able to take an order for the premium and the shipment.

I took a day off and wandered into the GPO with said camera and met one of their staff who was mystified because all of their documentation and procedures mentioned this 320E limit – which is far less than I wanted to insure the shipment for – and he was completely unaware of the concept that he might be able to sell additional insurance for the shipment to me. He then spent some time on the phone to Customer Services at An Post (whom I had called yesterday) who duly phoned DHL again. Mystification was everywhere. So I called DHL myself and explained what I wanted to do, and how I was singularly failing to do it, and that I had been told it should be possible and that now I was confused. They spoke to the An Post employee – whom I have to give a lot of credit to – and then agreed to do some more talking and that I would have an answer in a few moments.

When the answer came, it transpired that although DHL themselves can arrange shipment insurance for DHL Express deliveries done through them, An Post cannot arrange it for DHL Express deliveries done through An Post.

Now, I don’t have a huge problem with that per se although deep down I’d probably say it’s dumb. Where I do have a problem is that there was a disconnect between what I was told was possible and what turned out to be the case. I had to find a DHL Express office to sort out the shipment this evening and okay, that’s fine.

I like the idea that it would be possible to send something DHL via An Post. But I don’t think they have thought how it works through very carefully because if today showed me anything, it was that DHL Customer Services and An Post Customer Services did not actually know the limitations of the service offered via An Post, and what’s more, clearly had contradictory information on what was possible. For this, I spent quite a lot of time on hold yesterday, and 35 minutes in the GPO today. I think that’s just a little unfair on me, on the An Post employee who had to deal with this – and he really was great – and the DHL employees who took calls from me.

So I think that it needs to be clear that the DHL Express service offered by An Post is a short of DHL Express Lite. It would be far better if it wasn’t “Lite” but that’s almost beside the point. Truth is…it could be just a bit better.

PEOPLE with money on deposit are being subsidised at the moment and mortgage payers will end up bearing the pain — unless the Government moves to cap saver rates, a leading broker said yesterday.

So let’s make the people who have money as opposed to those who borrowed money bear the pain instead. Nice. Philip O’Reilly recommends we cap deposit rates to 2%. Clearly the fact that banks desperately need deposits for capital requirements has passed him by. Deposits cost banks money. They wouldn’t be paying it if they didn’t need the deposits. Capital requirements are slightly more important to your average bank right now than new mortgage business – they have plenty of mortgage business already, like. That they are having some difficulty managing.

He’s in the mortgage business and their new business has fallen off a cliff. I wonder if there’s any connection. Couldn’t be.

Up until 2006, property prices in Ireland were largely on an upward trajectory. So upward, in fact, that a lot of people could not actually afford to buy property. Anecdotally, there’s a stat floating around that said 40% of new builds in Ireland in 2006 went to investors. Meanwhile, as prices rose, first time buyers were left increasingly out of the market. To address this, banks introduced new lending criteria based on disposable income rather than salary multiples.They also upped the LTV and at the end of 2006, first time buyers were still increasingly unable to buy property.

As the chorus of voices pointing out that it was mathematically impossible for property to continue increasing in value exponentially grew louder, the counter claims suggested that we’d slow down and bump along in tune with inflation. Now that we have reached 2010, it’s been proven that the chorus of mathematicians are more in tune with reality than the chorus of, well, I don’t know what you’d call them. Wishful thinkers, possibly.

Now, 2010, we’ve a whole lot of other problems linked to insane bank lending practices which were even worse for commercial than they were for residential/specuvestors, one nationalised bank and a bunch of other banks being state supported via NAMA and an increasing number of mortgage repossession cases and arrears.

Nowhere have I seen anyone identify what we actually want. When I see all this bailing out, I suspect what people want is to avoid the following reality:

We borrowed too much and have to pay it back.

But that’s just a short term vision. In truth, the question is more “what are our housing requirements and how do we best fulfill them to the benefit of society?”

I don’t know the answer to that. I get the impression that people like feeling rich in a way that rising property prices made them feel wealthy; but this is not sustainable as we’ve already discovered, rather spectacularly. I get this impression based on the frantic efforts to NAMA-ise the residental hard done mortgage holders also.

But that’s not going to fix much. I think we need to look at the wider question of whether people should count their home as wealth at all? In principle I’m against a wealth tax but if people do see their home as a source of wealth while they are still living in it, then maybe it should be subject to a wealth tax. Can you imagine the speed at which property prices would have risen if every year you got charged more as property values rose?

The screams would have been audible from Mars.

On balance I’d like to be able to afford a three bedroomed property on my salary. It’s not unreasonable I think and is the sort of salary that would have afforded me more than a 3 bedroomed house in the past. But until recently all it afforded me was an apartment about 20 miles from where I work. A one bedroomed apartment.

But something else I’d like to see is a wholesale reform of how we handle various types of rental in this country. Our commercial leasing system appears to be opaque and weighted heavily against the customer, together with upwards only reviews, for example. Our residential tenancy legislation was updated in 2004, with howls of anguish from the landlord class but if you’re either a tenant or a landlord, it’s still rubbish. It takes months to get any disputes sorted out via the PRTB which is the responsible agency. Far too many tenants complain about unlawfully withheld damage deposits and far too many landlords expect properties to be handed back to them in better condition than they were handed over in the first place. Our reliance on furnished accommodation annoys me. I really don’t mind the idea of renting for my whole life but you know I’d like to replace the kitchen I have now. If I keep this place longer than a year I would be interested in replacing the kitchen and whereas it’s normal to negotiate things like this with landlords in France, Germany and Belgium, it’s almost unheard of here.

I don’t know.

The group is expected to consist of Irish Banking Federation boss Pat Farrell, consumer advocate and founder of the askaboutmoney website, Brendan Burgess; and Paul Joyce of the Free Legal Aid Centres (FLAC).

If I had any power in Ireland – and I do not – I would rise up and scream against the inclusion of Brendan Burgess. And here’s why. I used to contribute to AskAboutMoney until it became clear that the site would not tolerate any discussion of the possibility that property prices might fall as well as rise. You have no idea just how distructive this is, particularly in 2005. I believe I even read posts by Brendan Burgess advocating the use of interest only mortgages in some cases – probably investor related – but interest only all the same.

Property prices can fall. They are currently at a level not seen in many places since about 2004 and in some places since about 2002. And they are still falling. And while they were rising in such a way as to be utterly unsustainable, the main consumer finance website in the country shut down discussion on property prices and how they could bite as well as feed.

Who do I write to to block Brendan Burgess getting involved in trying to help the people he signally failed to help before they got into trouble? I don’t care if he founded askaboutmoney. It didn’t exactly help on the upside.

This week was illuminating. Someone told me JLS were playing in the O2 in January or February next year. I do not know who JLS are. The response I got was also illuminating. I must have heard one of their songs; it’s on the radio all the time.

This is me. When I am driving I listen to Radio WnB’s iPod which plays songs that I like ad infinitum. For example, currently it is playing Delerium a lot. And Skye. I like Skye. She has nice cheerful songs. I particularly like Love Show at the moment; it makes me think I might actually tell someone I love them. But that aside. I hate being made defensive because I don’t know what the latest and greatest pop song is. Jesus I’ve never known. I found a thread on boards.ie during the week about whether people would go to concerts on their own. I have always gone to concerts on my own, since I was in college on the grounds that very often, no one wanted to go to the odd esoteric gigs I wanted to go to and frankly, “cos I’ll be on my own” has never been an adequate excuse for doing stuff.

And yet, for a lot of people, apparently it is.

Someone told me today my life was very complicated. And that I made it so. With the benefit of some consideration, I don’t believe my life is complicated at all. There are some simple facts about it that are not the stuff of storybooks but I don’t know anyone whose life is bereft of simple facts that lack somewhat in the happy ever after front. No, my life is simple and I know it. Maybe I have a different definition of complicated.

So for the record I listen to RadioIO Chill if I am listening to the radio at all. I particularly like it through the wifi on the iPhone as it means I don’t have to tether the laptop to the stereo speakers. They don’t play JLS. Nor do they play too many ads and their DJs shut up.

I like this, right?