It’s not a big house, it doesn’t have a private garden and to my knowledge, based on what I know of the estate, it doesn’t have private parking either. It’s not semi detached; it’s one of four in a block. This will cost you 1000E per month, such is the wishful thinking of the landlord.

The biggest problem this country has right now is the cost of doing business here and living here. When I look at what I have, and what it costs me to live here I really and truly have to question the wisdom of staying here. The biggest expense I have every month is putting a roof over my head. I can’t live on my own if I want to have any sort of a garden, but to have that garden I get utterly shafted. In a city that isn’t short of property.

I earn enough to be paying high tax. Being single, I am paying disproportionately more tax. I want this country to grow but there is no way that can happen until it actually costs less to live here. To put a roof over your head.

Not one politician in this country considers reducing the cost of accommodation to be a good thing. They’d find it a good deal easier to create jobs if the cost of living and working in Ireland was lower. There’s a chance they wouldn’t have to steal from our pensions, for example.

So, Michael, here’s some ideas.

Deal with the fact that accommodation is too expensive in this country. Face up to it. And kill that problem. Rents should be at least 30% less than they are in this godforsaken twobit city. Houses should be half the asking prices they are still looking for. Murder that market as fast as you can because the sooner you do, the sooner you might get some economic and retail confidence back.

Oh wait – you can’t do that because to do so would probably drive a stake through the hearts of our vampire banks and we can’t be having that, can we?

I love this island. I hate this nation sometimes.

Where you have repository and code editing and compiler – IDE say – online and nothing stored locally?

Preferably not in a particularly obscure language – something Javaesque would be okay, and I’m looking at things like Python as well.

Needs to be completely browser and remote based for various reasons that I can’t go into.

If not, maybe – just maybe – I should look at developing one. I know GitHub can act as a repository but it doesn’t look to me like you can do remote compilation/codewriting there. I could be wrong of course.

Any ideas?

The only place I really, really wanted to go was the ossuary in the Czech Republic but I might leave that until after I’ve checked out the catacombs in Paris. It’s on the list; I swear.

In no particular order, however, places I want to go include:

1. Cocos Islands off the coast of Australia. I have on several occasions looked into the practicality of this. It is not practical at all involving getting to Perth and then onwards. I think the flights alone were well over 2,500E. I need to marry a kitesurfer and there we shall spend our honeymoon.
2. Isla Margarita off the coast of Venezuala. It’s another kitesurfing place. Last one I promise
3. Hawaii. Has it all, except hanggliding apparently. Surfing. Big waves Spectacular scenery.
4. Bordeaux with a hire car and a trip to the lighthouse in the mouth of the Gironde the name of which slips my mind just now – oh yes it’s Cordouan.
5. San Francisco. It has it it all, possibly including hang gliding. I would love to hang glide in the Grand Canyon too. I wonder if that’s allowed. And would my travel insurance allow it?
6. New Zealand in general.
7. Some snowboarding somewhere.

I’ve been to every continent in some shape or form now except Antarctica except I saw this documentary about rogue big waves hitting ships down there and now I’m rather antsy about it. So i watched the March of the Penguins over Christmas instead.

That’s just for starters.

Anyway, for reasons which I won’t go into, a lot of interesting blog thingies are turning up in my life. Blogs about being a freelance webdesigner, freelance writer, freelance programmer. All those good things. The latest of them is this one. To be honest, I haven’t looked too much into the idea of freelance programming distributed although I know a few people who do it from Ireland for customers that are a a few thousand miles and timezones away. It’s a nice set up in some respects if you can get it; albeit not without its disadvantages. Most people I know want home to be separate from work.

One of the points made by a commenter to the piece above related to the fact that the original writer liked the global possibilities offered by distributed programming, but the project itself wanted to hire people who were located in New York. Only. Which, given that the piece is lauding distribution across five states is odd enough. Someone else was unhappy at the thought that programming work for US companies could be distributed outside the US via this sort of distribution.

On balance, while I can understand the frame of mind that creates that concern, the other way of looking at it is if you’re in the US, you can fight for the right to work from the US for customers elsewhere, like Europe, for example. As in, you can offer competition, not suffer it.

It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately as I consider things like 1) infrastructure in Dublin and 2) property prices in Dublin and 3) current job opportunities.

We have a government who apparently are interested in the whole knowledge economy thing. We have a way of doing things in Ireland that leans to the centralisation. We have a management mindset as well that doesn’t always recognise the benefits of distributed working areas.

If we are to get this right, we need to change the way we think about work and how we value it. We have all sorts of tools that could allow us to distribute work around the country, not just in incubator locations in Dublin and Dundalk for example. One of the key benefits of the construction boom was that it removed the necessity for internal migration for a while. It was not a sustainable way of doing it; but we could turn the entire country into a development island if we were forward thinking enough about it. And we could take some high quality development and design work into the country. According to Dublin City Council, the creative industry is worth a few billion to the city and to support it they have set up an organisation to foster it and new entrants. It’s called Creative D and it also provides links to the same industry elsewhere.

A key requirement for this is obviously comms infrastructure. UPC are getting there slowly. Eircom are 10,000 miles behind. I’m stating this on the grounds that I’ve just ordered 30Mb broadband from upc and will be cancelling 8Mb from eircom. But we need to reassess the education system also.

In a way, I think there’s a social tendency to fear change upfront. Our education system while it works, does not work well enough. And our way of approaching it is too regimented. It lacks imagination. We generalise education too far – up to about age 12. We are not effectively teaching numeracy or communications skills. And we don’t value work creatively. A lot of working in Ireland – not just in Ireland as it happens – is perception over reality. Working to the clock and less to the job. All this needs to be adjusted if we distribute a lot of work that could generate export credit and benefit the trade balance country wide.

The original Celtic Tiger – I hate that term – happened because we invested in a future that offered some potential. We killed it when we refused to face the economic reality of an economy that was growing on consumer spending and property driven credit. We are going to have to face some imagination again. Identify a different way of doing business and working it. And this time, instead of going for the quick buck, go for the long buck.

So the whole investigation was shelved pending further information on some fronts. I have some prior qualifications. I have a degree in languages -French and German, postgraduate diplomas in conference interpreting and information technology. I did look at doing a continuation masters for the IT stuff but I can’t see that it’s still available.

In part, I’m stuck between a couple of principles. Firstly, I think that you should – as far as practical – study stuff you’re interested in. But I’m in my mid thirties and even now still have an eye on career implications and so this doesn’t leave me much scope for taking 4 years off to go back and study mediaeval history, for example.

With that in mind, I have started looking at options in the local universities and will also examine some options in the distance sector. As far as Ireland is concerned, that is National Distance Learning at DCU which is clinically insane since I live down the road from DCU, or the Open University which is expensive.

My interests are a bit varied. I’ve been looking at options in mathematics, multimedia, graphics design and maybe more information technology since what I do is hyperspecialised and will definitely not be around for the rest of my life. Some adjustment is called for.

For practical reasons, I’m interested in part time options. Ireland isn’t good at this. Much of Ireland’s college scheduling has a single market in mind and that’s school leavers. But browsing part time courses is hit or miss.

DCU, for example, if you’re looking at their postgraduate qualification lists them all on a single page and shows whether they are full or part time or both. This is useful. DIT allows you to browse on either part time or full time. This is useful too although I prefer the DCU option of listening everything. So far, on UCD’s page and Trinity’s page, I have had some difficulty identifying what courses are full and what courses are part time. This is particularly difficult because having looked at the maths stuff, UCD appears to have the nicer courses but they are all full time.

In truth, I rather think we need to look at how we approach education in this country. In some respects, it is overly regimented, and it’s quite reactionary. I live near DCU and I work quite near there at the moment too. In an ideal world, their timetabling structure would enable me to pick up some of their daytime degree courses on a part time basis by agreement with my employer for example – certainly to complete them over a slightly longer time frame or shorter as required.

Most of the universities and colleges in Ireland now have a credits based system. While I recognise that it’s hardly economically beneficial to have school leavers (particularly if they are government grant aided in any shape or form) languishing around the system if they cannot acquire a sufficient number of credits in a given time space, it might be long term beneficial to make it possible to acquire the benefits on an ad hoc basis if you are otherwise working.

I have no doubt that the colleges – already facing cuts and reconsideration – would scream at the cost of implementing such a system. On the other hand, for a country that’s desperately looking at ways of spinning out of an economic crisis, some fresh thinking is going to be needed and some hard thinking.

Of course, if it happens, it won’t happen in time for me. But in the future, if we can do a better job of selling education and making it possible to buy education particularly for people in full time employment – not, for example, rely on the Open University to fill gaps – it might go a long way towards contributing to ongoing economic development.

The question is, what do you do about it? Well there are two problems. There’s the short term problem of the current lost boys, and then there’s the long term problem of future generations and what worries me is that efforts will be made to correct the short term problem – possibly – and that the longer term will get ignored.

We can’t sustain an army of construction workers to the extent that we did from about 2001-2006. Unfortunately because this industry allowed young people to stay closer to home rather than moving to the bigger cities, the jobs were seen as positive. They just weren’t sustainable. So with the best will in the world, a significant number of people – predominantly men will have to retrain and find an alternative activity.

What that would be is open to debate although as I’ve mentioned on other occasions, the Green Party would have you believe it’s environmentally related energy generation that’s a key option. I don’t know and I am not equipped to solve that problem right now.

I’m more interested in the lacunae in the education system that brought about this situation. We don’t do education well and the way we are doing it continues to disimprove. There are various reasons for this; some practical, some financial, some entrenchment in the old way of doing things.

We are weakening in basic skill sets in the way of literacy and numeracy. Craig Barret formerly CX Intel has highlighted maths and physics as key areas to sort out in this country. I utterly agree with him. Our tendancy to sort out failing maths standards is to make maths exams easier over the years, and we have had an Education Minister suggest that universities reduce their minimal maths requirements to include foundation maths, which, if you’ve seen the foundation maths syllabus, should highlight just how bad things must be at some levels.

Issues with numeracy don’t just start with foundation level maths though; they have their roots in how we approach education at the earlier stages. So we need to address how we teach at primary school so that it feeds effectively into secondary level, and likewise.

If I were to suggest something, it would be to reassess the entire school cycle. In some respects, it’s just not working any more.  The generalist approach to primary teaching continues too late in my view. I can’t object to it up to about 10 or 11, but from then on, we need to look at things like maths and science in more depth. The situation whereby we start languages at the age of 13 – for the most part – is ridiculous.

We need to look very hard then at the third level courses we offer. We’ve an overabundance of soft courses which we can’t really build an economy on. These need to be knifed. We don’t need a load of media studies courses for example. We need a certain amount more cross disciplinary study. We may have to look at extending the university cycle by one year to cater for that. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. We need to target funding for courses. Make it more attractive – and rewarding – for kids to do course that feed into building an economy. One of the things I never understood about the Irish economy for most of the past 10 years was why we valued construction so very highly (and paid it accordingly) but IT and science comparatively low (try getting research funding…).

But that being said, we need to recognise that not everyone is going to have an aptitude for high level science and research so we need to look at what skilled and semi=skilled jobs can be brought into Ireland; what we can generate ourselves and what can employ large numbers and pay them a reasonable salary. In the past, this has typically been manufacturing. We can’t depend on that alone. We can’t depend on call centres alone. And we need to provide an education system that feeds into that reality too.

I used to live in Germany. They had a tiered system whereby you did a particular stream depending on whether you were likely to hit university, technical college or other trades. It has the benefit in recognising that different aptitudes can be more suitable for different skillsets. I also used to live in France where they split up the school leaving exam streams in terms of subject aptitude. I see a certain value to that also.

This isn’t going to work if there isn’t a whole sale change in how we perceive education in this country. Put simply, we take it for granted and assume that we are entitled to an education that will get us a well paid job that makes us better off than the neighbours. That is unrealistic. Education is one of those things that gives you more the more you put into it but you wouldn’t know that from too many people I hear talking about their youngsters today.

If we get some of the top level stuff right, it should have a top down effect. I realise that China manufactures everything but it doesn’t have to be that way. If we get a few people generating ideas that can be created and manufactured here, we can use this to create jobs further on in the chain. Which will have other knock on effects in terms of support.

The thing is, a monumentally improved education system is key to this.

In the meantime, we need to look at the profile of young people losing jobs now and start moving them in a similar direction although possibly on a lesser scale.

It’s just I’m concerned at what’s going to happen before life goes on. I’m actually getting to the stage where I don’t trust anyone much. Everything I am hearing about banking in Ireland suggests I can’t trust bankers. I already know I don’t trust mortgage brokers. I am going to be needing some serious dispassionate pension advice soon and I frankly think based on my experience of bankers, mortgage brokers and stockbrokers, I don’t know whether a trustworthy financial advisor actually exists? I am starting to doubt it.

I wonder if people actually think about this. If they wonder “what will happen if I reach retirement age – which wil be 70 by the time I get to that age and sweet Jesus what do they expect me to be doing then – and there’s no money. No money to feed me, no money to pay for shelter”. I think about it a lot. I think about it a lot now because it appears to me that no one much in any position of power thought of the future, my future or anyone’s future. I could slowly go mad thinking about it.

But

1. falling incomes
2. general CPI deflation
3. increased property supply
4. increasing tax burden
5. increasing interest rates
6. increasing unemployment
7. collapse in inward migration
8. increase in net emigration

This suggests downwards in the short term.

On the other hand

1. government action by way of moratoria on repossession proceedings
2. government action on properties securing loans to NAMA
3. ECB giving up on fighting inflation temporarily
4. another financial shock.
5. Demolition of  ghost estates
6. unexpected economic turn around in an as of yet unknown industry sector.

The problem for me is I can’t see what’s going to absorb our unemployment. The Green Party will tell you it’s renewable energy initiatives. So will Spirit of Ireland. Other members of the government ramble on about smart knowledge economy. But I can’t see that sector necessarily absorbing all the current unemployed.

If I had to put anything in writing – and this is a pure guess – I think that in the short term, property is going to head further down for the next 2-2.5 years. After that, I think it will bounce along the bottom for a couple of years.