O'Leary Plasters Clonskeagh

Cllr Jim O'Leary is really keen on getting the vote of Clonskeagh residents. So keen in fact he has covered the place in posters. Two on most polls at the junctions. Obviously his campaign has too much money and too little sense.

Election slogan

Following up from my earlier post the city is now covered in election posters. I see Fianna Fails generic poster is once again a picture of Bertie but with the slogan "Now, The Next Steps". I have to say it's no "A lot done, more to Do" of the last election.

My Vote

The election has finally been called and like greyhounds leaping from the traps to chase a hare every candidate is after your vote, desperate to catch you but I cant help but suspect that like any greyhound race the one that stands to loose most is the hare. Who will I vote for? Well I grew up in a Fianna Fail family so the idea of voting for anyone else was bizarre. Now, for the sake of the party I think a clean out at the top is needed and I'd welcome time in opposition.

For 10 years people like Bertie Ahern, Brian Cowen, Martin Cullen, Willie O'Dea, or the PDs Mary Harney and Michael McDowell have existed in a parallel universe, detached from normal life and protected from the everyday worries of the voters. They will tell you they understand life in their Ireland, but when was the last time any of them took a bus to work? Spent 2 hours in a traffic jam commuting to work. Queued at check in and security in Dublin Airport? Paid for a train ticket? Waited in A&E for hours? Slept on a hospital trolley in a corridor? Had to travel without a Garda driver to watch over them? Had to ask a bank for a mortgage? Had to worry about interest rate increases? Had to wait on hold to ask an eircom customer agent why their local exchange doesn't support broadband?

These people tell us all that life in Ireland is wonderful, all thanks to them of course, yet the longer they stay in power the more detached they become from the nation they govern. The more they believe that quality of life is measured in euros and stock options. The more they believe that theirs is the normal life.

So who will I vote for? Well I haven't decided who is getting my vote, but I know who isn't.

Poor Clonmel

Why don't I ever hear anything good about my old home town of Clonmel in the news these days? It's not a bad place it just seems to be going through a bad patch in the news lately. Today it is because a woman was killed in a suspicious fire and there are reports that some wheelie bins around the town had earlier been set alight. The speculation is that a bin fire spread to a car which exploded and set the victim's house alight.

It sounds like a prank that got out of control. It's a tragedy, and it is an over the top prank that cant be excused but I doubt anyone set out to deliberately burn down a house. That said the town does seem rought than I remember. This article describes some of it but I heard more last time I was home. It sounds like some local kids are basically travelling in gangs and consider themselves above the law.

On Saturday Clonmel town centre came to a standstill when a gang of uniformed youths took over the Main Guard area. Eye witnesses said weapons were produced and spoke of 'a violent clash'.

The previous Saturday, St. Patrick Day, the town centre was the scene of another shocking incident when young men stole weapons from a pet shop and later brandished them on the streets of Clonmel.

The town Mayor commented

Cllr. Prendergast said there should be more police patrols on the streets of Clonmel, a more visible presence to deter such activity. She also called for more resources to be channelled into housing estates to provide facilities that would establish an outlet for the energies of the young people involved in that type of behaviour.

Despite what Cllr Prendergast says it's not like the kids in Clonmel can complain about the lack of facilities in the town today. "There's no facilities" is just the automatic excuse when people dont want to stir things up. I know this sounds like I'm an old fogey but in my opinion the town has come on along way since the 1980s and 1990s when I was growing up there.

For years the cinema was closed, McDonalds would have been a family from Scotland, a coffee shop was some place with a jar of nescafe and a kettle, the best bookshop in town had about 4 shelves and 100 books, the best disco was two miles outside the town, a "playstation" used cassette tapes to store the games which you couldn't buy in town and the cable company wouldn't come down some roads unless every house agreed to sign up. It was a quiet town sometimes but we didn't cause trouble like what happened above. We had fun but we knew if we crossed the line we'd get into the shit with our parents, the neighbours and even the school principal would give you a bollocking if you misbehaved outside school.

Today the town is almost a small city with every possible facility to keep kids amused and yet some still join gangs, loot shops (that's how it was described to me), take over parts of the main street, attack passing cars, burn bins, cars and possible houses and people will still excuse their behaviour. When will we learn that bad kids don't always become good kids if you give them a pat on the head and put up some goal posts? Sometimes a little fear of punishment goes a long way to keeping people on the straight and narrow.

Embarrassing the Government

Pity poor Bertie. Years of dedicated service to the people of Ireland and we still do things that embarrass him. How thoughtless of us. Yesterday during a debate in the Dáil he was asked about the fiasco of e-voting machines.

Mr Ahern countered: “If this House did not want to play politics with the issue, we would not be the laughing stock of Europe by carrying out a vote for two million people by using pencils. A ridiculous situation.”

Well, it was his government that ignored concerns about the security of e-voting machines and paid €52 million for them. They were then used in just two elections, and have been sitting in storage ever since. The public had been under the misguided notion that the then Environment Minister, Martin Cullen, was the one who was responsible for the failure of the project. Turns out we were all wrong. You see the failure had nothing to do with the people responsible for the project itself. It was all the fault of the opposition parties because they, shudder, "objected".

He told the Opposition: “It was your fault because you objected to it. If you had taken a mature attitude to the e-voting system that worked particularly well in the last two elections, but politically you didn’t agree with it and got a few people in to find flaws with it.

How evil of them! Finding flaws in e-voting machines. Sush don't tell anyone, maybe we can sell them to some other country where the opposition and public are less diligent. Perhaps after the next election we could have the opposition Deputies bound and gagged before they enter the Dáil Chamber? That should make things easier for Bertie. Though it would appear he is already thinking along those lines.

“It is an embarrassment. I do hope that in the next Dáil that we’re able to rid ourselves of the horrendous difficulties we have in trying to be a modern country.”

So, Bertie is embarrassed that we are voting with pencils. Well, we have used those pencils to vote him into power for the last 10 years so if he feels that embarrassed by the whole process he can simply remove his name from those old fashioned paper ballot sheets and perhaps move to a country where such tedious problems have been already been overcome. May I suggest North Korea?

Coke Zero

I'm not a big coke drinker, personally I'd prefer a glass of cold water to a glass of cola or any fizzy drink, diet or otherwise. Still, my attention was caught by the recent arrival of Coke Zero.

Today at lunch we speculated that Coke Zero was really just Diet Coke re-badged and stuck in a black can to appeal to men. We bought a can of each and put them into two glasses for people to taste. The taste difference is very noticeable! To us casual consumers Coke Zero does taste more like full fat cola. Hard to describe really, I guess where Diet Coke is a little sickly fake sweet to my taste buds Coke Zero just tastes like a sugared drink, despite not having any sugar in it.

Opinion was divided but I prefer Coke Zero to Diet Coke. Though I doubt I'll be drinking much of it anyway. Now, where is my bottle of water...?

Alien Life

The big news of the day is the fact that astronomers believe they have found an Earth like planet 20.5 light years from our own. The mean temperature on the planet is 0 to 40 degrees Celsius which means water could flow on it's surface which means the conditions could exist for life.

I have to wonder, if there is life on the planet and if it is intelligent and advanced have they noticed us? If so what could they think about us? Maybe the TV listings from 1980s would help them decide.

They have just watched humanity fight off one alien invasion and are just starting to watch a typical suburban family protect another cat eating alien. The man destined to be the worlds greatest intelligence agent has just started down the path to international spy by doing a little bit of private investigation while former soldiers turned PIs enjoy the sun and drive Ferraris in Hawaii. But should they plan to attack our puny little planet they now know that you should never lock a team of 4 humans in a barn with a bus, a stack of air cannisters, some metal sheets and a welder.

Jindabyne

Someones made a movie about one of the towns I visited on my travels in Australia. Jindabyne is a little town in the Snowy Mountains between Melbourne and Sydney. The premise of the movie seems to be about a murder and the strange behaviour of people in the town after the body is discovered.

Having been there I have to say it's not the strangest place I visited in Australia, but I can kind of understand the idea of the local people starting to go a little crazy. It's a nice town to visit, but I imagine that for the locals things can get a little quiet. Plus, maybe it's just me, but if you destroy an old town and build a new one somewhere else giving the new town the same name as the old one just seems unluky if you don't add "New" to the name. When old Jindabyne was flooded they should have built "New Jindabyne".

But the madness is not limited to the locals, I even remember some of the people on the bus doing some strange things a few hours after getting there, namely Adrianna, Rachel, Jenny, Ian and their reaction to the "Picky Picky song". But sure what goes on tour stays on tour...

Best weather forecast

Jeremy Paxman doing the weather forecast. Very funny.



See The Dossing Times for more Paxman classics.

Smurfs

Jaysis, someone is making a Smurfs movie. Scary. I hope it's proper animation and not CGI or live action. Though I wonder who would play Smurfette, I'd vote for Britney Spears.