Yes Minister

Michael Healy-Rae is learning his first lesson as a TD, when a Government Minister asks you to do something in the national media you'd better say Yes Minister or be ready to go to the mattresses.

Joan Burton twice wrote to Michael asking him to step down from the Citizens Information Board now that he is a TD. Michael said no. Joan made a bit of an issue about it in the media and Michael responded by accusing her of cronyism and asking who she would replace him with on the board. In your face Minister, dont tred on Michael...

Then suddenly out of the 2007 comes the relevation that 3636 phone calls were made to a premium rate phone number from a phone in the Dail voting for Michael to win a reality TV show. This cost the taxpayer €2,639. Michael's response was he couldnt have done it since he was on TV and sure the money went to charity anyway. Leaving aside the obvious stupidity of an excuse that depends on the inability of everyone who was on Michael's fathers then Dail staff being able to use a phone, claiming it's ok anyway because the money went to charity is like saying it's ok to rob banks so long as it goes to a good cause. Now he's had to come out and pay back the money while insisting he still did nothing wrong in the hope that the story will go away. Meanwhile Joan is off on TV/radio announcing a national intern job scheme and just casually mentioning that Michael should resign from the board.

Whats next for Michael? Some rumours of voting irregularities in his constituency came up again yesterday. Elderly people in Kerry South reporting that people showed up on their door step asking to collect their postal ballot or help fill them out. Stuff like that happens all over the place during elections (or did when I was a kid) but suddenly it's news coming out of the same constituency as Healy-Rae?

Coincidence? Maybe but it's getting a message across as well. Dont mess with a Government Minister or it may just be your bad luck to find yourself in front of cameras explaining something from some years ago.

Wedding Documents

Anyone know a good religion, quick to join, fast track for wedding paperwork/interviews and a free church building at the start of August? Preferably one that has a courier service on speed dial who will be able to get documents from Ireland to Canada in less time than infinity?

It would appear that 6 weeks later our paperwork which took weeks to complete has disappeared into the processes of the Catholic Church and hasn't reappeared at the other end yet. Aaaaahhhhhhhhh.

If this doesn't go through Lauren will marry me just to divorce me!

Driving Test

I passed my driving test today. At my age it was a bit ridiculous that I had never bothered to even sit a driving test until today. I live in Dublin in an area well served by buses and the luas so it is easier for me to take public transport into town than drive and worry about parking. However my current job is at the other side of the city so driving became an issue and I decided to bite the bullet and go for my full license.

I have two observations about the process. First my god but lessons are expensive. They were worth it, but at €55 an hour for the pre-test I felt sorry for anyone who needs to book more that a couple of pre-test lessons. Now the instructor was great and without doubt I would have failed if I had not been through the two pretest sessons, had him bring me through the dummy test scenario and been brought around the routes. The test itself did bring me into some different areas from the lessons but in general I was comfortable enough with most of the estates, roads and junctions.

Secondly the tester is hyper professional. It's his job to mark my driving and tell me where to go and that is it. No small talk, no observations about the day or the monsoon rain that hit during the test, just "left here", "right at the end of the road", "pull in" for 30 minutes. Even after the main test when he had me park (yes, parking was tested though I was told it wouldn't be) he didn't say anything just told me to follow him back to the office. Then he sat behind his desk and started getting out papers. By that stage I was sure I'd failed by nearly killing us somewhere along the route and he was bringing me back to the office to wait for the Gardai to impound my car. It was only when he started filling in the Certificate of Competence that he paused and said "oh yeah, you passed, congratulations". I'm sure he sees dozens of test candidates every day and it's his job to test us all fairly with no bias based on how he likes the person so he did the right thing but it was nerve wracking.

So I finally have a full drivers license. I'm now qualified to drive where I like and on my own. Though somehow the knowledge of how to drive on motorways has not magically popped into my brain after passing, I might stay away from them for a while.

Bad Declan, Very Lax

I've been called to task by one old friend Col Ciaran Creedon who has reported me as MIA, or is that AWOL, from this blog for 90 days. It's been a hectic 3 months with wedding preparations and other projects so my ramblings were reduced to 140 character tweets and I never got around to posting here. Which is bad of me since the last 3 months have been pretty bloody interesting in Ireland, maybe not as interesting as prior to GE11 but still it's not like I couldnt have found some time to post an update or two. My apologies.

I'll get back to posting here from now on, I promise, and if I dont The Col. will track me down.

GE11

General Election 2011 is over, at least the first one is over and hopefully the politicians can sort out a deal to make a stable government. The odds are that a Fine Gael/Labour coalition will govern for some years to come while the outgoing Fianna Fail party could take several elections to recover from the disaster that befell it. At the end of the day Fianna Fail cant blame anyone but themselves. Their policy decisions over the last decade led the country into an unsustainable boom and when it all collapsed they landed the nation with a huge amount of debt while trying to shore up a group of banks that mattered little to anyone outside the golden circle of property developers and politicians. I personally dont doubt most of the TDs thought they were doing the right thing for the country but they had become so removed from the real country and the ordinary people that they did not understand what life was like outside Government Buildings.

I voted. I always have since I was old enough to vote. When you consider what people went through to get the right to vote then it seems childishly ungrateful not to spare 10 minutes every 5 years on the way home to call into a hall and put a mark on a piece of paper. For ID I brought my passport and before heading over to the polling station I snapped a couple of shots. Most of them didnt come out and then on the way I only managed to get one photo of the election posters that I liked. I did try to sneak an iPhone photo of the ballot paper when I was in the voting booth (not allowed but I wasnt the only one who did it) but it didnt come out.

Back to Analog

A year or so ago I was clearing out a storage space under the stairs and I came across a couple of VHS tapes I had packed away some time earlier. These were some old TV shows I had recorded and a couple of movies that I had not yet replaced on DVD when I had decided to keep them. They were significant because they were the only pieces of analog media left in the apartment (if you don't count books and I don't). In fact things had moved on to such a degree that beside the box of VHS tapes was my box of CDs, long since burned to MP3 and playing off my iPhone.

I contemplated what to do with the tapes, they did have a certain sentimental value but I realised that even at their peak they were not the best quality and I had long since disposed of the VHS player that could make them useful again. So they went into the bin, the last relics of our analog past. I was quite proud of myself to have finally moved my life to digital.

At least until last weekend when I went shopping for a present for my fiancee. She is a music nut and accounts for an ever growing percentage of the random tracks that appear on my iPhone after a sync. The English punk rock band The Clash have a strange and cheesy role in how we got together 4 years ago, so I decided that a set of Clash albums on vinyl would make an amusing and quirky Valentines gift. Off I went into Dublin City to scour the music shops for vinyl.

It turns out I'm not the only one to have gone digital, the mainstream shops in Dublin have long since made the switch too, pushing CDs into a smaller section and trying to cling to a market of DVDs and Blu-Ray movies. Even some of the old die hard music shops seem to be allocating more space than I would have expected to CDs. Granted many of those CDs were indeed old and from bands I had never heard of and whose names their own members probably struggle to remember after all these years. In the era of iTunes CD's may start to push the old vinyl disks out of the dusty hidden away record shops and into the antique shops as 30 somethings become nostalgic for their first album bought in the 1990s and want to show their kids how Daddy used to listen to music before phones had play buttons.

Eventually after being sent from one shop to another an assistant at one market stall informed me that indeed he had seen some Clash vinyl that very morning but in a different shop around the corner. Off I went and with some relief I finally managed to acquire 3 albums, an EP and a single (for far less than the new versions would cost on iTunes). Now the first album The Clash from 1977 sits in an album frame in our apartment while the discussion takes place on where we should hang it.

The fact that we don't actually have a record player did cross my mind but that's for another days shopping. We will get one, fans would insist that the music should be played, but for the moment this is analog media that has moved to the status of wall art. A historical relic from a previous era. I cant see myself ever hanging a CD on the wall, VHS tapes were never pretty and iTunes album art makes no sense at all in a role outside a computerised screen so perhaps that is the future for analog media in my home, finding a niche as visual art that digital can never hope to usurp.

New Dublin Street Trading Spots

Dublin Council is considering adding new street trading locations around the city. Most are food stalls but there would be several Arts and Crafts spots around the city. The full list is available here but some highlights include

• Books and/or paintings under Merchants Arch


• Jewellery/Crafts on Capel Street Bridge


• Art and Photography in St Patricks Park

I think some high quality trader spots around the city would be good, so long as they encourage Irish crafts and artists. The spot for Art and Photography in St Patricks Park would be good, especially if they allow numerous stall and dont allow the art crowd to exclude photographers in the way they do at other spots like Merion Square. I do wonder about the need for more flower stalls on Grafton St and a food kart on the traffic island opposite college green seems like a good way to get drunk people to wander into traffic while eating a kebab, but in general the new spots could be good additions to the city.

Dublin Bus Fare Increase

With all the media attention focused on the upcoming General Election for 2011 it appears that Dublin Bus have managed to sneak in approval National Transport Authority for a 2% fare increase. 2% may not seem much but somehow it adds up to 10c on some fares. A quote from their website:

Dublin Bus wishes to advise customers that from Sunday 6th February 2011, adult cash fares will increase. For journeys of 13 stages and under, the fares will increase by 5 cent. Over 13 stages, outer suburban and Xpresso fares will increase by 10 cent. There will be no increase to child fares.

So next week expect to pay more if you take a bus on your commute.

Alternatively if you drive a car through tolls apparently the National Roads Authority believe toll companies are ripping off commuters and should be reducing tolls to reflect the fall in the consumer price index. I agree with them, the price of state supported services should fall when the CPI falls, unfortunately the Public Service seem to think it's fair for them to increase their charges no matter what is happening in the economy.

New Toy

I got myself a nice new toy this morning, a Canon EF 24-70 f2.8 L USM lens. It's beautiful. Up to now I've bought EF-S lenses and they served my needs well but with my wedding coming up and a friends wedding before that where I have to take photos I thought I'd make the leap into pro lenses. My walk around lenses were good but when i zoomed in the aperture would go up and they never worked well in low light. I've played around a little this afternoon and have been impressed so far. We had to go to a wedding fair this afternoon so my opportunities to test the lens have been limited but hopefully I'll get out tomorrow and put it through it's paces.

Vivian Maier News Clip

I saw this amazing story yesterday. A Chicago nanny by day and a superb street photographer by night (or her time off). Her photos lay undescovered until after her death when a box of her negatives was bought in a sale of an abandoned storage locker. Eventually the guy who bought the first box was able to buy other boxes and found approximately 100,000 negatives, a third of which have not been developed yet so even Vivian had not seen them. It's worth watching and it makes me think of a car boot sale my fiancee went to in Canada a few years ago. A St Johns photographer was retiring and had lots of old cameras on sale. Lauren picked up an old Minolta range finder for me but she said the table was full of rolicords and other old cameras. I'd love to discover a box of old negatives or a car boot sale full of old cameras.