Maria

Bertie Ahern has finally announced that he will go. And the reason he hung on for so long while evidence of money received, tax evaded and lies told by him piled up one on top of the other? He truly believes he did nothing wrong.

In an emotional speech surrounded by his Government colleagues, Mr Ahern expressed thanks to his supporters over more than three decades in the corridors of power.
However Mr Ahern said he had no doubt that a simplistic analysis will suggest that his decision was influenced by more recent events at the Tribunal.

‘I have never done anything to corrupt my office’ he said. ‘I know in my heart of hearts that I have done no wrong and wronged no one.’

Accepting tens of thousands of pounds from cronies, passing it on to your mistress to buy property, being pursued by the Revenue Commissioners for dishonest tax returns, and lying about it to the Dail, to a Tribunal and to the people of Ireland again, and again, and again – Bertie, you wronged us all.

Charles Haughey has a lot to answer for. Ahern believes there is nothing wrong with accepting money from political supporters for his personal use, as long as he can’t be proven to have given anything in return. Even the least materialistic of Haughey’s coterie believes to the depth of his being that accepting money illegally is morally sound, because it is simply his droit de seigneur.

I’m glad to see Ahern finally go, but sickened that yet another self-serving generation of the largest political party in Ireland will believe we have wronged this liar and thief, and not the other way around.

In a moment of search engine ennui, I typed this into the Google search box: whatever I’m looking for, I won’t find it here.

First up was the nutty Tom Cruise video excerpt where he raves about Scientologists as the only people who can really help at the scene of an accident. Then, bizarrely enough, came a 2002 White House press conference with Bush convivially avoiding answering questions about unilaterally attacking Iraq and making in-jokes to the supine press corps. Then, suitably enough, a piece called ‘why search sucks and you won’t fix it the way you think’.

On page 2 of the results I found Trent Raznor moaning about album sales and proposing a music tax for ISPs, then Larry Birkhead insisting he would not share custody of poor (literally) misbegotten Dannielynn. Then MediaMatters gave a bizarre insight into the American poltiical psyche when a discussion of Clinton supporters sliming Obama for his middle name and Muslim father segued into how men feel castrated by Hillary.

And after that the randomness got a bit samey. Google’s tailoring of results to geographic location meant that any non-bracketed query of commonly used words returns me a cornucopia of US-oriented flim flam. It reminds me of why we used to buy a British Sunday newspaper at home; to know what they really thought of us. When the papers caught on to the Irish market and started finessing their stories and cutting back on the anti-Irishry, I lost interest. Same with Google. If I wanted to know about nothing but celebrity gossip and political tittle tattle then I’d, well.., I’d read the same pointless echo-sheets I already do every day.

I was going to ask Google if I’ll ever find true love. Don’t think I’ll bother now.

A few years ago, I was quite pleased that no one in Ireland seemed too bothered that our married but separated prime minister Bertie Aherne lived with his mistress/girlfriend/partner and even brought her on foreign trips. Bertie hasn’t given me a lot of joy overall, but it was nice to think that the Irish public had better things to do than worry about his marital status. (A couple of years previously, a government front-bencher had been apprehended by the police in a park at night, in an area popular with rent boys and their clients. The media unsuccessfully tried to whip up a moral panic, and within 24 hours most callers to talk radio shows were expressing sympathy to the man’s family but saying the issue wasn’t of enormous public interest.)

My idea of our newfound sophistication was punctured by a couple of Brussels diplomats. The French were particularly annoyed as they felt everyone should understand the mistress’s carefully delineated position. It was just gauche, they thought, to bring one’s mistress to an official dinner and expect other people’s wives to sit down beside her. Soon enough, Bertie dumped poor Celia – and the press did take a great interest in that – and began to go to official functions by himself.

But now the French are hoisted on their own petard! Sarkozy’s man-eating girlfriend, who happens to be the spit of his recent ex-wife, might accompany him on a state visit to India next week. And because the Indians are particularly conservative when it comes to recognising non-marital relations, they don’t know where to seat Ms. Bruni for dinner or where she should sleep. It really is a bit rude to put your hosts in such a quandary. So much for Sarko being anything but gauche.

Last weekend I went to a preview of The Golden Compass, the New Line film of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, fully prepared to love it. The trailers were terrific, and the casting of Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig was inspired. I’d heard Pullman’s insistence that cutting out all references to the Magisterium as a religious authority didn’t matter, because the Magisterium represented totalitarianism in all its forms. I didn’t buy it, but thought the film could still be worthwhile. Oh dear.
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I moved to the US a few months ago (It’s been a bit of a shock to the system. Let’s just say that on account of me not being a blonde, big-titted wannabe from the flyover zone, it was never my life’s dream to live in L.A.). Going to church makes me feel at home for an hour or so a week. At Mass last week, the priest gave a good but very rambling sermon. A propos of nothing at all, he said parishioners should make a point of wishing others a ‘Happy Christmas’ or even ‘Happy Hanukkah’ instead of the ubiquitous ‘Happy Holidays’.

Now, this being a very cool, gay-friendly church with great music, one person shouted out ‘why should we do that?’ as the wave of applause moved from the front benches backwards, faltering somewhere around the middle. I happen to feel the same as the priest, but kept my hands firmly in my lap. [click to continue…]

Just as Heroes Season II is finally hitting its stride, the Hollywood writers strike may cut it short. The producers are shooting an alternative ending that could air in early December, finishing the series half way through. That would be a shame, because this series is pacing itself pretty much like the last one. Both started slowly, with disparate characters wandering around doing lots of exposition but not much plot. Then the first narrative arc took off, feinted left in the middle of the season and revealed the real drama which peaked in the season finale. You really need the full dose for the plot to culminate. And the hotness. Twenty-odd episodes of hotness.
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Google is staking a claim on the moral high ground of Internet privacy. The company has called for new international rules, ostensibly to protect privacy online. Little of Google’s search information is strictly ‘personal data’, i.e. data directly concerning named individuals. But search data, potentially tied to individuals’ IP numbers, is dynamite, something it’s taken Google a long time to face up to publicly. Google got its fingers badly burnt by the incredulous reaction to its ‘trust us, we’re the good guys’ privacy policy a couple of years back. They hired Peter Fleischer, a well-respected Microsoft lawyer and data protection expert, to put their case more seriously. And now Fleischer is showing Google’s global citizenship willing by suggesting to UNESCO that an international body create a new set of rules on Internet privacy. But would this improve individuals’ privacy?

Part of the argument for a new instrument – at least as summarized in reports on the speech – is that the existing ones are too old and were crafted before the Internet really took off. The OECD Guidelines date from 1980 and the EU data protection directive from 1995, so they’re said to be out of date. Fleischer is said to argue for new rules based on the APEC privacy framework, and says Google is in favour of individuals’ privacy. The trouble is the ‘past their sell by date’ argument doesn’t hold up, and the APEC principles are a weak model to anyone who cares about privacy.
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You never know who you’ll run into on the way from Brussels to Kerry. In the check-in line at Zaventem, I met John Bruton, former Fine Gael Taoiseach and now the EU’s ambassador to the US. On Wednesday night, he had treated the Brussels branch of Fine Gael to his pungent and witty take on US/EU relations, and he was still in flying form. In the lounge, I was gently ribbed for my blueshirtedness by Fianna Fail MEPs Sean O’Neachtain and Liam Aylward. Both MEPs had been reading The Four Glorious Years, 1917 – 1921, an institutional account of the foundation of the Irish State by a civil servant of the time. They warmly recommended the book, saying you wouldn’t know the writer was a Dev man till the last chapter. Now this is something I just love about Irish politicians.
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Here are the things most people would happily pay for at an international transit airport:
– a shower
– clean underwear (for those of us who habitually forget to pack it)
– daylight
– an exercise facility to help with the jetlag and minimise DVT
– nutritious but not too heavy food
– a nap, lying flat, somewhere quiet.

And here’s what is generally available:
– Gucci
– Chanel
– l’Occitane
– Bodyshop
– Lacoste
– Nike
– a few plastic seats
– McDonalds, dougnuts, and the local variety of fried, sugary dross to add a sugar hangover to your jetlag.

Sometimes there’s a shower, and I’ve even heard of napping capsules – though never in the terminal I’m in. But generally, the big transit airports totally mismatch the actual desires of travellers, and instead lay on miles of the same over-priced globalised tat (Swarovski, anyone?) for the miserable and jetlagged to wander about in.

Is the idea that we’ll buy a Cartier watch because we’re so tired and addled? Or are ‘we’ such wealthy and time-poor businessmen that we’ll buy any shiny expensive thing we see for our neglected wives and mistresses? At Bangkok airport recently, most of the travellers were wearing tracksuits and carrying babies. Chanel, Prada and the rest of them were completely empty. Though at least there are showers and a spa in that airport. But all I wanted to buy was clean knickers and a mobile phone – and the result was 2-nil to the airport. At least I didn’t succumb to those silk and wool scarves they have in every airport in the world, but that only French women wear.

So why the complete mismatch of trapped and exhausted consumers to luxury goods? Surely the airports have woken up to the fact that travelling is mass market. Or are travellers such a captive market that airports can completely ignore what they actually want…?

My ICANN colleague, Kieren McCarthy, has written an interesting piece on the ICANN Blog about types of new top level domains (e.g. .com, .info). He dusted off a 1997 proposal to put .firm, .store, .web, .arts, .rec, .info and .nom in the domain name system (DNS).

What strikes me is the taxonomic approach of what we now think of as Web 1.0. The TLDs considered ten years ago were attempts to organise the Internet from the top down by category and generic activity type. If and when a process for approving new TLDs begins next year (it’s subject to a vote by the ICANN Board, probably in October), it won’t yield anything like this organised and thematic approach.

Rather than creating a hierarchy of meaning, we’ll see an explosion of ideas pushing up from below. About the only new TLD proposal we know we’ll get is .berlin, which has put a glint in the eyes of city managers and tourist authorities all over the world. We don’t know which new TLDs will be created, but as Kieren says they’ll probably be things like .blog, .news, .coffee, .google and the like, i.e. services in search of a market and branding efforts by companies, cities and pretty much anything you can think of.

The predominantly English-speaking technical cadre that looked at this issue 10 years ago only came up with one non-English TLD (.nom) which was still pure ASCII text. Today, the global technical community is working hard to smooth the way for internationalised domain names, i.e. names in non-Roman characters.

It’s clear that the Internet will start changing as soon as the new TLDs begin to appear. What’s not as obvious is how ICANN may change. Just as the European Economic Community was fundamentally altered by conceiving and administering the Common Agricultural Policy, ICANN may itself be changed by the new gTLDs programme. The CAP is a bad example substantively, as it was designed to shut competition out. The DNS isn’t a way to organise the world’s information, but is a tool people can use to organise and express themselves. I hope the new gTLDs will give expression and form to communities and interests around the world that use the Internet but don’t yet see themselves in it.

Things aren’t looking too good for the rainbow coalition of Fine Gael, Labour and possibly the Greens. Yesterday’s election had a very high turnout and Fianna Fail, the leading party in the most recent coalition has about 41% of the vote.

Right now, all indicators are that the next coalition will be led by Fianna Fail. But who will the junior party be? The Progressive Democrats, Labour (despite their pre-election pact with Fine Gael) or even Sinn Fein.

I’d hoped to get home to vote, but work didn’t permit. In Brussels, only Irish civil servants and their spouses are permitted to use a postal vote. I’ve no serious complaints. If our diaspora was allowed to run the show, the provos would have been in years ago.

18 months ago, it was decision day for the EU’s General Affairs and External Relations Council to decide on banning Uzbek government officials from entering Europe. A travel ban was put in place after the Uzbek government shot dead about 200 protesters in Andijan in May, 2005. The US also protested the massacre and was kicked out of its air base in Afghanistan’s neighbour (despite having poured $1 billion of aid into the country since 1992, not to mention the odd extraordinary rendition). In October 2005, the EU issued a strongly worded protest and banned Karimov and about a dozen of his cronies from entering the Europe. Today, it’s d-day again, as the Council decides whether to continue banning 12 named officials from entering Europe.

Normally, this bread and butter issue should have been decided last week in discussions between government officials. Most member states wanted the ban continued for 12 named people, but Germany wanted only 8. Using its presidency of the EU to throw its weight around, Germany refused point blank to negotiate at the working level, and pushed the issue up to the EU’s foreign ministers for their meeting today. All over Brussels, diplomats are scratching their heads at how far Germany is willing to stick its brass neck out for this nasty little dictatorship and asking themselves; wtf? [click to continue…]

Imagine my excitement when I turned on TF1 last night to see my two crushes amongst France’s Great Men engaged in intellectual naked mud wrestling together. Patrick Poivre d’Arvor was interviewing Nicolas Sarkozy, and was as benignly indifferent to Sarko’s expressive eyes and small man ego as if he were talking to his puppet on Les Guignols. Sarkozy punctuated his remarks by referring directly to PPDA as “Patrick Poivre d’Arvor”. It was odd, and I’m sure there’s some history behind it. Does anyone know the story?

Through the campaign, Sarkozy has been even more invigorated, more expansive, more himself. He finally wrestled an endorsement out of Chirac a couple of weeks ago, when it was obvious that Super-Menteur was hurting only his own credibility by witholding approval of his prodigal son. Sarkozy is off the leash and thriving on it. A political campaign gives expression to his infamous hyperactivity in a way the mere presidency of France never could. He’s growing into the role, but he’ll never be amiable like Chirac or grand like Mitterrand. Sarkozy is charmingly insecure. He completely spoilt his statesman act last night by pointing out how he rises above the insults of his rival candidates by refusing to address them.

This morning, in a political broadcast, Segolene Royal was looking much less exhausted than she has over the last few weeks. She articulates perfectly the nation’s desire to live out its values of fairness and justice and accommodate the rest of the world purely on France’s terms. If France’s presidency was the figurehead role initially envisaged in its predecessor republics, there would be a place for this sort of thing. Without naming names, she referred to those who are ‘bulimics of power’, implicitly contrasting her own, more measured approach. But while Royal says she’ll steer France away from the ‘neo-liberal’ policies of the last five years, in practice it would mean more of the same when it comes to the economy. Chirac has stayed a steady course purely out of lassitude, Royale would do so out of a popular, Canute-like belief that France can stand alone against ‘de-localisation’ and ECB interest rates.

The dark horse is, of course, Francois Bayrou. Try as I might, I never seem to switch on the telly when he’s talking. I’d love to see PPDA give him a good working over.

Rather worrying news from Ireland where figures from the last quarter of 2006 show that, as expected, new building is declining, but also that exports dropped by 10% when they’d been expected to rise by more than 2%. [click to continue…]