Monthly Archive

I’ve been listening to the excellent “Whistleblowers” series on RTE Radio 1. In the past it has featured interviews with Jeffrey Wigand (Brown and Williamson tobacco), Sherron Watkins (Enron) and Craig Murray (British Ambassador to Uzbekistan). Today the subject was Harry Templeton, a Glasgow printer who stood up to Robert Maxwell in the late 1980’s, and got duly shafted for his troubles.

Another story worth listening to is the tale of David Kaczynski, who discovered that his brother, Ted, was the Unabomber.

You need Real Player installed to listen to these programmes.

I managed to get myself up very early last weekend in order to take a few photos down by the coast while the sun was low in the sky.

This photograph, of the fields, the mist and the windswept bush in the foreground, was taken on my way down to the beach. I love it.

The above are a few photos taken of the coast and the rocks as they are bathed in the orange searchlight glow of sunrise. Check out the rock monster poking his head out of the ground!

I’ve just finished a reading a book called “Crucial Conversations“. I’m not a big fan of self-help books, but this one did provide quite a number of useful and practical insights. Crucial conversations refer to those conversations we have - with family members, friends, work colleagues, bosses, anyone - that have a high potential to end in acrimony and bitterness.

A number of concepts jumped out at me, but I’ll mention just two: safety and stories.

Safety

A core message of the book is that progress can only happen when people are in dialogue with each other. When one or more parties feel threatened, dialogue ceases immediately. Threatened people usually adopt one of two modes of behaviour - a mental withdrawal from the conversation (silence) or some sort of verbal attack (violence). Both responses are easily recognised and when they occur, further progress is impossible. A sense of safety must be reinstated first of all. People have to feel safe to continue in dialogue. If you are holding a discussion with someone and the other person’s expressions or actions indicate a strong degree of insecurity, then you need to restore safety before you can proceed.

Stories

When people display aggressive or passive aggressive behaviours, what we are seeing is the end result of a process: usually initiated by a factual occurrence, then by a story used to interpret these facts, then by emotion, and finally a response. The story is the most critical piece in this process. It is the amplifier that takes a tiny signal of information (often mis-information), and turns it instantly into a blisteringly hot, out of control, current. Because different people can display a wide range of responses to the same occurrence, the conclusion must be that very often, stories are just that: works of fiction. Merely saying to oneself “this may be a story” when getting riled up is sometimes enough to blunt the edge off one’s anger. Distinguishing facts from the stories that result, helps to ease pent-up emotions.

That’s all very well..

Sure, sure, there are books and then there’s the real world. I’m not expecting any hugely dramatic changes in my behaviour overnight, but I have to say the book has given me a lot of room for thought. Already I have tried to use some of these skills during interactions with my kids, while also observing more carefully how other people manage potentially difficult conversations.

I just got a flyer in the door today telling me that Chorus and NTL, the two main providers of cable TV in Ireland, are merging. No news there, however it’s how they are trying to market it that has me irked!

According to them this merger is “a new kind of choice”, and inside in the leaflet we are told that with this new arrangement we will have “greater choice”.

No we won’t. We will have less choice. If this renamed service (UPC) is dreadfully poor (and I’m not hopeful, believe you me) then we will have fewer alternatives to seek out. Between them they will hold a huge percentage of the overall market with around a million customers here in the Republic. The only choices we should care about are our options should UPC fail to deliver, or increase their prices on a whim.

The sheer brass neck of this lot. “Greater choice”. Tsk.

I took these shots with my mobile phone camera near Sean O’Casey Bridge on my way back from work last Monday.

This picture was taken just south of Sean O’Casey Bridge, a low sun and surprisingly few people around.

The docklands are undergoing a massive transformation. For some years now, tall cranes have dominated this area, once populated by warehouses and derelict sites.

Finally the Ulsterbank group headquarters, Connolly Hall, the Customs House and the Spire in silhouette, as the sun diminishes into the west.

I was in Brittany a few weeks ago, attending the wedding of a good friend of mine. My elder kids and my mum came with me. Even though we only had a week before the kids went back to school, we managed to see a lot of the Breton countryside (as well as a few places in Normandy too).

Carnac is one of the busiest beaches in Brittany - soft white sand, calm waters and one of the best ice-cream shops I have ever visited in my life. Oh, and they do sand sculptures too. Pah! Easy-peasy. Anyone could do it.

Carnac is famous for its 6,000 year old megaliths - granite pillars of varying size, aligned in rows and columns over a distance of almost 4 kilometres. Some people say it was a vast army turned into stone. Others claim it had a religious and astronomical purpose. I think myself it might have functioned as gigantic spreadsheet for Bronze Age accountants.

I found a number of imposing World War II fortifications in Gavres - a small village overlooking the city of Lorient. Lorient was a major U-boat base during the war. The city was practically razed to the ground during the first months of 1943.

Le Mont St Michel, in the extensive mudflats of western Normandy, is one of the great “must see” places in Europe. Built on a granite outcrop and accessible via a long narrow causeway, the monastery dates back to the 8th Century with the main fortifications dating from the 15th century. It even served as a prison for a while after the French Revolution. More recently, Peter Jackson used it as his template for Minas Tirith in the Lord of the Rings. Yeah, yeah, it’s touristy and kitchy inside, but even so, it’s an impressive and inpirational place. The views take your breath away.

Here are my kids in a classic “James Bond” pose on a concrete defense in Utah Beah, the most northerly of the main landing beaches in Normandy. The invasion sequence in the film “Saving Private Ryan” was shot in Ireland, on Curracloe Beach in Wexford. The similarities between the beaches are incredible. Now quiet and placid, it is impossible to imagine what the beach would have looked like during the summer of 1944.

Finally, a sunset scene: taken from the ship on our way back home.

I’m giving the final presentation of my thesis to my academic supervisor and second reader today, and then that’s it. It’s all over. I finished my thesis about 2 months ago, so it’s been something of a challenge re-reading it again in preparation for today.

Even though it was a lot of hard work, I enjoyed writing my thesis. I was fortunate in that the subject I chose was very interesting to me. I don’t think too many people have written about my chosen subject before - it’s certainly a first for the academic body I am presenting to. This makes it even more special to me.

Hopefully it will be an interesting day and not too challenging! I’m really looking forward to my graduation day in November.

I’ve been thinking further about the changes that have taken place in Ireland over the past few years. Many words come to mind immediately - brash, self-confident, multicultural, materialistic, dynamic, aggressive, etc., etc. Some of my more recent posts have veered somewhat in this direction.

One word, however, strikes a dissonant chord.

Smug.

We have become very smug about our country’s new-found success. As if nothing bad can or will ever happen again. We have achieved, and now we can just sit back, max out the credit card, let the money roll in and lecture everyone else about how they are doing it all wrong.

Well, I think Dick Wolf’s quote says it all:

“As soon as you become complacent, your show gets cancelled“.

Pat Kenny hosted a radio program from the Hill of Tara yesterday. Tara has a huge amount of significance in the mythology and pre-history of Ireland. It was the seat of the Irish high-kings and the archaeological features in the area are extensive and fascinating. Although built on a low ridge overlooking the River Boyne, the views over the Irish midlands are quite spectacular.

Over the past two years, Tara has rarely been far from the headlines because of a proposed motorway (the M3) that will pass near the Hill on its way to Cavan and Fermanagh. From the press coverage of recent years, you would think that the Hill itself was going to be bulldozed away, given the level of public debate on the issue!

The Kenny show yesterday blew the protestors’ case away in an utterly convincing fashion. We discovered that the construction of the motorway had the support of the vast majority of the local population, so much so that it wasn’t even an issue for Co. Meath voters in the last general election. We discovered that most of the protestors (90%) were non-local. We discovered that the current road (the N3) is utterly unable to cope with the volume of commuter traffic. We discovered that the recently discovered Lismullin earthworks, found along the route of the motorway, were nothing special in the context of Irish archaeology. (You can’t throw a stone in this country without hitting an ancient monument of some sort - this country contains up to 60,000 ring forts alone). We discovered that most of the protestors had no role to play in the public consultation phase prior to the final routing decision. The protestors themselves were found wanting when questioned. To me it seemed that their arguments were high on emotion and thin on rationality. Even worse, they had brought along a bunch of yahoos who did nothing to help their case: they continually hooted, insulted and interrupted the speakers from the government / development side.

Supporting the protest case was a nice “hug the stones” little ditty from Liam O’Maonlaí, which had me rushing to find a cigarette lighter so I could swing my arms in unison with the song. A pro-motorway singer couldn’t be found, strangely enough.

It seems to me that the Tara M3 Motorway is perfectly reasonable and logical in the light of a rapidly expanding capital city and a northwest region that badly needs major infrastructural investment to keep up with the rest of the country. The motorway works itself may actually help us to uncover new knowledge about our distant ancestors. Diligent archeological work will be performed on the motorway site throughout the entire development. This is in contrast to the many thousands of monuments cleared away by private developers and farmers all the time with no consultation or discussion. The protestors have (yet again) pointed their ire at the wrong culprits.

I took a short business trip to Warsaw earlier this week. It was my first time ever in Poland, and my brief impression of the place and its people was overwhelmingly positive. Up until this week, Poland was something of a mystery to me. Although there are lots of Polish people in Ireland at the moment, I know none of them, and thus I had no reference point.

It turns out that the Polish have a lot in common with us Irish. We are very similar in how we see the world. The Polish people I came in contact with were very friendly and seem to live in a world where people are continually putting up with less-than-stellar service and rules. If there’s a law, a regulation or a proscription, there’s a way around it. The Poles laugh a lot: always a good sign.

Compared to many countries in Western Europe, Poland still has some way to go. That doesn’t mean it won’t get there, however. There are clear similarities with the Ireland of 20 years ago. Back then, Ireland was still a backwater: a peripheral little fiefdom struggling to extract itself from decades of neglect, indebtedness and corruption. Few people could have imagined the social and infrastructural changes that would take place since then. The transition into a self-confident state, where things actually worked, was utterly unforeseen in the 1980’s. And yet, looking back, it now seems obvious that Ireland’s economic success was no accident and that many of the crucial factors were in place.

Well, that’s where I think Poland is now - on the cusp of a major economic and social revolution. It will take time: the current bunch of politicians there would make the Keystone Cops seem super-organised by comparison. The infrastructure is poor (Warsaw has only one metro line for a population of 3 million people), and inefficiency is the order of the day if the airport check-in procedures are anything to go by. But there appears to be a mood for change. The Polish who have left the country in recent years have a reputation for uncomplaining hard, high quality work. They love their country, and there’s a young population there who want their lives to be substantially different than what their parents settled for. In addition, the multinationals are entering Poland in their droves. You only need a few big names to enter to create momentum, and these names are now beginning to appear there, establishing substantial distribution and customer service operations.

My time there was short, but I’ve been given a flavour of the country, and I’d like to get back there again - to see more of Warsaw, the Baltic coast, Krakow, the Tatras Mountains and the Bielowieza Forest. Some day soon, perhaps.