The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Was in Clare Hall this last weekend, and good to be out and about because I’ve had a chest infection and was going stir crazy at home. But slightly depressing to see that the Eason’s franchise in Clare Hall is now rebadged as a Book Stand. Apparently there’s one in the Omni centre too and I understand there are branches around the country. Eason’s had the franchise and now it no longer does. So away with all Eason’s branding, but more notably no papers or magazines were on sale.

I’d dropped in to get some stationery and a copy of Private Eye but it’s clear that newspapers and magazines are fading away in retail outlets. Tesco in Clare Hall used to have a good selection of both. Now it’s fairly minimal. Book Stand is grand as a book and stationery shop but it’s a restricted function.

I was in a shop in Kilkenny a week or two back which had no newspapers or magazines at all. Just chocolate bars, snacks and soft drinks and fruit. But it wasn’t a food shop as such. It was effectively a newsagents without the news.

Sure, I get it, mobiles, iPads, computers, televisions. But it’s amazing to see how this is now functioning. Or not. There’s a part of me that wonders about this, about how corporations big and small are turning the screws on information, channelling it – consciously or unconsciously, in different directions. How does that work?

“DON’T SEND OUR KIDS TO WAR”

This is our Mothers Day message, which we will be sharing from our stall at Fairview today. We will be there from 12.30 to 2pm so come along and show your support.

Members of the Dublin 3 for Neutrality campaign have already spoken and made it very clear that the campaign for Irish Neutrality is vital to protect the future for our children.

Community activist Fionnuala Halpin, a mother of two sons stated this very clearly:

“People in our communities are not stupid, we understand the long-term implications of the Irish Government’s erosion of our neutrality. Ultimately, we will see Irish people coming home in body bags, casualties in other nations’ conflicts. We will no longer be seen as fulfilling our traditional peace-keeping role, a proud tradition we should cherish. That is why we use the slogan Not our Sons and Daughters”.

Eleanor Paine, a North Strand resident agreed:

“I was very impressed when I first heard the slogan Not our Sons and Daughters. It really brought it home to me what a future without Irish neutrality could mean. I am the mother of three young boys and even the thought that they may fight and die in any war terrifies me.

Eleanor added:

“The recent vote by Dublin City Councillors which passed a pro-neutrality motion by a huge majority was very positive and gives me great hope that Ireland can stay on the path of peace”

Join your local campaign group.

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY

All contributions welcome. 

Cost of living crisis? It’s all ‘our’ fault apparently.

My own theory as to why we’re so tolerant of high prices in this country, and so reluctant to resist them, is that we share a residual DNA-level memory of poverty and want — so long a reality in Ireland — and a resultant fear of appearing poor. My long-dead granny’s idea of a compliment was to tell you that you looked fat, because looking thin meant you didn’t have enough to eat.

We’ll keep bidding on overpriced properties and pay more than we believe they’re worth, according to a recent survey, rather than concede they are out of our reach

A bizarre take on the current Irish government here this morning:

Bonds between the two countries had taken a knock in recent years, so any easing of tensions can only be welcomed. A reset was only possible, however, because the Irish and UK governments are now basically cut from the same pattern.

Both believe the answer to every ­social and political problem is to drink from the bottle marked “More EU”. Both are carriers of the busybody gene, which makes its hosts believe it is their fervent duty to organise all our lives down to the last atom.

This seems unlikely:

Dublin’s approach [on neutrality and US corporations] is also isolating us from our natural allies in Europe. We are at risk of being seen to keep company with Viktor Orban’s anti-Ukrainian Hungarian government and Robert Fico’s increasingly illiberal Slovakia as thorns in the side of EU progress.

Fico? Orban? Martin?

A columnists in the Independent argues that:

Money is a moral matter too. There is an entirely legitimate argument that income earned in a country should be taxed in that country, and that Ireland is ripping off the citizens of America and Europe by hoovering up taxes that rightfully belongs in those jurisdictions.

Those who believe the Taoiseach should lecture Trump publicly about his war should also tell us what spending cuts they’d make if those companies moved just 10pc of their taxes back to America. What infrastructure will they not build? What health spending will they cut back?

They won’t of course, because the Irish left likes to condemn America while freely spending American money.

Does it? Perhaps some evidence of same might be useful.

A humblebrag:

I was reading the historian Tacitus’s account of Teutoburg Forest while Oscar-hopeful Timothée Chalamet was making headline news. A clip of the actor was circulating: no one cares about opera or ballet any more, he said. He wants to work in movies – an art form that still attracts an audience. It’s an honest and brave thing to say.

Here’s a problem:

New research by the Silicon Valley-based SETI Institute (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) suggests tempestuous space weather makes radio signals from the distant cosmos harder to detect.

The organization, which is partly funded by Nasa, said stellar activity such as solar storms and plasma turbulence from a star near “a transmitting planet” can broaden otherwise ultra-narrow signals. That spreads the power of any such transmission across more frequencies, the institute’s scientists say, which makes it more difficult to detect using traditional narrowband searches.

And:

The new research, they say, highlights an “overlooked complication”: even if an extraterrestrial transmitter produces a perfectly narrow signal, it may not remain narrow by the time it leaves its home system.

“Plasma density fluctuations in stellar winds, as well as occasional eruptive events such as coronal mass ejections, can distort radio waves near their point of origin, effectively ‘smearing’ the signal’s frequency and reducing the peak strength that search pipelines rely on,” a statement accompanying the finding states.

In layman’s terms it means that, however unlikely a scenario, the institute believes aliens might be out there, and could be trying to talk to us. But if they are, unpredictable weather conditions have garbled the messages, and we simply cannot hear them.

And:

Brown said the findings meant space listeners would have to rethink the long-established mechanics of the search for alien lifeforms, including conducting future observation surveys at higher frequencies.

“By quantifying how stellar activity can reshape narrowband signals, we can design searches that are better matched to what actually arrives at Earth, not just what might be transmitted,” she said.

All very interesting – a pity the article then takes a predictable left turn into UFO’s and the noise around release of some files on unexplained anomalous phenomena, which frankly is beside the point. What would be more interesting would be some outline of the means by which scientists could work around this newly realised challenge. As always with space science and exploration the reality is that all this is difficult – transmitting signals across light years is a massive endeavour.

As it happens radio and other signals are expanding outwards, up to 200 light years from Earth but, as this piece notes – the ionosphere of this planet ‘garbles’ many of those, and even those that survive: (like Earth-space communications), by the time they’re 100 light-years away, are so attenuated and weak that they’re basically undetectable anyway.

More modern communications media tend to be ‘quieter’ and less easily detectible. That might be no bad thing.

Intriguing BelTel interview with Samuel G. Beckton earlier in the Winter, who has written ‘The Unbroken Covenant: Could Ulster Unionists have controlled a nine-county Northern Ireland, 1920-1945?’ (there’s also a favourable review in the current edition of History Ireland).

Derrynow has a report on the book and talks to Beckton.

Dr Beckton, who is originally from Leeds in Yorkshire in England, came to Trinity College Dublin in 2015 to study International Peace Studies, where he met his wife and moved to Belfast in 2017 to study his PhD.

“Protestants in these three counties felt abandoned following partition. There was a sense of the broken covenant, referring back to the 1912 Ulster Covenant [signed by more than 470,000 in Ulster in opposition to the British Government’s Third Home Rule Bill for Ireland], he added.

Joe Lee once pointed to how for all the rhetoric of the southern state and its supposed evils, unionists were willing to abandon the populations of those three counties to what had been painted as an appalling situation (and of course not just them, with other unionists across the 26-counties). Beckton suggests:

“Unionists in those counties might have been part of the new northern state because originally the British Government wanted nine counties to ensure Irish reunification might happen much later with demographic change bringing about a peaceful resolve.

“However, the majority of Ulster Unionists decided they wanted a six county option not a nine county option.

“Now supposing they had gone for a nine county option, yes the economy would have been bigger, yes areas such as East Donegal for instance or some elements of the border counties would not have problems with tariffs going into traditional markets such as Belfast, Derry / Londonderry and Strabane.

“But it also would have meant, in the long run, with the abolition of STV [single transferable vote] voting in Northern Ireland in 1929, they would not have necessarily had that much representation in Stormont in a nine county Ulster. They might have actually had more representation, ironically, in the long run as happened in our timeline, compared to what might have happened with the change to first-past-the-post in Northern Ireland.”

It’s a fascinating counter-factual. Whether there was any political momentum for a nine-county Ulster in 1920-21 is a different matter. It’s difficult at this remove to see this as an option that was stymied so much as an option that from the perspective of a Unionism in significant retreat offered nothing better and possibly much worse than a six-county Ulster. Though the other way of looking at it was that partition in whatever form meant that problems were stored up and stored away, to erupt in one way or another sooner or later.  

Here’s an Irish album (hat tip to Eddie for the lead) from last year created by former JJ72 bassist Hilary Woods. Her fifth solo outing is am atmospheric and interestingly melodic selection of songs (with long time David Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley on duty as mixer and additional producer). The melding of her strength as an instrumentalist (and so much of her output has been instrumentals) with her voice is just about perfect. The overall tone slips between the sinister and the nostalgic and yet overall it’s an oddly comforting listen -cool but never cold. Concise too at just over half an hour with seven songs. Deeply impressive.

Endgames

Taper

Voce

Brightly

Offerings

The Independent Friday points to one obvious facet of the crisis:

There are four times more Airbnb lets than long-term rentals available nationwide, new research has shown.

In some counties the statistics are even more stark, with short-term accommodation outnumbering residential properties by up to 30 to one.

An analysis carried out by housing charity Threshold shows more than 8,600 second homes are advertised on Airbnb, yet only 2,100 properties are available across the country on a long-term basis.

Kerry had the highest ratio, with 1,009 short-term lets advertised, compared with 33 homes for private rental. Clare, Donegal, Mayo and Leitrim also had far more Airbnb properties available than residential accommodation.

The recent restrictions on towns that have a population of 20,000 or over with regard to short-term rentals is of no use at all (and as we know originally the measure was meant to be on towns with a population of 10,000).

It’s an appalling indictment of this government’s lack of interest and lack of energy and activism in this area.