Heading towards a 'dual monarchy'?

I've no idea whether he has used this phrase before, but Barry White's reference to the necessary Sinn Fein/DUP agreement to work in office together as a Dual Monarchy reflects some privately held fears amongst liberals, on both sides, that their supposedly mutually exclusive agendas will lead to a de facto repartition of Northern Ireland (cue: Green Flag). A long way from that Shared Future some people keep talking about. Emily Moulton reports:

Trevor Ringland said the Carran Crescent development in Enniskillen, which will see Protestant and Catholic families live side-by-side, could be a catalyst for very significant change.

"We cannot have a truly modern, dynamic and successful society and economy if our community continues to be divided along sectarian lines," he said.

"No society can be vibrant and prosperous if the resources of the entire community are not pooled and if two sets of services such as schools, libraries and health centres are required due to division where one would otherwise be necessary.

"Carran Crescent has to be the shape of things to come and must only be the tip of the iceberg. Division in Northern Ireland serves no one."

Carran Crescent, which will become home to 20 Protestant and Catholic families, is the first mixed housing estate to be built in Ulster in the last few decades.

The Northern Ireland Housing Executive spent £2m on the pilot scheme and there are plans for another mixed development in Loughbrickland, Co Down.

Robinson: SF's timeslip seems inevitable...

For all the talk of heated exchanges in the DUP's big consultation Peter Robinson sounded incredibly relaxed on Inside Politics on Saturday. He noted, rather laconically, that Sinn Fein's arrangements for consulting their party make it likely that the government's deadlines will slip by. He repeated his belief that Sinn Fein should ask for more time, if they need it. Deadlines, he argued were not, and never have been, his party's preferred means of closing this deal.

TG4 has put language back in Ireland's cultural life

Farrel Corcoran was involved with TG4, or TnaG as it was on the day it launched ten years ago. In a debate around language that has often become distracted on politics and an often disabling obsession with tokenism, TG4, he believes is a perfect example of how utility has succeeded when given its head:

It was never going to be easy, not just because of severe resource limitations but because of the hostile ideological environment, policed by a small number of newspaper pundits trying to shout down the message from opinion polls showing broad support for public funding of broadcasting in Irish.

It was clear by the 1980s that the old polarised ways in which we thought about Irish were changing. Insistence on a highly prescriptive sense of Irish identity, based on claustrophobic policies that held sway since Independence, began to wane, as did its opposite, the post-colonial shame that associated the Irish language with backwardness.

Deepening contact with the EEC fostered the novel idea that linguistic minorities in all parts of Europe should have a "right to communicate". This new self-confidence was put to the test in the campaigns of the 1980s to establish a Gaeltacht television service, a reaction to the arrival of S4C in Wales and to the perceived marginalisation of Irish language programming in RTÉ, where commercial pressure to maximise audience size was getting intense. Those campaigns were a direct riposte to what Gaeltacht activists rightly saw as political dithering and posturing in Dublin.

What has changed in the 10 years since the launch of TG4 and how do we evaluate its current role in Irish society?

For media critics working totally within a market ideology, with no interest in TG4's actual output, the only question has been its audience share. In fact, TG4 has managed to increase its audience each year, to the point where its share is now five times greater than when it started.

'B' is for building...

I can't believe he did that. Hat tip Piaras!

Magners leaving Guinness in the poor place

It started as a bit of prematch banter, but Huw Richards thinks there may be something in the idea that in rugby the Magners (Celtic) League is spectacularly outgunning the Guinness Premiership in England.

Northampton play Scottish Borders today, while Cardiff entertain Leicester at the Millennium Stadium tomorrow. These contests between members of England's Guinness Premiership and the Magner's Celtic League follow the opening weekend's 4-0 clean sweep in head-to-heads by the Celts.

Following on from the vicissitudes of the national team, club failures are a further blow to the confidence and self-esteem of English rugby.

There's a whole season ahead yet, so it may be premature to pronounce the death of English club rugby. Northampton seems to be turning the tables on Border Scots at least.

Hollowing out the designation system?

Ian Parsley argues that one way Alliance could prove its cross community credentials by allowing its MLAs to register "a designation of identity" - as Unionist or Nationalist, as they see fit. He argues that:

Under the current arrangements, if three Alliance MLAs designated "Nationalist" and the rest "Unionist", the party would actually hold the balance of power "in both designations". That would mean, effectively, that where the parties within each camp were split (e.g. SDLP v. SF or UU v. DUP), Alliance would decide. We would, in effect, become the most relevant party in the Assembly - *because of the designation system*.

Ireland and the blurring of historic socio economic lines

I'm reading an excellent book by FT columnist called The Truth About Markets : Why Some Countries are Rich and Others Remain Poor. It suggests that the basis of the world's (extremely limited) economic prosperity has deep roots in history, culture and geography. But it was this passage that jumped out at me after reading one of the comments on the Trimble thread:

The correlation between religion and economic development is inescapable, but the nature of the connection is controversial. Max Weber explained how belief in predestination led to austere, hard-working morality we still call 'the Protestant ethic'. RH Tawney and Robert Merton gave greater weight to the intellectual ferment that followed the breakdown of clerical authoritarianism: the opportunity to challenge established ideas and practices which is essential to the co-evolution of technology and institutions. The combination of moral rigour and free inquiry is the basis of disciplined pluralism - the defining characteristic of the successful market economy.

Apart from anything else it underlines the massive social and economic changes that have taken place in the Republic over the last decade or so. Indeed, the roots of the current situation are deeper than that. As Andrew Greely noted in his 1999 essay Religions of Ireland:

...the southern Irish work longer hours than members of the other two communities [Northern Irelanders], almost forty four hours a week as opposed to slightly under forty for the Northerners. If number of hours worked is a sign of the Protestant Ethic then Irish Catholics are the last Protestants in Europe.

Oireachtas adds blogging to list of banned activities

Here's a statement I received this morning from the head of Human Resources at the Oireachtas, Dublin's equivalent of the Palace of Westminster:

"The policy of the Office of the Houses of the Oireachtas explicitly prohibits the use of our computer facilities for chat room purposes or for weblog (blog). Staff members who engage in blogging which is not related to their official duties, while using their Office computer will be subject to disciplinary action."

It follows several blog reports (here and here, and here). The story has yet to break in Ireland's mainstream media.

Let me say, straight away, Ireland is not banning its politicians from blogs. TD's like Ciaran Cuffe of the Greens and Liz McManus will continue to blog from both inside and outside parliament. Nor is it necessarily banning all its staff from reading blogs. But it says something for the power and pull of blogging that its capacity to waste people's valuable working time that it has been listed alongside porn surfing as a disciplinary offence.

Most of us who run moderately successful blogs can confirm that the big numbers come to us during the working day. In the Republic this is possibly exaggerated by the poor quality of its national roll out of broadband. One international company recently had to review its offer of a laptop and high speed broadband access to its employees, when a large number of them had to refuse on the basis they could not access it at home.

Clearly Leinster House feels that keeping staff on task is an important priority. But in using such a sledgehammer to crack a specific nut, it is also cutting them off from one of the major innovations in the way knowledge and information is transmitted. It is not inconceivable, for instance, that this same human resources department will be blogging all its messages to its staff, within a very short period of time.

Blogging is not about subversives sitting up half the night and day in their pajamas pushing out spikey missives about what's wrong with the world. It is just one intimation of a flatter, knowledge-driven world in which crucial connections are made quickly and transitively. Nor is blogging the definitive endgame. A ton of smart new collaborative applications are already in use or being developed. Flickr, Delicious, Digg, even YouTube all follow on and build on the networks established through the intitial blogging revolution. In the case of The Times of London and the Daily Telegraph, its technologies beginning to become embedded in its key online offering.

It is unlikely that the good burghers of the Oireachtas (Leinster House), who can already read the Guardian Unlimited or the BBC News with impunity, will face disciplinary proceedings for reading this blog (or the Editors Blog), since the focus of the directive appears to be on the act of blogging, rather than just reading them.

But this is a read/write revolution. If organisations blunt the capacity/opportunity for their members employees to engage in online communitication, they are, ultimately, also blunting their longer term capacity to function in this new, networked world. Those of us who care about the health of Irish democracy, will be hoping for a rapid change of mind on what looks to be a very hastily thought out policy.

Best postcard views...

My cousin Paul sent me this competition to find the UK's favourite view. Vote for your own choice, but I'm going for this one of the Antrim coast.

Still working on getting Slugger back...

I'm guessing you don't really want to know the details of Slugger's travails over the last few weeks, but the upshot is that we're in the process of moving the site. Last time we did that, it took 12 hours, this time, I'm doing it myself and its been in process, on and off, since five o'clock yesterday (I blame Pete for the big long posts). I'm trying to get this done asap. This time we'd like to put back up plan in place, so that we can avoid such instances in future.

In meantime, if you'd like to help (you are not one of those kind and generous souls who have already send a donation): feel free to hit the tip jar. Size doesn't matter, its the gesture of support that counts.

Shorts job losses larger than expected...

Angela Eagle tells the BBC that they did not tell her about the job losses at Bombardier when she visited last week on a trade mission to Canada. However, it seems, there were strong intimations of this as early as 8th August. The jobs are not being cut so much as being shifted to Mexico. It is a pattern we might expect to see repeated, as lower end functions get pushed out to take advantage of the cheaper labour costs of the developing world. The question is whether NI can follow the example of the Republic and the south east of England, and move its private sector up the food chain?

Trimble and the peace process....

That discussion on Doughty Street TV the other night on Trimble and the peace process is now online.

Does the media drive the agenda?

Vincent Browne raises his old bete noir (subs needed): why does no major Irish media outlet not support "a radical restructuring of Irish society to achieve a far greater level of equality than exists"? But is it true that the fourth estate always leads the political agenda? Aside from a tiny Sinn Fein rump of TDs, in the Republic there is no political mainstream party that is credibly pushing the line that Vincent outlines.

So my point is not that opinions other than the one which holds that a radical restructuring of Irish society is essential are unsustainable or are morally objectionable. I am merely noting that none of the mainstream media will reflect that position. They all converge around the prevailing "common sense" - that aside from some marginal imperfections, the structure of society is fine.

And the media-led agenda will reflect that "common sense". The debate will be about who best can manage this "basically okay" society and what marginal reforms are necessary to correct the imperfections. The view that there is something inherently wrong with the structure won't get an airing, aside from the obligatory genuflections towards "balance" which will allow the occasional representation of that viewpoint before the main debate resumes.

And that media-led consensual agenda will result in either the re-election of the present Government or the election of a government that, policy-wise, is inherently no different.

Outage continues...

I'm slightly disadvantaged in my attempts to get Slugger back up and working in that I'm in London today, primarily to give a talk about blogging and Web 2.0 to an international NGO. I have had a few generous offers of help, and am confident we can get back fairly quickly. Thanks to both Joe (a very regular donor to Slugger) and John for their kind help. It is much appreciated.

Trimble interview and discussion...

You can catch David Liddington, Donal Blaney, myself, and Iain Dale on Doughty Street TV tonight at 10pm

Oh dear...

Sorry for the outage today. We have another episode of the mysteriously missing template(s). I'm trying beg borrow and steal enough tech wisdom to get us back online. But it may take some time. You can help by throwing something in tip jar.

Here's Tony, while Slugger is down...