For example recently reading a story in An Phoblacht with a photograph of a train at Lisburn station I thought; ‘there is no way SF took that photo or purchased it’ and sure enough when you look about you find it comes from a Open Content project under a Creative Commons Licence.

As with most, the originator can’t/won’t be bothered or isn’t interested in enforcing his licence/copyright and probably wouldn’t know the content had been lifted at all.

Do Creative Commons Licences really have value or is the reality non-profit contributors to the internet have their content used and/or abused by anyone and only business contributors have the money and legal backing to apply content restrictions, as we recently witnessed with the BBC limiting Slugger’s ability to use their material?

The reason the PSNI felt is necessary to use such manpower hasn’t been revealed but given their previous denial anything occurred any statement from them on the incident would be next to worthless.

The éirígí video of the demonstration shows the police action was to deal with a small group of people walking on public land, listening to a speech, holding a few placards and waving flags. At worst there seems to have been one case of trespass.

Using their usual get out of gaol free card the PSNI spokesperson contacted by the ATN stated that anyone with complaints should contact the Ombudsman – something they know won’t happen when those targeted reject the PSNI’s legitimacy and would not make use of any structures supposedly holding them to account. It remains to be seen if those supporting the police and claiming to hold them to account raise the issue on their behalf.

In June they used a mass deployment to prevent their demonstration against Armed Forces Day for a technical breech of parading legislation when supporters stepped on the road at a construction site while making their way to Belfast City Hall.

Mr Robinson added:

“I cannot guarantee the future of the Assembly but I can guarantee that it will not be the DUP that will walk away.”

Peter Robinson did not name his unionist targets when he saved his most vitriolic comment for them but it is deemed that he had the leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice Jim Allister and his supporters in mind when he fired this salvo:

And I warn those unionist cave-dwellers who seek to wreck our achievements, that they had better be prepared to come clean and explain to the people of Northern Ireland how on earth they think the return of Direct Rule - which is all they have to offer - represents a safer choice or a better way.

Whatever did happen to the fantasy of an all-Ireland economy? Since the recession kicked-in politician after politician in the South has lined-up to bang the drum for shopping locally. Crossing the border, in particular, has become an act of treachery, at least according to some more swivel-eyed government ministers. I was stunned to find myself agreeing with Ben Dunne, but when he waded-in on this issue I wanted to shout his comments from the rooftops. In a nutshell, Dunne said:

- The North of Ireland is still Ireland
- The prices in the South are 20–30 per cent higher – it’s not minimum wages, rents or VAT that’s the problem, it’s retailers ripping people off
- Southern retailers: stop whining and lower your prices

Unionists might want to take issue with the first point but I assume we can all agree on the latter two.

There is nothing new in people heading North. When I was a child in the 1980s my entire extended family did most of their shopping for high-value items in the North. The fact that they had Northern connections probably made this easier but I rather doubt it was an unique experience.

The bizarre complaints by the government are obviously an attempt to shore-up the economy through consumption but do they also represent something more noteworthy? Such as, the abandonment of the ‘unity-by-economy’ strategy beloved of Fianna Fáil, the SDLP and, latterly, Sinn Féin.

Shopping is only the most visible expression of economic activity and economics do matter. Does anyone remember the old trope that “the South couldn’t afford the North, even if it wanted it”?

During the week I spoke to a Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) spokesperson for an article I was writing on the British-Irish institutions set-up in as part of the peace process. The TUV spokesperson expressed some interest in the institutions but compared them unfavourably with the North-South bodies, arguing that, unlike the British-Irish bodies, they “deal with economic matters because it is a very short step from economic integration to total political union – but as soon as a power becomes devolved it automatically comes under the ambit of the North-Southery established by the Belfast Agreement.” (1)

The day-to-day reality for many of is that the border is an irrelevance, at least when it comes to matters like commerce. As someone who disapproves of politicised shopping, whether in the form of cod-nationalism or supposedly ‘ethical’ activity, I am glad about this. (2) But even if ‘North-Southery’, as the TUV fears, is genuine, what does it mean in economic terms? How can two polities share an economy other than in the sense of trading with one another? Smuggling has always been a big issue in Ireland, even moreso now with tax hikes on fuel and cigarettes, but surely it is unavoidable due to the fact of the border?

Jason Walsh is the editor of forth magazine

Footnotes
(1) British and Irish baloney, Jason Walsh, forth, November 20, 2009
(2) For my money, shopping is apolitical because it is largely passive activity that is located at the wrong end of the production-consumption spectrum. See: Content producers of the world unite!, section three ‘Giving up on production’, Jason Walsh, spiked, August 11, 2009

Wallowing in recession

To some degree the Irish border has always been imaginary, or at least so functionally non-existent that porous doesn’t even begin to describe it. Despite this there is no getting around the reality that Ireland is home to two separate polities, whatever any of us thinks of the issue. There was some feeling in nationalist and republican circles that the booming economy in the South made Irish unity an inevitability. This was, for the most part, idle talk among people who didn’t have their hands on the levers of power. Both Sinn Féin and the SDLP continued to recognise the question was fundamentally political in nature and couldn’t be simply ignored (though both parties did play the ‘let’s pretend’ game).

Much like the liberal conceit that the EU makes the national question an irrelevance, there is more than a dash of wishful thinking in the notion that political disputes will melt into thin air as history marches inevitably onward. Nevertheless, it was a feeling that had plenty of currency. Until the credit crunch.

For this reason alone, never mind the very real economic ties between the North and South, it’s worth taking a look at the Southern economy, specifically how the enthusiasm of recent years has given way to a case of the béal bocht that makes Peig Sayers look like an optimist.

So, where to start? The meeja, of course.

It is almost impossible to turn on a current affairs programme on television or radio without hearing about our impending demise. So shrill are the voices that one could be forgiven for confusing a typical news broadcast with a re-run of ‘Dad’s Army’. Newstalk radio presenter George Hook has been talking down Ireland’s economy for over a year now, claiming at some points that we were actually experiencing a depression. And Hook is far from alone. Celebrity economist David McWilliams and investment advisor Eddie Hobbs have been among the most vocal in attacking the government, with Hobbs in particular demanding deep cuts to income levels and generally doom-mongering.

Opposition politicians have, of course, had plenty to say - after all, it’s their job - but what is most interesting is the fact that the public mood is a strange cocktail of anger and resignation.

How the country should deal with a recession is a question that sharply divides people along political lines, but most people in Ireland - at the juncture anyway - seem to broadly favour an interventionist Keynesian approach. Taking that as a given, then, is it really right that all of that money should be spent in the way it it? Rather than patching-up the failing institutions, wouldn’t it be better to massively invest in creating a broad-based and productive economy?

Of course, like any good journalist, I’m not here to provide solutions, merely to note things. The significance of the question about how the recession is dealt with is that it indicates not only an unwillingness to face up to the matter of what makes a productive economy, but also contradictory attitude that we deserve to be punished and yet it is not our fault.

Economics, not moralising

It is perfectly true that Ireland’s boom was not quite the miracle it was once thought to be. If one was so inclined one might say that it was in fact a historical aberration, though that view does a disservice to the changes the economy has witnessed in the past twenty years: the Republic of Ireland went from 65 per cent of the UK’s per capita GNP to 140 per cent in just 20 years. What is indisputable is that the country’s improved economic performance transformed the lives of Irish people, even if the spoils were unevenly divided. Quite why many liberals spent their time criticising this is a question worth asking.

No-one denies that many were left behind by the boom but is it really possible that it was actually a bad thing for Ireland to experience rapid economic expansion?

With urbanisation (and, indeed, suburbanisation) came modernisation; with materialism came secularism; with work came personal freedom. As an example, increased car ownership tends to be viewed through an environmental prism, rendering it a problem. Another way of looking at it, though, is that people on lower incomes are finally afforded personal mobility and the freedom that comes with it. (1)

Anyone who argues from a liberal position that the boom was bad will quickly find they have some strange bedfellows: arch-conservatives. In 2005 John Waters bemoaned how increased wealth had brought with it alcohol abuse and gangland violence, and said the nation failed ‘to look beyond the impermanence of the material world, to put values of decency and compassion before money’. Surely this is topsy-turvy view of not only the relationship between crime and economics, but also a distorted and fundamentally anti-human outlook?

As John Hearne noted, the international press had a field day reporting on Ireland’s woes, often exaggerating them wildly. Why, though, have we ourselves been so keen to be downbeat about our future? ‘Times is tough’, to be sure, but even the most ardent anti-Fianna Fáiler could be forgiven for thinking Bertie Ahern was on to something when he implied that some people are so down in the mouth that they should kill themselves.

Then there is the cod-socialism of ‘bash the rich’. Watching super-rich developers and bankers fall from grace is fun, no-one is denying that. But it isn’t helpful. Any pain experienced by the captains of industry will be meted-out tenfold to the rest of us.

Boom town rents

The common perception during the boom was that the construction sector slowing would have little effect Ireland’s wider economy because most of the work was done by immigrants. This was never true. In fact, in 2006 employment in the construction sector in Ireland accounted for a total of 252,100 jobs from a total of 1,929,800. Of these, 22,600 non-nationals were employed in construction, less than were employed in both the manufacturing and hospitality sectors - and, interestingly,  only slightly more than were employed in financial and business services. (3)

The fact that, in 2006, the average price for a three bedroom house in Greater Dublin was €752,734 (approx. £515,214 at the time) (2) indicates a severely over-heated economy. In terms of house prices things were not quite as bad as they were in England where planning regulations meant that few new houses were actually being built. At least in Ireland many of the houses bought and sold were new and thus represented actual productive investment in the economy.

Of course, three years later we now know that when the construction sector tanked the economy went down with it. Worse still, it wasn’t a purely local phenomenon: the entire world economy wobbled badly and at some points looked as though it might actually fall over. Ireland fell as fast as it did because it wasn’t just construction in trouble, it was everyone, everywhere.

However, the fact remains that the Irish economy did not have a sufficiently wide industrial base. Over-reliance on construction was always a bad idea - as is over-reliance on any individual sector - but there appears to be no political will for building a broad-based economy through capital investment in productive new technologies.

As the dole queues lengthen it’s no surprise that people are feeling worried, but that’s no excuse for high-profile figures in Irish life, particularly ones who are still coining it for practically cheerleading the recession. Turning the economic recession into widespread psychological depression will do nothing for any of us. We don’t need therapy or a chance to have a go at politicians, we need an end to austerity starting with a decent economy that provides jobs and wealth.

Jason Walsh is the editor of forth magazine

Footnotes
(1) Between 1997 and 2007 the population of the South increased by 18 per cent while the number of registered motor vehicles increased by 71 per cent and the number of driver licence holders increased by 37 per cent. Source: Road Collision Facts 2007, Road Safety Authority/Údarás Um Shábháilteacht Ar Bhóithre

(2) As calculated by economist Constantin Gurdgiev in 2006

(3) Source: Here to Stay: Non-National Workers in the Irish Economy, AIB Global Treasury Economic Research

Additionally

I will say more about the interim arrangements in the coming days. I am conscious that I have a duty to inform my Ministerial colleagues and fellow Assembly members of the Interim arrangements I will be putting in place.

But let me assure everyone either in or outside of this room that a smooth transition is on my agenda and it should be on yours!

The revised arrangements will be capable of accelerating the convergence process toward ESA and ensuring that we are fit for purpose to face the next financial year.

It is clear that we face significant resources constraints next year. In addition, the existing delay in ESA coming into being has meant that savings of £21m in total costs of excess bureaucracy which are already factored in to our financial plans, have yet to be achieved and we will face a huge challenge to meet these savings. If not addressed and addressed urgently this will impact on front line services. That I cannot allow to happen.

In the period ahead I will task the ESA Implementation Team to lead and co-ordinate work across the existing organisations to maintain service continuity and deliver the levels of savings required in preparation for ESA.

I know a delay will be disappointing to many here and many more across the education system.

I regret that the political process has not yet delivered what the Executive promised, but I remain determined that it will before long.

Well, what they actually agreed, as I pointed out at the time, was to give the Education Minister an extension on the deadline for progressing the required legislation - to 1 January 2010.

Adds And from the Education Minister’s press statement

The Minister said: “If the political will exists, the Executive objective of 1 January 2010 for the establishment of the Education and Skills Authority (ESA), could still be achieved.

“I will however in the coming days, announce interim plans to ensure a smooth transition between the current structures and ESA, in the absence of political goodwill in achieving the Executive decision to have ESA in place by 1 January 2010.”

He ended up admitting at the beginning of the session that Digital Britain was a deficient title for the subject matter of Lord Carter’s recently delivered wide ranging report but that he wasn’t there when they were ‘dreaming it up’ clashed in… UTV and its news output “is unrivaled for its output and reach throughout the UK…” Committee chair, Sir Patrick McCormack asked him “have you watched any?” “No, I haven’t”. (Although it comes out later in a response to Iris Robinson that he’s referring research in terms of audience volumes).

The underlying issue is the IFNC (Independently Funded News Consortium) which is a three year pilot scheme (valued at £3 million per annum by the Culture Minister Nelson McCausland). In effect it would release money to independent producers to come with new projects. It’s to build capacity and experience.  In another session, Trevor Birney of Below the Radar (a company with an interest in the way the matter gets resolved) noted:

...the Minister for Culture, Arts and Leisure, Nelson McCausland, was due to meet his counterpart at DCMS to discuss Northern Ireland’s role in the UK’s digital revolution. Last night that meeting was cancelled. The Minister, indignant at Northern Ireland once again falling foul to the same Londoncentric attitudes that have caused many of our problems, told DCMS that he will only come to London once this government has a firm proposal on how Northern Ireland is to be included in the pilots to be rolled out across the rest of the UK.

And the reason Nelson’s so miffed? Simon made the announcement, which effectively sets three pilots up in England, Scotland and Wales, but cuts Northern Ireland out of the loop here with even lifting the phone to him.

The first will be held 11 – 11.45 am at Tullycarnet Library (Admission free but booking advisable, t. 028 90485079, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).

The second will be held from 7.30 – 9.00pm in the 174 Trust, Duncairn Avenue, Antrim Road.

These events, outwith their natural beauty and artistic value of the singing itself which is quite haunting, you have to let yourself go it it to get it but the skill is undeniable, have a huge role to play in challenging stereotypes and bigotry that we often see here on Slugger for example whenever any mention of Gaelic culture is made.

Here will will have Free Prespiterians singing Pslams in Gaelic. Just let it sink in folks.

The Free Prespiterian church as a social institution plays a vital role in keeping the language language and culture alive in Scotland. That could not obviously be said about its equivalent here.

The event has been organised by Colmcille, who work to strengthen the bonds between Gaelic Ireland and Gaelic Scotland, once one and the same but have become strained by language loss, loss of vital dialects, cultural shifts and politics. It is interesting that for all the publicity given the the Ulster-Scots - Lowland Scotland link, Colmcille who work quite quietly in the background, plugging away, have in my view done as much as the Ulster Scots agency to promote ties and cultural bonds with Scotland - though obviously with a very different remmit. I would appreciate an Ulster-Scots assesment of the situation.

I do note that for many of our young people who have been on the end of a Scottish Camàn (they laminate them, thon’s chaetin!) they may not see this work as positively as I do.