Slugger O'Toole

Latest posts from John Ó Néill (see all)

John Ó Néill has posted 99 times (0 in the last month).

Latest comments from John Ó Néill (see all)

John Ó Néill has commented 1,061 times (5 in the last month).

1. Comment on Ireland’s impending experience of its own ‘Total Perspective Vortex’?
   on 11 May 2012 at 1:47 pm

   I don’t think it is too cynical a platform to call for a ‘No’ vote on either as it merely reflects a domestic political perspective on the government rather than an attitude towards the EU or eurozone (i.e. it says ‘get back in there and get something better out of this’).

   From a wider point of view – the arguments ‘for’ the Treaty largely rely on [hegemonic] acceptance of the logic of the current plans as being somehow natural or inevitable. I assume that if the drift to the left extends beyond France and Greece, then a neu logique will displace it that states that finance houses and other lenders will have to just accept their losses rather than be bailed out via sovereign borrowing/funding.

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2. Comment on Ireland’s impending experience of its own ‘Total Perspective Vortex’?
   on 11 May 2012 at 1:34 pm

   I think that’s the clever narrative you use to explain a ‘No’ vote.

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3. Comment on Ireland’s impending experience of its own ‘Total Perspective Vortex’?
   on 11 May 2012 at 1:00 pm

   The ever-steepening gradient of austerity will reach into the thin air of high altitude by 2014 when there is an €11.9bn bond maturing in January of that year. If the state hasn’t gone back to the bond markets that would been the point that it would need a second ‘bailout’.

   I’ll advance another reason for a ‘No’ – the government can’t publicly reject the Treaty – but the citizens can. That would strengthen the negotiating hand of a government that has consistently failed to look like has any sort of handle on its brief in this area.

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4. Comment on Ireland’s impending experience of its own ‘Total Perspective Vortex’?
   on 11 May 2012 at 11:56 am

   Well, as Nama Wine Lake has put it’s argument for a No vote:
   If your insurance broker were to offer you the pick between the following two insurance policies which would you choose? (a) a policy which covered you for all risks, entails a premium of €1,000 and is payable now or (b) an identical policy but instead of paying now, you can pay after disaster strikes and it will still cost you €1,000. Wouldn’t you be crazy to plump for the first policy?

   Given all the uncertainty, it is just speculation to claim the unknowable: that a treaty rejection would make the current (or a future bailout) more onerous (controlling both the Improbability Drive and the Total Perspective Vortex). But the permitted deficit levels in the Treaty guarantee that acceptance of the treaty will make the current bailout more onerous in Ireland (particularly when dumbly converting even more Anglo promissory notes to sovereign debt and calling it re-negotiation is merely steepening the gradient that must be climbed to meet the obligations a yes vote would bring). With the ongoing issues in Spain and Greece, the change of emphasis in France etc, delaying the referendum would actually make sense purely on the grounds that the context is shifting, as would rejecting it for the same reason (that it is actually premature to expect a sign-up to it’s provisions now – it only has to be in law by next January).

   And, more so, since the drift towards the left is a better fit to the general aspirations of reconfiguring the socialised banking debts than the existing Merkel/Sarkozy approach of protecting the private sector by strong-arming other states into the nationalisation of speculators’ losses.

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5. Comment on Being an all-Ireland party has its downsides – Sinn Fein’s inconsistency on property taxes
   on 22 April 2012 at 12:02 am

   Local authorities (i.e. councils and corporations) in the south do set and levy commercial rates (on top of the usual fees and planning levies etc) so the funding model is partially in place. The real mistake here was in not bringing rates back in (and by doing so, differentiating local power from the Oireachtas to dilute the parish pump dynamic).

   And, in fairness to them, APNI audience didn’t seem to recognise factoids when they were given them by the Minister.

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6. Comment on Being an all-Ireland party has its downsides – Sinn Fein’s inconsistency on property taxes
   on 21 April 2012 at 10:24 pm

   Rates (as a property tax) are set, levied, collected and spent by local authorities in the north. They are set as a flat rate, collected and spent centrally in the south (as a straightforward poll/asset tax rather than a local authority service charge). So another member of the FG-Lab govt and now APNI appear not to know or understand the difference. Frankly, I’m surprised at APNI.

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7. Comment on “This is part of the culture of Ireland”
   on 2 April 2012 at 3:18 pm

   There was a conference that specifically considered the 1200 BC issue a few years (more info here).

   I’m not sure modern vernacular English derives so much from Norman French as the literary language does (it is largely still Anglo-Saxon shoe-horned into spelling and grammatic conventions from Norman French). There is a critical distinction here between the written and spoken forms – top-slicing society to replace it and some of its social conventions (e.g. the documentary language of choice) will be highly visible in the written record (i.e. estate charters, chancery rolls etc) but are unlikely to be representative of the hugh proportion of society who are illiterate.

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8. Comment on “This is part of the culture of Ireland”
   on 2 April 2012 at 9:27 am

   Yokel/Malcolm – the general problem understanding language change is that most documented examples happen when mass print culture is present. In Ireland, there was no significant overlay of Norse (or Norman French) beyond some vocabulary, even when there was known movement of people. Old English settlers and the plantations preceded the widespread adoption of English (in the 18th/19th century) by a number of centuries and needed a National School system plus print culture to more or less facilitate a change-over. In recent experience, population overlays are often accompanied by some pathogenic event which would collapse one of the two populations (think Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel) which probably did happen at the start of Neolithic c.4300 BC. If it is the immigrant population that survives obviously language change would be likely to follow. There is always the obvious complication in Ireland being an island that seems to make it much less likely that there would be large-scale population movements the further you go back into prehistory.

   It is hard to see where in prehistory the archaeological record (in Ireland) would support large-scale inward migration that might promote the same process. Even the replacement of copper technology by ferrous technology (around 600 BC) was probably a response to the eventual collapse of the large-scale copper extraction and distribution networks in central Europe that failed when iron emerged as the metal of choice in southern Europe after 1000 BC or so. It seems the collapse of markets can cause chain events even in prehistory.

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9. Comment on “This is part of the culture of Ireland”
   on 1 April 2012 at 9:31 am

   Yokel, afraid there is no real evidence for actual invasions (i.e. large-scale population movement) after the end of the Ice Age until the Norse. There is circumstatial evidence that suggests inward migration around 6500 BC and again in 4300-4000 BC.

   Last detailed research on Bronze Age metalwork looked at groups of objects (hoards) and found those that included non-Irish objects were treated differently and didnt evidence standard patterning that was associated with hoards that only contained Irish objects (research was by Katharina Becker for her PhD at UCD). Ireland was self-sufficient in gold in the Bronze Age but probably imported most of its copper after about 1500 BC. As its prehistory, there are no written records, and you can interpret that anyway you like (xenophobia, imports as exotica etc).

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10. Comment on “This is part of the culture of Ireland”
    on 30 March 2012 at 7:37 pm

    If it is deemed as ‘treasure’ – it is automatically acquired by the state and the Valuation committee merely determine value to be paid to the finder/landowner. Not sure the issue of acquisition is as at all optional as BBC report suggests. Convention has been for Ulster Museum (as was) to access funds for purchase (e.g. from DCAL or National Lottery) or even with help of EHS (Built Heritage).

    Unless British Museum has begun to aggressively lobby, the coroners finding makes it inevitable this will end up in UM.

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