Marking Time

So Mayo have qualified for the all-Ireland football final for the first time since 1997 having beaten Fermanagh by 2 points in a nerve-racking semi-final replay. Even more nerve-racking if you’re an ex-pat wandering around in the mid-day heat of Madrid trying to find a place to see the game and wondering anxiously what the hell is going on as the minutes tick away.

Of the dozens of so-called Irish pubs in Madrid only two show GAA matches. The rest proudly boast that they’re showing everything from English Division 4 to the NFL and baseball but “sorry, nothing for fans of Irish games”.

No hassle, sure as long as one or two pubs are showing it we’re sorted.

Except that they’re not. That’s right. Not one pub in this god-forsaken sweaty armpit of a city is showing the all-Ireland semi-final. Apparently they only get the feed from Setanta for games that take place on a Sunday, and wouldn’t you know it, replays are always scheduled for a Saturday.

No problem, we’ll rush back to the house and grab the second half on the radio over the internet.

Back at the house, “RTE wishes to inform you that due to the Olympic copyright blah blah we cannot provide any live audio feed of any sport even if it’s not the Olympics for fear that someone might just casually slip in a reference to said games thus jeopardising our chances of ever bidding for ‘exclusive’ coverage of this prestigious world-stopping event ever again”.

Is this what our forefathers fought for etc. ? I’m starting to hate the Olympics.

So I try for the local radio station: Mid-West Radio, the loyal servant of Mayo emigrants all over the world. But no joy. Their site has been designed by someone who has just discovered javascript(open.new.window.everywhere.except.for.the.live.streaming ) and I can’t get the damn thing to work.

Finally, I get Sean Bán Breathnach on Radio Na Gaeltachta broadcasting in Irish and, with a few intermittent hiccups, manage to get the gist of the rest of the second half of the game in my native tongue.

As I said, nerve-racking stuff. One of those days when it would be nice to be in Ireland.

I bought a suit today in preparation for the interviews (fingers crossed) that lie ahead of me when I start job hunting next month.

The last time I bought a suit was just over ten years ago when I was doing the rounds of interviews in my final year at college. I could count on the fingers of two hands the amount of times I’ve worn it since. It served me well though - a one-shade-suits-all style that worked for weddings, funerals, anything.

Let’s see how well the new model does.

Gerry McGovern nicely sums up the advantages and disadvantages of blogging. Among the disadvantages:

1) Most people don’t have very much to say that’s interesting, and/or are unable to write down their ideas in a compelling and clear manner.

2) I have often found that the people who have most time to write have least to say, and the people who have most to say don’t have enough time to write it.

3) Like practically everything else on the Web, blogs are easy to start and hard to maintain. Writing coherently is one of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks for a human being to undertake. So, far from blogs being a cheap strategy, they are a very expensive one, in that they eat up time.

I hear ya, brother.

I came across an interesting paper analysing the roots of the Celtic Tiger and its impact on Irish society.

In “Macroeconomic success and social vulnerability: lessons for Latin America from the Celtic Tiger”, Peadar Kirby of Dublin City University highlights some of the downsides of the Celtic Tiger and the limitations of the Irish government’s economic strategy. Some of the statistics relating to wealth distribution and poverty make sobering reading.

But even if you can dismiss his highlighting of the lot of the less well-off with the argument that the poor will always be with us, it is not so easy to dismiss his obversation regarding the ’sense of dislocation, an alienation from Irish society and its values’ that is felt by those who should have nothing to complain about, those whom mainstream commentators say are the greatest beneficiaries of the Tiger economy.

Kirby sees them (or rather I should say us, for this resonates deeply with me and I have observed it in many of my friends) as the victims of ‘a social catastrophe’ equivalent to that brought on by the Industrial Revolution in Britain. This tallys with much of my own experience. When I read his paper I can map it to my own feelings over the past few years and to those around me a lot easier than the analysis of mainstream economic forecasters, much of which seems to be on a different planet to mine.

Kirby’s conclusions (emphasis mine):

The Irish case and the policy lessons derived from it raise deeper questions about the nature of economic success in a globalised world and the social costs of that success. For policy makers, these inevitably raise painful dilemmas as to the ability of a state in a globalised world to guide the market in ways that are socially beneficial. Unfortunately, the Irish experience throws little light on such dilemmas as economic success has been achieved through the state facilitating the operation of the market rather than guiding it towards more development ends. It is therefore a cautionary tale of the social costs of economic success in a globalised world. Policy makers in states which have not experienced much economic success may be tempted to settle for such a trade off. But its long-term social cost and their threats to its sustainability should not be underestimated.

This echoes much of what I have observed and have been trying to express. It has a lot more substance than the analysis of the media and the ‘pop-star’ economists from the banks obsessed with the single statistic of economic growth as a measure of everything.

It seems we have been too busy chasing the pot of gold to notice that the Celtic Tiger has pulled the social fabric out from under our feet.