The Senate is everything that's wrong with Ireland, so time to change it

The Seanad chamber

Irish politics at the minute resembles a sort of intergenerational domestic feud. The Dail's relationship with the Seanad has deteriorated to the point where they can barely be civil to each other any more. The Seanad, indolent, under-achieving and coasting hopelessly, is being sent to a military academy by its emotionally distant, repressive and ultimately damaging and damaged guardian, the Dail. The 4th of October is the day when the people will decide if the Seanad should straighten up and fly off.

In short the Senate, and the government's plans for it, is everything that's wrong with Ireland in an nutshell. But so is the Dail.

Let's look closer at the Dail, in fact. Having launched headlong into a massive economic iceberg, Enda Kenny now says the Seanad could have done more to stop the financial crisis. He conveniently forgets the fact the Seanad aren't at liberty to much pertaining to money, and that the Dail went on a wanton solo run on the bank guarantee and much more besides anyway. Displaying the same imagination with the Upper House as they have with pretty much everything else, this government is content to let the Seanad slide formally behind the bookshelf of governance, and it's too fat and lazy to reach in there and actually devise any proper use for it.

Regina Doherty though, one half of the Keystone Cops running the referendum for the government, claims that abolishing the Seanad is in actual fact an exercise in leaner, meaner government. Everyone else is having to make do with less, she claims, so too must the political classes. Except, while they're cutting the Seanad down to the quick, they're only skimming 8 seats off themselves. A whole 5% cut! Meanwhile, the local authorities haven't been so much reformed as sloppily amalgamated, with the same old mandate to point at potholes in newspapers. We're getting to the point where the role of a TD will be that of a local councillor, national legislator, and their own check and balance.

If their would-be assassins are ham-fisted and disingenuous in extremis, then the Seanad have been woefully inept at saving itself. In the last few days and weeks alone David Norris, clearly struggling with myriad legacy issues, has let his emotion get the better of him, his claim that Regina Doherty was "talking out her fanny" completely overwriting his earlier magnificent defence of the chamber he's sat in since 1987. Mary White invoked Godwin's Law comparing Richard Bruton to a Nazi propagandist. Jim Walsh was brutally graphic during the abortion debate. Terry Leyden suggested Hitler and Mussolini were good Christians. Fidelma Healy Eames.

The sad fact is of course that the Seanad is a repository of future TDs, washed up TDs, party hacks who wouldn't get elected in anything resembling a normal circumstance and a handful of eminent voices that stick out like sore thumbs. The only sane option therefore isn't to blow it up, but amend the buffoon : eminence ratio. The Seanad could and should be a house where civically minded people who aren't all professional politicians could congregate, deliberate and make legislation better, or sometimes just cool the jets of an impetuous Dáil. They could and should be elected in a different way, so that a Senator running for office doesn't need to have "Ballypoltroon & District NEEDS a representative!" and can focus solely on national issues. But oh no.That would be too sensible for this government, for this country,

The nine things Ireland has learned from the frustrating abortion debate

Billboard in Ireland earlier in 2013

After 21 long years and 6 feckless governments, abortion is now a teensy weensy bit legal in Ireland. As one tweeter said, she became an adult in the time it took them to get their act together. But if that isn't a big enough development, the debate has certainly brought up a number of issues. For example:

1) Political Conviction Only Applies To The Unborn

Call me naive but I was always of the opinion that politically minded people had a whole issue profile of things they felt strongly about. It turns out abortion is apparently the only political issue that matters. Words like conviction and conscience were thrown around for the abortion debate in a way you never see for, say, an efficient public health service or education provision. It's bizarre, macabre even, that people who are arch-pragmatists when it comes to punishing waiting lists or gutted education funding for people who are actually walking around living their lives become principled absolutists over a pregnant woman's womb. Which brings me on to my next point...

2) Lucinda Wasn't So Much Brave As Proud

Yes, on one level a Minister sacrificing their position on a point of principle is a hell of a thing. But in this case the questions keep totting up. Why now and why this? How is it that the risk of a mother committing suicide being grounds for having an abortion is the moral red line when she's been part of a government that has implemented all manner of harsh policies? She already voted with the government for some of the amendments, so why not work inside government to put a proposal to the people on abortion that would leave the constraints of the X-Case a thing of the past? Why insist on a collision course with the leader and deputy leader of her party, and so soon after being a key figure of Ireland's EU Presidency? People on the pro-life side laud her bravery but self-immolation feels more like it.

3) Peter Matthews Is A Wee Bit Bananas

Peter Matthews was a banker in a past life, and brought in to the Fine Gael ticket thanks to the oft-unfashionable notion that legislators who regularly discuss certain topics should have a background in them before speaking up. Peter Matthews has in recent times ditched talking money and gone on a full-on pro life tirade crusade. He's pretty hardcore about it, having somewhat perversely replied that "We're all going to die anyway" when posed with a question about a hypothetical dying mother's plight. But his appeal late at night in the Dáil for everyone to "Wake Up!" to what's happening was a bit warning-the-end-is-nigh-wearing-a-sandwich-board.

4) Mattie McGrath Thinks Shouting The Parliamentary Equivalent Of "Jumanji!" Will Sort Everything

Mattie McGrath, a man who has spent so much time working the parish pump he must have arms like Rafa Nadal, must have been watching Perry Mason or something the night before the debate as he claimed the whole thing was unconstitutional and should be suspended. Nobody paid a blind bit of heed. But he was just one in a long line of TDs who had blithe regard for the terms of previous referenda who were happy to ignore democratic will because they didn't fancy it themselves.

5) Bitterness In Fine Gael Could Corrode Titanium

It was clear from some of the exchanges in the Dail that a lot of people are pissed off in Fine Gael. Michelle Mulherin was clearly seething at the threat of being booted out if she voted against the government, but not seething enough to actually do it. Interplay between Lucinda and James Reilly and Lucinda and Enda Kenny has been icy at best, and Reilly said of the aforementioned Peter Matthews "You're not a doctor or a lawyer". I'd suggest a saucer of milk for all concerned but it'd go immediately sour.

6) Declan Ganley Really Needs To Wind His Neck In

Poor Declan Ganley is the political success equivalent of Mean Girls' Gretchen Wieners, always trying to make "Fetch" happen. It's not going to happen. But on he goes on his doomed quest for relevance anyway, trying to assemble the dual forces of right wing economics and strident pro-life bona fides in various ways. On the night of the overnight debate, he tweeted about Texan changes in abortion law and made reference to Ireland to Ireland taking it up as it becomes "unfashionable". He actually used that word.

7) The Whip Situation In Ireland, Along With Everything Else, Needs A Rethink

There was something a bit merciless about the way parties used the whip to settle any dissent in the ranks, and in an ideal world TDs would have more flexibility to vote what they think. But as long as the vast majority of TDs are acting the role of souped up county councillors playing to the gallery every time they open their mouths and not proper legislators, then whips are necessary to get anything more nationally pressing than potholes done.

8) Fierce Late Night Debates Make Some TDs Awful Grabby

Hey, who among us hasn't been working til 3 and yanked a national legislator on to his lap? Oh. Not even Benny Hill would be at that.

9) Youth Defence Are Just The Worst

I don't really need to elaborate on this, do I?

Irish radio station 2FM's no old music policy - If I was putting them in the right direction, I wouldn't start from here

Is no old music really the best way to revamp radio?

So Dan Healy is the new boss of 2FM. Right. It’s not an easy job he’s just landed, as 2FM is struggling with a problem substantially worse than being a radio station that everybody hates: it’s a station nobody’s all that bothered about. So what is his first big announcement of regeneration? Songs before 1990 will be generally banned. Oh.

On one level. I can understand the rationale. 2FM is Ireland’s ostensible youth station, hence a music policy that focuses on recent music is the way to reel the 18-34 punters in, right?

There’s just one problem with that point of view: it’s bollocks.

This year, the song of the summer came straight from 1977. A song so catchy and imagination grasping that it’s been made into hours-long mixes featuring the likes of Alan Partridge and Ron F*cking Swanson. It came from an album that features contributions from the guy behind this and this, from a band that derived their name from a magazine review when they were an indie group named after a Beach Boys song. A band, incidentally, who have made their career from taking awesome old songs and making them awesome new songs.

This is also the year of Spike Island, a much-vaunted film inspired by the Madchester scene. Under Healy’s rules, most of the previous work of Nile Rodgers, Giorgio Moroder and Stone Roses, three of the most important musical figures of this year, would be technically banned.

So too would most of Glastonbury’s big hitters this year. Apart from the aforementioned Chic, the likes of the Stones, Public Enemy, Elvis Costello would have a lot of their key work seen as music non grata. Primal Scream and Nick Cave would just about survive. Even the Arctic Monkeys are embracing their retro selves, as Alex Turner looks like a cross between Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent these days. Why is that Public Image Ltd can sit easily with Monsters And Men, or Kenny Rogers followed by Vampire Weekend at the gold standard of music festivals, but not on a national radio station?

This is the thing Dan Healy appears to be overlooking: age and relevance are not the same thing.

When you listen to music on YouTube, or iTunes or Spotify or Grooveshark or the many, many other ways you can circumvent listening to radio these days, you might start contemporary but it won’t be long before you’re referred on to other similar songs or whole playlists full of stuff that may be a good bit older than where you started, but it still holds together. Shouldn’t a radio station do the same? Shouldn’t a radio station be a place where people can hear good music, all kinds of music, and hear skilled presenters enthuse about it and the connections between the artists of today and where they drew their inspiration? Ultimately, despite it being obsessively genrified nowadays there are only two kinds of music, good and bad. Automated algorithms on websites seem to be better at realising this than radio bosses.

So, it seems, are ad men. In recent times songs by Fleetwood Mac, the Bellamy Brothers and Jona Lewie have enjoyed a resurgence due to their use in wildly popular TV ads. The youngest of those songs was released in 1988. We’ve come to the remarkable and preposterous situation where a bank, a mobile company and a Scandinavian warehouse that sells things called Pöpli or whatever have more influence over what we listen to than radio.

If Dan Healy was trying to make a wholesale change to 2FM’s appeal, a bit like when Matthew Bannister led a bonfire of the Smashey and Niceys from BBC Radio 1 in 1993, then this plan of his would make a whole lot more sense. If he genuinely wanted to rebrand 2FM as a brash, unapologetically youthful Radio 1 full of Grimmys, Coxys and Scott Millses, and formally cede the BBC Radio 2 demographics to Today FM, I’d applaud his daring. But he’s also said that he hasn’t thought about a shake-up of presenters, none of whom in the crucial 7am - 7pm timeframe fall into the 18-34 demographic Healy is so keen to attract.

I’m not suggesting that 2FM consistently play oldies of the vintage parodied in clips like this, or have the same old DJ’s trying to be something they’re not (although Terry Wogan as a Garage MC would be a welcome addition to any roster), but an arbitrary ban on music before a certain date is a daft cure based on the wrong diagnosis.

2FM might have its problems, first among them a lack of a compelling identity, and a public perception of calcified indifference .Stopping DJ’s from playing too much Deacon Blue will hardly change that.

Ireland's national broadcaster should not pander to special interests from gay pride to pro-life protests

Gay Pride Dublin 2013

The conservative Catholic cultural commentator and alliteratively described David Quinn had a problem recently. He took exception to 2FM, a constituent radio station of the national broadcaster RTE, being the official media sponsor for Dublin's Pride Festival. Quinn, a vocal opponent of French moves to legalize same sex marriage and, you get the impression, every liberal reform since Vatican II, asked if RTE would do that, why not the next big pro life event? He expanded on this, wondering whether 2FM should also sponsor, say, Muslim and Catholic events.

It's just as well David Quinn is a writer, as with an apples and oranges argument his career as a greengrocer would surely be a disaster.

The notion that a pro-life rally and a gay pride event are remotely analogous is, to be generous, bizarre. A pro-life rally is a nakedly political issue. Gay rights and celebration, while certainly having a political element to it, ought not to be. Gay is also not a religion, and you can participate in a pride march without being gay, welcomed in fact. The same can hardly be said of a "pro-abort" (as some of the Youth Defence crew refer to pro-choicers as) showing up at the Vigil for Life.

Loathsome as it may be for some, Dublin Pride as an event has much more in common with St Patrick's Day or National Healthy Eating Week than, say, the Catholic World Youth Day. It's a community event in a way a life vigil never could be.

I don't doubt the sincerity of the views of Quinn and similar conservative commentators, but you get the opinion when you hear them railing against RTE bias, what they really mean is "Why aren't people listening to and agreeing with us?". In fairness, the same can be said for anyone who rails against bias, it's just they're the worst offenders. Besides, the conservative assessment of RTE as a liberal haven of anti-Catholic bias is pretty much struck dumb by the fact the bells of the Angelus are played on Radio 1. Every single day. Twice.

That's not to say the left-wing doesn't have it's problems with RTE either. A look on the likes of sites like Indymedia cast RTE as the stooge of a massive neo-liberal orthodox establishment. It even gets trouble from the centreground, as this damning video comparing and contrasting the Late Late and Graham Norton shows.

But this is the challenge that public service broadcasting faces. It can't and shouldn't aim to appeal to just a certain section of society, it has to at various points cover everybody. Public service broadcasting  has to be as broad as possible, and yet instructively niche at the same time. You may not always like it, but it would do us all a disservice if a public channel played to the gallery of our preconceptions all the time.

A lot of media commentators often claim that certain opinions or voices shouldn't be heard on the public broadcaster. These same commentators are invariably employed by privately owned media, who seem to think that the airing of views is their gift to dispense. It's not. Public broadcasting is here to serve everyone, either through the proliferation of different voices, wide coverage and, yes, endorsing the odd event, and to do so free of a money-making agenda.

The same day as Dublin's Pride march, across the water at Glastonbury another group concerned with liberation of another kind, Public Enemy, were playing. At one point during the set, Chuck D "I ain't here to sell shit, I am at your service". Assuming you could get that past the censors, it wouldn't be a bad new slogan for RTE.

"Guns & Roses" - How left wing coalition might be Ireland's Labour Party's only hope

Eamon Gilmore discusses the Algerian hostage situation on Irish TV

I was in a hotel room in London last week, and switched on the TV for the news at the time the Algerian hostage crisis was being covered. Half way through the bulletin, I see Eamon Gilmore being interview by a press pack in his capacity as Foreign Affairs Minister. My first instinct was to think, "Oh yeah, that guy. What ever happened him?"

For a while now - specifically, since February 2011 - that question has been reverberating round my head. "What ever happened to Eamon Gilmore?". Or indeed, "What ever happened to the Labour Party?". Despite their best ever showing in an Irish election ever in 2011 they have since gone into hibernation, choosing to prop up the political status quo by going into coalition with Fine Gael rather than taking their place, for the first time ever, as Ireland's main opposition party. Now, you might say that nobody achieves anything in opposition, but then again they haven't achieved anything in power either. Seriously, can you think of anything worthwhile Labour have done in the last two years? Answers on a postcard please.

Their choice to take the leather of ministerial Mercs and office chairs poses a serious problem for the party in this, the year of their 100th anniversary, and indeed beyond. As people cast their minds back to the nostalgia-doused heroism of Connolly and Larkin, today's Labour top brass will look all the more ridiculous and feckless. And as for the next election, the problem gets more serious. If Labour couldn't properly assert themselves with 37 seats at the height of their powers, how will anyone believe they can get anything done after five risible years in power and an inevitably diminished parliamentary presence?

At this stage, there seems to be only one option, one that isn't all that palatable to some, but it's not like Labour have a choice: alliance with Sinn Fein. It won't be easy for the ex-Stickie dominated Labour to countenance a move jokingly referred to as a "Guns & Roses" coalition, but ultimately what choice do they have? The long wished for unification of the left  in Irish politics should and could have happened a few times over in the last two decades, but for Labour to maintain any relevance in the next decade and beyond, they need to become a senior partner in a cogent force advocating genuine social democratic principles. Once the old embarrassments of the Sinn Fein parliamentary party finally stand down, and it's only a matter of time before they do, the only obstacle remaining will be outright snobbery. But if Labour can't detach themselves from their death grasp with Fine Gael for the "politically naive" or "economically illiterate" Sinn Fein, then pride will surely come before a very large fall.

Home thoughts from abroad can cause serious January blues - New year blues for immigrants leaving their families again

Heading back to reality after the holidays can be hard

As I start writing this, on the 6th January, it's not the just the Christmas decorations that are on a come down.

Post-Christmas malaise hitting you like a juggernaut of omni-problems and January's role as an austere counterweight to all the December revelry is a familiar trope and a feeling we're all au fait with, but for the emigrés among us who returned home for the holidays, the feeling hits a little harder.

I, for instance, now living in Manchester, got home for a little over a fortnight. At least, that's what the calendar indicated, but I'm convinced I've been swindled by the space time continuum somehow. There's no possible way that lightning fast pop-my-head-round-the-door of a holiday was 16 days long.

There's a lot to pack in to such a short space of time, and that's what makes that great big expanse of January all the worse. While at least you get some degree of solid family time, it's the important people outside that circle that proves problematic. You try and catch up with all your friends, but inevitably there are a few you can't meet up with, and that's vexing. But what's almost worse is the friends you do see, but just barely. When there are a slew of people you want to catch up with, people you might not have seen in ages, a whistle stop visit a mile wide and an inch deep doesn't really cut it. In the season of goodwill to all, you really want to have time to say more than "Merry Christmas!" to them all.

Meetings can also be bittersweet because the geographical distance can show up other forms of distance. When you don't see someone in ages, and you have a long list of developments to share in a short space of time, the new names and new factors you've been missing out on while away can cause considerable lament.

With the new year rattling inexorably on, full of appraisal and longing as much as hope and resolution, the one thing we in the places we've left behind can resolve to do is make sure the links of our life don't become rusted over. "No man is a failure who has friends", so said Clarence the Angel in the Christmas classic It's A Wonderful Life. The festive season may be over, but the effort to make time for the people who matter to us most shouldn't stop, whatever the time, and wherever you are.

2012 a tale of two Northern Irelands - from the celebrations of the Queen's Jubilee and the Olympics to the violent Union flag protests

Protesters with covered faces object to the removal of the Union flag from Belfast City Hall

I lived the vast majority of this year in Belfast, and a very happy time, for the most part, it was too. It was a very busy year, with "Our Time, Our Place" posters strewn about the place, Titanic and Solemn League & Covenant centenary celebrations, and a Diamond Jubilee revelry in there for good measure.

In July, Martin McGuinness even shook hands with the Queen. At the height of summer, City Hall was baked in sunshine as it blasted out the Olympics from their jumbo screens. It seemed that Belfast, and Northern Ireland as a whole, had genuinely moved on and was realizing its potential as a modern, vibrant, confident city. But just under the surface, something was amiss.

In the aftermath of Belfast City Council's decision to only fly the Union flag only on special occasions, what quickly became known as the "Flegs" debacle soon exploded in everybody's face, and still drags on as we speak. The effects are palpable and varied. Not only is it having an adverse affect on business, the Christmas market, shopping and a general ability to get on with life, but the violence was so bad at one point that Childline had to vacate their building for a time. Sure, some vulnerable kids might not have been able to get through to someone they needed to talk to, but hey, it'll be worth it if those brave loyalist souls get their flag back!

While the violence and laughable uproar has caused a flare-up the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time, the underlying problems did show themselves earlier in the year. In May, perennial agitant Willie Frazer sounded off about a primary school in Tyrone having an Irish flag outside, suggesting the IRA was training kids to use weapons in there. Except, possessing narrow vision to match his narrow mind, it wasn't the Irish flag he saw, but the Italian. It was there as part of school project, along with the Polish and Turkish flags which he somehow missed.

This year also had people on the other side of the fence fulminating over Rory McIlroy daring to say he felt British. Honestly, the gall of him! You'd think a man raised Catholic would know better! Following his revelation next came the inevitable boycott campaigns, which mercifully gained negligible purchase. And in fact, amdist the depressing elements of community relations this year, that is something we can take a positive from.

In times past, such altercations and conflagrations such as this would carry with it a certain degree of community justification, as ammunition in an eternal rally of "Whatabouttery". But in today's Northern Ireland at least the daft actions of the 1% are ridiculed by the rest of us. All progress, so it's said, depends on the unreasonable man.Northern Ireland has made great progress in this last year, sportingly,civically, commemoratively, things we can be proud of and build on for 2013. It's important we don't let the unreasonable flag-beaters undo it all.