PRINCE CHARLES INCONVENIENCES ME

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For several years now I have been taking daily strolls down by the river and my dog Zorro loves them. It’s a riverbank walk where I have seen otters, a terrapin and even a seal a few times. I have got to know many of the other regular users, one of whom told me that the place is locally known as ‘the hips & heart park’ for the many people who use it after illnesses. The freshness of morning brings with it the music of birdsong from the many trees in this small park. If you like peace, tranquillity and nature, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Yet behind it runs the busy rail line to Cobh in both directions, in front of you can often see ships of many nations as they traverse up and down the river and overhead the jets from the USA to Europe and back again, growl through the clear morning sky.

To get there I only need to pull out of my street and I can then almost freewheel down the long steep hill and across the flyover at the end to this oasis far from the madding crowd. If it is a mile from my front door it is a lot. The main road traffic on that hill is always heavy, never more so than at rush hours. Sometimes it can take two minutes and other times it can take twenty to get down to the spot, but Zorro and I always get there.

We didn’t though last week because Charles and Camilla were due to visit and uniformed Gardai in high vis. jackets were diverting and pointing us hither and yon and barking at us to be quick about it. In short, I had to turn around and return home until “One” had safely negotiated the main road and got to one’s first engagement.

I did get back down later that day though and a very old man I know from West Cork was slowly making his way along the path. When he saw me he said, “Jasus, but the traffic was shite earlier,” to which I nodded my agreement. “I’m told the quare fella was in town,” he added. I confirmed that we had indeed been graced by the royal presence and his wife. “I hope he’s not planning to stay the month or I won’t get out at all,” he shot back. There’s something direct and refreshing about West Cork folk.

I think though that his Mom, Queen Elizabeth was a more popular visitor. When she came to Cork we knew enough to stay at home and watch her on TV that day because there was no point trying to go anywhere until she was safely away.

OFFICIAL VERSION versus THE REALITY

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There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that the numbers of people and the waiting times in A&E wards around the country is a national scandal. The nurses organization have regularly tracked the numbers over the years and anytime a Health Minister tells us that it is improving, the nurses hit back with the latest real figures, which always seem to be a new record for the HSE. The gap between the official version and the reality is enormous.

Shamed into seeming to do something about homelessness, the Government estimate of the homeless figure was hugely at variance with the actual numbers on the ground, provided by the various charities at the coalface. Then the Gardai got in on the act by reporting that one and a half million breath tests were carried out by them on motorists nationwide in one year. They were still clapping themselves on the back for this when it emerged that a million of those tests never actually took place. It would be a surreal comedy if the stakes were not so high.

Today, in the time honored tradition we learned that a third of homes officially built since 2011 weren’t actually built at all. The Government proudly announced they’d built them and received the plaudits for so doing, only for the CSO to then announce that they were never built at all. “Some 85,154 new houses and apartments were calculated to have been built from 2011 to 2017, but the true number was 53,566, just 63% of what was believed.”

There’s lies, damned lies and statistics and then there is the actual reality. All the spin and bullshit they can shovel at it won’t disguise the complete absence of 31,588 new builds that the Government swore to us had been completed because they never were. The magnitude of the difference between reality and the empty political announcements cannot be explained away as errors because the margin of error in each case is far too high. So I conclude that it can only be lies, told in the full knowledge that were lies. It is cheating on a grand scale by the very people I predict will be coming looking for your vote sooner rather than later.

Oh, and they’ll have their ‘facts’ as to why you should vote for them, supported by their own lying statistics. Let’s all get real.

LOOKING THE PART – THE OPTICS

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One company I worked for in the past, which was growing rapidly in monetary and headcount terms, decided to go for an IPO. To float such an entity to the market, a number of boxes needed to be ticked, one of which was ‘rebranding.

“Rebranding is the process of changing the corporate image of an organisation. It is a market strategy of giving a new name, symbol, or change in design for an already-established brand. The idea behind rebranding is to create a different identity for a brand, from its competitors, in the market.”

In larger companies such as Irish Water or the ESB, the cost of rebranding can be enormous. Logos and fonts get changed so all letterheads need to be reprinted. Vans and trucks need to sport the new livery as well and for big operations the cost can run to millions. But like everything else in business, rebranding is about increasing growth and profitability. The corporate rebranding of my old company enriched the owner beyond his wildest dreams though it needs to be borne in mind that rebranding is a risk and the opposite can just as easily happen.

The question today though is, why would anybody want or need to rebrand the Gardai? Their job is fundamentally to enforce the laws of the State and keep the peace. Would a change to the Garda logo or the paint scheme to the squad cars enable them to do it better? Does somebody somewhere really believe that their new summer uniforms will make them more attractive to the citizens? I mean, they’re hardly out to sell us more fines and grow the comp…..ah! organization are they? So why do the Gardai need to be rebranded? Is it just another empty PR spin exercise I wonder?

The Garda motorcycle is an essential tool for the force and I was shocked to learn they only had 104 of them nationwide. I was further amazed that this number has fallen to 92 recently and has prompted the need to buy some new ones. “Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan has confirmed that An Garda Síochána will not buy motorbikes this year, despite the planned tender. None were bought last year, either.”

Apparently instead they are going to change the name ‘Traffic Corp’ to ‘Roads Policing,’ which leads me to wonder aloud, are they policing the traffic, as in the motors we drive, or has their job changed to maintaining the roads? Either way though, the old worn out battered bikes are going to get a fresh lick of paint and sign-writers will inscribe them with the legend ‘road policing’ meaning there is no money for any new motorbikes for the boys in blue.

In response, “The Garda Representative Association (GRA), which speaks for grassroots officers, has criticised the prioritisation of “window dressing” over “fit-for-purpose” vehicles to help them apprehend criminals. The GRA believes that the rebranding exercise has had more to with optics than real roads policing progress,” said spokesman John O’Keeffe. But the money for new bikes is to be used to spruce up the old ones.

Garda headquarters would not disclose the overall cost of rebranding. It said the bill up to February 1 was €29,806, but the process only started in mid-January and is ongoing. May I suggest that the thirty grand in question is most probably the fee for the graphic design house that pitched for the business. I believe the Garda logo remains the same so thirty grand buys us all a change of name and possibly a slight change in pantone colours for the bikes. But not a single paint brush has been dipped or any sign writers employed yet. The squad cars need to be repainted too and the letterhead across the force will have to reprinted. Incredible, isn’t it?

The waste in the public sector never ceases to amaze me but if sometime later in the year you begin to encounter abandoned Garda motorcycles hither and yon, you can at least stop to admire the artwork and design. Meanwhile of course, don’t expect to be seeing any of them showing up in an emergency.

LIED TO FOR OUR OWN GOOD!

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This week, the HSE issued yet another report on smoking. The amount of repetitive and lazy research on this topic is probably why the HSE has little money left to invest in other areas.

Anyway, this particular headline ran, “Smoking is the cause of 100 deaths and more than 1,000 hospital admissions in Ireland every week, according to research from the HSE.” That is not what it actually said but I’ll come back to that.

Now, you need to understand that there is no one ailment unique to smoking so it is difficult to understand how the HSE can claim any death whatsoever from it. Smokers don’t die from lighting cigarettes. They die, like everybody else, from heart disease, cancers and all the rest. Again these are all conditions involving multiple causes and it is scientifically impossible to single out one of them for study. Having checked one time with the CSO, I found out that not a single person in Ireland has EVER been certified as having died from smoking, either as the primary or secondary cause. Smoking can CONTRIBUTE to ill-health, that is the pertinent point, but it cannot cause it on its own.

So where did this death headline come from? Back in the early noughties the American Cancer Society issued a ‘statement’ that claimed that one in five deaths in America were attributable to smoking. Never mind that there was no credible scientific evidence to back up this claim, the soundbite was just repeated often enough so that it would be accepted without question by the dumb masses. It was a ratio that other countries were invited to apply to their own mortality statistics for propaganda purposes.

In Ireland, we have 29,000 deaths from all causes each year on average. That converts to 558 deaths every week in the country. So the 100 deaths/week from smoking contained in the report of our HSE is simply the application of the 5 : 1 ratio, dreamt up several years ago in the States. It is not research and it is not new. Just rehashed bullshit, puked out on a slow news day.

So I went back to the headline and looked at the second part of it, the “1,000 hospital admissions in Ireland every week.” Always one to check the facts, I went to the CSO to discover how many hospital admissions there are each week/month/year in our little country.After all, if the five to one ratio holds true, then there must be 5,000 hospital admissions every week or 260,000 annually. But no! Taking all ages and sexes, the total amount of hospital admissions for 2016 was 17,290 …………. FOR THE WHOLE YEAR!!

Stranger still, the headline should apparently have read, “1,000 (smoking) hospital admissions in Ireland every year,” because that is the official statistic. As always though, the devil is in the detail. HIQUA has already admitted that figures for those who smoke and those who don’t, are not collected by the hospitals. So there is no hard data from which to draw the conclusion in the headline. At best it’s a guess and at worst it is just empty propaganda. Either way, it is not factual.

I hate being lied to for my own good.