Irish college student blows €400 on phone porno binge

Slightly unusual news from Ireland today.

A college student at University College Cork narrowly avoided having to pay a phone company over €1,600 ($2,200) for downloading over 80 gigabytes worth of online pornography in the space of just three weeks.

The unfortunate student did have to cough up €400 ($574), but was able to rely on the good graces of the popular phone network, Meteor, to avoid having to pay the rest.

A number of Irish websites including TheJournal.ie and technology focused newswire Silicon Republic have already carried the story, while several Irish print publications are reported to be contemplating running it in tomorrow's editions pending confirmation of the account from Meteor.

The massive data bill happened after the lascivious student thought that his bill-pay plan included unlimited internet, and went to town in major-league style on what he believed to be the unlimited bandwith that he mistakenly thought came with his plan.
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The student also claimed that his accommodation was without internet for three weeks, prompting him to resort to alternative means of getting his fix of streaming online video, which is otherwise known among male college students in Ireland as online porno.

The story, for all its hilarity, is far from beyond belief.

I was astounded when checking my own bill-pay statement last week to find that my own phone network (the international conglomerate 3) had failed to add my own unlimited internet add-on to my package for over four months (unsurprisingly no apology was forthcoming).

Fortunately, I hadn't been downloading feature-length adult films several times a day as this individual had, but if I had, or engaged in other forms of excessive downloading , I could well have been landed with a similarly gigantic phone bill.

I also racked up over €200 ($287) worth of data charges in the space of just two weeks while on a 10 day trip to Florida last year, without hardly even using the internet (the charges, presumably, accumulated almost entirely from sending and receiving email), which also goes to show how easy it is to unintentionally accumulate massive data bills.

It's also more than possible that the sales assistant who reportedly misinformed this customer that he had unlimited internet on his plan really did so. High-street phonestore workers can be uninformed on the very plans they're selling at the best of times, and my own helper in the 3 store wasn't even aware that a driving licence was considered good enough proof of ID until I had to download a page from their staff manual (six months later, some staff documentation is still freely available online) to show him so!

All in all the only really astounding thing about this funny story is the amount and frequency of porn which this particular user downloaded over just three weeks, and why he couldn't simply do without it until he got his regular internet back!

Irish national daily the Irish Examiner is running a multi-part feature on the danger of pornography use among young people, particularly students, at the end of next week, and this case may lend support for the idea that such an exploration is both timely and necessary.

In an age when free pornography is available at the literal touch of a button, and most young people have unlimited access to the internet, abuse, even at this ridiculous end of the scale demonstrated here, is inevitable, and it shouldn't be seen as throwing us back to the Dark Ages to question whether such overuse could possibly prove detrimental to a person's mental and physical health.

Studies have already been done to prove that internet pornography can throw a viewer's dopamine levels off balance, which lends scientific credence to many users' reports that they feel somehow 'not right' after time spent abusing online porn.

I think that the criticism could be extended to over the top computer usage in general, though.

The constant bombardment of information from Twitter, Facebook, and other websites can get extremely tiring after a while, and now that smartphones allow people the 'luxury' of staying connected to the net while on the go, it's become practically impossible for some people to get away from it.

I deleted my own Facebook's 'news feed' last week after getting tired of reading friends' exaggerated accounts of fantastic nights out (if you're having such a good night, why bother Facebook or Tweeting it?), and limit Twitter usage to the bare minimum necessary to keep in touch with a few other reluctant Tweets; most other use is automated.

The whole essence of the new internet (the 'web 2.0'), which I recently saw summarized in the statement that 'everybody cares what I ate for lunch today', can become as much a daily grind as work after a while.

Maybe it's time we all took a moment to disconnect a little, the author included -- before we also end up with a $2,000 data bill!

Irish university could face prosecution following blasphemous exhibition

University College Cork, the usually quiet Irish university at the centre of an international controversy following a two day exhibition that featured a portrait of the Virgin Mary sporting a bikini, could now face criminal prosecution for allegedly violating recently introduced Irish blasphemy legislation, according to unconfirmed reports from a number of Irish websites.

Although national police (Gardaí) have thusfar declined to offer official confirmation that an investigation into the incident is ongoing (or even for that matter under contemplation), national Dublin-based news website TheJournal.ie led a story into the incident that prompted a columnist with the UK's The Guardian newspaper to speculate that the university could now have a "case on its hands" to answer, for having supposedly wilfully violated the provisions of the 2009 Blasphemy Act.

The Irish legislation, introduced amidst considerable controversy at the time, makes it an offence (felony) for a person to "utter" or "publish" anything that is considered "grossly abusive or insulting" to "matters held sacred by" any religion, and which causes "outrage" amongst a "substantial number of the adherents of that religion".

An important pro-viso in the legislation, however, exonerates one accused of the newly created offence if he/she can show that "a reasonable person would find genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value in the matters to which the offence relates."

The case has supposedly been submitted by police for consideration to Ireland's national prosecutor, the Director of Public Prosecutions (the 'DPP' for short, current incumbent James Hamilton), although this fact itself rests on the very unshaky foundation of an anonymous blog entry supposedly emanating from the 'Association of Catholic Lawyers in Ireland' which claimed, in turn, that this had been confirmed to it by a Cork-based super-intendent.

What's rather unfortunate about this whole rather strange incident (the offending portrait was a tiny A3 piece of digital art nestled unassumingly amongst a number of other exhibits on display at the college) is that the people of Ireland deserve a definitive answer as to whether or not University College Cork (UCC) is going to be investigated for this exhibition, but such an answer has, now four days after exhibition began, not been forthcoming.

The Guardian's Pádraig Reidy, himself a Corkman, teases the legal implications of the incident out in this excellent columnn entry (namely, issues affecting Irish free speech, artistic expression, and more), but for all the commentary and debate surrounding the tiny exhibit-piece ( - even the 'America Needs Fatima' association led a prominent international e-petition that collected thousands of signatories opposing the display - ), people are still really none the wiser as to what is actually going on.

It was a 'controversy' that pitted figures as varied as the local bishop and politicians against what seemed like a majority in favour of letting it go ahead, but simply because some of the exhibition's most vocal opponents could easily be caricatured as religious fanatics isn't reason enough in itself to completely dismiss the question of the exhibit's legality from public consideration, or brush off as if they didn't exist calls that it should be investigated. The Garda Press Office hasn't even denied that the Catholic Lawyer Association's blog, which states as fact that the incident is to be investigated, is true.

If legislation exists on the Statute Book (compendium of current Irish law) that could make the exhibition illegal, then the Irish policeforce, as the enforcers of the law, should at the very least let people know what, if anything, they're planning to do about it. If some people were so aggrieved by the exhibit that they were willing to stand outside the college gates protesting in the pouring rain for two whole days, then the least they deserve is an answer to this question. Stupefied silence simply isn't good enough.

And legally, given the fact that a "substantial number" of Catholics in this country did indeed feel "outraged" by the exhibit, it really comes down to whether or not the elusive "reasonable person" would have considered the depiction to have enough artistic merit to offset whatever illegality it might otherwise have accrued during the course of its display. It's a legal conundrum that can't easily be answered either way.

Whether or not the exhibit was 'blasphemous' is actually a fairly close call, but one which the Gardaí, at least in the interest of clarifying the highly controversial blasphemy debate, shouldn't simply choose to ignore.

The Danny Boy blog is now also on Twitter!

docarroll@irishcentral.com.

'Blasphemous' exhibit sparks international outrage, before it's even begun

A 'blasphemous' exhibit depicting 'Our Lady of Guadalupe' in a floral bikini is to go on show in University College Cork (UCC) tomorrow -- and critics have begun attacking the 'artwork' before it's even begun.

'Our Lady and Other Queer Santas' is the brainchild of Alma Lopez, a graduate of the University of California at Irvine - a well-known target of criticism from religious Catholic groups, and is being displayed as part of a weekend conference on Hispanic Studies taking place at the university.

The conference is to discuss the ins and outs of Chicano culture, alongside a discussion of the plight of Mexicans in US culture, but it's the exhibit that has been making the headlines recently, and attracting the critics.

A discussion on popular Irish radio broadcaster Joe Duffy's Liveline programme gave airtime to some strong opponents of the exhibition, while a number of figures on the blogosphere have criticized the display, which is due to go on show in the college's O'Rahilly Building.

This morning local politician Jerry Buttimer even chimed in with his two cents, calling it 'denigrating' to adherents of the Catholic faith.

The exhibit sits very broadly within the context of a larger debate in Irish society about blasphemy itself.

A controversial 'Blasphemy Law' was passed at the start of this year, and was decried as a retrograde step by many in the Irish media at the time.

It's since been proven to be largely irrelevant and unenforceable -- 'blasphemous' utterances and displays, such as (arguably) this, continue to go on, and its use seems likely to be largely nfined to cases of blasphemy that are likely to incite hatred on religious grounds. Nevertheless, it continues to prove to be a major bone of contention between the law-making establishment and those governed by its decrees.

Irish universities are also generally libertarian in nature (as they are almost everywhere), and this display (which has attracted local as well as international attention), is a typical case of the collegiate 'free speech' movement clashing with the pervasive (though rapidly demising) influence of the Catholic Church, which once held such an iron-cast grip on Irish society.

As for my own two cents on the exhibition (this being a blog, after all), I have no shame in admitting that I would lend my broad support to those signing petitions against it.

Sensitivity to religion and other peoples' belief systems cannot simply be whitewashed away under a mass current of free speech and libertarianism, and this depiction - while not grossly offensive or obscene - could still find a more suitable home than at a university, which is supposed, at least in my understanding of the concept, to be a place of mutual respect and understanding for others.

> Interesting article from the Irish Examiner with a little more detail about it, here.

Emigration, not fees, the real problem facing Irish graduates today

Two problems are currently at the fore for Irish students, one major, the other minor.

The major one is the rather stark reality that most of them will have to leave the country to find work as soon as they've finished their degrees.

Lack of work at home has meant that the tragedy of forced emigration is part of young Irish students' lives again; commentators have even speculated that this wave of emigration could turn out worse than the last one we endured in the 80s.

The comparatively minor one is that there's a slight increase in the amount of college fees payable each year: €350 worth, to be precise.

Dublin's leading social policy think-tank, the ESRI, recently estimated that around 70,000 of our youngest and brightest left for foreign shores last year (the exact figure has yet to be determined) while this website's Cathal Dervan reports that emigration to Britain, the quintessential receptacle of Irish emigrants in times of economic hardship, has sky-rocketed to near record levels.

Compared to the whole forced emigration upset, the altogether less drastic news that college 'fees' are increasing by a paltry €350 -- from €1,650 to €2,000 -- seems like a relatively minor headache, all the more so when the education Minister's recent announcement that the fee can now be paid in two, rather than one, instalments is borne in mind.

This is why it seems somewhat strange that Irish students, or at least students' unions, seem more concerned with criticizing the relatively minuscule increase in the already rock-bottom college fees than with the fact that most of them will have to leave this country to find work after graduating.

The education Minister's recent announcement that the 'fee' would indeed increase (despite a short-lasting pre-election pledge that he would oppose this happening), was met with the rather paramilitary-style threat that 'all hell would break loose' if this were to happen by the Union of Students in Ireland (USI), while the ongoing student emigration fracas has tended to be countered with much more tepid pronouncements, such as protests, demonstrations, and oft-repeated 'astonishment' that this issue appears to be so clearly off the government's radar.

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Which makes me wonder: would it not make more sense for us students to direct our abundant supplies of whining and groaning to the more important issue of graduate emigration and unemployment, and accept the minor increase in fees as a necessary (albeit unpalatable) part of Ireland's painful economic hangover?

Would we loose too much face if we were to admit that all this bluff and bluster about fees was really just a lot of hot air?

On a side point, I should note the Union of Students in Ireland (USI), the body collectively representing Irish third-level students, or at least the vast majority of students, has made a strong and principled stand against student emigration as recently as last year. My worry is rather that this is slipping off the agenda, and risks being totally eclipsed by a fees 'crisis' that really isn't turning out to be all that big of a deal.

This concern about fees seems like a case of us getting our priorities mixed up, and the very real problem of not having a job to work at in Ireland after graduation surely amounts to a more substantial threat than the risk of having to pay an extra €350 per annum to stay in college.

Even if college were (hypothetically) totally free, with zero fees and expenses, what good would attending such a place do if there were no jobs to be filled after graduating? It's the forced emigration and unemployment, not a few hundred euro, that threatens the future of our young people.

Irish students have plenty to complain about at the moment, as indeed all Irish currently do (it helps that we specialize at this skill, too), but perhaps it's time for students to ask themselves if the very slight increase in college fees is really that big a deal, and if their time, energies, protest, and letters to politicians, would not be better directed at the real and crippling problem of there being no jobs to go round after graduating.

Global web seminar to discuss Ireland's emigration problem

Quick something that might be of interest to the wild geese reading my blog on IrishCentral.

University College Cork, one of Ireland's seven universities, is hosting a symposium / web-seminar on Ireland's emigration problem this afternoon, and there's no need to make a special visit to Cork, as it will be available over the internet via a 'web seminar'!

It's interesting as it marks just about the first time that a group of academics have made an effort to bring hi-falutin discussion about Ireland's emigration problem (according to Ireland's flagship public policy thinktank the ERSI, over 70,000 people left the country last year for foreign shores, while a recent report on Irish Central noted that emigration to Britain had hit record levels), to a broader, even worldwide, audience.

The symposium, to be held this afternoon in the university, will feature a number of local and international speakers discussing emigration, with a number of recent emigrées on-hand to offer their own experiences at why they had to leave Ireland and move abroad.

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Participants in the 'web workshop' (it's open to everyone), can also give their input. Those wishing to take part in the global discussion this afternoon, can contact ucc.emigration.workshop@gmail.com for login details.

The workshop runs from 1400-1730 Irish time, which is 0900-1230 EST for East-coast listeners, and 0600-0930 PST for those on the West Coast.

Why Irish-America is good for Irish presidency

Those of you who have been following Niall O'Dowd's possible bid for the Irish presidency may have read Walter Ellis' ad hominem in Ireland's paper of record The Irish Times this morning.

The surprisingly aggressive piece, in which Ellis criticizes O'Dowd for viewing Ireland as "a brand, not a nation", before regurgitating a series of highly selective quotes from this website and its print publication, The Irish Voice, displays almost as shocking a disdain for the Irish-American community and its values as its author accuses O'Dowd of having for the Queen, and culminates in a sweeping statement that those with ties to the fictional village of 'Glocca Mora' (Irish Americans) are deluding themselves into believing that they have any connection beyond that of 'blood and ancestry' to their genealogical homeland.

I disagree with the piece for a number of reasons.

Firstly, like O'Dowd, and several other prominent commentators (take, for one, maverick economist-cum-columnist David McWilliams), I believe that there is great untapped power dormant in the numbers and scale of the Irish diaspora, and that alienating or deriding these people is contrary to Ireland's best interests.

Irish Americans, many of whom I met interning with this website last summer, have a genuine determination and zeal for all things Irish, and are imbued with great ideas that -- if listened to more earnestly, and taken more seriously -- could make a positive contribution to Ireland's troubling future. Ellis should know that -- he arguably is one himself!

Even those whose families have not stepped on or seen the 'Emerald Isle' for two or more generations have a real understanding that in America, the great melting pot of nations, retaining ones sense of heritage and national identity are of the utmost important, and have a knowledge of what's going on in Ireland and its geography that greatly took me aback when I saw it first hand in New York last summer.

There are, of course, exceptions - as there are to every rule - but Irish Americans have a contribution to Ireland which could be of real benefit to the country if harnessed properly,

This is more or less the same sentiment one Irish university president expressed to me when I interviewed him earlier this year, in which he said that he thought the ideal situation for Ireland's future would be for young Irish graduates to emigrate after completing their third level studies, gain experience and knowledge working abroad, and then return home to apply what they've learned, and seen done better, to help rectify our ailing economy back home.

These people, the Irish Americans, whose exact number and geographical dispersal are still matters of debate and speculation for those who care, are not 'misty eyed', nor do they 'adhere to' a picture of Ireland that includes in its geography 'Glocca Mora'; they are real, tuned-in, and care about Ireland's future.

I remember meeting an Irish-American about my age last summer whose family had never even even visited Ireland, but had as good if not better better a knowledge of Irish geography and politics than I had, naming, without falter, the 32 counties and its past six Taoisigh from memory.

They're certainly far from the imbeciles Ellis describes in his piece this morning, and anyone with ideas to get us Irish out of our current economics mess -- however tenuous their connection to Ireland or distant their heritage -- needs to be listened to, in earnest, and immediately, before they stop trying.

Besides that diatribe, Ellis also criticizes O'Dowd's vision of a pro-active presidency, one which would see the President travel as a 'travelling salesman' convincing Irish abroad to invest -- intellectually and financially -- in our country, before accusing him, by having emigrated Ireland to earn a living in the State, of having 'irretrievably' shorn himself of his Irish nationality.

Nowhere in the Constitution is it written the the President has to amount to nothing more than a ceremonial figurehead, and for me, and others impressed with some of Niall's initial musings on his possible bid, a President who could show a bit more dynamism and boldness would be a welcome complement to our current government, which -- at least compared to the Fianna Fáil cronies it ousted -- has been taking action, even if not always appreciated.

O'Dowd, at least for those of us who'd support his bid hope, doesn't consider Ireland to be some faceless corporation, but at a time when the country is being forced to introduce water charges to adhere to the terms of a loan it's been forced in to by sheer economic ruination, a bit of business sense, not to mention some inward investment from abroad like we saw in previous days, certainly wouldn't go astray.

O'Dowd's political activism, for those who follow it, is dedicated to promoting Ireland and strengthening its ties with the Irish abroad. The argument that by emigrating to the States he has reneged on some sort of national pledge, or constitutional duty, is simply not true; he has done more for Ireland than most that spend their whole lives living there.

For naysayers like Ellis, though, any budge from the presidential orthodoxy, including electing to the job an Irishman who has spent some of his life in the States, would amount to heresy; for me, though, both are positives, and I can only see a willingness to better engage with, and interest the extended Irish diaspora, particularly in the US, as a good thing.

I hope those misty-eyed souls still dream of Glocca Mora would agree.

I'll include an email and link to my Twitter in future posts, as some readers/commenters seem to have difficulty getting in touch:

docarroll@irishcentral.com

twitter.com/daniel_ocarroll

Even for politically adverse youth, Lenihan was a hero

Even for Ireland's youth, for whom politics has come to symbolize little more than student emigration, economic ruination, and misery, there was a palpable sense of sadness at news of the death of former Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan early this morning.

I learned of the late Minister's death via Facebook, the same way I heard of the recent passing of the late former Taoiseach Garrett Fitzgerald, and there's a frankness and honesty to that medium that can capture the emotions and feelings of the 'everyday man' or woman better than any news report can.

People spoke admiringly of the Minister's valiant and courageous battle against an in-conquerable disease, and of how bravely he'd carried on the impossible fight till the end, all while shouldering the most onerous of ministerial responsibilities, and steering Ireland through a financial crisis that few, even he, could have foreseen.

Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn's recent backtracking on an explicit promise to oppose a raise in college fees just before the election has sunk politics to a new level of grubbiness and un-trustworthiness among Ireland's youth, many of whom are now left without re-assurance that they will be able to afford college tuition in as little as two years, but today's epithets and news reports of the late Lenihan, who epitomized the brave, noble, and courageous statesman that he was, makes the whole system seem as if it retains at least a shred of dignity.

My last, and I think the only time I saw the Minister in person, was when he delivered the annual summertime oration at Béal na mBláth, the site where Michael Collins was gunned down, last summer.

My abiding impression of that afternoon was of seeing such a strong, impressionable, and handsome speaker that it made me sad that that same man had a ticking time bomb inside of him, and was literally waiting - although you'd hardly know it - for his time to die.

Renowned for his sharp intelligence and leadership skills at a time when the government was widely perceived as being clueless and incompetent, it was possible to draw a faint parallel between himself and the slain Michael Collins, also a Minister for Finance although of a different party and stripe, at whose approximate graveside the late Minister was delivering the oration.

I even remember my curiosity prompting me to ask the Fianna Fáil party sympathizer at whose behest I had attended the event to ask how the Minister was faring with his treatment, before being told, with an air of despair, that pancreatic cancer, of which the Minister this morning died, was virtually impossible to treat or cure.

There's also a sense of surrealism at the fact that so little had been said of the Minister's disease since it was publicly announced by TV3, even, allegedly, before the members of his family had been told, in late 2009.

There was no story days or weeks before the Minister died to morbidly inform the public that his health had 'taken a turn for the worse', as so often happens when the end is nigh.

An early May interview with Dublin's The Evening Herald, 'Lenihan laughs off 'I'm Dead' Rumours', is the only hint - itself now an utterly tragic one - that something was wrong. His passing more or less just happened, suddently, out of the blue, a cold reminder that the Minister who just weeks before had still been in the public eye, had indeed, not been well,

The most touching part of today's reactions to the Minister's passing, though, is that the sheer humanity and courage of his brave struggle with cancer so clearly transcended politics.

Just as his death drew heartfelt messages of condolences from political foes, so too even the ordinary Irishperson, for whom Lenihan, as Minister for Finance during the disastrous Fianna Fáil years, could have been so clearly implicated as a vital cog in the wheel of a system that so devastatingly wrecked the country and its public finances, couldn't help but feel deeply sadenned by the news of his sudden passing this morning. If there's someone callous individual who feels that the Minister got his just deserts, I haven't met him yet.

Most of all, though, for the way he carried on so bravely and courageously in the face of his terminal illness, even to the extent that people forgot seem to have forgot that he was dying, he will rightfully be remembered not just as a great politician and public servant, the scion of an illustrious political family, but, in the so-often dim firmament of modern Irish politics, as a shining example of humanity and courage, and, ultimately, as a hero.

Exams body to monitor students' Twitters during State exams

Ireland's high-school exams body, the State Examinations Commission (roughly equivalent to the American College Board) has announced today that it's going to hire out "an external agency" to check students' Twitter before and during exams in a bid to catch out potential cheaters.

The announcement comes just hours after GAA boss Christy Cooney confirmed that the Gaelic Games Authority (GAA) has issued guidelines to players on what they could and couldn't Tweet, following Laois footballer MJ Tierney's expression of disillusionment with team management made via the micro-blogging site, not to mention, of course, the ongoing 'superinjunction' fracas taking place in the UK.

It's pretty safe to say at this stage that the Twitter craze -- adopted fairly quickly by Irish politicians, but somewhat more reluctantly elsewhere -- has now spread to all areas of Irish life, and will continue to play an important and interesting role in the country's future, even if half the country, such as this blogger, has little idea how it actually works.

The SEC's proposal to monitor Leaving Cert. (the finishing exam) Tweeters, however, seem, even to a Twitter neophyte such as me, to be perhaps just a little poorly construed.

Over in the Orient, the ever tech-savvy Chinese students are at cheating with a bit of style, by investing their yen in a little bit of high-tech equipment in their own efforts to foil invigilators at the world's largest examination, which 62 million Chinese are preparing to sit this week.

The Irish Times' Clifford Connan reports that authorities there are on the look-out for two-way radios among other electronic paraphernalia that could be used to leak exam clues to other students. Even watches, seemingly, can be fitted out with various James Bond-style mobile technologies embedde and have been banned from exam halls as a result over fears that illicit technologies could be too hard to spot for invigilators.

At home, though, it seems as if the now relatively benign delights of Twitter and Facebook are all our homegrown mischievous youngsters are going to use to attempt to gain a head-start on the bad-boys over at the SEC and their spooky "agency" colleagues following their every digital move.

Decoy Facebook 'friends' and innocuous 'Tweeters" will prowl the social media landscape looking for any whiff of an untimely hint, or any other sign that something just isn't right.

Besides the fact that catching cheaters via Twitter and Facebook is probably impossible (decoy accounts, masked IP address, and the fact that smartphones aren't allowed in exam halls are just a few are of the problems facing the 'Twitter clampdown'), there's the problem that genuine Tweets speculating what's going to be on the exam paper are probably going to number in the thousands.

And no matter what methodology the SEC uses to try catch potential cheaters out, if a student manages to get his hands on what's on the exam paper before the exam, then whether he shares that information via Twitter, Facebook, text message, or good old word of mouth, it's really the SEC's fault for letting the information escape in the first place.

This in fact happened no earlier than just last year, when a sloppy exam invigilator mistakenly handed students the wrong English paper, resulting in a national scandal in which an entire paper had to be taken again, inconveniencing tens of thousands of already harried students. Let's also not forget the minor difficulty that 'Tweets' (Twitter posts) have to be limited to 140 characters. It's called micro-blogging for a reason.

This year as ever, though, the more conventional methodologies are still going to remain the weapons of choice in the fight against against preparing your material the good old-fashioned way (that is, through that horrible thing called study), and no group of spooks in whatever "agency" the SEC has engaged in this digital battle is going to be able to foil these tried and tested techniques.

Back in my own Leaving Cert-going days, when, like many others, we had sunshine to deal with as well as stress (tomorrow, I hear, is going to be rainy-cloud), stanzas and equations scribbled under your sleeve were still the most common and reliable method of trying to 'cog' the exam. And that was only three years ago.

Despite creepy invigilators stalking you practically onto the toilet seat (I don't know if this happens around the world or just at Irish exams), I have it from reputable exam-taking sources that this scribbling method could and still cannot be foiled, in-cubicle monitoring, digital or otherwise, not yet having been made legal.

No smartphones or Twitter required, folks, just a pen, long-sleeved shirt, and a few seconds of furtive shuffling, and unless full body searches are to be instituted (I wouldn't laugh), I can't see why or how that's going to change or be prevented.

Still though, let's give the exam-masters at the SEC credit for being 'on' to something technological (the same spokesperson said that this sort of hi-tech social media prowling has been going on for two years now..), even if the #leavingcert hashtag isn't the first place students are going to go to dish whatever exam-related dirt they somehow come to know ahead of the hand-out time.

Good luck to anyone with relatives/family starting tomorrow!

Fewer students taking Gaeltacht courses is bad for future of Irish

A telling headline that caught my attention today was one from Irish education website schooldays.ie.

The number of Irish students taking summer courses in Gaelic speaking areas of Ireland (in Irish, the gaeltacht) has dropped further.

Now just 25,000 students are making the trek out to the few Irish-speaking localities left in the country each summer to brush up on their spoken Irish ahead of high-school examinations, and partake of the other home-grown delights the Gaeltachtanna have to offer.

This further decline, combined with the increasingly common pattern of Irish students taking out J1 summer work visas to spend their summers working in the States, as well as the rampant and unchecked phenomenon of student emigration, means that there will be very few budding Gaelgóirí left here at all in future summers to perpetuate the language by their visits , memories, and good times they take back home from summers in the gaeltacht.

These summers, once such a a staple of ever Irish school-goer's school holidays, carry the key to the survival of Irish as a spoken language, and prevent it from seeming totally extinct, when in so many other respects it often does.

Irish's main use for the youth of Irelad today unfortunately seems to be as a means of communication on foreign holidays, where (as every Irish holidaymaker can surely remember) it is skillfully deployed as a means of encoding a message that you don't want the taxi driver or hotel receptionist to hear, mustering whatever few words of Irish you have lodged somewhere in your brain, and probably haven't used since the 'Junior Cert'.

As a means of actually engaging in day-to-day communication outside the Gaelteacht, however, it is unfortunately all but extinct, and friends from the Gaeltacht who have come to Cork in search of work tell me that even there its use among the youth is patchy at best, which is hardly surprising given the ubiquity of English and the still limited selection of services and entertainment available in Ireland through Irish.

The instruction of the Irish language in the secondary school system is also lacklustre at best, and despite attempts at curriculum reform most students -- even those with a natural love of the language -- are left cold by antiquated grammar drills, intensive study of out-dated literature and poetry, and scant emphasis on the language as a spoken and living means of communication.

For all those reasons and more those summers spent in the Gaelteacht -- as renowned for being good 'craic' as they are for being effective means of imparting knowledge of Irish -- are very important for maintaining Irish students' connection to Irish in a country that is shunning it and forgetting it in all other respects.

That, and Ireland and the western world's wholesale adoption of American culture, mean that maintaining a little authentic piece of our own culture is more important now than ever before.

Correction

Commenter 'GeorgeDillon' is correct. As I should have pointed out above, the Gaelteacht/Irish college holiday is generally associated with secondary (high-school) students, while J1 summers begin, usually, with college-goers (and as he also pointed out, there are also eligibility requirements on the visa to that effect). Notwithstanding that inaccuracy, I stand by the general point that if summer trips to the Gaeltacht fall out of vogue, no matter at what age, young peoples' connection to the language is in danger, and that will have a knock-on effect on the language's image.

Americans bemused by Irish governance in Indo's Wikileaks exposé

Reading the Irish Independent's coverage of the diplomatic cables it received from notorious whistleblowing website Wikileaks over the past few days, you'be be forgiven for forming the impression that the Irish government was being run by a bunch of amateurs.

The overall picture that emerges from the leaks on the whole can probably be summarized as a group of bemused but seemingly very clued-in American diplomats wondering just what was going on across Dublin in Leinster House, why those with the information about the impending economic bust close to hand weren't divulging it to the Irish public, and most pointedly why nobody at the Department of Finance had seemingly formulated a plan for recovery.

Former Ambassador Thomas Foley emerges of course as the protagonist of the show, while the sub-diplomats and councillors that join him at high-level meetings also seem to share in his disbelief and disquiet at what they seem to have correctly foreseen as an economic disaster in the making.
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Wikileaks shows Irish government paralyzed by looming crash

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U.S. Ambassador believed 'Biffo" was correct name for Brian Cowen

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Former Finance Minister Brian Lenihan's "turned a corner" speech, in which he claimed - without reason - that the economy had turned a corner, when in fact only the bailout was in store, seems to have come as a particular shock to the diplomats, while the lack of a clear plan as to what to do if a bailout was necessary, and almost total paralysis at the Department of Finance in this regard, were also concepts of Irish misgovernance which seemed alien and incomprehensible to the Americans.

The most worrying thing about the leaks, though, is that the American diplomats seemed to have had a much more realistic of where Ireland was heading, and of what was going on behind closed doors, than the government itself did.

Lenihan's turned a corner speech was instantly spotted as being the stuff of make-believe, while other aspects of the country's finances -- even the provision of near-free education at third level -- came under scrutiny and shown to be incompatible with what Ireland was trying to achieve financially.

The Americans knew that the value of the 'toxic' loans being transferred to NAMA wasn't what the government was claiming it was, and had realized that the State would have to have recourse to an EU/IMF bailout deal even when it was maintaining its charade that it wouldn't be necessary.

If Ahern and Cowen had managed to pull the wool over anybody's eyes with what was truly going on, it certainly wasn't the American diplomats.