TellUsWhy.ie - Irish website tries to move presidential race beyond a soap opera

Here's a great idea that got noticed a little late in the day to maximize its potential.

TellUsWhy.ie departs from a simple premise: that candidates for the presidency need to tell us why they're fit for the job rather than engage in a mud-slinging contest trying to unearth the latest scandal.

The website seems to have got going around January (see an Irish Independent piece dated around that date, here) but hasn't received the attention it deserves.

With just a little over a week left until ballot day, most of the electorate, myself included, are left with that frustrating  feeling that while we understand what kind of letters David Norris wrote, what boards Mary David sat on, and approximately what sort of role Martin McGuinness played in the IRA's bloody past, we know precious little about what each of the respective candidates actually stand for.

'Tell Us Why' could have been more than a website -- it could have become a national slogan for a disenfranchised and under-informed electorate left bewildered by the media sandstorm.

The website, the brainchild of Trinity College politics student, Daniel Philbin Bowman (a son of veteran RTE broadcaster John Bowman) has managed to post four questions to candidates so far, and received a response from each, but four dozen questions (and perhaps a nicer layout) would have been more helpful.

Nevertheless it's a great idea, and one which could have really engaged the public had people not been so distracted by the often lurid allegations flying back and forth.

And the fallout from those lurid allegations is now the largest reason why many may choose not to vote come election day.

As the official literature comes flying in the letterbox and the canvassing draws to a close, making an educated decision as to who to vote for seems extremely difficult -- particularly as the fact that there are also two referenda to vote on gains public attention.

One commentator pointed out that as the Irish president essentially assumes a figurehead role there are no real policies or manifestos to advance and counter-- thus the race for the job has become little more than a thinly glorified popularity contest involving desperate attempts by each candidate to denigrate the others.

That may be the case, but after three months of the 'soap opera' as it's now often dubbed, myself, and most of the country, are still at a loss as to who to vote for on election day. Perhaps someone could have told us why!

Sugar-daddying booms in Ireland as desperate students struggle to pay tuition

Sugar daddying on the rise in Ireland as
cash strapped students try avoid dropping out
of  college.

Sugar-daddying is a boom industry in Ireland as cash-strapped students prove they'll do anything to make ends meet and pay for college.

And it's not just women who stand to 'benefit' from the arrangement, according to this morning's Irish Examiner -- 'sugar mommying', whereby males offering their intimacy and friendship in exchange for financial sponsorship, is an increasingly lucrative industry for young college-going men too, with well-to-do Irish cougars easily to capitalize on toy boys' desire to stay in higher level, without having to take on dreary part-time jobs to do so.

The story has a familiar ring to it: last October I reported that prostitution was how students were making ends meet, while pole-dancing is a perennial vice-industry favourite of hard-strapped students. One UK night-venue owner recently made headlines by publicly encouraging students to dance at his club as an easy way of making money.

An Irish website quotes top brass at sugar-daddying web portal seekingarrangement.com as saying that Ireland now 'boasts' the highest number of signed up sugar-daddying exchanges outside of the States -- and at 5,000 the figure is disconcertingly high for the relatively small college-going population here.

The website's owner even recounts how one 21 year old was paired off with an octogenarian millionaire, a sign of how ridiculous the 'matches' can be.

One Dublin graduate in her thirties was quoted demanding exorbitant sums in exchange for her 'companionship', which in the realm of sugar-daddying seems synonymous with intimacy, a price she was presumably able to command, given that her found sugar-daddy was a multi-milllionaire based comfortably close-by in the Dublin area. Others had similar stories to tell.

Perhaps what's more worrying than the idea of sugar-daddying taking off here is the numbers engaging in it. If there's already 5,000 registered members in Ireland (possibly a conservative tally of the overall total) we can expect that there will only be more joining the sugar-daddying ranks in months to come.

Donie O'Sullivan of University College Dublin's The College Tribune recently grabbed an exclusive from Union of Students Ireland (USI) president Gary Redmond that lifted the lid on a planned anti-fees march in the months ahead.

Worryingly it now seems as if €5,000  (approx. $6,800) is the latest figure on the cards for third level fees next year, and if passed in the next Budget this would almost certainly be far more than most Irish families are able to afford.

The march which the Union plans to mount against it will likely eclipse last year's one in Dublin which saw allegations of police brutality against protesting students, amid concern at the time that the increases in that Budget would be more severe than what they amounted to.

And if the fees-hike is given the green light come Budget-time, it's a fair bet that increasing numbers of students will be seeking out avenues like sugar-daddying as a last-ditch means of avoiding dropping out of the system altogether.

Michael D Higgins admits to smoking marijuana - an interesting blip to an otherwise dull campaign

Michael D, photoed after his rock 'n roll years

Presidential forerunner Michael D Higgins has admitted to smoking marijuana, an interesting revelation in an otherwise extremely dull campaign.

Higgins now follows in the footsteps of several other political leaders who have capitalized on their ganja-puffing ways to lighten up their image a bit, and appeal to the younger voter, for whom a pro-cannabis stance is usually almost always endearing.

Higgins told the Irish Independent that this happened at Indiana University, though he was careful to add that he had never been in favour of using drugs as a vehicle to expand consciousness, and emphasize that he had never tried LSD even when his friends were experimenting with it.

This unexpected dope-toking surprise comes close on the footsteps of a similarly unexpected revelation that the diminutive and starkly un-rockstar like Michael D had in fact gone through some "rock 'n roll drinking years," to quote his words in another press conference.

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My choice for president of Ireland is...


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And although picturing Michael D smoking cannabis is about as difficult as imagining how he must have looked while at the height of those glorious 'rock star years', it's probable to say that the answer to the cannabis question was a calculated ploy to endear him to the younger votership, with which he seems to have been finding favour as of late.

A national student poll conducted on third level campuses across Ireland last week ranked Higgins as the students' choice for the job, amassing an impressive 34pc of the student vote, which was perhaps a precursor to his choice to disclose the marijuana episode. Higgins has also been capitalizing on the media ineptitude of his competitors as of late. As scandal now besets Dana, 'Michael D' is practically the only runner left in the field who hasn't suffered a major media controversy.

That should come as no surprise, though. Higgins has largely sat tight during the race and avoided controversy whenever it threatened to stop at his door. The strategy has been boring, but also successful.

But whatever about Higgins' calculation or otherwise in disclosing the cannabis smoking, it seems almost certain that disclosing a mild and preferably marijuana-centered drug-taking past, while underscoring that it was an isolated incident that did not lead to dependence, it a political stratagem which could have been taken straight from Machiavelli's little handbook had it been popular among the political classes of his day (and who knows, maybe it was).

The since-deposed Brian Cowen went on the record before coming to power as being our first Taoiseach to have officially admitted to having smoked cannabis, at a time when there was little else going for him (which, on a side note, after his deposition from office that still holds true). Barack Obama's owning up to smoking cannabis and using  cocaine during his college years, rather than waiting for an artful journalist to find that out in an expose, was been seen by some as a PR key tool in his successful election.

And if admitting to trying marijuana works to mobilize the traditionally stagnant student vote, an Irish politician will be slow to pass up the chance to try it, especially one as crafty as Michael D.

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Students give up on Irish presidential race after drawn out bickering - VIDEO

'Michael D'

Irish students could no longer care who the next head of state is.

That's the impression I was left with after co-ordinating a pre-election poll at University College Cork last week and speaking to about 300 students about whom they would vote for on election day.

The survey was part of a nationwide student poll being co-ordinated by Dublin's The College Tribune, the results of which are being published tomorrow, and pollsters in other parts of the country reported very similar feedback.

Perhaps most shocking of all though was the number of students unaware that an election was on in two weeks.

A recurring dialogue went something like:

"Who are you voting for in the presidential election?"

"President of what? Of UCC [University College Cork]"

"No, of the country"

"Is there an election on?!"
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Besides those who were presumably sequestered in a cave while the Norris / Byrne / McGuinness scandals boiled over, the vast majority were simply disinterested in who they were going to vote for.

Most of those who knew an election was on seemed to share my feeling that as there was nobody left worth voting for, it was better to commit that grave democratic sin of forgoing one's suffrage and simply not vote on election day, or in the alternative to spoil the vote as minor mark of disinterest in the candidates.

Tellingly, though, even those on the threshold of being unaware that there was a presidential election in a few weeks seemed to realize the farcical mud-slinging match which it has descended into.

Those unaware what the candidates were called, or what, if any, party they were affiliated to, proved able to identify them by prompting a controversy that they were involved in.

Norris was the letters guy, disability pay taker, among many other monikers; McGuinness the IRA man; Davis the Board expenses woman and so on and so forth (Mitchell unsurprisingly was usually just referred to as the boring guy).

However even those knew who the candidates were were really only interested in voting for two.

Just as repeated opinion polls show at a national level, the presidential election from students has condensed itself into a two horse race between Michael D Higgins and Seán Gallagher.

My personal interest in either is not very high.

Michael D, who came to speak at UCC last week, proved so horribly uninteresting that I forewent a pre-arranged photo opportunity and left in boredom after ten minutes of discussion by him on ancient literature, while Gallagher is largely, and rightly in my book, perceived as more of a businessman than president.

Having blogged about the presidential race on this website for a while now, I think that it was actually those candidates that never made it to the final nominations who were actually the best ones: Gay Byrne, Niall O'Dowd and Fergus Finlay would all have been eminently better than having Higgins instated to the Áras in my book.

What exactly 'Michael D' has done to convince the 25% of the Red C poll who said they'd give him their first preference on the 28th to vote for him is beyond me.

But perhaps the answer is very simple: there's simply nobody better left.

Below: Ireland's (probable) future president reading some of his poetry:

Uranium reactor at Irish university -- college 'hopeful' it can be removed

A subcritical assembly reactor

Another eventful news episode from my alma mater, after recent reports that it houses a satanic church.

This time a longstanding urban myth in Cork has finally been proven correct: University College Cork does indeed house a real-life student training reactor that houses 2.5 tonnes of uranium.

The proper name for the contraption is a subcritical assembly (SCA). It was received by UCC in the 70s from the United States, but has not been used since.

A critical mass (of a substance), according to Wikipedia, is the smallest amount of that substance needed to tick off a nuclear chain reaction, so the assembly, to this unscientific blogger, sounds like a device to produce very small nuclear reactions.

The fairly amazing story came to light after the Minister for Education, Ruari Quinn, took a parliamentary question on the matter and was forced to confirm the strange truth.

The reactor has been speculated to exist for a number of years (see, for example, this thread from a popular Cork discussion board), but discussions aimed at finding a way to remove the material have  been behind closed doors, leaving the ultimate question of whether or not UCC houses a uranium facility the stuff of rumour and speculation.

The Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland (RPII) has been liaising with the university for a number of years to try trash out a solution that would get the material off campus, but evidently one hasn't been forthcoming.

The material is apparently kept within a secure facility and guarded by 24 hour CCTV security, but the fact that there's a small quantity of uranium a few minutes' walk from where I'm writing this post is quite strange.

Strangest of all though has been the authorities' fairly unassertive reassurance that they are 'hopeful' that the reactor and the uranium it's made can be removed, which doesn't instill much confidence that that can actually be done.

Previous efforts to remove the uranium rods seem to have been met with a good degree of disinterest, owing presumably to the cost and effort such an operation would entail.

"Until there is both the will and the money, it will just lie there," Dr John O'Grady, a chief scientist with the national radiological institute said rather nonchalantly in a previous interview with the Irish Times.

Despite the obvious problems the mini reactor has generated, though, it does seem fairly cool that physics and chemistry students were presumably able to practice their skills on one of these things until it was decided to put it into permanent retirement.

As law students we thought that the law faculty's new moot court was a nice embellishment to our legal education, but it obviously didn't compare to the experience of manufacturing small quantities of nuclear material as part of university coursework!

Failing the 'will' and 'money' to get rid of the waste, though, both of which seem to be in short supply, it seems like a safe bet that UCC will continue to house 2.5. tonnes of uranium on campus!

Strange YouTube video claims Irish college hosts Satanic church - VIDEO

The Honan Chapel, UCC

Here's a strange one to start the week with.

According to Irish third level website StudentNews.ie, University College Cork -- better known for recently accumulating such accolades as a five star quality rating from QS, and the Sunday Times Irish University of the Year -- is in fact also playing host to a satanic religious institution on its main campus.

The Honan Chapel, known to students as the on-campus chapel, and also a popular wedding venue for those a little past their college-going years, boasts eerie satantic imagery according to this video from YouTube.

According to the piece's description: "You will see [in the chapel] great sun (lucifer worship) and zodiac on the entrance, in the midle of chapel there is a big mosaic of serpant-dragon (lucifer himself). There is also lots of occult symbols all over the chapel."
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Even by YouTube standards the camera-work is decidedly dodgy, but the uploader does go to the trouble of giving us curious watchers a walk-in tour of the facility, highlighting the satantic imagery which he listed out in the video's description.

To be honest the video is pretty weird, and having been in said Chapel many times, I would be alarmed to find out that I was in fact in some sort of ancient Satantic ritual-house, but the story is strange enough to have piqued my interest, as well as that of a local education correspondent, who is trying in earnest to convince a no doubt skeptical editor to run the story; if successful, it could be the talk of the town

Irish witches celebrate annual Wiccan festival

On a similarly occult tack, Ireland's Wiccan and Pagan community recently celebrated its annual festival - Féile Draíochta - an annual celebration of all that's 'witch' and Pagan related in Ireland.

The festival took place in the Camden Court Hotel yesterday.

Organised by two modern-day witches, the festival apparently provided an interesting glimpse into everything occult in Ireland.

One of the organizers, explaining Wicca to the Irish Times journalist, likened it to a kind of healing religion, explaining that: "Wicca is a kind of religion,” says Lee, “but it’s also a craft – it encompasses the practice and creation of magic. We practise sympathetic magic, using items like candles or crystals or herbs to create spells. We celebrate the cycle of the year: we observe the four major fire festivals and the four solar festivals, and those are our main meeting rituals. Wicca ritual is about celebrating the Earth, channelling positive energies and creating healing. There’s no dogma or written creed in Wicca: it’s very free and it allows for difference in experience, in practice and in perception.”

For those curious enough to watch the UCC video and judge for themselves whether or not it's a Santaic Church, see below: