Births and Deaths

The first 3 years of this blog consisted almost entirely of baby announcements for my friends. I guess to be consistent it should also let friends know about those who have passed away. It is obviously a bit clueless to claim that the internet (and blogs in particular) democratises the news but I have to admit that I only buy a newspaper now on Friday, Saturday and Sunday - Friday for the jobs section, Saturday for the food/property section in De Paper and Sunday for the TV bit of the Sunday Times. I use various Irish Blogs and the RTE news feed for everything else.

Over the past few years I have found The irish Times becoming more and more unbearable where at this stage it has disappeared entirely up it's own arse. I used to think newspapers were for news, now I realise they are just paper blogs from those who aren't qualified to do anything else.

This was particularly driven home a few years back when my father-in-law, Brian, died. This was a man who, as County Manager of Cavan, transformed the county. Once a back-water with the biggest potholes in Ireland, under his direction it became the model for how a county could drive forward providing employment, quality of life and cultural pursuits for all sections of society so that it became the most dynamic in the country.

Brian had something so often missing in Public Servants - he had vision. And to back that vision up, he had a will of iron and a big thick Redhills neck! His sudden death shocked many people and it is wonderful to see that the new library will be named after him.

Johnny and the team in the Celt obviously did a fantastic job on the obituary for Brian. And what did the obituary in the Irish Times say about this symbol of Irish achievement in Public Administration ? Nothing! They obviously couldn't fit him in when they had to laud the life of some cultural icon like the Curator of Bee Poetry at the University of Reykjavik.

Unless the IT and other other totally self-referential papers like it somehow manage to make themselves relevant to the lives of more than a tiny sub-section of Irish/Dublin society, I predict they will have disappeared before the end of the decade.

End-Rant