dublinstreams

My many administrative regions.

2011-11-13T06:01:00.001-08:00

Work in progress

List of My regions
Maps of Regions
Sources
Eastern River Basin District
Local Health offices
Townlands
HSE North East
Sewerage

% of Expenditure Limit vs % of Vote 2011 Irish General Election

2011-10-26T02:44:00.000-07:00

View fully on Tableau Public
2011 election expenditure - SIPO
Dept of Environment Voting documents

Displayed as percentage of spending limit and percentage of vote to normalize for the different sized constituencies.
* 3 seat constituency - €30,150.00
* 4 seat constituency - €37,650.00
* 5 seat constituency - €45,200.00

2011 Election guidelines from Standards in Public Office Commission.
Google Spreadsheet data
2011 Election results on wikipedia

In the spreadsheet I have the data on the public and party funding, and the percentage that makes up of the candidates expenses just looking for a good way to show that.
Also need a better way to show the average e16,790 spend by candidates.
A 2011 candidates donations and costs

What does the Irish President spend their time doing. Work in progress

2011-07-19T04:32:00.000-07:00

Updated with Tableau Public dashboard below for years 2010/11.
I did get some help from coders, via scraperwiki although the poor formatting on president.ie frustrated the ability to scrape past engagements,.. need a mass geocoder.
https://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/irish_president_engagements/
https://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/ie_pres_events_details/
Rough presidential engagements data google spreadsheets data garbled after spreadsheet failed
Functions of the President of Ireland - Citizen Information Board of Ireland.

The President is the Irish Head of State, although he or she plays a mainly ceremonial role in the running of the State. The current President of Ireland is Mary McAleese, who commenced serving her second term as President on 11th November, 2004, and which ends in November 2011 with an election campaign beginning in Autumn 2011.
The Government must approve all Presidential communications, messages or addresses, both to the Oireachtas (Irish houses of Parliament) and to the public.
Many of the powers of the President can only be exercised on the advice of the Government. This means that if the President wishes to exercise a power, he or she must first obtain the advice and agreement of the Government.
The President also possesses some powers that he or she cannot exercise without first consulting with the Council of State.
The President's powers include
Appointing members of the Government, judges and other officials
Summoning and dissolving the Dáil
Convening the Oireachtas
Representing the people
Signing Bills and referring Bills to the Supreme Court
Acting as Supreme Commander of the Defence Forces.

Áras an Uachtaráin Wikipedia Commoms
Generally the Presidents role is split into three parts, upholding the constitution, representing Ireland internationally and meeting and speaking to communities, charities, services and industry.
There is a lot of skepticism in Ireland as to why a politician or professional who would have made great effect in the previous political life would agree to be so restricted to not be able to make further great change in the role of President separate to the policy of the government of the day. while hoping to show how genuinely busy the President with many many engagements each and week, it also seems strange to have someone so highly qualified and experienced spending so much time meeting people and opening buildings rather then spending their time publicly debating and drafting laws and legislation as opposed as to much more discretely as President in reviewing laws passed by the government in power. New candidates for the President are making pronouncements are how they will carry out the role while there's still little much awareness, scrutiny or critique of the details of the President's work. I think the President role is to shake the hands of other foreign heads of state, presidents and kings on deals made by their governments, the weight of the decisions is on the President, similarly with the domestic laws. So I thought I would visualise the President's official diary to see how much time they spend on each role and sub-categorize their acts and engagements.
The President is one of the few Irish politicians who with regularity publishes their diary in public ahead of time on publically accessible web site rather then only directed towards the press. I think the impression of the Presidents would be improved if there were more ways to find out and keep track of their work. The diary should be put in well formatted and reusable format (such as .ics calendar file) and the license that could be spread around to be reused in whole or in part to keep people informed.
Scraperwiki
I have tried to code a scraper puts its such a steep learning curve with so much presumed knowledge, I've previously failed to grasp the looping and syntax needed and there are few examples that you can apply generally. So I put in a request to scraperwiki for some help, a user finddb wrote a ruby scraper which scraped the 2011 engagements. This gave me a csv file I could download and import into a google spreadsheet Although grateful for somebody to write the code for me, I need to split up the time_place variable to possibly geocode the address via Scraperwiki and figure out how scrape all past and future dates and to output and receive the information as it updates daily and weekly, and find the ideal way to share and display the stream of data.

Two coders attempted to scrape the badly formatted engagements data from the president website, but it was too onerous a task and is incomplete. They are about 6,000 records.
Matt's irish_president_engagements scrapper.
Owl's ie_pres_events_details scrapper.

Engagements
I have categorised the engagements as date, year, time, destination, region (destf), day, address, latlng, arasnotaras, details, place, act, issue, constitutional, month. This need further review, further accuracy in geocoding and further judgement on the types of engagement and category which should be applied, I could probably categories more of the foreign affairs as economics trips. I've tried to isolate the active verb, the location, the place, the parties met in each engagement and a more general category of the issue associated with the event. I have categories whether this was constitutional act in regard to reviewing laws, appointing members of government after elections, receiving and appointing ambassador and carrying out state visits or more general public engagements.
Tagclouds

Word clouds have a bad reputation as anything in chart junk, particularly with word length exaggerating or undermining the importance of a word, but the more I look at the above the more I think it might a useful way to see straight away the keywords of the engagements, school, community centre, Ambassador from Brazil, signed Justice act etc without having to drill down or match colours with issues. I have been looking at the following examples, making it in R or Prefuse seems be the best bet for it, if I can find anyone who done similar.

superbowl twitter geo cloud animation
text analysis election08 stump speeches Tableau word clouds example

geography of presidential campaign rhetoric

Maple – a Web Map Service for Verbal Visualisation Using Tag Clouds Generated from Map Feature Frequencies

timecloud by stef
carto junk
mapping londons surnames
tagmaps discontinued - yahoo
Building a better word cloud Vidi tagmap
tag map using engagement data ugh.

Exhibit
As I have used many, times, before again I used MIT's Simile Exhibit, the faceted browsing dashboard which allows you to map, list and timeline and drill down through data and which is relative easy to make. I used the calendar extension for the first time, make sure you get all the files it needs. Exhibit receives data in JSON form which you can output from a google spreadsheet so that you can edit it by hand.
Irish Presidential Engagements Exhibit. Unfortunately this doesn't work anymore I went over the formula limit in the spreadsheet and now can't revert the document. Google spreadsheets is both great and crap.

You can click on any of the word clouds or select any facet from the sidebar to focus on the engagements on the map or the timeline. Click on the calendar tab or the details tables for further info.
I know there too much info on the screen but I use these exhibit as working visualizations to sort through the information and add categories to chop up the data, and figure out how it works, I'm using the in-google spreadsheet geocoding which is restricted to 50 addresses geocoded at a time, I still need to review each address again.
TimeFlow
TimeFlow by Flowingmedia is desktop program for viewing large amounts of information, it was bought by google and its public development stopped but you can download and use an alpha release by importing csv files.

Tableau Public
Used the freemium visualization dashboard Tableau Public to show map and timeflow style overview of engagements with some interactivity.

Other visualization options
Timemap D3 linear heatmap calendar
Choosel GWT Visualisation
Tableau Public

President of Ireland
President Engagements
bitly bundle of relevant links
Irish president engagement details

% of Expenditure Limit vs % of Vote 2007 Irish General Election

2011-02-05T11:16:00.000-08:00

View fully on Tableau Public

2007 election expenditure - SIPO

Displayed as percentage of spending limit and percentage of vote to normalise for the different sized constituencies.

* 3 seat constituency - €30,150.00
* 4 seat constituency - €37,650.00
* 5 seat constituency - €45,200.00

2007 Election guidelines from Standards in Public Office Commission.

Google Spreadsheet data

2007 Election results on wikipedia

	Elected	Not Elected	All	All £	Avg £ of Elected	Avg £ of Not Elected	Avg £ of All
Votes Avg	16.84%	4.86%	9.19%
Spending Avg	60.1%	36.64%	45.4%	13,707	22,245	13,664	16,790

In the spreadsheet I have the data on the public and party funding, and the percentage that makes up of the candidates expenses just looking for a good way to show that.

Also need a better way to show the average e16,790 spend by candidates.
A 2011 candidates donations and costs

Dail Constituency Boundaries for Election 2011

2011-02-01T07:32:00.001-08:00

Anyone coming to my blog looking for Dail constituencies, I don't have em.

The official Constituency Commission has images and detailed reports on the boundaries and changes.

Go here for the 2012 boundaries in google-kml http://www.tallyroom.com.au/maps (free if credited to Ben Raue ) or here for more detailed ones with Electoral (sub) Divisions http://icampaigned.com/blog/dail-constituency-maps/ (not free) or go Ordnance Survey Ireland for commercial use files.

Of course I think digital boundaries files of useful detail should be should be free for non-commercial public reuse.

A better word cloud with R: FF Party vs Country

2011-01-29T21:46:00.000-08:00

Keep meaning to learn R an open source statical graphics language so I copied this example from Drew Conway about building a better word cloud. I took the Fianna Fail leadership contest speeches from the Irish Times as recent examples of comparable speeches. There was a lot of talk of how often the spoke of what was good for the party as opposed to what was good for the country.

Click to enlarge

As Drew says this only shows common words so here are wordle clouds, of all there words.

Irish Government Legislation Exhibit

2011-01-02T16:48:00.000-08:00

Irish Legislation Exhibit

Trying to put together something that shows the progress and types of Oireachtas Bills through the Irish parliamentary and see how many they have fulfilled from the Government Legislation Programme, an attempt at a less good IBM Many Bills. It shows details of bills progress through the Dail, Seanad and committees from the life for the government from 2007 to 2011. As always its ugly, heavy and there too much information on screen, but just trying to figure it out, I still love the faceted browsing on timelines made with Smilie Exhibit its allow you drill down through so many options and its so easy to make. It atleast gave me something to find out what other information I would need for a better version later.

My rough Calculations give these totals and averages
254 total bills
105 total enacted
0 total opp enacted

278 avg days everything
104 avg days to enact
149 avg opp bills life days
89 total opp bills

Im still trying to learn how bills are made so try these two guides
How legistation is enacted
How a Bill is made Video.

Bills
Collected details of the oireachtas bills here onto a Google Docs spreadsheet based on many already gathered by The Story

Panels with LEGISLATION • PARTIES • DEPARTMENT • COMMITTEE • DETAILS • ALL DATA

Stages
1st First Stage 1st Second Stage 1st Third (Committee) Stage 1st Fourth (Report) Stage 1st Fifth (Final) Stage 2nd First Stage 2nd Second Stage 2nd Third (Committee) Stage 2nd Fourth (Report) Stage 2nd Fifth (Final) Stage Enacted

Bills go through one house then the other.

Displaying progress of bills
Spent ages trying to get a percentage completed bar to show in Smilie Exhibit, I got Timeline percentage extension partly working then broke it, but in the end just used different colours but its hard to have enough spread in the colours. Obviously there problems with contrast and too much text on screen. I just wanted to create a filter every differentiation I could find.

Simile Gannt Timeline

latest start earliest end

Scraping
Had to scrape the info from the Oireachtas site.

Used a combination of the previously gathered info from the story, Google docs import html, laborious copy and paste and scraperwiki

Scraped the source code with the help of Alvin who made a ruby scraper and another with help from Julian Todd the creator of scraperwiki.
2010-statutory-instruments-ireland irish-legislation bii-p-url Need to make some auto updating running totals of the various stages which would be more useful for people and look better, using this scraperwiki example, but the Oireachtas sites is very changeable and not easy to pinpoint the stage it is at.

How a bill becomes law Some good examples of infographics to the explain the complicated process.
bill to law
how our laws are made

How A Bill Becomes Law

I'll have to make my own version of this, I started the very basic of it on a google doc drawing

Links
Oireachtas Bills
Dail Record
Kildarestreet.com Dail transcripts
Dail Sessions
30th Dail Wikipedia
Citizeninfo legislation

Fingal Council Meeting Video Embed

2010-11-15T11:38:00.000-08:00

Government aircraft travel of Irish ministers 2010 exhibited, mapped, timelined, listed and editable

2010-10-13T22:35:00.000-07:00

This screen shot shows an exhibit of Irish Government Ministers travel on Government aircraft in 2010 using this data via Ken Foxe's FOI's

I made the 2008 and 2009 travel exhibits last year when Ken Foxe put up the Freedom of Information requests of the Ministers Air Travel it hasn't got many views although I haven't promoted it a lot, but it didn't get as much notice or use as I hoped,I thought it could be a prototype for visual data journalism in Ireland I'm not sure of displayed entirely correctly or usefully for people but the one thing that was incomplete is the purpose of the visits, its unfair to show the travel without context of why they travelled, I should have spent as much as much time searching for that information, it takes a lot of work to go find the reason for the trip, even when the St Patrick's day ministerial travel was put out it was only one line of information they gave out to news organisations to explain what the ministers were doing when the flew around the world for March 17th. I couldn't hope to find details of every last trip myself and left it to other people to help find it, but its been difficult to find a quick and easy way to allow people add info to the Exhibit on the web page itself as opposed the google doc.

Its pity there no way to batch search, so I could quickly find why Mary Harney was in Helsinki in 2009 and Michael Martin went to New York in July 2010, although google Timeline has been useful Brian Cowen New York

If there was a way to search for trip keywords and return the top and allow people 1 click to confirm the relevant result? To gamify data correction. This hasn't been possible with google docs, but maybe possible with google apps. The only place I've seen something like that is Freebase's, acre apps like matchmaker

They could drown you in information but they don't? Government communications is still stuck in the notion of giving info to the press rather then the public, or its hard to find on their websites, although merrionstreet.ie may now make it easier to find information on the government. I need regular engaging posts to get links that's hard to do with old information thats incomplete, I guess that's where the actual journalism of the Sunday Tribune's Ken Foxe's comes in. I could suggest that the amount of trips and therefore the costs has reduced significantly from 2008 to 2010, although Im missing the data from the last months of 2009 and 2010, so I can't compare definitively as yet.

The source
Ken Foxe of the Sunday Tribune has been requesting information (FOIs) about government minister's travel and particularity noticed the excessively costly travel arrangements of John O'Donoghue the Ceann Comhairle (also when he was Minister for Tourism). Because of his and others journalism and rather then justify the costs he resigned as chair of the Irish house of parliament (Dail) in October 2009.

The change
Ken Foxe in a very unusual move for a professional journalist has shared the raw information he got in his FOI's with the public. The information from the Ministerial Air Transport Service is voluminous so with more eyes and perhaps my exhibit of the information in a more visual and manipulatable manner we can comprehend more of what politicians are doing with government resources. He used FOI'd government aircraft travel data to write ...Living on our jet plane, at a cost of €10.6m (18 Oct 2009, Sunday Tribune).

TRANSPORTING government ministers aboard the government jet over the past four years has cost the taxpayer more than €10.6 million.
Figures from the Department of Defence show that the €7,890-an-hour Gulfstream IV jet has been in use for 1,214 hours since the beginning of 2006. The government's Learjet – the running costs of which now come in at almost €3,000 an hour – has been in the air for 826 hours at a cost of €1.89 million.

...continue reading at tribune.ie

Ken's FOI data
Using the spreadsheets he then re-published Ken Foxe's Gov aircraft use FOI's eg. Ministers Air Travel - 2010 Jan - Oct (Scribd doc).

Mats Stats 2010 Up to 30 Sept 2010 (2)

My Data
I rearranged it into this google doc file with labels so that the Exhibit script can read it as JSON. How to make an exhibit from data fed directly from a Google Spreadsheet

Use Define groupings and calculations to calculate personal totals
Used Batch geocode for the locations and Notepad ++ and jEdit some basic excel/google spreadsheet macros and functions. And converting dates to the right format.

Made with Exhibit from MIT which...

Exhibit enables you to create html pages with dynamic exhibits of data collections without resorting to complex database and server-side technologies. The collections can be searched and browsed using faceted browsing. Assorted views are provided including Timelines, tiles, maps, and more.

I modified the Presidents Births and Death example of which you can see it's simple JSON file. You can use MIT's Babel to convert your data to JSON or XML (create live XML with editgrid.com) or any google spreadsheets form. The exhibit
You can pick out any element or facet of the info from the list on the left, the central tag cloud, the timeline, map or Flight time slider below the map, deselect it by un-checking on the sidebar list or use your browser's back button. You can zoom into the map under Ireland or Europe or view the Details of the trips in a table.

Your help
I need to add the purpose of the trip and a contemporaneous news article to give them fair context. Anyone can help me to do that by going to the google spreadsheet and editing the 'purposeoftrip' or 'contexturl' and 'urllabel' columns for each row/trip. I also need fill in the unnamed Ministers of State in the person column.If there is a another way to arrange the data to make it more comprehendable by people please suggest it.

Added paths so you can see the routes was easier then i thought using werelate.org coder additions and added to my own, didn't even have to run it locally polylines extension of exhibit made by www.werelate.org code changes

To do

I'm also worked on a politicians constituency map and TD exhibit

Snout in the the Trough
Ken Foxe has written a book called Snout in the the Troughbased on his Tribune articles and previously unpublished research and FOI's. I bought it and am reading it by the index, I haven't read much of it yet but it seems to be mostly a exhaustive description of recent political expenses, it may be better used as index reference then to be read front to back. I disappointed he didn't go more behind the scenes into the civil service part in the carrying out the privileged operations of the government but I guess its up to the politicians to take the lead in use and reform, though I still think he could have gone into the operation in more detail on this. When I got the book I went straight to the issue of the london embassy car hire practice, politics.ie gets a mention in the book, or alteast via Gavin Sheridan..., who said posting a link to his thestory site and the detailed expenses document from his FOI work here helped raise the issue beyond discussion and into the national daily papers. Ken foxe wrote...

Tens of thousands of euros had been paid to a London-based chaffeur company Cartel Limousines. The costs seemed at times incredibly high often more then £1400 per day The owner of the firm was Terry Gallgher, the son of the late Fianna Fail Minister Denis Gallagher. The anonymous whispers of the internet forums screamed crony-ism but the reality was somewhat different. Terry Gallgher's firm had been doing business with the Irish Embassy in London for two decades during a series of governments, including Fine Gael led administrations.

disappointed with the view taken, he should know that establishment cronyism goes beyond party politics, the civil service will favour the establishment across parties and allow for such costly practices to go on for years untackled. The book spends most of first half detailing the exposure of John O'Donoghue's excessive spending and of the other ministers who also overspent but eventual resignation of the Ceann Chomhairle overshadowed the expenses of all members of the Dail and their resistance to reform and the resignation of Tom O'Higgins who was supposed to in charge of reform, the eventual reform when it came made things even more opaque

Irish Seanad, members of Ireland's senate information exhibited, mapped, charted, listed and editable.

2010-09-29T02:53:00.000-07:00

This screen shot shows how I have used Simile Exhibit Widget to display Ireland's 60 Senators, members of Ireland's Seanad, (upper house) information exhibited, mapped, charted, listed and editable. Using information I gathered on this google spreadsheet and used google maps to display the 8 panels the senators seat on.

Seanad Eireann is the upper house of the Oireachtas (Irish parliament). It has 60 Senators, 43 are nominated on to 5 panels by professioanl bodies,having special knowledge of particular vocation, Administrative, Agricultural, Cultural and Educational, Industrial and Commercial, Labour and voted on by members of councils, the Dail and the previous Seanad elections, must be held within 90 days of the dissolution of the Dail. 11 are nominated by the Taoiseach, 6 are voted on by university graduates.
Its roles is to initiate, advise and revise legislation, senators also participate in Oireachtas committees.

Administrative Panel	7
Agricultural Panel	11
Cultural and Educational Panel	5
Industrial and Commercial Panel	9
Labour Panel	11
Taoiseach	11
University	6

I hope the shape and the interactivity of the exhibit may help to explain the Seanad and its make up better to people.

I have made panels showing

PANELS • SENATORS • PERCENT VOTE • ELECTIONS • SENATORS DETAILS • NOMINATED BY • NOMINATING BODIES • POSITION • COMMITTEE • CONTACT • PANELS
which you can combine with the sliders
Terms - Age - Percent Vote - Gender

can you think of any more ways to display the data?

I have listed which professional organisation of member of the Dail or Seanad has nominated, which senator to which panel, and percentage vote they got from TDs, Senators and Councillors.

I have listed the nominating bodies, their websites, member numbers, their sub-associations and who they nominated to which panel.

Still to do
There are some mistakes on this, I have to review the Seanad byelections since 2007, can't find details of them and the oireachtas.ie won't respond and details of new senators, office locations, I added salary expenses, and should add donations, distance from Dail.

Questions
Is it just the boards of the nominating bodies who nominate?

Salary and Expenses Not sure best way to shows salary and expenses the figures I have from The Story FOI's, go year to year, including senators who were just elected, I tried to reflect that in my calculations

Corrections, for instance do you know where the town the senators operates from or his office?, go to maps.google.com centre over it then take the latitude and longitude from the link, double check by pasting those coordinates back into the google maps search and then change in the TD spreadsheet and leave a comment on the cell too.

This is follow up to my previous Dail TD exhibit

MIT Exhibit
Made with Exhibit from MIT which...

Exhibit enables you to create html pages with dynamic exhibits of data collections without resorting to complex database and server-side technologies. The collections can be searched and browsed using faceted browsing. Assorted views are provided including Timelines, tiles, maps, charts and more.

You can use exhibit with in a semantic mediawiki install, or simpler table wibbit version. You can embed exhibit and timelines in wordpress using Datapress or Drupal once you converted some data to static json file. .json file example with Babel.

The best part of Exhibit is using faceted sidebar menus to display lots of categories of data and combinations of data. And being able to call that from google spreadsheets which you can leave open for editing and correction.

You can pick out any element or facet of the info from the list on the left, click on map or sliders, deselect it by un-checking on the sidebar list or use your browser's back button. You click on any icon to get an info bubble on that TD. You can zoom into the map by clicking on the constituencies map on the right or turn off the constituency polygons below, you can click any of the panels at the top to show, charts and voting maps, look at list of information on the TDs or see all the data on them.

I rearranged my information into this google doc file with {labels} so that the Exhibit script can read it as JSON. How to make an exhibit from data fed directly from a Google Spreadsheet You copy code from the examples and Exhibit wiki and add panels that are coded like this

 ex:role="exhibit-view"   id="map1"  ex:collectionID="bothcollection2"  
   ex:viewClass="Exhibit.MapView"
   ex:label="Irish TDs"
   ex:eventlabel=".td"
   ex:size="large"
   ex:zoom="7"
   ex:mapHeight="600"
   ex:center="53.45,-8.0"
   ex:overviewControl="true"
   ex:showSummary="true"
   ex:latlng=".latlng"
   ex:polygon=".constpoly"
   ex:pin="false"
   ex:borderOpacity="1.0"
   ex:borderWidth="1"
   ex:borderColor="purple"
   ex:opacity="0.0"
   ex:showToolbox="false"
   ex:icon=".imageURL"

...calling the named columns from the google spreadsheets.

Description of how I made the government travel exhibit.

Because senators don't have constituencies, I have arranged them into the 8 panels, Administrative, Agricultural, Cultural & Educational, Industrial & Commercial, Labour, National University of Ireland, Taoiseach and University of Dublin, arranged somewhat how they would be seated in the Seanad, usually voting with the government or the opposition.

Info
Oireachtas Senators
Seanad Eireann on Wikipedia
Committee
Members of the 23rd Seanad
List of senators at oir.ie
How Seanad is elected
Report on Seanad Reform
seandcount.ie internet archive
Seanad at Citizen Info
electionsireland.org Results
2007 Candidates
Register of Nominating Bodies 2009
Register of Nominating Bodies 2007
Seanad Electoral Roll pdf
List Nominating Bodies

Information

Timelines
I've created a time line of when the currents Senators were first elected. The time line extension is part of its own Simile timeline system which can get more info on how to use on its wiki. Although its not easy to show the times Senators didn't get elected and then returned a following election. (to stop and start the timeline on the same line with the same person). So for the moment it does not show that and goes straight first election to most recent.

Collections and Types
I have multiple collections in this exhibit to call the types and collections 60 senators in one spreadsheet and nominating and associated info in another spreadsheet. Thankfully David Huynh provided the code to call from one the other or both collections in the mailing list. I'm not sure if can write code to add a third one (partys).

The Data
I have split the senator google spreadsheet into different sheets, bio,time,websites,locations,positions,panellatlng,elections,nombods,nom2007 that are read by the main senator sheet,you edit the the subpages and they will be renewed by the main page, do not re-sort them.

Information categories most of which you can select in any combination.

facet	category	source
label	name
type	type
party	party
panel	panel
longaddress	long address
address	address,town
area	area
county	county
senator	senator
lat	lat
lng	lng
latlng	town coordinates
senconstituency	who votes for them,td councillors,senators
description	description
position	position
spokespersonissues	spokesperson issues
committee	committee
tdcllr	tdcllr
nicestartdate	nicestartdate
start	start
end	end
dailterm	dailterm
terms	terms
oirterms	oirterms
age	age
position	position
knowlpractexp	knowlegde practical experience
nominatedby	nominated by
subpanel	subpanel
electorate	electorate
firstpref	firstpref
electorate	electorate
seats	seats
candidates	candidates
quota	quota
percentvote	percent vote
govopp	govopp
voteswith	voteswith
phone	phone
email	email
govopp	govopp
voteswith	votes with
panellatlng	front map panel
gender	gender
imageURL	imageURL
wikiurl	wikiurl
website	website
partywebsite	partywebsite
ksurl	kildarestreet seanad speeches
partycol	partycol
nombod1	nombod1
nomurl1	nomurl1
nombod1	nombod1
nomurl2	nomurl2
nombod3	nombod3
comment	comment

Nominating Bodies

label		source
nominated
type
nominatingbody
nomurl
panel	<
subpanel
nombodmembers
nombodassoc
nombodassocurl
irishnames

Irish openheatmaps

2010-09-16T04:11:00.000-07:00

There many ways to make thematic maps openheatmap just made it even easier, as Pete Warden says he wants to make the "YouTube for maps", its been available since July.

I prodded him into adding up Irish geo-political boundaries Choropleth maps templates.

I searched for Irish boundaries and thanks to by Ben Raue for the KML 2007 constituencies, Councils from the CSO (councils to be added to openheatmap soon) and Counties (KML).

Its a JQuery plugin using either Flash or HTML5’s Canvas overlayed on openstreetmap. Its open source and free to copy and run the most of the setup off your own site.

For Ireland use these as the name columns...

ire_constituency (2010 redrawn constituencies)
ire_constituency_2007
ire_constituency_2007_code
ire_constituency_code
ire_county
ire_county_code

Councils to come...

and then the value column.
or tab_FF, tab_FG etc. for the each map tab.

You can use .csv,(comma separated files), saved from your spreadsheet program or load them from a public a Google Docs spreadsheet.

Upload your map, it will make your aware of any problems, and once you have those fixed, you can preview the map and changed the colours and range settings for you data and then share the link to the map or copy the embed code for your own site.

Pete Warden has made a helpful video to explain it all. The full detailed documentation is here with the source at github/openheatmap

I saw this UK election results tabbed maps example and I used Openheatmap to make an Irish version.

I used the 2007 Election results summary (pdf). You'll find more election results to try at environ.ie Typically for the Irish government it comes in messed up tables in pdf instead of a spreadsheet file. Google Doc version

Time by heat maps has been available from the site, by adding a time column, and you can use an address column to automatically place addresses on heatmap, these have been available for a while but its hard to find good data to use for Ireland, geocoding still presumes addresses are in American so I suggest using Batchgeo, which you can restrict results to Ireland and review and correct and hand place some of the erroneous results. Most info is done by constituency, county or council so this should make it easier to to find data to apply. Animated time by heat map example

Lisbon Openheatmap
Lisbon results google doc
Lisbon II 2009 results

Dublin Bay Coastline Google Timeline Map

2010-09-05T18:43:00.000-07:00

Click through to google earth plugin view
One of many half done things, should I finish it give it labels etc.

Failed experiments in reports digestion, annotation and Entity extraction on the cheap

2010-07-26T01:02:00.000-07:00

I've been looking around for ways to digest and annotate and make lengthy reports more usable for years.

One of the main ways to do with would be through named entity extraction running the report through a program and extracting all key words, and sorting them into proper names, places, organisations, companies etc. I have looked around and there are lots of university thesis papers on how to do it but it seems nobodies cracked it, unless mega corporations maybe able to do it on a industrial level. You could also paste it all the report into a wiki and hope people will annotate and link sections of the report, but wiki's aren't easy to use and there no way to automate it even a little that I know of.

Entity extraction has come back in vogue at the moment particularly in conjunction with the rise of the semantic web and there a number of companies who now offer it, Yahoo YQL, AlchemyAPI and Open Calais. There have demos you can try to see what it extracts Alchemy API demo and Open Calais demo but then it give you REST urls to actually use them and I don't know what to do with REST urls and they rarely give examples.

Open Calais has a wordpress plugin which will try and extract tags for your blog it works ok and I figured actually a blog would be good way to present a report, and give me the structure I would need, I could also dole out the pages reports via rss.

Open Calais actually has an WP Calais Archive Tagger too, So I found Mass page uploader plugin for WP and got some dense reports from thestory who who have gone to the effort of getting government reports, scanning and OCR'ing them, Like the Fas Report INV 37, into excessive spending by the Irish state training body.

I downloaded it from scribd a document pdf store website which also stores files in txt format. I followed the instructions of the mass page maker plugin useing Notepad++ to split each page in to a separate blog post in a in the mass page maker syntax a comma separated file(.csv) file and uploaded it to a blog.

Then I ran the calais archive tagger over each page, it extracts about 10-20 tags from each page, it often splits name and organisation up, I tried some YQL based and other auto taggers plugin on it too. Auto tagging WP plugins . They don't work very well.

I did have this blog, with each page of the DDDA report into state bodies bad property deals with private groups in the Dublin docklands, posted and tagged on my domain but had to delete it because it was getting in the way. An earlier attempt *shrug*

There are many other wordpress plugins I tried, for group tagging the tags into entity like groups of people and companies, for locating every place mentioned in the text on a google map. There are a number of plugins for wordpress to create taxonomy of words and glossaries.

Annotation
Wordpress does allow to leave comments at the end which may elucidate a report but in length of text it may be easier to annotate the text directly on to it. I came across WP plugin that does just that. Digress it Example, which has a floating side commenting widget which annotates each paragraph of post. There are another couple of previous versions of this plugin he has developed but I couldn't get any of them to work. There is particular apache setting most shared hosting services don't have and I can't change it or get any of suggested fixes to work stably.

Document cloud, seems to be professional answer to all these things and investigative journalism websites like Pro Publica are already using it for annotation and it seems to be open source and they say it will do entity extraction but its not ready yet.

So dear wind, I couldn't get entity extraction to work very well, nor annotation, maybe I'll just have to concentrate and read the reports :/

Detailed reading of the reports is what enable The Story reporters Mark Coughlan and Gavin Sheridan to produce article like this one about renting of buildings from business partners of FAS employees from the dense reports, and tracking down the details, I guess thats what investigative journalism is.

Irish Political Parties numbers of TDs in Dail Tableau Public Stack Chart Dashboard Style with Days in Gov by Party

2010-07-20T19:52:00.000-07:00

View it better wide at Tableau public

Data Spreadsheet at Google Docs.
Source from Wikipedia

Difficult to give proper account of the governments make up and the independents/others opposition or government TDs. Still have to try this with percentages.

Irish Political Parties numbers of TDs in Dail Tableau Public Stack Chart

2010-07-19T01:17:00.000-07:00

View it better wide at Tableuu public

Data Source from Wikipedia Still have to try this with percentages.

Fit to Lead

2010-07-14T06:19:00.001-07:00

Enda Kenny doing 180km Ring of Kerry cycle

Taoiseach at Gaelic Park in The Bronx 12 July 2010
Originally uploaded by MerrionStreet.ie

Irish Political Parties numbers of TDs in Dail Google Fusion Time Series

2010-07-06T02:46:00.000-07:00

View it better wider at Google Fusion Tables

Select the handles at either end of the bottom bar to zoom into a particular time period. Full Names for initialed parties below.

Luckily all the data I needed was presented in this wikipedia table, h/t to whoever contributed that info, User:Phil_Nolte? and User:Snappy.

This time series is much Better then ManyEyes Stack chart I blogged last night.

It positions the years properly,shows you the party numbers at the key points, you can select the governments, I like it Shows CnaG trailing off and then Fine Gael picking up the line a few years later. Like to have it shaded in and with percentages, I now have all the info and will make that later along with making a timeplot for more customization.

Fianna Fáil	FF
Fine Gael	FG
Labour Party (Ireland)	Lab
Sinn Féin (Pro-Treaty)"	SF (Pro)
Sinn Féin (Anti-Treaty)"	SF (Anti)
Cumann na nGaedhael	CnaG
Farmers' Party (Ireland)	FP
Sinn Féin	SF
Business and Professional Group	BPG
National League Party	NL
Irish Worker League	IWL
National Centre Party (Ireland)	NCP
Clann na Talmhan	CnaT
National Labour Party (Ireland)	NLP
Clann na Poblachta	CnaP
National Progressive Democrats	NPD
Workers' Party of Ireland	WP
Anti H-Block	AHB
Socialist Labour Party (Ireland)	SLP
Progressive Democrats	PD
Green Party (Ireland)	GP
Democratic Socialist Party (Ireland)	DSP
Democratic Left (Ireland)	DL
Socialist Party (Ireland)	SP
People Before Profit Alliance	PBP

Ok now check out my TD Exhibit which I blogged about here.

Irish Political Parties numbers of TDs in Dail stack chart

2010-07-05T15:53:00.000-07:00

View it full/wide screen View large static image

Data Spreadsheet

Updated this with 1922 to 2007 figures. Made this to see if politics was diversifying or FF stranglehold on the country continues.

If you want to add the numbers for earlier years you can go ahead and enter them here
Info Government of Ireland

Oh heres the complete data I need, Dail Eireann election summary.

As always constantly trying to see which service does it better. That stack chart isn't very good, it doesn't display the years right,ie the length of the governments...,which mirror its makeup. Although i like that its shaded in and you can show percentage to keep the shape even as Dail numbers change. Im going to make Google Fusion Time Series, a Timeplot and Tableau Public version. I think Timeplot will do the job best but take longer. Come back later.

In response to my tweets was pointed to two other similar Dail Charts.

House A very well made java applet(made in 2006) which shows the make up of Dail since 1918, its shows a colored bar chart, government parties, majorities and seats loses and gains, which you can play in a slideshow.

and

guthanphobail.net An Irish language page with stats and charts back to 1982 and the latest referendums. Very detailed java charts showing counts and transfer of the all the candidates not just the winners.

Next the rate of change of tds over the years, that'll take some work...

Ok now check out my TD Exhibit which I blogged about here.

Bio-regional democracy River Basin based European parliament Constituencies for Ireland

2010-04-18T03:22:00.000-07:00

A throw up post to see if it piques anyone interest. I first read about this being implemented in Cascadia Pacific Northwest of America

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioregionalism

Bioregionalism is a political, cultural, and environmental system and set of views based on naturally-defined areas called bioregions, or ecoregions. Bioregions are defined through physical and environmental features, including watershed boundaries and soil and terrain characteristics. Bioregionalism stresses that the determination of a bioregion is also a cultural phenomenon, and emphasizes local populations, knowledge, and solutions.

Instead use the River Basin Districts to determine regions.

Obviously this crosses the Northern Irish Border in the UK, but it wouldn't work without this, a lot of the time rivers divide regions or countries but actually people on either side of river would have more in common.

I started to try and outline Liffey bioregions and potential new Dublin electoral constituencies down to local councils areas.

Bioregions is is based on watersheds and many other commons areas flora, fauna, weather and people defined and overlayed together.

This is on my Todo List... Irish River Basin districts

Irish Parliament Reshuffle, Ministers, Party Issue Spokespersons, and Committee positions

2010-03-23T17:09:00.000-07:00

Reshuffle
Brian Cowen's Reshuffle Speech - Irish Times

Spokespeople
Just putting up my spokespersons spreadsheets making them more visible, if you see any mistakes, you can go straight the docs and edit them yourself, or leave a comment below.

irish political party issue spokespersons

Ministers
Minister full web page

Spokespeople

Spokesperson full web page

TD data
I have the spokespeople in this spreadsheet to run my TD exhibit off.Mininsters Location after reshuffle

TD database webpage

If TDs are to be seen as national politicians, then you should contact them on national issues, I know that you should also contact your local TD on national issues so the party can get an idea of where the issue is being raised, but usually the TD just says they'll pass it on to their issues spokesperson, so if you want a quicker response you can should email the spokesperson directly on your topic of interest as well.

shadow spokespeople
shadow spokespeople
There's less of clear showing of cabinet positions in Ireland, but I think I have most of them right,(actually i made this 6months ago and its probably in need of an update) if it open the spreadsheets and change em.

Sources

Fianna Fail	http://oireachtas.ie/members-hist/default.asp?housetype=0&HouseNum=30&PartyId=41
Fianna Fail	http://www.fiannafail.ie/people/listing/
Fine Gael	http://www.finegael.org/people/
Sinn Fein	http://www.sinnfein.ie/dail-members
Green	http://www.greenparty.ie/en/people
Labour	/spokespersons.html"> http://www.labour.ie/peopleandplaces/spokespersons.html

I've been wanting to make a contact form site like contact.ie

Been meaning to try to make my own, probably with civcrm, I surprisingly hard to find a simple module to do this, plus I have found Drupal's backend horrible to use and all over the place.

Howth Malahide Election spending Scatter plot Tableau

2010-03-21T11:11:00.000-07:00

Continuing to try out Tableau Public

This is the Howth Malahide 2009 local election spending, spend per vote.

Data in google spreadsheet form I'm not sure of all this correct is based on figures I found searching through Fingal Independent articles from. Not sure if it works either whether you immediately get who was most got most bang for their buck.

Of course the number of terms a councillor has already served, how well they're known (Peter Coyle), local political history and unpopularity of government parties all play a role, I wonder if I should weight for terms served.

I post on Politics.ie some graphs I did Manyeyes, but wasn't happy with them.

Manyeyes Election spending scatter plot

Manyeyes Election spending Bubble Chart

Obviously Tableau has more options, was particular looking for trend line and winner and losers lines, would like winners trend line.

Also the Howth and Malahide elections areas were merged at this election. see election history at electionsireland.org

Bayside Shopping Centre redevelopement granted planning approval

2010-03-20T18:27:00.000-07:00

Bayside Shopping Centre redevelopement that I blogged about it being its 3rd plan has been granted planning approval that was applied for on oct 30 1009 has been approved by Fingal County Council on Mar 10th 2010.

Search for F09A/0522 Fingal planning search for plans. Because the links die, Im reposting the planning approval and conditions below.

MeetingThere's a meeting on 25th of March on Bayside Church at 8:30pm to discuss this.

Planning Application Details F09A/0522 Date of Application: 07-Oct-2009 Date of Registration: 12-Feb-2010 Application Type: Permission Case Officer: Harry MacLauchlan Applicant: Bayside Centre Management Location: Bayside Shopping Centre, Bayside Square, Sutton, Dublin 13 Proposal: A mixed use commercial, retail, residential, medical and creche redevelopment. View full text Fingal Co Co Decision: GRANT PERMISSION Date of FCC Decision: 10-Mar-2010 Final Grant Date: Current Status: Decision Made by Fingal County Council This application was received by Fingal County Council on 07-Oct-2009 and registered on 12-Feb-2010. On 10-Mar-2010, the decision GRANT PERMISSION was made by Fingal County Council. Application Reference: F09A/0522 Decision of Fingal County Council: GRANT PERMISSION Decision Date: 10-Mar-2010 Extension of time to (if applicable): If a decision has been made, then listed below are the conditions and reasons attached with the decision of Fingal County Council. The category of decision made, determines what is displayed under the type column: * Conditions are associated with grants * Reasons are given for refusals * Directives are items requested under Additional Information * Informatives are items requested under clarification of Additional Information * Notes are reasons for invalidating a planning application In some cases, a combination of conditions, reasons, directives and informatives are used with regard to split decisions i.e. grant permission and refuse permission. N.B. In the event of an appeal, any decision by An Bord Pleanala will supercede the above, the details of which (from 2002 onwards) can be found by following the path to the website under the Appeal tab. Type Description Condition The development to be carried out in its entirety in accordance with the plans, particulars and specifications lodged with the application and Additional Information received on 12th February 2010, save as may be required by the other Conditions attached hereto. REASON: To ensure that the development shall be in accordance with the permission and that effective control be maintained. Condition That the private amenity spaces serving the podium level apartments on the 1st floor shall be fitted with screens and dividers to a maximum height of 1.5m, except for Units A1.2, A1.3, A1.6 and A1.7 which shall have a minimum 1.8m high side screen fitted to the south east facing bedroom windows adjacent to the lobby entrances to extend outwards by at least 2.0m; Unit B1.3 which shall have a minimum 1.8m high side screen fitted to the north east facing bed room window adjacent to the lobby entrance to extend outwards by a minimum of 2.3m; and Units C1.3, C1.6 and C1.10 which will have a minimum 1.8m high side screen fitted to the north west facing bedroom windows adjacent to the lobby entrances to extend outwards by at least 2.3m. REASON: In the interest of the residential amenity of future occupants. Condition At third floor level only the areas designated as balconies for individual apartment units as detailed on Drawing No. 08044-PL-104 Rev. C shall be used as outdoor amenity space. No other roof areas shall be accessed and used as amenity space. REASON: In the interest of the residential amenity. Condition Prior to commencement of development drawings, plans and specifications detailing the proposed internal ventilation system for retail Unit No. 10 shall be submitted to and approved in writing by the Planning Authority. The works shall be carried out in full prior to the operation of the hot food takeaway commences and maintained as such thereafter. REASON: In the interest of public health and amenities. Condition Notwithstanding the provisions of Condition No. 12 above no additional roof plant shall be permitted except by way of separate planning permission. REASON: In the interest of the visual amenity. Condition That the proposed Retail Units Nos. 1 to 9 inclusive and Nos. 11 and 12; and the Anchor Store shall be restricted to that use identified in Class 1, Part 4 of the Exempted Development Regulations 2001, no other use shall take place without the prior grant of permission by the Planning Authority or An Bord Pleanála on appeal and shall not be used as: a) a fried fish shop or a shop for the sale of hot food for consumption off the premises; b) a shop for the sale of pet animals or birds; c) a shop for the sale or display for sale of motor vehicles other than bicycles. REASON: To protect the amenities of the area and in the interest of the proper planning and sustainable development of the area. Condition That the proposed Retail Units Nos. 1 to 9 inclusive and Nos. 11 and 12; and the Anchor Store shall be open only from 07.00 Hrs to 23.00 Hrs Monday to Saturday; and 08.00 Hrs to 22.00 Hrs on Sundays and on Bank/Public Holidays. REASON: To protect the amenities of the area. Condition That the proposed take away at Retail Unit No.10 shall close at 00.30 Hrs Monday to Saturdays and 22.00 Hrs on Sundays and on Bank/Public Holidays. REASON: In the interests of residential amenity. Condition That the proposed gym shall be open only from 07.00 Hrs to 22.00 Hrs Mondays to Saturday; and from 09.00 Hrs to 20.00 Hrs on Sundays and Bank/Public Holidays. REASON: In the interests of residential amenity. Condition That the proposed crèche shall be open only from 07.00 Hrs to 20.00 Hrs Mondays to Saturdays; and shall not be open on Sundays or on Bank/Public Holidays. REASON: In the interests of residential amenity. Condition That the proposed medical centre shall be open only from 08.00 Hrs to 20.00 Hrs and Monday to Sunday and on Bank/Public Holidays. REASON: Condition That the proposal allows for the development of 52 apartment units only. REASON: In the interests of clarity of development. Condition That goods deliveries to all commercial uses shall not be permitted between the hours of 22.00 Hrs and 07.00 Hrs. REASON: In the interest of interest of amenities of the area. Condition No amplified music speakers shall be attached to the outside walls of any of the commercial units’ hereby permitted. REASON: In the interests of residential amenity. Condition That adequate provision shall be made for the disposal of litter outside premises. Litter bins to be provided in prominent locations both inside and outside premises. Details to be agreed in writing with the Planning Authority, prior to commencement of development. REASON: In the interest of residential amenity. Condition That any shutter boxes and security grilles shall be located behind the shop window. Grilles/Shutters shall be perforated. Details of the above including colour shall be submitted for the written agreement of the Planning Authority. REASON: In the interest of visual amenity. Condition That no additional signage or fixtures other than by way of a separate planning permission shall be permitted other than those proposed as part of the application. A separate planning permission will be required. REASON: In the interests of visual amenity. Condition That the out door area to the crèche be secured by a 1.8m high secure boundary fence; and that the crèche facility in all other respects be developed in accordance with the requirements of the Environmental Health Office. REASON: In the interests of orderly development. Condition The applicant shall comply with the following requirements of the Parks Division, Fingal County Council: a) In order to ensure that the trees to be retained are fully protected and maintained in good Condition throughout the course of the development a tree bond of 30,000 Euro shall be lodged with the Council prior to the commencement of any development works on site .This bond reflects the important contribution that the existing trees make to the existing environment and underlines the importance of ensuring that the trees are adequately fenced off and protected and are maintained in good Condition throughout the course of development and are not damaged by engineering associated with the proposed development b) A qualified arboriculturist shall be retained for the duration of the contract and that regular consultation is held with the Parks Division on progress of the development c) A specific specification and maintenance program to ensure the successful establishment and growth of these specimen trees needs shall be submitted and agreed with the Council prior to the commencement of development. d) A detailed works specification and maintenance and development timescale for the landscape plan for the remainder of the site shall submitted and agreed with the Planning Authority prior to the commencement of development e) The landscaping shall be carried out in accordance with BS 5837: 2005 Trees in relation to Construction. REASON: In the interests of visual amenity. Condition The applicant shall comply with the following requirements of the Transportation Department, Fingal County Council: (i) The recommendations of the stage 1 road safety audit are fully implemented. (ii) The vehicular accesses to the site shall be revised to be a ‘crossover’ of the public footpath and not a form of road junction, i.e. the footpath shall be continued at a raised level across the access, but shall be ramped and dropped as necessary (e.g. 32mm kerb over carriageway) to facilitate vehicle-entry/exit and crossing of the footpath. A level dwell area of 5m min length (max gradient 2.5%) shall be provided adjacent to the edge of the public road carriageway. (iii) The footpath running along the eastern side of the development tapers as it approaches the site entrance. The public footpath shall be maintained at a minimum of 1.5m and continuity between the footpath along the eastern boundary of the proposed development and the existing footpath along the eastern boundary of the church shall be maintained. (iv) The basement car-park shall comply with the current edition of 'Design Recommendations for Multi-Storey and Underground Car-Parks' published by the Institution of Structural Engineers, UK. (v) All of the car-parking spaces provided within the development for the residential units shall be individually marked and assigned to the residential units and/or reserved for visitors to the residential units as appropriate. No residential parking space shall be used for any purpose not directly related to the residential aspect of the proposed development and no parking space shall be sold, leased, licensed or sub-let in connection with any other use or purpose. (vi) All underground or overhead services and poles shall be relocated, as may be necessary, to a suitable location adjacent to the new boundary at the developer’s expense. REASON: In the interests of public safety. Condition The following requirements of the Planning Authority in regard to water supply and drainage arrangements to serve the proposed development shall be complied with: Foul Sewer: (i) No foul drainage is to discharge into the surface water system under any circumstances. (ii) All drainage from basement areas shall be pumped to ground level prior to discharging by gravity to the public drainage system. Basement car parks must be discharged to the foul system via a petrol/oil interceptor. (iii) The foul drainage must be in compliance with the 'Regional Code of Practice for Drainage Works Version 6.0' FCC April 2006. Surface Water: (i) No surface water/ rainwater is to discharge into the foul sewer system under any circumstances. (ii) All proposed SuDS features must be fully implemented. (iii) All intercepted surface water run-off from the ramp/basement access areas shall be pumped to ground level prior to discharging by gravity to the public surface water drainage system. (iv) The surface water drainage must be in compliance with the 'Regional Code of Practice for Drainage Works Version 6.0' FCC April 2006. (v) In the interest of water conservation and prevention of water wastage the applicant must submit details of proposed rainwater harvesting system for written approval prior to the commencement of construction. Water Supply: (i) All water fittings and installations must incorporate best current practices in water conservation. (ii) All houses and apartments must have 24 hour storage and individual water services to each unit. (iii) All commercial units must have individual metered supplies with 24 hour storage. This includes shop/office units within apartment complexes. (iv) The water supply for the development must comply with the 'Guidelines for Drinking Water Supply', FCC February 2009 Revision 1. (v) All hydrants must be at least 6 metres from a building and the absolute maximum distance any part of a building can be from a hydrant is 46 metres except in rural areas. (vi) All watermains of 300mm diameter or less must have a clearance of 5 metres from the centre of the watermain to the nearest building or structure on both sides. REASON: In the interests of public health. Condition Prior to commencement of development plans, drawings and particulars showing both cycle stand areas to be covered by a canopy shall be submitted to, and approved in writing, by the Planning Authority. REASON: In the interests of amenity. Condition That each proposed dwelling be used as a single dwelling unit apart from such use as may be exempted development for the purposes of the Planning and Development Regulations. REASON: In the interests of orderly development. Condition Prior to commencement of development, a management company shall be established by the developer and membership of this company shall be compulsory for all persons owning property in the development (whether or not there is a single owner of the entire development or individual owners of the residential units). Details of the management scheme shall be submitted to and be to the satisfaction of the Planning Authority. REASON: In the interests of orderly development and residential amenity. Condition Prior to the commencement of development, the applicant shall comply with the Fingal County Council Housing Strategy, drawn up in accordance with Part V, Section 96 (4) of the Planning and Development Act 2000, as amended by Section 3 of the Planning and Development Act 2002, and in accordance with agreement to be reached with the County Council Housing Department. REASON: To comply with the County Council Housing Strategy and Part V of the Planning and Development Act 2000 – 2002. Condition Prior to the commencement of development, the developer shall submit a formal Project Construction and Demolition Waste Management Plan to the Environment Department of Fingal County Council for agreement prior to Commencement Notice stage. This plan shall, inter alia, include the information recommended in sections 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 of the document entitled “Best Practice Guidelines on the Preparation of Waste Management Plans for Construction and Demolition Projects” published by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. REASON: In the interests of the reduction and best practice management of construction and demolition waste from the proposed development. Condition The following requirements shall be met in full; (i) The hours of operation on all construction sites shall be restricted to 8.00a.m. to 7.00p.m., Monday to Friday, and 8.00 a.m. to 2.00p.m. on Saturdays. (ii) No activities shall take place on site on Sundays or Bank Holidays. (iii) No activity, which would reasonably be expected to cause annoyance to residents in the vicinity, shall take place on site between the hours of 7.00pm and 8.00am. (iv) No deliveries of materials, plant or machinery shall take place before 8.00a.m. in the morning or after 7.00p.m. in the evening. (v) If there is any occasion when work must be carried on outside daytime hours, the Environmental Health Officer, local residents and businesses in areas which are likely to be affected by noise from the proposed works should be notified in advance e.g. in letter or leaflet or advertisement form, of: a) Name, address and telephone number of company carrying out works b) Nature of and REASON for works c) Likely duration and times of work (vi) No outdoor burning shall occur on site. Site must be secured to prevent access. (vii) During any demolition and the construction phase, all necessary steps shall be taken to contain dust and airborne pollutants arising from the site and to prevent nuisance to persons in the locality. This shall include i) covering skips, ii) covering slack heaps, iii) netting of scaffolding, iv) regular road and pavement damping and sweeping, v) use of water spray to suppress dust, vi) proper paved or hard stand access for trucks and vehicles to and from the site to prevent dirt and dust from the site being carried from the site on to public roads etc. In the interests of both public health and the environment the above guidelines shall be included in the work policy of those undertaking all large and small building. These details must be made known to all developers contractors and sub-contractors. REASON: In the interests of public health and residential amenity. Condition Notwithstanding the details submitted a Waste Management Plan shall be submitted to the Planning Authority for written agreement. This plan shall be in accordance with BS: 5906: 2005 ‘Waste Management in Buildings’. Details of the form of ventilation or the proposed bin storage area shall also be submitted as part of this plan. REASON: In the interests of amenities and public safety. Condition Prior to commencement of development, full details of a Bring Bank Facility including drawings, plans and particulars to be provided on the site shall be submitted to and approved in writing by the Planning Authority. REASON: In the interest of amenities and public safety. Condition Prior to the commencement of development a Lighting Scheme detailing full details of external lighting to the building and car park shall be submitted to, and approved in writing, by the Planning Authority. It is a requirement that any lighting proposed as part of this development may, if required, be revised as appropriate at any stage should it be considered by the Planning Authority that it causes unacceptable light pollution or glare to motorists or other road users. REASON: In the interest of amenity and traffic safety. Condition During the operational phase the Developer shall ensure that all activities at the site shall not give rise to noise levels off-site, at noise sensitive locations, which exceed the following sound pressure limits (leq, T) Day 55 dB(A)lAeq(30 Minutes) (0800hrs to 2200 hrs) Night 45 dB(A)LAeq (30 Minutes) (2200hrs to 0800hrs) There shall be no audible noise tonal component or impulsive component in the noise emission from the activity at any noise sensitive location. REASON: To control emissions from the facility and in the interest of amenity. Condition That a financial contribution in the sum of €429,374 be paid by the applicant to Fingal County Council in lieu of open space provision towards the cost of amenity works in the area of the proposed development as provided for in the Contribution Scheme for Fingal County made by the council based on a shortfall of 2,925 sq.m. (2,106 sq.m. Class 1 and 819 sq.m. Class 2). REASON: The provision of such services in the area by the Council will facilitate the proposed development. It is considered reasonable that the developer should contribute towards the cost of providing the services. Condition That all public services to the proposed development, including electrical, telephone cables and equipment be located underground throughout the entire site. REASON: In the interest of amenity. Condition That no development under any permission granted pursuant to this decision be commenced until security for the provision and satisfactory completion of services, including maintenance, to the taking in charge standard of the Local Authority for roads, open spaces, car parks, sewers, watermains and drains has been given by:- A. Lodgement with the Council of an approved Insurance Company Bond or a Bond of any Body approved by the Planning Authority in the sum of €208,000 which shall be kept in force by him until such time as the Roads, Open Spaces, Car Parks, Sewers, Watermains and Drains are taken in charge by the Council……OR/ B. Lodgement with the Council of a Cash Sum of €130,000 to be applied by the Council at its absolute discretion if such services are not duly provided to its satisfaction on the provisions and completion of such services to standard specification….OR/ C. Lodgement with the Planning Authority of a letter of guarantee by any body approved by the Planning Authority for the purpose in respect of the proposed development in accordance with the guarantee scheme agreed with the Planning Authority and such lodgement in any case has been acknowledged in writing by the Council. REASON: To ensure that a ready sanction may be available to the Council to induce the provision of services and prevent disamenity in the development. Condition That no dwelling be occupied until all the services have been connected thereto and are operational. REASON: In the interest of the proper planning and sustainable development of the area. Condition That an acceptable naming and numbering scheme for the development shall be submitted for the agreement of the Building Control Section of the Planning Department prior to the commencement of the development. The naming scheme shall reflect local historical place names, and shall be bilingual. Road name signs shall be located at prominent positions within the development, and shall be bilingual. Dwellings shall be numbered and these numbers shall be affixed to the dwellings in a prominent position. REASON: In the interest of the residential amenities of the area. Condition That the residential aspect of the development in terms of available daylight to habitable rooms shall comply with BS: 8206 Lighting for Buildings, Part 2 1992: Code of Practice for Daylight. REASON: In the interest of the residential amenity of future occupants. Condition Samples of all materials to be used on all of the external finishes of the proposed building, and civic square, shall be submitted to, and approved in writing, by the Planning Authority prior to the commencement of construction of the proposed development. REASON: In the interest of visual amenities. Condition The lift and stair cores on the northern elevation shall be of a simplified design with the number of window opes reduced and rationalised on each floor; and walls shall be finished in one material, different to the rest of the elevation. Prior to the commencement of development plans, drawings and particulars shall be submitted to the Planning Authority, and written approval obtained, showing an amended design and a single material to be used on the external finishes. REASON: In the interest of visual amenities. Condition The developer shall pay the sum of € 1,308,127.00 updated at date of commencement of development, in accordance with changes in the Wholesale Price Index (Building and Construction Materials) to the planning authority as a contribution towards expenditure that was/or that is proposed to be incurred by the planning authority in respect of public infrastructure and facilities benefiting development in the area of the Authority, as provided for in the Contribution Scheme for Fingal County made by the council. The phasing of payments and the giving of security to ensure payment shall be agreed in writing with the planning authority prior to the commencement of development. REASON: It is considered reasonable that the payment of a contribution be required in respect of the public infrastructure and facilities benefiting development in the area of the planning authority and that is provided, or that is intended will be provided, by or on behalf of the Local Authority. Note 1: The Applicant is advised that under the provisions of Section 34(13) of the Planning and Development Act 2000 a person shall not be entitled solely by reason of a permission to carry out any development. Note 2: The Applicant is advised that the onus is on them to comply in full with the Building Control Regulations. Note 3: The Applicant should consult with the requirements of the principle Environmental Health officer, H.S.E., Northern Area, 1st Floor, Unit 5, Block 4B, Blanchardstown Corporate park, Ballycoolin, Dublin 15.

St Patrick's Day Irish government ministers travel exhibited, mapped, timelined, listed and editable

2010-03-17T18:15:00.000-07:00

This screen shot shows an exhibit of Irish Government Ministers travel on St Patricks travel in 2010 using this data.

Made with Exhibit

Source St Patrick's Day trips abroad for 23 officials

Details of how I made this here

Tableau Public, Visualisation Dashboard

2010-03-04T03:44:00.000-08:00

Via readwriteweb a top notch blog about web tech, I read about Tableau Public Software Which provide you with free* interactive graphs, maps and dashboards for the web.

This video example about taking public data about graffiti in New York, graphing it, mapping it, finding trends in the data and then showing those trends on the Dashboard. If only we had access to this kind of data in Ireland.

Obligatory Haiti Dashboard Olympic Medals Dashboard

The free service which you download to you desktop gives you 100,000 rows of data, or 50mb which you can upload to its site to view and share.

This is the new manyeyes for me, particularly because it can do maps of Ireland and you can upload and manipulated large tables of data at once.

Im not sure of its geocoding will be useful for Ireland but can use the updgraded batchgeocode.com to get the lat lng and input them directly. Batchgeocode now specifically geocodes for and within Ireland.

Desktop program

You can use excel or csv files. You can make a graph, from one sheet a map from another, then put them together on dashboard, making the filters for them global to get a fuller nuanced picture.

I've tried a few here myself using the data from my TD's Exhibit. It nearly makes it my use of Exhibit defunct. It seems like it had more ways to total, average and display data automatically.

Data at TD google spreadsheet
Constituency editable spreadsheet.
Party editable spreadsheet.

Download these files as xls, strip the { and } from the headers and think of ways of displaying the data.

Need to think of ways to use data to fully utilize this. Figure out how to make the difference in size of icons logarithmic.

Irish Dail TDs, members of Ireland's parliament information exhibited, mapped, charted, listed and editable.

2010-02-27T14:41:00.001-08:00

This screen shot shows how I have used Simile Exhibit Widget to display Ireland's 166 Dáil TD's, members of Ireland's parliament, information exhibited, mapped, charted, listed and editable.Using information I gathered on this google spreadsheet and having geo-coded their constituency_offices_address' and used that constituency spreadsheet as basis to show information about them on a map of Ireland on top of polygons of Dáil constituencies.

Made with Exhibit from MIT which...

Exhibit enables you to create html pages with dynamic exhibits of data collections without resorting to complex database and server-side technologies. The collections can be searched and browsed using faceted browsing. Assorted views are provided including Timelines, tiles, maps, and more.

I have been very impressed with MIT exhibit, there is a whole suite of systems for displaying large amounts of data simply and lightly. Though its a fair few years old and isn't being updated any more I wasn't sure whether it was worth pursuing and using to create my Irish Politics displays but I haven't seem anything as impressive and easy to adapt for a copy and paste coder like me. Looking around for visualisations, faceted search (which is usually associated with semantic web) and mapping systems, I haven't seen any better. The original creator of Exhibit David Huynh has gone on to work on freebase which hopes to automatically gather and similarly display data,(mainly from wikipedia). Try Dipty for timelines by themselves also. It helps to be able to run it off MIT servers, running it all of your system takes a little bit of changing of calls within the scripts.

Still to do
I need to reduce the heaviness of the page, by removing script from the main html page and putting it in includes, and seeing how to reduce calls by putting the whole system on my host rather then calling to the MIT.

Corrections, for instance do you know where in the town the constituency office is?, go to maps.google.com centre over it then take the latitude and longitude from the link, double check by pasting those coorindates back into the google maps search and then change in the TD spreadsheet and leave a comment on the cell too.

Im looking for medium detail file of polygon data of Dáil Constituencies. In KML or geojson format. I have just gotten an Irish counties KML and traced the maps available with the difference between the counties and constituencies. The .json files is only 1.5mb with each of the 42 constituencies polygon being around a 1000 coordinates, but this is too much and causes a slow script warning in IE.

I have made panels showing

Irish TDs • Dublin • Percent Vote • Expenses vs. Votes • Parties • FF TDs • FG TDs • Labour TDs • GP TDs • SF TDs • Ind TDs • Constituencies • Votes • expenses • Donations • Donors • Elections • Travel Details • TD Details • Contact • Position • All Data
which you can combine with the sliders
Terms - Age - Distance from Dail - Percent Vote - Gender

can you think of any more ways to display the data?

Exhibit
MIT Exhibit
I modified the Presidents Births and Death example of which you can see it's simple JSON file. You can use MIT's Babel to convert your data to JSON or XML (create live XML with editgrid.com) or any exhibit friendly form.

 ex:role="exhibit-view"   id="map1"  ex:collectionID="bothcollection2"  
   ex:viewClass="Exhibit.MapView"
   ex:label="Irish TDs"
   ex:eventlabel=".td"
   ex:size="large"
   ex:zoom="7"
   ex:mapHeight="600"
   ex:center="53.45,-8.0"
   ex:overviewControl="true"
   ex:showSummary="true"
   ex:latlng=".latlng"
   ex:polygon=".constpoly"
   ex:pin="false"
   ex:borderOpacity="1.0"
   ex:borderWidth="1"
   ex:borderColor="purple"
   ex:opacity="0.0"
   ex:showToolbox="false"
   ex:icon=".imageURL"

...calling the named columns from the google spreadsheets.

Description of how I made the government travel exhibit.

I have used more of the Exhibit extensions, with more maps, bar charts, scatter plots, polygons, and more sliders, gradients and icons,.. copying these example exhibits

and after a lot of searching through the simile mailing list.

Information
I have geo-coded the constituency_offices_address' of the 166 TDs and used that as basis to show information about them on map of Ireland with polygons of constituencies.

Polygons
Adding polygons was major extension from my previous exhibit you can use this version exhibit babel to help you convert kml and other formats to geojson. I adapted the creator David Huynh's election 2008 example and polylines example.
The coder behind werelate.org has created some extensions exhibit pedi maps to make connection icons on the map.

Timelines
I've created a time line of when the currents TDs were first elected. The time line extension is part of its own Simile timeline system which can get more info on how to use on its wiki. Although its not easy to show the times TDs didn't get elected and then returned a following election. (to stop and start the timeline on the same line with the same person). So for the moment it does not show that and goes straight first election to most recent.

Collections and Types
I had to change to having multiple collections in this exhibit to call the types and collections 166 TDS in one spreadsheet and 42 constituency polygons and associated info in another spreadsheet. Thankfully David Huynh provided the code to call from one the other or both collections in the mailing list. I'm not sure if can write code to add a third one (partys).

The Data
Google doc JSON TD editable spreadsheet.
Google doc JSON Constituency editable spreadsheet.
Google doc JSON Party editable spreadsheet.

Sources Constituency Profiles
TDs info from Oireachtas.ie
Wikipedia
electionsireland
Oireacthas.ie 2007 Results
SIPO
The Story

20 TDs example of information

Information categories most of which you can select in any combination.

json category	explanation
{label}	don't edit
{td}	don't edit
{person}	person
{type}	type
{constituencyofficeaddress}	constituency office address
{street}	street
{city}	city
{county}	county
{co}	county code
{party}	party
{tdconstituency}	td constituency
{donations}	donations
{seat}	seat
{electorate}	electorate
{validvote}	validvote
{firstprefvotes}	firstprefvotes
{percentcalcvote}	percentcalcvote
{percentvote}	percentvote
{partyvote}	partyvote
{expenses}	expenses
{party}	party
{donorlatlng}	donorlatlng
{labourlatlng}	if you replace latlng replace this
{fflatlng}	if you replace latlng replace this
{fglatlng}	if you replace latlng replace this
{gplatlng}	if you replace latlng replace this
{sflatlng}	if you replace latlng replace this
{indlatlng}	if you replace latlng replace this
{distance}	distance
{lat}	if you replace latlng replace this
{lng}	if you replace latlng replace this
{latlng}	constituency office coorindate approx
{LHlatlng}	Leinster House latlng
{distanceC}	distance from leinster house
{constlatlng}	center of constituency
{zoom}	zoom to constituency
{nicestartdate}	nicestartdate first elected
{start}	start first elected
{election}	year election
{latestStart}	latestStart
{earliestEnd}	earliestEnd
{now}	now
{terms}	terms
{yearsofservice}	yearsofservice
{event}	event
{constphone}	constphone
{end}	end
{imageURL}	imageURL
{partywebsite}	party website
{email}	email
{website}	personal website
{electiontype}	election type
{istd}	istd
{wikiurl}	wikiurl
{age}	age
{gender}	gender
{gov}	gov
{position}	position
{spokepersonissue}	spokepers on issue
{committee}	committee

Constituencies

json category	explanation
{id}	don't edit
{label}	don't edit
{type}	don't edit
{seats}	seats
{population2006}	population2006
{electorate}	electorate
{validvote}	validvote
{partyvote}	partyvote
{opac}	opac
{labour-vote}	labour-vote
{ff-vote}	ff-vote
{fg-vote}	fg-vote
{sf-vote}	sf-vote
{gp-vote}	gp-vote
{pd-vote}	pd-vote
{ind-vote}	ind-vote
{tdsofc}	tds of consituency
{constlat}	constlat
{constlng}	constlng
{constlatlng}	constlatlng
{area}	area
{ctagrade}	ctagrade
{ctaaallowance}	ctaaallowance
{zoom}	zoom
{election}	election
{wikiURL}	wikiURL
{lastelectiontype}	lastelectiontype
{constituency2}	constituency2
{constituencyprofile}	constituencyprofile
{vote-for}	vote-for
{vote-forts}	vote-forts

Parties
Number of TDs
Vote percentage by party
party vote
party
swing
logoURL
tds of party
party url
partywikiURL

To do Make a CSS highlighting image map
Automatically geocode the donors for each TD
Search doesn't work
make it easier to edit, ie. add wiki backend

Government aircraft travel of Irish ministers 2009 exhibited, mapped, timelined, listed and editable.

2009-11-01T03:56:00.000-08:00

This screen shot shows an exhibit of Irish Government Ministers travel on Government aircraft in 2009 using this data using Ken Foxe's Freedom Of Information Requests.

2008 finished

Made with Exhibit from MIT which...

Exhibit enables you to create html pages with dynamic exhibits of data collections without resorting to complex database and server-side technologies. The collections can be searched and browsed using faceted browsing. Assorted views are provided including Timelines, tiles, maps, and more.

You can copy examples from the Exhibit wiki and simile mailing list.


                        ex:role="view"
                        ex:viewClass="Map"
                        ex:label="Birth Places with Photos"
                        ex:latlng=".birthLatLng"
                        ex:center="38.479394673276445, -115.361328125"
                        ex:zoom="3"
                        ex:bubbleWidth="200"
                        ex:icon=".imageURL"
                        ex:shapeWidth="60"
                        ex:shapeHeight="60"
                        ex:selectCoordinator="president"

...calling the named columns from the google spreadsheets.

The change
Ken Foxe in a very unusual move for a professional journalist has shared the raw information he got in his FOI's with the public. The information from the Ministerial Air Transport Service is voluminous so with more eyes and perhaps my exhibit of the information in a more visual and manipulatable manner we can comprehend more of what politicians are doing with our government resources. He used FOI'd government aircraft travel data to write ...Living on our jet plane, at a cost of €10.6m (18 Oct 2009, Sunday Tribune).

TRANSPORTING government ministers aboard the government jet over the past four years has cost the taxpayer more than €10.6 million.
Figures from the Department of Defence show that the €7,890-an-hour Gulfstream IV jet has been in use for 1,214 hours since the beginning of 2006. The government's Learjet – the running costs of which now come in at almost €3,000 an hour – has been in the air for 826 hours at a cost of €1.89 million.

...continue reading at tribune.ie

MIT Exhibit
I modified the Presidents Births and Death example of which you can see it's simple JSON file. You can use MIT's Babel to convert your data to JSON or XML (create live XML with editgrid.com) or any exhibit friendly form.

Ken's FOI data
Using the spreadsheets he then re-published Ken Foxe's Gov aircraft use FOI's eg. Ministers Air Travel - 2009 Jan - Oct (Scribd doc).

Mats - 2009 Jan - Oct

My Data
I rearranged it into this google doc file with labels so that the Exhibit script can read it as JSON. How to make an exhibit from data fed directly from a Google Spreadsheet

The exhibit
You can pick out any element or facet of the info from the list on the left, the central tag cloud, the timeline, map or Flight time slider below the map, deselect it by un-checking on the sidebar list or use your browser's back button. You can zoom into the map under Ireland or Europe or view the Details of the trips in a table.

I need to display the helicopter trips better.Working on it here to add polylines extension of exhibit made by www.werelate.org code changes

Its pity there no way to batch search, so I could quickly find why Mary Harney was in Helsinki and Michael maritin went to New York in July.

Want to do 2008
2008 MATS spreadsheet FOI'd by Ken Foxe
via scribd.
JSON base file
MATS 2008 Exhibit

To do
I need to figure out functions to add up totals...

I'm also working on a politicians constituency map and TD/Dail diary similar to the above.

The Story
A couple of young (ish) journalists have set up thestory.ie to gather and release data about Irish politics for crowd sourcing and crowd reviewing. Gavinblog and Mark Coughlan have, as have I, been inspired by the work of projects like the UK's mysociety.org in opening up shared data resources for citizen journalism. They are working towards creating an Irish version of whatdotheyknow.com, which makes it easier to request and share 'Freedom of Information' requests. Another MySociety project created a more accessible and manipulatable parliamentary record called Theyworkforyou, programmer John Handalaar has already created a version called kildarestreet.com for the Irish parliamentary debates.

The visualisations
I have taken some of thestory's spreadsheets of data and made visualisations (I'll describe how in another blog post).

A visualisation of donations to parties by-industry using Tree Map's via Manyeyes and Google Docs. Visualised Liam Carroll's Corporate Structure, a more dynamic ZVTM version of LC companies
Minister for Finance for Ireland Brian Lenihan's Diary during the financial crisis, in google calendar form, in SIMILE WIDGET timeline form.

APIs, feeds and linked data
I had been using some of the above methods to follow the Howth Malahide council elections and hope improve with use of RDF and XML and geocoded feeds. With free collaboration and document sharing sites, RDF and XML and feeds and API's its becoming easier for non-programmers to serve, slice and link data.

Links
Another Irish Journalist Mark Tighe is releasing data for his Sunday times articles
Guardian Open Platform.
Batch geocoding addresses.
Sunlight Labs the tech development of open government US.
The sunlight centre for open politics UK.
Zoho: Document collaboration site To do
The coder behind werelate.org has created some extensions exhibit pedi maps to make connection icons on the map. I think you havve to put the whole system on your own host, which when I manage to add it I can use to connect flight.

The 3rd Bayside Shopping Centre re-development proposal

2009-10-23T13:49:00.000-07:00

Some leaflets from the Bayside Shopping Centre Management and the local residents arrived for the 3rd new proposal for the Bayside Shopping Centre redevelopement. The first two proposals were refused in 2007 and 2008.

The current shops. The development involves retail, 62 apartments, an underground carpark, services. Planning number is F09A/0522 Search for it the Fingal planning website

To quote the two Bayside Centre Management leaflets.

We are in agreement that the existing square and associated shops/ buildings need to be redeveloped in full as its has become run down, dilapidated and detracts from the Bayside/Sutton Park area.

Who is responsible for the rundown dilapidated Bayside Shopping Centre?

Failure to achieve a satisfactory planning application with your support will inevitably lead to the further disuse of retail units and dilapidation of the existing centre in the future and we believe that it is in nobodies interest for this to happen.

Who is responsible for the disused units and dilapidated Bayside Shopping Centre?

This is an opportunity to finally replace the current dilapidated and run down centre with a new vibrant and modern facility which will enhance the whole area.

Who is responsible for the run down and dilapidated Bayside Shopping Centre?

We the retailers of the Bayside Shopping Centre, feel that if this one fails there will be neither be the funds nor the appetite to try again for many years to come and the existing centre will continue to deteriorate.

Who responsible for the deterioration of the Bayside Shopping Centre?

Existing Centre: Derelict Squash Court

Who responsible for the derelict squash court?

The answer to all those questions is the Bayside Centre Management, so they should stop trying to blame it on the locals.

Here are the leaflets. More later.

Bayside residents meeting recap of objections

The Study the BCM refers too is the Bayside Urban Development Framework Which somehow manages not to mention the phrase '5 storeys' in its report while recommending such 'focal buildings'.

The contact for the Bayside management is Baysidesquare@gmail.com

News article from the Dublin Northside People with quotes from residents, councillors and the developers.

Type of donor money to Irish political parties

2009-10-06T09:37:00.001-07:00

Irish European Election Constituencies Map

2009-05-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

European Elections Constituency commission report on European Elections Constituencies (2007-9, PDF).

Google Earth Kmz version
Google map browser version

Version with Candidates Names Placed
Google Earth
GM Browser

Not perfect but use and see what you can do with it. You can use a program like Ge-Graph to add 3d graphs or colour gradients with stats etc.

Irelands Elected MEPs

East
Liam Aylward MEP (FF)
Mairéad McGuinness MEP (FG)
Nessa Childers (LAB)

NorthWest
Jim Higgins MEP (FG)
Marian Harkin MEP (IND)
Pat 'The Cope' Gallagher (FF)

South
Senator Alan Kelly (LAB)
Seán Kelly (FG)
Brian Crowley MEP (FF)

Dublin
Gay Mitchell MEP (FG)
Joe Higgins (SP)
Proinsias De Rossa MEP (Lab)

Full Candidate list

Dublin (10 candidates: 2 FF, 1 FG, 1 LAB, 1 GP, 1 SF, 1 SP, 1 LIB, 2 IND)

Cllr Eibhlin Byrne (FF)
Senator Deirdre De Burca (GP)
Proinsias De Rossa MEP (Lab)
Joe Higgins (SP)
Mary Lou McDonald MEP (SF)
Patricia McKenna (IND)
Gay Mitchell MEP (FG)
Eoin Ryan MEP (FF)
Caroline Simmons (LIB)
Emmanuel Sweeney (IND)

East (11 candidates: 2 FF, 2 FG, 2 SF, 1 LAB, 1 LIB, 3 IND)

Liam Aylward MEP (FF)
Thomas Byrne TD (FF)
Nessa Childers (LAB)
Kathleen Funchion (SF)
Paddy Garvey (IND)
Micheál E Grealy (IND)
Mairéad McGuinness MEP (FG)
Raymond O'Malley (LIB)
Senator John Paul Phelan (FG)
Tomás Sharkey (SF)
Jim Tallon (IND)

North West (13 candidates: 2 FF, 2 FG, 1 LAB, 1 SF, 1 LIB, 6 IND)

Pat 'The Cope' Gallagher (FF)
Paschal Mooney (FF)
Jim Higgins MEP (FG)
Senator Joe O'Reilly (FG)
Susan O'Keefe (LAB)
Declan Ganley (LIB)
Marian Harkin MEP (IND)
Cllr Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (SF)
Fiachra Ó Luain (IND)
Michael McNamara (IND)
Noel McCullough (IND)
Thomas King (IND)
John Francis Higgins (IND)

South (10 Candidates - 2 FF, 2 FG, 1 LAB, 1 GP, 1 SF, 3 IND)

Brian Crowley MEP (FF)
Ned O'Keeffe TD (FF)
Colm Burke MEP (FG)
Seán Kelly (FG)
Senator Alan Kelly (LAB)
Senator Dan Boyle (GP)
Cllr Toiréasa Ferris (SF)
Maurice Sexton (IND)
Kathy Sinnott MEP (IND)
Alexander Stafford (IND)

Irish Times candidate details
RTE candidate details
General EU links
electionsireland.org
politics.ie
europeanelections
micanddiate profiles
euobserver.com
euprofiler.eu
candidatewatch.ie
www.votematch.eu

Leonard Cohen Hallelujah Live

2008-12-15T21:25:00.001-08:00

Its ain't a christmas song but if you going to buy it by this one. can anyone find the extra lyrics extra sexy version from austin 1998 and cohen live 94 album online? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallelujah_(Leonard_Cohen_song)

Hallelujah - xfactor - sad kermits version

2008-12-15T21:16:00.001-08:00

for no1

Olympic censorship by IOC and RTE

2008-08-12T12:18:00.000-07:00

IOC AND RTE out do China

RTÉ Radio Olympics 2008 Coverage

Due to International Olympic Council Internet broadcasting rights restrictions RTÉ is prohibited from making Olympic content accessible outside the island of Ireland (the territory).

These rights restrictions prohibit RTÉ from making any audio content broadcast live from, or recorded in, an accredited Olympic venue available outside the territory.

Because of the nature of RTÉ Radio’s comprehensive Beijing 2008 Olympic Games coverage the only manner in which RTÉ can comply with these rights restrictions is to regretfully make all our live Radio streams and the majority of our archived programmes available only within Ireland for the duration of the Olympic Games.

We do realise that this is of annoyance and inconvenience to our users abroad for which we sincerely apologise.

A limited number of programmes will be made available post-broadcast worldwide, in an edited format, during the Olympic Games. Please check the programme website to see if this is the case.

Further Explaination Q&A

Did you try and appeal?

Yes. The EBU made a number of appeals to the IOC, but was rejected.

Why not just block the Olympics themselves?

Because the restriction is not just limited to highlights of the Games, but it expands to any footage filmed within the 'accredited' area or interviews conducted within the 'accredited' area. For instance, if Pat Kenny was to interview an Irish person via a mobile phone and they happened to be in an official Olympic car, we cannot play that interview outside of Ireland.

Realistically, this means we need to block all live streams, radio and television, because we cannot monitor all of the streams 24 hours.

Question is will anybody else be monitoring this and objecting to Pat Kenny interviewing an Irish athlete live?

How about a program on censorious capitalist copyright restrictions RTE?

p Heres a good article on it from US reporter with an Irish husband who noticed the problem

NBC exclusive deal means no live ceremony on US TV

Another blog describing NBC lame coverage

Radiohead 3D LIDAR music video

2008-07-17T18:24:00.000-07:00

Radiohead have used live Lidar laser scanning and recording to make a video for the new single House of Cards watch the music video the making of and then wait for the load up of the 3d video google gadget. 3d DataWhich you can download and manipulate yourself if you know how.

Mind blowing.

Antony Gormley Sculpture for Dublin Docklands permitted

2008-07-17T07:33:00.000-07:00

The Antony Gormley Sculpture for the Dublin docklands has been giving permission by the Dublin City Council as noted in the Sunday Times.

The Dublin docklands has jumped on the big name fad but I think Gormley work like the Blind Light installation (where you can't tell the difference between people and sculpture among the smoke) and the pieces like the Quantum Cloud are exceptional and you can seen the engineering and craftwork much easier then in something like the bland Spire.

I like his description of it as a ‘like a charcoal drawing against the sky, changing as your position changes in relation to it’ as it will covered in black matt paint and think the use of complex angles to create something that the eye has to fill in itself is very clever.

View Orientation,structure and base plans

The sculpture is being made by the Advanced Geometry Unit of Arup Engineers, London. The science behind the sculpture which is based on TCD Weire-Phelan geometries of the bubble matrix!
to create and see through but sturdy lattice. It the same formula used for the Beijing Olympic swimming pool Other examples of his use of engineering on Body Space Frame and Quantum Cloud construction The right placement?

Quantum Cloud

Placement planning map

Its been placed on the south bank of the Liffey 12 metres from the quay and 30 metres down on seaward side of the Sean O'Casey bridge. It will be 46 metres high 12 metres its widest take eight months to erect and will cost €1.6m.

Some nearby residents objected the idea of towering over them and were They were on Liveline on Monday raising their concerns.

Embedded from RTE.IE

The DDDA say "The authority could have located the statue, which is 80% the height of Liberty Hall, in an area where it needed no planning permission, but chose to site it at City Quay on the seaward side of the Sean O’Casey bridge, to allow for public input."

Lombard and City qauy resident objections

The East Wall Residents' Association said it planned to object to the project because there had been no public consultation. Indo 07 I'm sure DDA would say they has been full public consultation and opportunities to object,a number of locations were listed for the sculpture in the EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) but the DDDA chose it and stuck with it. The main consideration was it not getting the way of boat traffic.

I think it could have been put further down the bay. I don't know why they had to put it next to the few remaining old residential houses on the docks. They should have put if further out. The 'Quantum Matrix' above seems to be more in open industrial space, rather then among the new city. Although there are the old warehouse of the CHQ and the Georges Dock Iron contraption it may have been more suited to where there is still some industrial activity. As pointed out in the objections there a number of other sculptures nearby to lives lost at sea and the linesman on the quay and the sculptural shape of the Sean O'Casey bridge itself but this overshadows them. Although this statue is much more light weight other submissions have compared its height to the Statue of Liberty or Christ figure in Rio which are in far more open spaces. I think the artist wanted it near people but somewhere nearer Grand Canal dock would have been just as busy.An Taisce submission preferring another location.

The decision mentions the request for it to be put in more open area(page 13,pg.2) but rejects it without really giving a good overriding reason.

"It is positioned at a point between the old and new development areas of Dublin City and on a prominent site when viewed along the Liffey Corridor and along one of the main thoroughfares down to the River Liffey. It is also at a location where north/south and east/west pedestrian movements intersect.

"In addition, the proposed site allows the sculpture to be viewed against the skyline within an area of Dublin that has low rise buildings on both sides of the river and it does not interfere with navigation on the river Liffey"

DDDA may use these sculptures to distract from thing like their plan for buildings on stilts jutting out into the Liffey with a canal (an open grey system) behind it(Archiseek). And the deliberate dereliction and speculation that the docklands redevelopment is based on.

DDDA Updates
Non Techincal Sumamry of the EIS
Full EIS
Planning searchReference code 0430/97
planning submission
View Orientation,structure and base plans
Irish Times interview with Antony Gormley

ps I don't think the money could be spent elsewhere for the homeless or the hospitals I just don't think they come from the same budget.

ps Why did the DDDA with all this derelict docklands space, only allow 7 story buildings, if you going to blame anybody for lack of high rise in Dublin don't blame nimbys or an Taisce blame the DDDA.

Grace Jones @ Meltdown 18 June 2008 Love is The Drug

2008-06-25T10:00:00.001-07:00

vid author boris99gj's description:
The formidable Grace Jones performs Love is the Drug... The video is of the backing screen, she was stood centre stage with very little light with a silver mirror ball bowler hat, a strong lazer pointing down directly onto her head! enough said.

Legend and a great musician and performer.

Conscription is militarism for mothers. They don't want either in Lisbon

2008-06-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

was listening to yesterday rte radio again and hearing a lot of politicians talking about how they met these people worried about conscription,particularly older women,... and i thought by god these FF'ers are telling us they only meet are stupid disconnected no voters, that they are saying that the only no voters are imbeciles.

now im no-voter-who-abstained, im deeply anti-war , campaigned and marched against shannon etc, but i don't think conscription is on the horizon, but im am worried about merkel and and o'deas words about making the EU a global power player and 'exporting peace and prosperity to the rest of the world' echoing george bush's comment just a few weeks ago... and we all know what GWB means about exporting democracy, it means exporting capitalism and conflict and drill rigs.

But I was talking to my mother (an FG reluctant yes voter,most worried about immigration) who said she met a neighbour who said the very same thing about conscription, and i said well she's an imbecile... and she said well i don't think it'll happen right now but maybe my grandchildren...' but i said well im big anti-military head and even i don't think that will happen, imbeciles!

Then I heard Mary Hanafin talking about the conscription issue coming up again, but she describe how a young women came up to her and asked her about shannon, military and neutrality and hanafin said she went on to say how it didn't change our position on neutrality (which could be true but we're not neutral).

Dermot Ahern and Michael martin both said how they found a lot of older women were bringing up conscription and and that's what they found after doing polling after nice 1 that it was older women worried about military.

anyway my main point is i then realised that these women aren't imbeciles they just think in different way to me and other young folks on the issue militarism.

when i think of iraq or Afghanistan, i think of the 100,000 unnecessary deaths and the trauma and destruction Iraqis have to live in ( and also the pillaging of their resources) but when the so called general public think of Iraq, particularly older women think in sons...

this is why they use the word conscription to convey their worries about neutrality, while i would use militarisation.

you see all the time on the news in uk and usa they manly report the deaths of us soldiers, they barely mention t the deaths of even the iraqi soldiers on 'our side' even if they died in the same battle.

UK and US parents say bring the troops home, they don't say end the war or save iraqi lives, most don't think in that way.

both patricia mckenna and pana and SF mary lou mcdonald all said they weren't worried about conscription or weren't going around telling people about their sons being conscripted and it wasn't in their literature. It wasn't in any no groups leaflets.

M L McD said on tv3 other night that she wasn't using scaremongering about conscription but people were thinking 'longheaded' about it and she was most worried about militarisation. and when she says militarisation she means imperialism (cos she doesn't mind the other kind).

lots of yes vote advocates mention indian and china in threatening way, a distance menace that are will trying to dominate the world, which leave you to think how could we fight them without conscirption...

so that's a longwinded way to say something very simple and obvious, conscription (ie. military neutrality) is valid concern in this eu referendum.

that's why they exit polls said they lost nice 1 and so they made changes ith the seville declaration reassured people and nice 2 passed but it's still why they lost lisbon.

and it a valid concern because we're not neutral and never really have been, and were certainly not now with active facilitation of the iraq war at shannon and no matter what ff/fg say, many of their voters are concerned about militarism, because of our history of being on the wrong end of imperialism, which connected to the feeling for independence which connects with the general fear of loss of sovereignty,(its the reverse of the uk independence euroscpetics who are pro-military). we've seen this at one of the biggest ever protest marches in recent times against the iraq war and the use of shannon. you could say our position on neutrality wasn't going to change but we're not neutral so nobody can't trust their assurances on that. Our neutrality is threatened most by our own governments actions not some exterior EU bogeyman.

so maybe these people aren't coir constituency either but COIR hit on the right word to use, conscription because it reflects women's and parents fears more then faraway conflicts that the PANA and the SWP talk about, so coir partly won it on SF,SP, PANA and SWP's issues with FF and FG voters.

that and uncertainty, distrust and immigration.

insert 'sons and daughters' and male parents where appropriate

Lisbon referendum results 3d map

2008-06-12T08:29:00.000-07:00

Trying to see if its worth putting this in 3d and how best to visualize the votes. At the moment it hard to see the difference in yes and no. ETA June 13th. I've gotten the results for Lisbon treaty and added them to many eyes that I described in my previous post. Lisbon Treaty 2008 Visualisations

With the help of sgrillo's GE-Graph

~~The google earth in browser API is quite heavy so lets try another new thing from google, static maps. With the help of Peel me a grape coder blog~~

Nahh that work either starting map as ordinary sat view with earth browser option.

Updated with Lisbon 2008 referendum results: NO % constituency.

If you don't see any 3d maps you need a quick download and read of requirements of the google earth in browser plug-in Direct download

Updated with Lisbon 2008 referendum results: Yes % by constituency.

Results from Referendum Commission.
electionsireland.org

Compare with displays of results by rte.ie
ireland.com.

What I like about google maps is that you can it use to produce 2d maps of good quality and variation too. No need to redo in flash.

Many Eyes Visualisations of Ireland

2008-06-10T10:37:00.000-07:00

I've been looking for ways to display Ireland election or referendum results dynamically live interested in visualisations and mapping of info and web 2.0 here are the two combined, Many Eyes an Visual Communication Lab IBM research project.

Anybody can upload data sets from various sources and use the visualisation models to visualise the date in various ways from graph to word clouds to heat maps.

Somebody called Colm has upload and visualised many interesting data about population, houses, politics and GAA.

The Shifting of Ireland's Population to Dublin

A Data Set of Population by County

Compare Bertie election 2007 acceptance speech and his resignation speech a year later (switch between 1 or 2 words on the Many Eyes sites).

Its a pity it doesn't have Irish electoral constituencies of other administrative districts if any has the shapefiles for them please add them.

Google had visualisation API for heat maps now to but only maps and recognises individual countries or administrative areas at the moment as far as I can see.

Im going to see if i find or add Ireland administrative boundary geonames.

Why move Dublin port to Bremore?

2008-06-04T04:20:00.000-07:00

2009 Update
Added Details of port zone extension.
port-development-to-take-ships-twice-current-size

Application only available in police station under supervision?

Indymedia Bremore next to be destroyed. Background Info 2009
Port threat to passage tombs Irish Times FMcD
Major parts of new port to be built in Meath

Why would you take away a cities main purpose?

2008
Tara Foundation video

Photos
http://www.panoramio.com/user/743400
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/673880
Bremore on panoramio
Archaeology
Archaeologist raises fears over new port site
National Monument map viewer
Hidden artefacts at Bremore: RTE Nationwide
The Dublin Port Debacle
tomb
http://www.meathchronicle.ie/news/roundup/articles/2008/03/29/23872 megalithomania.com
ancient-site-may-delay-bremore-port
Ancient site may delay Bremore port

Drogheda Port
http://www.droghedaport.ie/cms/publish/port_generalinfo.shtml
merchants wharf
http://www.droghedaport.ie/cms/publish/article_99.shtml
http://www.droghedaport.ie/cms/publish/article_231.shtml http://www.irishtrucker.com/articles/2005/january/drogheda.asp

Bremore Port
strategic infrastructure bill
Drogheda port brochure for Bremore
http://www.bremoreport.com/
http://www.irishexporters.ie/BremoreInvestment.shtml
http://balbrigganchamber.ie/latest-news/BremorePort.php
Balbriggan
port-plans-may-leave-balbriggan-in-shadow
Gormanstown

Rezoned Land map(pdf)

Fingal Council
http://www.fingalcoco.ie/minutes/meeting_doc.aspx?id=16209
Meath Council

Dublin Port
Gov report on future of dublin port http://www.newheartfordublin.ie/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamax 12m
port depths
bremore 10.5?
dublin 12
drogheda - tom roes 6.5m
cork 12
bantry 23
Shannon Foynes Port 17

george owen tara foundation youtube balbriggan.net etc

sean dublin loftus, port extension

Microsoft live Mapcruncher and birdseye view let down by aerial maps

2008-05-20T00:26:00.000-07:00

Mircrosoft has added a birdseye view to micrsoft maps for parts of Ireland,they are amazing but its strange how their aerial/sat maps are _awful_, they seem to have skipped a process and gone for the four angled birdseye views, but you might not think to look at the excellent quality birdseye view for central Dublin after seeing the quality of their aerial maps...

I use flashearth to compare or just go to googlemaps or Live maps

Here are the brilliant birdseye view of Dublin which you can turn to see from four different angles(only two angles further out from city centres).(Click images to open maps).

Liberty Hall and customs house in Googlemaps.

This is how far in I can view Dublin city center! in MS maps.live.com

The problem is it makes it quite difficult to add overlay with mapcruncher(as I explain below).

Microsoft Mapcruncher
Microsoft Live version of Googleearth and Googlemaps/mymaps, its been around for a while but is still in beta and of limited use with low resolution images for maps.live.com for Ireland.

You have to download a small program and then find the area of interest on the map then load the overlay image and match points in the two images so Microsoft knows where to overlay it and account for curvature of the earth and terrain etc.(This with Ireland's low resolution images which disappear if you try to zoom in too far).

You click render, it then splits the top image into tiles to overlay on the server maps (which seems unnecessary on small maps?). You need a web space where you can upload multiple folders and files optimally your own web domain.

Here I overlayed the current image of Dublin airport with what it will look like when the second runway is built.(Source)

See the map; Live maps: New runway for Dublin Airport Mapcrunch

Googlemaps Mapplets
Google have added photos and videos as direct options to overlay on googlemaps, so you can just view and area and see corresponding photos from flickr,panoramio etc, so you view photos like

or perhaps zoom into Croke park

and see videos taken by somebody (badly on their mobile phone) of some past-it rock band or even GAA if that's your sort of thing.

PS. A Canal Bank Walk by kregori

Video of the outer ring of Rath Lugh:Tara

2008-05-10T07:06:00.000-07:00

The outer Ring of Rath Lugh

See more videos of the Tara protectors.

Arrogant Tara archaeologists treat public like they are stupid

2008-05-08T22:27:00.000-07:00

In an previous blog post I complained how a digital reconstruction of the Lismullin henge at Tara, the site of which was being controversially destroyed for the construction of the M3 Motorway, was being withheld because...

Virtual images will not be made publicly available for the moment as the high quality of the computer generated images may lead to misconceptions as to what actually exists at Lismullin.

Well here are the images.

Wow.

Its clear the images were withheld because it would have given a visual aid, strengthening the case by the activist that the Tara valley was full of ancient sites, and whether or not much remained of the upstanding structures at this henge in a hollow showed how it was the landscape itself that was important and that should be preserved along with the central monument at Tara.

In June 2007 John Gormley told the Dáil he would release the file in the near future "to ensure the highest levels of transparency and accountability".. The reconstruction were first made in mid 2007 nits now mid 2008, so Gormley's idea of transparency is release vital images a year late.

The massive site with the post holes marked in the foregound. More images of the exposed site

A description

The site is a large (c.80m diameter) circular enclosure formed of a double row or ring of stakeholes. The two rows are 2m apart. The stakeholes are small in diameter (c.10-15cm) and evenly spaced (c.60cm apart) perhaps suggesting post and wattle construction. The enclosure appears to have an entrance in the east. A smaller enclosure c.16m in diameter formed of similarly closely spaced postholes (c.25cm diameter) is positioned centrally within the large enclosure. There are two radial rows of postholes forming a corridor between the entrance of the outer and inner enclosures. In addition there are what appear to be two slot trenches between the end of the corridor and the entrance of the inner enclosure
The enclosure is situated at the centre of a natural geomorphological hollow surrounded by a ridge of higher ground which overlooks all sides of the monument, which in turn is surrounded by lower ground.

Anyway the last camp has been evicted from the area Tara Vigil Camp Being Evicted with some violence by the private security construction company and police. Further reports from the Tara Pixie.

More info on Lismullin.

Delicate site destroyed when NRA archaeologist removed all the top soil off it

M3/NRA reports. Inlcuding photos of the site before during processing(pdf). and Full report on Lismullin excavations with line drawings(pdf)(html copy)

Dept of Environment releases on Lismullin etc

It doesn't seem like(to my amateur eyes) they used a height map to show Lismullin's position in the hollow of the landscape does it?

Article on Lismullin by Joe Fenwick
On the Significance of Lismullin Archaeological Method and Theory and the M3 by Dr Ronald Hicks.

Comparison images from Sacred Ireland

M3 gets green light through Lismullin site

test tagged rss feed for irish atheist

2008-04-29T10:25:00.000-07:00

if you follow my ramblings here http://www.atheist.ie/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=11864#11864 (playlist are cool but,i don't want to embed every video i watch onto a website!! i could add my favourites but i want to add amny peoples favourites and you can't really create a shared playlist apart from in a group and you can't create a playlist of videos added to a group or embed them :/ ) im trying to find a way to list videos of irish atheists or videos recommended by irish atheist on a website, embed... one seems to be able embed a list of videos you've watched or list by keyword but 'irish atheist' throws up too much rubbish, if people specifically wanted to add their videos they could add an, opt-in, addmetoirishatheist tag on their videos. and then create a feed which searches for that unique tag. which results in this, (which might possibly be added to atheist.ie front page, if the owner want to) http://www.freewebs.com/dublinstreams/a2partyoutubefeedexample.html but there's still no way to embed a list of recommended videos via group... :/ http://www.youtube.com/group/irishatheists a group is fine, i guess, but i wanted something more automatic and something you can integrate into a website well i got it working for opt in tagging youtube video list, now test of opt in tagging blog posts by adding addmyblogtoirishatheist as a tag

New O'Connell Street Development

2008-04-24T20:14:00.000-07:00

ETA Photos of the wooden models at archiseek. And views of Moore Street tour I posted about on Archseek, keep following the O'Connell street sorry there.

Finally after years of legal wrangling and speculation and deliberate dereliction of our national main street plans have been revealed of new mall for O'Connell street. 'Dublin Central'

RTE: The plans cover a 5.5-acre area known as Dublin Central which stretches from O'Connell Street to Moore Street and from Henry Street to Parnell Street.

See Irish Times:€1.2bn mall scheme to transform O'Connell Street area and Property Week:€1.25bn Dublin mixed-use scheme planned for details.

Another Irish Times article: €180m spent assembling 'Dublin Central' site describes how they want about buying all the building on face and behind O'Connell Street, Henry Street, Moore Street and Parnell Street.

Chartered Land are the developers who built the new Dundrum Town Centre, the refurbished Ilac Centre and Grand Canal Square and South King Centre.

New Street Layout in Green
Malls in Blue

I wanted to see how the area would look with the new streets of the Dublin Central and Arnotts development together.

Heres a Google Earth Version and a Googlemaps version. You download the Googleearth Version or view it in

Googlemaps and save it to your 'mymaps' and collaborate and add info.

And a microsoft live maps birdeye view to

to follow the walking routes through the proposed development of the streets behind O'Connell street.

Where would be without Architecture Ireland site. It has details of the Arnotts Northern Quarter development and new streets and there are also details of the Original Arnotts buildings. HKR Architects are the site developers for the 'Northern Quarter'.

Somebody has created an interesting tour of Moore street. Here's how it looks in live maps with bird's eye view.

See it in googlemaps

I can't find where you enter the kml's address so I just add it to the url in the address bar after "http://maps.live.com/?mapurl="

More Google Sketchup Buildings for Dublin

I was looking for 3D Google Sketchup buildings for Dublin I had remembered that a few were made years, but was always surprised with google having its EU headquarters here that there is not more google things for Dublin, but I found the old collection of buildings but I also found new one been worked on currently under the Dublin google Sketchup collection.I know there a good mock up of Dublin in second life, and I've seen part of Dublin recreated in 3D in an old TCD graphics department and there are plans to do a new dynamic one, but apart from laziness I figure that I never really attempted to add my own because like the TCD projects its already been done somewhere its just not put up on google.

Dublin Buildings by Domhnall

An outfit called Inshore surveys have as part of business demo show a number of well made models of dublin buildings. and also a animated preview of windmills in Sligo

Also partially complete Dublin Airport

Corrib Gas Rossport Google Map

2008-04-19T14:50:00.000-07:00

I started this map a year ago or more but the area on googleearth wasn't high res enough and was too distorted to overlays maps, more of the area is covered now but not all of it, but I used other sources of maps to mark things. I consider it just a draft now but needed to get it up.

Corrib Gas Embed Map more up-to-date.

I want everything relevant to the issue on the map so please correct and add things. by emailing me or using googlemaps to make new placemarks.

For a primer on the Corrib Gas Project and protests go to wikipedia article on the issue

Need an overlay of the terminal and it place in the former Coillte lands.

Google Earth or Googlemap version - Refined and updated version April 08

Sources

http://www.shelltosea.com
http://www.mayogsinfo.com
http://www.publicinquiry.ie/pdf/Fiosru_2_HI_RES_Final.pdf
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/83016
http://www.archaeology.ie
http://www.npws.ie
http://www.corribgas.com
http://www.corribgaspipeline.com/
http://www.mayococo.ie/en/News/GasTerminal/
http://www.offshore-technology.com/projects/corrib/
http://struggle.ws/rsc/
Shell in Ireland - Corrib Natural Gas http://bymnews.com/news/newsDetails.php?id=22299
Ireland Gov Marine Notices

Separated religious teaching in schools, it might sound like the only good compromise but it doesn't work.

2008-04-16T14:12:00.000-07:00

After the notion that the church could have a veto on each teacher in a primary school full of many different religions was rejected (that I blogged about previously) the debate moved on to how it will be actually thought in the new schools and the consensus among the religious and the mainstream was that children could be separated during the school day and guest clergy could teach each religion denominationally rather then teaching an overview of religion and ethics to all students at the same time.

David Quinn (Indo's religious hack) writes of three options

As to the second question, how should religion be taught, there are three basic options. One is to teach the children their own religion separately and during school hours. The second is to teach them a generic religion course, and the third is to teach them their separate religions outside of school time, but on the school premises.

And says he rejects the third and writes that the second is the only option...

So it looks like there is little practical alternative to teaching the various religions to the various sets of children during school hours.

Yet in the very same paper Educate Together CEO Paul Rowe refutes this and actually gives example of how when ET's started they were forced to do in-school separate religion teaching and he explains it just didn't work...

In some of our early schools we were compelled to adopt an approach similar to that being proposed in this pilot. It proved to be educationally unsound and led to difficult and complex negotiations that have resulted in the current Educate Together model in which children are not segregated according to religion within the statutory school day. In contrast, the VEC pilot as announced involves the compulsory registration and separation of children from the age of 4 according to their parents’ religion. Such practices have been shown to be socially divisive, unethical and educationally flawed. In a primary school class, they critically impinge on the socialisation of children and are counter-productive to the aim of preparing young people for a society in which religious discrimination is illegal.

He expands on the ad hoc setting up of here new VECs on the ET website and points out the DQ third option is the only workable option they found in practice.

A COI priest writes how segregated teaching of multiple religious would be chaos and describes the practical difficulties in his experience of it at a secondary VEC school...

Firstly, the pupils were often from different classes, so while in some cases the Protestant pupils would be receiving religious instruction at the same time as the Roman Catholics, in other cases they would be missing a maths, Irish or English class...

Although there are some differences between the teaching of secondary and primary we must keep in mind.

John Carr general secretay of INTO is personally in favour of non-denominational teaching but hasn't been clear enough enough on this issue as a representative of the teachers.

In this recent RTE interview he asked three times did he want religion though outside of school hours and he didn't proper answer. In 2007 he said...

Mr Carr said the INTO favoured a broad religious education programme for all schools on, perhaps, four days a week, with the various churches coming in on the fifth day to "add their own stamp", in accordance with parental wishes

In a another recent Irish Times article he fudges again

Separate religious teaching during school is just not practical and it comes back the issue that a more secular system suits most parents and is most social and cost efficient.

This post is collation of my and other thoughts and info from discussions on atheist.ie and on Boards.ie PS. It interesting to note that the Church of Ireland as a minority is happy to continue teaching COI primary schools kids religion outside of schools hours at Sunday schools etc.

Irish GeoRSS News feed: YahooPipes vs GoogleMaps

2008-04-13T02:09:00.000-07:00

Testing to see if I can embed a geoannotated news rss feed into my blog, and testing the difference between Yahoopipes version and Googlemaps version on an Irish breaking news feed.

Feck yahoo pipes doesnt offer embedding for free yet, I'll should just try georss and yahoo map api, hmm need a server access for that, sure everybody outputs the result to google maps anyway. Here's what a Yahoo pipes map looks like Irish Examiner breaking geonews Yahoo pipe

Back to google maps thanks to nearby.org.uk and lots of detailed but basic how-tos at Mike at Blackpool Community Church Javascript Team!?.

okay so got that working its pretty simple but making it usable for an Irish website its what I want to do, so I can put it in the corner and a small list of the stories below from the same rss feed and be able to click those links with a # tag and have a small icon where you can zoom down to street level which would make it useful for local blogs.I figure out how to put a link in the infowindow directly to the story. So it doesn't work very well, but there are different versions and if you go to georss homepage you can add the locations as they come up so you can improve its hit rate yourself. There are also javascript api that allow for infowindow to display outside the map so you don't have to scroll to read it etc.

Here's a few attempts at refinement A GeoRSSS plus clickable sidebar list

Wholesale education reform Ireland

2008-03-25T22:16:00.000-07:00

RTE teachers union conference round-up

Hearing that teacher union conference season was coming up I checked the ASTI,INTO and TUI websites for motions to conference, there are few there but no mention of religion or wholesale education reform.

We had to depend on David Quinn and John Walshe to inject and reform religion into the conferences.

Bishops seek religion veto on teachers in new schools

Parents demand right to pick schools for children

David Quinn is desperately trying to create a particular conflict between state and parents that doesn't exist. I wrote more about it here when he brought it up a second time his his drivel column. The RED C poll he bought says 48% percent don't want catholic schools, he claims that 47% want catholic run schools but I doubt they want to pay for them all themselves, thus the state takes the taxes and redistributes the money in a more equatable way including setting up secular schools that suit most people.

In the RTE interview the bishop says he wants church vetted catholic teachers to teach Catholicism to primary school children during the school day, but as the interview points out as opposed to secondary schools there's only one teacher per class in primary school,so are they suggesting they've had to employ a Jewish Muslim orthodox, bahai, Hindu, Baptist, protestant teacher for each school? but hey it'llprobably end being Catholic teacher won't it.

Church Vetting
“When a post is advertised for a teacher of religion, an interview board is set up, usually made up of five people. If the post is for a teacher of religious education, the patron has a right to have one nominee on the board. That is not a veto but an input” he said.
How could this possibly work in a diverse school?

Mary Hanafin the Minster for Education and the church keep saying they want to provide schools that cater for every creed but its clear that she and the Bishop are continuing to presume privilege for Catholicism in Irish schools.

Also John Carr of INTO is asked 3 times in the RTE interview whether denominational religion should be taught during the compulsory school day in the new style VEC's or outside like ET schools, he never answers clearly either way.

The teachers have chosen to raise one important issue that is which would be benefit to them and students the reneging on promised class sizes reductions.

But where's is the call from the unions for wholesale education reform, tinkering around the edges won't solve the problems. Some might say that there is more important things in schooling in Ireland then arguing about the half-hearted religious education they get nowadays but so many of the problems stem from the abdication of responsibility by the state. From water charges (cos the schools are private rather the public buildings) to underfunding, to employment contracts, BOMs, liability, to lack of schools for new populations etc, etc.

Forum to study how primary schools are managed

So Hanafin has announced a one day forum to review management structures...,Does she think they have it sorted in a couple of hours?

Where are the green and white papers, the Oireachtas committees, the Bills of legislation being drafted debated in the Seanad and Dail the public meetings the manifesto proposals for local elections?

The pilot VEC schools are moving ahead because of the desperate need and none lack of specific legislation on this shouldn't delay them but where is the democratic and political processes that are needed to change this twisted system!?

As an knowledgeable commentator says in reference to lazy claim in the Indo editorial

Quote: "Even atheists acknowledge the splendid role played by the Irish Catholic Church in education over the decades."

Quote: Ahem, I'm an atheist and I object to that outrageous statement. The Irish national school system was originally setup to be non-denominational and treat all children as equals. It was gradually taken over by the various churches, including the catholic church. This was not out of charity, but to monopolise education to ensure that undesirable ideas, like women's liberation, were not taught.
Posted by Kevin Byrne

There still this inexplicable softness towards the spiteful Hanafin, Sean Moloney said on Newstalk that education system was a 'victim of its own success' which is similar to how Frank Fahey said Irish traffics jams were a 'sign of success'?. No they are sign of lack of forward planning, while the Irish education system does seem to be capable of teaching most how to read and write and add its creaking at the seems for decades.

Now Hanafin tells us there an economic downturn and there is not as much money available while some schools have probably been waiting (in prefabs) for improvements during the 10 year boom and before it.

Corrib Gas embed map

2008-03-23T21:39:00.000-07:00

Tara: Rath Lugh tunnel built ,what you do when they won't admit they're wrong.

2008-03-07T22:09:00.000-08:00

Watch this great video of the creative defenders of Tara, the stupid aggressive contractors and the clueless colluding police.

This worker doesn't get paid to try and run people over so what is he doing?

Gardai turn their heads and walk away every time contractors get rough with the protestors

What are is digger doing, marking its territory?

Tunnel

Between CPO lines till legal injunction is heard, diversity of tactics in action

Love the bit where the police women says go to the boundary and immediately regrets it because there is chorus of people asking, where is the boundary? shows us the boundary!, they won't show the maps, the lines have been changed so many times, shows us the line and we might get behind it.

Situation update About 8.30am two men arrived and served a trespass notice on the Rath Lugh camp asking them to vacate immediately. Coillte responded saying that the land had been CPO'd and that it was now the property of MCC/NRA. However, campaigners who had visited the Land Registry Office at Navan discovered that the NRA were trying to extend the original CPO line but that the extra land was still in the name of the Coilte and that the CPO transfer had not yet taken place.

I can't believe ACS Ltd surveyed the motorway based on maps they knew and the department knew may be inaccurate, they never double checked, and they sent that to the EIS report, a report that the Minister of Transport Dempsey keeps pointing too, Well the survey is full of errors which they now admit, reason enough to be considered a material change in circumstances, we keep telling them and keep ignoring it,so how do you make somebody listen,(build a tunnel?) and the spin it by saying preservation which really means facilitation of the motorway. See Rath Lugh finally on a map

http://www.heritagedata.ie/en/NationalMonuments/

Note that because of errors in the locational information for sites in the Record of Monuments and Places we are withdrawing this information from this website

Here admits they got a monument position wrong http://groups.yahoo.com/group/savetara/message/2954

I have been asked by Mr. John Gormley, T.D., Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government to refer further to your recent correspondence in relation to Rath Lugh.
I should point out that the location of the monument at Rath Lugh is shown incorrectly on the Record of Monuments and Places (RMP) map. The location is, in fact, closer to the M3 than shown. Earlier this year, following discussions with the Department and the National Museum of Ireland, the NRA and Meath County Council commissioned a detailed topographic survey in order to confirm its precise location in relation the M3. The survey confirmed that the monument is approximately 20m east of the motorway fence line. Special measures are being put in place to ensure that the monument is not under-mined or endangered in any way during construction or when the road comes into operation.
In light of the above, the previous temporary fence line on the Lands Made Available boundary has been removed and a new temporary fence line has been erected approximately 10m inside the Lands Made Available boundary and surrounding the esker base. The monument, then, will be over 30m from the motorway carriageway.
Yours sincerely,
___________ Eddie Kiernan, Private Secretary

A reprint of mail I wrote showing the arrogant attitude of archaeologist both for and against the road to the general public.

Virtual reconstruction of the upstanding structures of Lismullin Henge being withheld from the public.

I don't know when these files were put up but I only read them now I amazed to discover that a image of what Lismullin would have looked like when used has been created but witheld from the public. http://www.environ.ie/en/Publications/Heritage/NationalMonuments/

Minutes of 11 October 2007 (doc, 84 kb) http://www.environ.ie/en/Publications/Heritage/NationalMonuments/FileDownLoad,16345,en.doc

Virtual imaging RS circulated images of what the upstanding enclosure might have looked like.

The chairman was concerned that the computer generated images looked so realistic that they could be mistaken for photographs of actual upstanding features. Because we're stupid or what???? It was agreed that there was a need to show what is actually there alongside what might have been there in the past. GC suggested that the actual photos be shown together with the reconstruction images and that the captions should be very clear as to the nature of the images.

CN pointed out that such reconstructions were a valid archaeological tool but suggested that the colours be changed to make the reconstruction obvious. He also asked that the spoil heaps be taken out and that, if possible, the reconstruction images should show the funnel entrance and passageway from the outer to the inner enclosure.

RS said that he would amend the images and circulate to the committee again before making them publicly available.

Minutes of 18 September 2007 (doc, 92 kb)

http://www.environ.ie/en/Publications/Heritage/NationalMonuments/FileDownLoad,16346,en.doc

Virtual imaging Further images will be circulated to group. Virtual images will not be made publicly available for the moment as the high quality of the computer generated images may lead to misconceptions as to what actually exists at Lismullin.

We know what remains are just shadows of wooden post and ditches and some small artefacts, we'd still like to see what it looks like, I thought this road archaeology was for Ireland's educational benefit and Gormely promised to be transparent but constantly with Lismullin etc they have held back information until its too late. They continue to suggest that Conor Newman recommended destroying Lismullin when they simply ignored his expert advice not to route the motorway through the value which would has avoided the need to dig it up. We know that Lismullim is just one example of why the road shoudn't have been routed through here. Its not the be and all of the campaign. Maybe they won't release the images because they know how effective it would be to show the activity of the Tara area.

Its a pity that there isn't anyone who could review these docs and make presentation on them. The archaeologist both against and for the motorway route don't seem to be very willing to explains things to the public.

Other info. from earlier meetings

Lismullin Advisory Committee Meeting – 5 September 2007 http://www.environ.ie/en/Publications/Heritage/NationalMonuments/FileDownLoad,16347,en.doc

Dr. Wallace and Mr. Newman re-stated their views that the souterrain was a national monument because of its location and its associative value with Tara (see updated minutes of previous meeting) but that it could not be preserved in-situ given the constraints of the current route.

The autocad set of the technical drawings used by the engineers for the briefing are to be sent to the chairman as soon as possible for circulation to the committee. Mr Newman wishes to consider further the curvature of the road in the area. It was agreed that there is still time to consider these issues, as there will be no engineering works in this area for quite a while.

The issue of using virtual images to show what might have existed at Lismullin in the past was discussed. The chairman asked to see the existing virtual images (prepared by NRA) and Mr. Swan agreed to circulate them to the members of the committee. The potential use of virtual images will be considered further at the next meeting.

Mr. Cooney and Mr. Newman raised the wider issue of the way in which national monuments are designated as such under existing legislation. Mr. Duffy outlined the present position which is, essentially, that statutory protection as national monuments only extends to national monuments – as defined under the Acts – which are in the ownership or guardianship of the Minister or a Local Authority or in respect of which a preservation order is in force. The committee agreed that the issue of designation as a national monument and proper professional assessment of what is a national monument needs to be addressed in the proposed review of policy and practice in relation to archaeological protection generally.

Great letter handed to Gormely

To Minister John Gormley, via Cllr. Michael Regan.
For your Urgent Consideration.
Dear Minister
We received with great welcome the news that you intend to put a Permanent Protection Order on Rath Lugh in the Tara/Skryne Valley. We are writing now in regard to the present situation there.
The area has been endangered by recent activity by Siac Ferrovial whereby heavy machinery is regularly encroaching upon the esker, as recently as today.
The NRA have publicly admitted that their Ordnance Survey maps and co-ordinates are wrong. Due to the presence of heavy machinery, concerns are increasing that irreversible damage will incur should it be allowed to continue.
Siac Ferrovial are trying to proceed and make claim to the land that has been proven to be incorrectly defined. There will be no point to a Permanent Protection Order if there is nothing left to protect.
We now appeal to you to come and see for yourself first hand what is actually happening at Rath Lugh.
Without a complete independent archeological report and independent survey of the Rath Lugh complex, the integrity of Rath Lugh will be destroyed beyond repair. The PPO needs to be implemented without delay.
In the meantime, the Temporary Protecion Order is being challenged at best, flouted at worst. A complete stoppage of all works there must be implemented until the survey can be completed and correct boundary lines established.
Please do not hesitate at this critical time. We beseech you to use your power to ensure that the order is respected. Not just the area covered by the TPO, but the ENTIRE Monument needs to be preserved without delay.

Save Tara vs M3 protest update

2008-01-31T09:26:00.000-08:00

The scene of ???struction at Soldiers Hill Meath.

I haven't been following the issue at Tara/M3 very much lately it just seems doomed (M3 route likely to open ahead of 2010 deadline), although when people reference the nature reserve in California that had roads and lamp posts installed yet was saved from development it does hearten me, as does the video of people still disrupting the work of the construction sites.

See in this video how to handle constructions workers who misdirect their aggression.(Skip to 13 mins).

Ardsallagh Toestown Blockade

You get paid either way so why are you trying to run me down, huh?

Google Map API Crib links

2008-01-29T11:41:00.000-08:00

A list of links how-to's and example I used to make my Tara landscape Google map APIs( as a reference for me). Tara Hill Skryne Valley Google Map

Made possible mainly by GeoXml and labeledmarker examples of which I found at Googlemapsbooks.com and some examples at uwmike.com/maps/ and lots of detailed basic howto at Mike at Blackpool Community Church Javascript Team!? Also Mapki API reference page and the Google map API and Google Map API discusion groups

Del.ico.us is good way to find examples by searching the bookmarks of people who bookmarked the same thing as you

Googlemap infowindows are functional but clunky.

Yahoo Pipes GeoNews Ireland

2008-01-28T08:28:00.000-08:00

testing to see if I can embed a geoannotated news rss feed into my blog Irish Examiner breakingnews Yahoo Geopipe feck yahoo pipes doesnt offer embedding(although I could put it in an frame), I'll should just try georss and yahoo map api, hmm need a server access for that, sure everybody outputs the result to googlem maps anyway.

Back to google maps thanks to nearby.org.uk

okay so got that working its pretty simple but making it usable for an Irish website its what I want to do, so I can put it in the corner and a small list of ths stories below from the same rss feed and be able to click those links with a # tag and have a small icon where you can some down to street level which would make it useful for local blogs.Anyone know how to do that?

Dublin Electoral Constituency Google map

2008-01-26T05:00:00.000-08:00

Anyone coming to my blog looking for Dail constituencies, I don't have em.

The official Constituency Commission has images and detailed reports on the boundaries and changes.

Go here for the 2012 boundaries in google-kml http://www.tallyroom.com.au/maps (freeif credited to Ben Raue ) or here for more detailed ones with Electoral (sub) Divisions http://icampaigned.com/blog/dail-constituency-maps/ (not free) or go Ordnance Survey Ireland for commercial use files.

Of course I think digital boundaries files of useful detail should be information should be free for non-commercial reuse.

I had traced on the Dublin city and County Electoral commission for 2004 and made it available on bbs.keyhole.com but the Electoral Commission put out a report and new maps for 2012.

Dublin County Constituency (draft v2.0) and for Google Earth program and for Googlemaps to view in your browser

A lot of outer Dublin wasn't very clear in GE but they updated some areas like the Dublin mountains so I can trace the border more accurately, but not the very northwest of county Dublin.

Just the Dublin City Electoral Constituency (draft v2.0) for Google Earth program and for Googlemap to view in your browser.

So I've updated them here I consider it still a draft until more eyes have been on it to spot any mistakes I may have made. I had hesitated on publicising them more because I thought maybe bad maps are worse then no maps. But along as have caveats about their accuracy people may still find them useful. At some point I saved an old map over a newer ones I had double checked which so I wasn't sure which I had double checked which browned me off on the whole thing. As new higher resolution photos of Dublin appear the lines no longer match exactly...:/ And the commission maps doesn't stretch and match over the GE satellite image either. I don't think they'll ever be perfect.

I'll add links descriptions, TD's, election result and other constituency stats.

2004 Dublin City and County Constituency Commission polygons and map overlay draft 2004

The Index of streets of the electoral register for Dublin City might be helpful to you, via Vocal Voter.
Dail at wikipedia Politics.ie Dail wiki Boundaries at electionsireland.org South Dublin

View Larger Map

PS. The creator of itison.tv has pointed there the OSI have new web service called Smartmaps He shows us some different views of Tara, Rath Lugh and Lismullin. There have couple of different types of maps you can buy but you can't seem to preview them. Also strangely there are earlier maps then the ones at the NPWS with maps from ~2003 that shows the scar of the M3 going through Tara, these aerial photos are very different a step clearer and brighter feel 70's.

PPS. Eirepreneur continues to jump start Irish uses of new mapping apps by giving an example of a collaborate google mymap, he has started one on wifi hotspots. I hope to find a project to create my own and get people involved. I was wondering would it be efficient to use this collaborative method to create maps for the constituencies for the rest of Ireland and the European and local elections, but I don't know whether hand traced maps data would eventually be useful for anybody to use and mash up to display other information. Any other ideas for useful Irish collaborative maps?

Catholics called to Cudgel Secularists by Cardinal Brady

2008-01-07T21:24:00.000-08:00

Cardinal calls on Catholics to fight against secularism. By Johnny O`Hanlon, in Rome.

NEWLY elected Cardinal, Archbishop Sean Brady, called on Catholics to "take up the cudgels against secularism" in Ireland when he informally addressed the guests at a reception at the Irish College in Rome on Monday evening.

Well if you want to talk aggressiveness how about this sort of talk from a bishop! :)

As I said before the bishops are conflating materialism with secularism again. They might be two noted trends of the modern era but I don't see the direct connection between them. It such a big subject I haven't managed to channel my anger at his ill-considered speeches to into a blog entry that would sum up the issue, it is admittedly hard to define secularisms place in society (without using words such as values), I have started to correct people when they use the word freedom when they mean capitalism but maybe secularism is a counterpart of capitalism although I personally would consider secularism as having more value to a society then capitalism.

Although heres an interesting counterpoint to my opinion on commercialism.

Bertie Ahern talked in the Dail about 'aggressive secularism'. Yet all I see is secularism 101, its this church which is aggressivly trying to keep its privileged position.

The bishops say the word secularism far more then they say materialism, although they are taking the word as secular meaning the secular and the profane rather then secularism as in creating society neutral to religion.

Here are some examples of recent comments from the bishops, where they compare secularists with...drug addicts,violence, killings, alcoholics, convicts, vain celebrities...

Being an Irish celebrity can-be-dangerous-warns-bishop Bishop of Limerick Donal Murray waffles.

Preaching in Christchurch Cathedral, Dr Neill reminded the congregation that it was not only the socially deprived who were vulnerable. "Those who have lost all sense of direction and meaning in life, in a society focused on wealth creation and instant gratification, are extremely vulnerable," he said.

"The drug culture that has recently come to public attention is indeed about addiction, but it is also about wealth, instant self-gratification and criminal activity including mindless violence and murder.

Unfortunately we have to depend on the Pope to actually name capitalism rather then just secularism as a threat. Pope Speech in Brazil For some reason the Bishop can't manage to say the word capitalism in a critical manner? The Pope Denounces Capitalism and Marxism

The headlines is Brady says Ireland's secular project has failed Welcoming economic growth in the Republic as "a fantastic and very welcome achievement", he warned of "becoming intoxicated with it" as there was "growing concern about evidence of a gradual breakdown in social cohesion". This arose from "an emphasis on the happiness of the individual, particularly of the individual as a consumer".

This evidence included a "dramatic increase in the levels of violent crime", with "increasing use of illegal drugs", "the phenomenon of gangland killings", and the fact that "our young people have some of the highest levels of alcohol addiction in Europe". The most tragic evidence was "the unprecedented levels of suicide, notably among the young".

There was clear evidence that "many people are getting tired of the emptiness and stress of a life built predominantly on secular and consumerist values".

He is suggesting secularism can't battle greed as well as catholicism can. But as always secularism isn't trying put itself in that position, I don't know what is. Innate commonsense, considered thought and mutual aid perhaps.

Archbishop: We're addicted to wealth and shallow celebrities

John O'Shea, supposed humanitarian again calls for military intervention first.

2008-01-04T12:46:00.000-08:00

John O'Shea goes off on another solo run and rather then call for political action, calls for military intervention. Ahern dismisses calls for EU intervention in Kenya.

There no statement on the goal website about advocating this so again it was during one of his ill-considered rants on the radio. that he asks where are the EU Battlegroups, NATO, or the UN peace-keepers?

ETA: I see he got a letter into the Irish Times too saying the same, it almost automatic at this stage the same letters are published from him every other week.

Why is the violence and deaths in Kenya the problem and fault of the EU? Is it not for stablishment there to try to calm first. All the international countries, AU, EU, US, are urging a political solution and sending political envoys meanwhile John O'Shea calls for troops! Even if he just trying to make some sort of rhetorical point, its still idiotic and dangerous talk.

Goal was organising for its workers and their families to leave Kenya. While Trocaire and Concern workers are staying put for the moment."(The Concern rep. on RTE Radio describes a calmer situation.) An Irish missionary criticised the pull out as 'imprudent and shameful' and as a betrayal to the displaced Kenyans.

I'm sure the ethic violence in the slums and the burning of houses in the country, as well as the number of deaths in the church etc was very alarming but I can't find anyone else calling for military intervention in one of Africa's most relatively lengthy and stable democracies.

Both sides have accused each other of genocide. It was anti-government people who burnt the church and caused the largest number of deaths, and burned government aligned Kikuyu houses outside the town the deaths in the slums involved police shooting at poor youth and armed gangs taking an opportunity to revolt. It may be tribal, class, political and ethnic violence but no one is trying to wipe out a whole people as in genocide...O'Shea is at least right in saying there are no goodies in this. What would happens if troops went there next week and kept the sides apart, it may spare a number of deaths but it would also solidify the governments position, a government who has been accused of stealing an election.

Although he may well have barely won the election, most of Kibaki's cabinet were not re-elected and he lost a lot of support when a major constitutional referendum in 2005 wasn't passed, he has continued with a split and corrupt government ever since but it doesn't seem that the opposition has overwhelming support either with only a few thousands youths coming out to protest for Odinga's own million man march, even with the fierce repression in Nairobi and live TV cut off you would expect more. I just don't know who's safety he is most concerned for. Although tribal preferences may split loyalties in the police and army, they are trying now to protect those who homes were burned and are clearing the roads to get food moving. I'm not claiming to be an expert on Kenya but I'm just trying to read and write a few things to get a very basic handle on the situation and figure out John O'Shea bizarre behaviour.

Well after watching him on Late Late a while back I tried to figure the guy out. Rogue charity maniac.

Here's a article on Kenya in todays SBP, giving more background on Kenya's corruption, even though he is cited as journalist who has worked for Goal he suggests potential 'empty tourist hotels' are the best leverage the west has, he warns against loose language and he calls military intervention highly unlikely. Maybe he should talk to his boss, but he seems to be just an echo chamber for J'OS, most of articles just quote him and he also seems to be a bit of a bland military fetishist too writing for the International Security Network.

The Eureferendum blog also comments on John O'Shea optimism on the speed of international action.

I had a thought last week until I checked that the Orange Democratic movement opposition was trying to ape the western funded orange revolutionary movements in Georgia in Ukraine especially when I heard Odinga described as a business man, but it actually to do with the symbols used to denote the yes and no sides of the referendum in 2005 for the illiterates in Kenya. It seems Kibaki is still Washington's man.

BTW and PS: Poor Judge of character

John O'Shea shows his lack of judgment again by associating Goal with the most vapid person he could find. After the truly unfortunate death of young Katy French he was among those to praise her beyond her worth.

After she went to see the poverty in Calcutta she claimed to have changed her world view, but clearly had not if we look at her continued flaunting of vulgar wealth and indulgences in alcohol and other substances.

Ms French had also recently visited Calcutta at the request of the Irish charity GOAL, and had left an "indelible impression", according to its chief executive, John O'Shea.

Irish Education: State should take its share of responsibility

2007-12-29T12:39:00.000-08:00

Update Jan 3, 08
Schools will be billed for water but no clearer on funding
Two year delay with flat rate charge gov abdicates responsibility to LA's.

What do we pay our taxes for?

Stat-ist and water bills

Im loathe to write blog posts around articles by David Quinn but there have been a series of articles in the papers recently suggesting the someone, some body somewhere is calling for complete state takeover of schools, yet they never names who these people are.

No politicians and priests just parents.

When the question is framed as, Church or State, many people, especially those of a liberal or secular outlook, will answer "State" every time. Quite apart from their distaste for the Church, the idea that a religious organisation of any stripe should run so many of our schools offends their secular principles.

I commented, when secularists say the state should run schools, they mean state funded via tax, because secularist generally believe in free education via the tax system, taxing at various levels and spending it where its needed. We still think there should be local committees of parents and maybe one or two politicians and priest but not a majority of such. Secularist expect their income tax to cover opening of schools and to pay for the heating and lighting of that school. (He is right to highlight the issue of class, but its not reason not to reduce the catholic monopoly.)

But again in this fawning article about Cardinal Brady David Quinn repeats the falsehood about trying to reduce parental choice by getting the state to take its responsibility in education, when infact currently there is little choice.

Obviously there are too many denominational schools in this country. But reducing their number is not enough for our die-hard secularists who want them reduced to zero. They dream of a system entirely dominated by the State and in which parental choice counts for nothing.

People like him say that there is a constitutional right for parents to choose schools run by religions but with currently with 98% of schools church run the constitution is actually being broken by the current system giving little or no choice to parent to choose secular schools. He obviously hadn't read my comment on his previous article.

When the issue of water charges finally broke onto the front pages another series of articles was written in the never ending public argument between various papers columnists and even between columnist in the same paper. I don't like that Fintan O'Toole has become a columnist now as well but he is the only person writing about these issues consistently and summing up the whole situation. I wonder if F'OT is that aggresive secularist Bertie Ahern was talking about?

A lesson for Primary schools

Imagine, writes Fintan O'Toole , a country so poor that it has no national primary school system. The state doesn't set up schools for children, but leaves the task to parents and local groups.
Teachers and parents spend much of their time trying to collect money for basics like water and heat. We don't have to imagine this country, of course, because - except for the bit about being poor - we live in it. But we are so used to the absurd situation of primary education in Ireland that we forget how crazy it is that one of the most basic tasks of modern states is left to a ramshackle network of over 3,000 private institutions. Maybe we need the even greater absurdity of forcing parents to pay for the water used in the schools their children attend to shock us into realising that we can't go on like this.

Which induced another article attacking the strawman state-ist.

Now, as then, we are being told that the answer to all our problems is more -- much more -- state intervention, a total state takeover of our schools, in fact. The faith of some people in the State is simply touching.

He also suggest the local communities having to fund raise to pay basic bills is good thing as it bring the schools closer to the local community!!

Breda O'Brien wrote a similar article this weekend as well, Funding is core issue for schools, not patronage (reg req). Which it is in the short term, but this problem stems from state abdication of responsibility for education, which she highlights.

The Department of Education and Science acts as if the schools were completely private institutions when it suits it, and at the same time demands exacting educational standards as if they were completely State-run.

but then she says..,

It is suggested that dismantling this system and making the State directly responsible for all schools would solve the problems. This can only be described as a touching, if somewhat puzzling, faith in a state that has proved itself incapable of planning even water charges.

It is suggested. Suggested by who?

So again O'Brien doesn't say who it was that was calling for such a thing, the only call I've heard is for the state to fund the schools fully and for new types of schools with firm state, parental, community and some politicial ( and even some religious) involvement. But I disagree that patronage is not an issue, they are inextricable, its the root of the prob she describes. Her long opinion column then waffles on about, morals muslims French republicans holding back women and schools set up communities (for her read religious communities).

I haven't read are listened to all of the reports on this issue but I haven't seen or heard anyone suggesting this in regard to the water issue or funding in general, or during the recent discussions over new school 'patronage'. Fund the fecking schools!,thankfully both DQ and B'OB say this but also addressed there articles to these state-ist straw men.

Hanafin is still abdicating responsibility while pretending everything is okay or passing the buck and blaming everyone else.

Minister knew of school water crux.

Correspondence seen by the Irish Independent also shows that then-minister Dick Roche offered to pay for water conservation measures in schools to help reduce the bills in October 2006, but the Department of Education did not respond.

In the Dail Bertie Ahern admitted that even though delayed parents will end up paying for water charges and even with water conservation these bills will be in the thousands. RTE report on water. Still no free education.

So what are the principals and teachers and boards of management saying about school funding in relation to water charges...

Cllr Walter Lacey, who has been involved with schools as chairman of the board at Scoil Mhuire Gan Smal in Carlow for a number of years, said it was a well known fact that there was no income or business to be made from schools.

Schools vow to revolt on water charges

“Parents and teachers have had to organise fundraisers to foot the bills for running costs, refurbishments and repairs as it is.”

Principals claim water charges would be the ‘death-knell’ for rural schools
Schools turn to second minister in water row
Hundreds of schools now set-to-seek refunds
Water charges unfair to schools

Sean Cotteral,Director, Irish Primary Principals' Network writes to the Indo Scandal of school water charges

Schools neither manufacture nor sell goods or services for profit, nor register for VAT. Incredibly, schools are the latest soft targets for stealth taxes despite having to continuously fund raise to make up for systematic Government under-funding of day-to-day running costs.

Of course when right wing people talk of choice what they really mean is privatisation, so perhaps what David Quinn is really angling for is privatised schools like the City Academies in the UK where millionaire Evangelical Christians have been able to wow council with their money to build huge highly equipped while impose their religious beliefs on schools Most recently seen in the The New Fundamentalists C4 Dispatches program.

So the new style of patronage will be VEC's. I worry that the VECs will become our city academies when they start doing second level ones, VECs have in their mission statement specifically to produce students for trade and industry... like these city academies.

But Bock calls the Bishop on the hypocracy.

Mairaid traces Hanafins awful track record of grand false promises and refusal to recognise any problems in Irish education.

Tara Hill Skryne Valley Google Map

2007-12-25T08:45:00.000-08:00

The white line marks the planned M3 tolled motorway route the green the existing N3 with the text labels marking points of interest with clickable photos. The yellow lines show the extent of Tara core complex with the red lines indicating defensive earthworks on the western boundary.The blue outline is the Tara hill core with the concentration of monuments. The red outline is the wider Kingship and Landscape of Tara researched by Conor Newman. The purple line is the old railway/alternative route.

New in browser GoogleEarth version of this map. Multiple Googlemaps of Tara and the M3 Motorway