Posted in Irish Middle Class, Irish social history on Aug 7th, 2010 1 Comment »
Not from the Celtic Tiger years, but from 1925, and spoken by this man: the President of the Irish Free State, William Thomas Cosgrave.
It comes from a debate in the Dáil on 1 April 1925 [link here, paragraph 1675].
A few brief lines by way of background and context.
On the eve of the First World War […]
Posted in Irish Economy on Aug 7th, 2010 5 Comments »
Just to follow on from yesterday’s short post, again the same trend of a stall in part-time and casual work levels around the end of last year, the first plateau since the current economic crisis really took off.
Again, a tentative conclusion, but one of the employment trends which was keeping people in work - […]
Posted in Irish Economy on Aug 6th, 2010 No Comments »
I’ve been looking at the quarterly household survey from 2008 to 2010Q1 and the upward trend in short-hours (1 to 29 hrs a week) tapered off at the end of 2009 and was flat until March.
This is a very tentative conclusion, but we know that businesses were putting people on short hours rather than […]
Posted in Irish journalism on Aug 5th, 2010 4 Comments »
Cunt·coph·o·ny - /k^nt’käf’ne/
1. A harsh, discordant mixture of sounds, usually made when a group of Irish media commentators are together
2. The dissonance of self-opinionated shit, dressed up as insight and vomited out in front of the public, amplified through sheer weight of numbers.
3. The opposite of detailed, coherent analysis. The harsh sounds which are voiced […]
Posted in Comedy on Aug 5th, 2010 No Comments »
Finally found an embed-enabled version of one of my favourite Saturday Night Live sketches.
Enjoy.
Posted in Irish journalism, RTE on Aug 5th, 2010 6 Comments »
The Live Register has increased again.
This is what RTE had to say about it.
“The number of people on the Live Register in July climbed by 8,500 to 452,500. The Central Statistics Office said this was the biggest rise in the seasonally adjusted figure for a year. Women accounted for more than half of […]
Posted in Irish social history, Irish Labour History on Aug 4th, 2010 23 Comments »
Not Trevelyan, I’m afraid, but Cumann Na nGaedheal.
I came across the quote today and, well, here’s the background.
In April 1924 the government passed a Housing Act which gave grants of between €60 to €100 per house to speculative builders and to middle class households to help them construct private houses. £250,000 was set aside […]
Posted in Irish Economy on Aug 2nd, 2010 No Comments »
[Photo from Ghosts of the Faithful Departed by David Creedon]
This is a footnote on page 111 of Irish Agricultural Production by Raymond Crotty. Written in 1966, it contains an insight which still hold true.
…the removal of surplus labour by emigration will not result in full employment for the remaining population. The loss of population by […]
Posted in Irish property bubble, fuckwits, Irish journalism, Irish Times on Aug 2nd, 2010 3 Comments »
Negative equity is only a problem if you need to sell your property urgently, either because you can’t make payments or for family reasons. As regards the first motive for those who bought as first-time buyers - the most likely buyers to have 100 per cent mortgages - government plans to abolish stamp duty will […]
Posted in Irish Capitalism, Irish Economy, Irish social history on Aug 1st, 2010 7 Comments »
[Dublin Cattle Market, North Circular Road]**
Sorry for the scrappiness of all of this - the recent posts on what I’m working on and writing at home - but here’s an extract from a report I mentioned last week.
It’s from Ibec Technical Services Corporation, and entitled An Appraisal of Ireland’s Industrial Potentials (New York: Ibec, […]
