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Media

Classy!

by Gerard Cunningham 22 February, 2016

Irish news-radio programming shows a strong anti-tabloid bias in selecting contributors, according to an examination of survey data from the three main broadcasters earlier this year. Journalists interviewed by the stations’ news programmes and participating on panels came overwhelmingly from the Irish Times and Irish Independent during the survey periods, with none at all from the Irish Daily Star, the Sunday World, or the Irish Sun. The data, originally collected by Lucy Kavanagh as part of her research into gender bias in Irish radio, highlighting the absence of women’s voices on air, show that 50% of Irish journalists on air came from just two titles, the Irish Times and the Irish Independent. Another quarter of journalists came from the remaining three broadsheet titles, the Sunday Business Post, the Irish Examiner, and the Sunday Times Irish edition. [For the purposes of this analysis, the now “compact-size” Irish Independent is defined as a broadsheet. Although its sister paper the Sunday Independent is widely regarded as a tabloid at heart, and has been for years, this did not influence the results as no Sindo journalist participated in any of the programmes in the study during the time period under review.] The analysis, by Village media correspondent Gerard Cunningham, excluded the stations’ own journalists. It means that stories and viewpoints from some of the largest selling newspapers in Ireland are excluded from the airwaves, to the detriment of public debate. And given the demographics associated with the readerships of those newspapers, it means that by proxy, working-class voices are also locked out and silenced. Curiously, despite the ownership overlap between Communicorp and Independent News and Media, both strongly identified with Denis O’Brien, Irish Times journalists were proportionately more likely than Independent journalists to appear on Newstalk programming during the period studied. The data covered Newstalk’s Breakfast Show, the Pat Kenny Programme, the Lunchtime News, the Right Hook, and TodayFM’s Last Word during the period 2-8 June 2016, Newstalk’s Sunday Show and RTE’s Marian Finucane show and This Week programmes on Sundays 3 May- 7 June, and the Late Debate (RTE) May 26-June 4. International experience shows that less than one quarter of voices heard on radio belong to women, despite making up a little over half the world’s population. These figures indicate that when other demographic factors are taken into account, the lens through which radio reflects its audience becomes even narrower. Working-class voices are, as a rule, virtually unheard on national radio, outside of occasional vox-pop and roving-reporter segments featuring Paddy O’Gorman and Henry McKean, where the tone isoften voyeuristic. Non-Irish voices are even rarer. A 2012 CSO survey showed that Britons are the second largest ethnic minority in Ireland, yet their voices are heard far more often than those of the largest, Poles. Voices from Latvia, Lithuania, Nigeria, Romania, India, and other large immigrant communities are egregiously rare. Irish radio, in other words, is overwhelmingly white, English-speaking, middle-class, and male. These findings are reinforced by other findings, such as a 2012 Freedom of Information request which showed that over half of the €120,000 RTÉ paid its top-ten external correspondents over a three-year period went to Irish Times journalists. 50% of Irish journalists on air came from just two titles, the Times and Independent. Another quarter of journalists came from the remaining three broadsheet titles In a 2010 report on the Irish Broadcasting Landscape by Athena Media, commissioned for the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, the authors found that: “Surprisingly, few broadcasting initiatives have been made to the changing dynamics of Irish society [sic]. There is little content available in languages other than English/Irish, and no local or community services offering specific choices to minorities, whether new communities such as the Polish, or established minorities, like the Irish Travellers. Beyond the RTÉ DAB service, Junior, there is no non-music radio service for children or young people since RTÉ 2FM now serves 25-45 year olds. There is a need to examine both the commercial and the public-service opportunities in the changed Irish social landscape. In the current model, the delivery of services is defined by providers. A more flexible approach to innovation and licensing could stimulate more targeted offerings for specific groups”. In the five years since, it would seem little is being done to redress the structural imbalances in Irish national radio. Irish radio’s definitive biases against tabloids, immigrants and alternative voices. A few years ago, as print media watched their subscription and circulation plummet, digital advocates were fond of reciting the adage of internet guru, Clay Shirky, that “no medium can survive the indifference of 25-year-olds”. The advocates had a simple solution. Readers didn’t care about paper and ink, they wanted content, so move the content to where the readers were, establish a presence online, through the web and apps, get rid of the unsustainable dead-tree costs, and pursue a combination of advertising and subscription revenues.

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International

Refugees, bombs and compulsory EU quotas

by Anthony Coughlan 22 February, 2016

One way of dealing with Middle East and North African asylum-seekers coming to the EU would be to allocate them in proportion to the arms exports by the different EU countries to those areas. That would mean that Britain, France and Germany, in that order, would take most refugees. Would it not be fair that the EU countries which, after the US, have been most responsible for the civil wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria, should carry the consequences of their meddling in those countries, of which the current migration crisis is the latest? Irish Times Berlin correspondent Derek Scally wrote recently about Germany’s unemployment blackspots: “German politicians rarely visit those areas, nor do they have answers to German involvement in the causes of the refugee crisis. Such as how, in the first half of 2015 alone, Germany green-lighted arms exports worth €6.35 billion – almost as much as in the entire calendar year 2014. Arms exports to Arab States – from where millions of people are fleeing –more than doubled to €587 million”. Western powers are breaking all international law in attacking Assad, for his regime is the legitimate government of that country, recognised by the UN The Western Powers ousted Colonel.Gadaffi’s regime in Libya, as they had earlier ousted the secular dictators in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whatever their faults, these had kept Sunni-Shia antagonisms under control in those countries – and in Iraq’s case protected its 2000-year-old Christian community. Gadaffi’s overthrow in turn opened the way to mass African migration through the now failed Libyan State, and the horrific drowning of thousands in the Mediterranean. It is the Western powers that armed Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, that have been channelling arms to the rebels against Syria’s Assad, the last remaining secular dictator in the region. They are breaking all the norms of international law in so doing, for the Assad regime is the legitimate government of that country, recognised as such by the United Nations, and there has been no Security Council resolution mandating his overthrow. If the Western Powers expect others to respect international law, should they not do so themselves? Britain’s David Cameron failed to get House of Commons approval for bombing Assad in 2013. He is now seeking Commons approval for joining the French and Americans in bombing the IS jihadists in Syria. Presumably from the point of view of those making the bombs and cruise missiles it matters little on whom they fall as long as Government arms orders keep rolling in. The more Middle East mayhem there is, the more the military-industrial complex likes it. Two principles should govern international migration policy. One is that there is no right in either international or natural law for people to move to other peoples’ countries unless they are genuine refugees, who do have such a right. EMBOLDEN Countries are perfectly entitled to control immigration, either to preserve their social cohesion or to prevent wage-cutting and defend labour standards. The other is that once people have moved to a new country they should be treated the same as everyone else in it. It is the continual confusion of these two principles that makes rational discussion of migration policy often difficult. While treating educated Syrians as refugees, Germany now plans to deport non-Syrian economic migrants it does not want, back to to Turkey and Balkan States Syria’s refugees escaped from the bombs and bullets that directly threatened them by moving to neighbouring Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. However miserable their lot in the refugee camps in those countries, they no longer face there the physical dangers they fled from. It seems to be the reduction earlier this year of food supplies and rations to these camps by the UN and straitened international aid agencies that precipitated the recent mass exodus to Europe. Once people move from the refugee camps, if they decide to do that, they are essentially economic migrants and under EU rules should be differentiated from those claiming to be refugees. Chancellor Merkel’s call for Syrians to come to Germany was quite irresponsible, despite the media-generated emotionalism that first greeted it. With the arrogance typical of German governments, which was amply demonstrated in German bullying of Greece during the summer euro crisis, Merkel unilaterally tore up the EU rules to encourage as many educated middle-class Syrians to come to Germany as possible. The German Government gives these Syrians favourable treatment – a policy which is officially justified by Germany’s supposed need for inward migration in view of its low birth rate and ageing population. Yet it is economic nonsense to suggest that populations must grow in order to have economic growth. What about the rising productivity of labour that has characterised industrial societies for the past three centuries? National output can rise with a static or even falling population if output per head increases. Machines, robots, computers and more efficient organisation of work make this possible. Fewer producers can carry more dependants and fewer young people can maintain more older ones because they have got more individually productive. While treating educated Syrians as refugees, Germany now plans to deport non-Syrian economic migrants it does not want, back to so-called “safe countries”, which include Turkey and all the Balkan States. Hundreds have already been deported to Kosovo. Large camps are being opened in Germany to process returnees. “Refugees Welcome” notices are getting rarer. Hence Merkel’s desire to “Europeanise” the problem by imposing compulsory EU quotas to allocate refugees to other EU countries. Likewise France’s calls, even before the Paris atrocities, to beef-up the EU’s Frontex border service to create a “Fortress Europe”. And the EU’s moves to bribe Turkey’s Erdogan, the hammerer of the Kurds, to keep Syria’s refugees in Turkey. This is the explanation of the unexpected decision of Germany and France to push through a qualified majority vote at the EU Council of Justice Ministers in September to allocate 120,000 refugees among the EU Member States by means of mandatory

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Kenny fumbles in a greasy planetary till

by John Gibbons 22 February, 2016

The mammoth COP21 circus will folds its tent after Paris, on December 11th. Already, it’s been a record-breaker, with thousands of journalists and the largest ever gathering of heads of states descending on Paris for the two week jamboree. Conspicuously absent from the event were the tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of activists and demonstrators who had been planning for months to descend on central Paris to apply ‘street pressure’ on the politicians and policymakers to deliver a deal that, for once in 21 of these annual Conference of Parties mega-talking shops, just might actually mean something. History suggests otherwise. Since this whole UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) was first mooted after the 1992 ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro, with the express aim of avoiding “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”, the emissions, rather than being stabilised or reduced, have in fact spiralled by over 60%. Kenny dispensed with the hiatus and instead effectively completely retracted his entire three-minute speech on behalf of Ireland to COP21 an hour before he delivered it This time the result will be different. Maybe. The last ‘make or break’ conference, COP16, took place in Copenhagen in a bitterly cold December 2009. Obama was then still wet behind the political ears, the Chinese were completely disengaged and, to make a bad situation hopeless, the dark money poured into the climate denial networks struck gold with the phoney ‘Climategate’ scandal which a credulous and lukewarm global media swallowed without even chewing. An older, undoubtely wiser Obama was back, this time with his political legacy very much in mind, and the Chinese fully engaged. Joining the pantheon of statesmen for the opening day was our own Taoiseach, Enda Kenny. Given what we have come to expect from Mr Kenny, it may well be said that while he disappointed, he did not surprise. Kenny usually waits a couple of weeks after his latest outing on the world stage before telling Paddy back home what’s the real deal. This time, most likely under acute pre-election pressure from the IFA lobby machine, Kenny dispensed with the hiatus and instead effectively completely retracted his entire three-minute speech on behalf of Ireland to COP21 an hour before he delivered it. This, even by his standards, was quite something. Just before he addressed the Summit on World leaders’ day, Kenny told reporters that the targets for Ireland needed to be “fair” and “sustainable”, which is Kennyspeak for “meaningless’ and ‘unenforceable”. “What we want is an understanding that we are serious about achieving fair and sustainable targets but we need space in order to achieve that…what we have to have is plenty of ambition but one that is tempered with reality”. He went on to make the quite grotesque argument that we as a nation are just too poor to shoulder our share of the burden. “Ireland was not in a position over the lost last decade to plan for the future in the way we would like”. From here, Kenny started channelling Flann O’Brien: the recession, apparently had resulted in Ireland “not being in a position to invest in climate change mitigation and research”. “Until we have an economic engine that will enable us to change structures – and to invest in research and innovation to invest in more sustainable ways of doing agriculture – it presents us with a challenge”. Linguistics departments are, even as I write, rushing to parse this last couple of paragraphs to see if even the slightest morsel of meaning was inadvertently trapped between the layers of waffle. Kenny must have forgotten his IFA briefing notes – the ones that repeatedly brag about our world-beating levels of ‘carbon-smart’ agriculture, our amazing ‘carbon footprinting’ of tens of thousands of individual farms. Wandering dangerously off message from Farm Centre, Kenny admitted that we in fact have not developed any “innovation to invest in more sustainable ways of doing agriculture”. Turns out all this ‘carbon efficiency’ is just more fairy dust being sprinkled around by the agri-industry spoofers and boosters. Lest this seem a little harsh, it’s worth considering what Kenny committed to the Green Climate Fund in time for COP21 – €2 million, or less than 50 cent per capita, and, by unhappy coincidence, precisely the amount of the payoff agreed between IFA president Eddie Downey and ousted general secretary Pat Smith. Oisin Coghlan of Friends of the Earth correctly identified the apparent main purpose of Kenny’s talking down of the achievability of EU emissions targets for Ireland: Kenny is trying to get the goalposts moved so that everyone, bar the hard-case Irish can do their share. In the future, of course, things will be different, honestly: “As our economy and technology improves and smarter ways of doing production, we will have a stronger economy being able to make the changes after 2020”. Translated, this sounds like Kenny code for: “I’ll be long gone by the time the emissions shit hits the fan, so long suckers!”. For the leader of a first-world country with a GDP per capita of almost €40,000 to have the gall to say it is too poor to shoulder its share of the critical burden of dramatically lowering greenhouse gas emissions almost defies parody; and may be unique. Perhaps Malawi, with a GPD per capita of around €750, a negligible contributor (unlike Ireland) to current or historic global GHG emissions, should take the hit instead? Crazy, but this appears to be how Kenny’s logic works. For COP21 to break the long and disastrous sequence of broken promises and missed opportunities to finally put a brake on runaway climate change, there has to be an agreement that we all jump together. As Barack Obama put it in his COP address: “One of the enemies that we’ll be fighting at this conference is cynicism, the notion we can’t do anything about climate change”. Little did he know that, as he spoke, Ireland’s leader had just come into the room having

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Culture

In defense of a transcendent absurdity

by Frank Armstrong 22 February, 2016

Portentousness is the word that best delineates most Anglo-American literary criticism. The canon seems to demand erudition and a souciant hauteur loaded with the jadedness of the cocktail party. That at least is the tone favoured by the Times Literary Supplement whose reviewers tend to devour books as AA Gill does restaurants. Attending functions when I wrote for The London Magazine (a lesser breed of the same genus) I encountered a few of London’s bottom-feeding literati, one of whom I bitterly recall ordering our entourage wine at a price that tome suggest it adorned the list purely to capture the largesse of a foolish patron. Here one of Dr Johnson’s aphorisms seems apposite: “criticism is a study by which men grown important and formidable at very small expense”. Best to go Dutch at such soirées. After enjoying without entirely comprehending the Franco-Czech author Milan Kundera’s latest book ‘The Festival of Insignificance’ I noticed a review of it by Michael Hoffman in the Times Literary Supplement. Notwithstanding the mortal risk of referring to another’s review, Hoffman’s excoriation was so venomous that I have been inspired to share my own reaction. His article culminates in the assessment that: “It reads like something one of Kundera’s enemies might have written, and passed off as his”. This was a hatchet job of Viking proportions. Hoffman wrote that the book reads like something one of Kundera’s enemies might have written, and passed off as his Before casually dismembering the corpse with the grubby gusto of a journalist on a junket, he dismisses the oeuvre of one of the most original novelists of the last century in surprising, gastronomic terms as: “addictive, moreish, still fresh, thin textured, a little unsatisfying (perhaps that goes with their addictiveness) and obvious”. It was as if Gill had been asked to assess the Nando’s menu. Perhaps Kundera’s real crime in the eyes of many of the Anglo-American literary elite is to have declared himself a French author, and written a number of novels in that language. With some foundation French culture is now roundly dismissed as decadent and trapped in rehearsal of past glory, although Michel Houellebecq makes a virtue of this. The idea of an unadulterated émigré Czech writer might be far more appealing at least in London, but, like Samuel Beckett, Kundera has found expression in the language of his adopted country, and his work may be more interesting for that fertilisation. Like all good (it would be hasty to ascribe greatness) writers of fiction, Kundera shines a light on universal human traits. Eschewing conventional structure in favour of fractured tales, readers are left to draw their own conclusions. As in real life, grand narratives are not apparent but overlapping, quotidian sequences. Within that schema he projects ideas that shimmer elusively on eternal truths. This might be the addictive quality Hoffman describes but really what compels are his sublime observations on the human experience, seemingly obvious but actually quite original. My favourite example remains his exposition on litost, in ‘the Book of Laughter and Forgetting’: “Litost is an untranslatable Czech word. Its first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog. As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it…”. Kundera expands on its meaning by way of anecdote. “She was madly in love with him and tactfully swam as slowly as he did. But when their swim was coming to an end, she wanted to give her athletic instincts a few moments’ free rein and headed for the opposite bank at a rapid crawl. The student [the boy] made an effort to swim faster too and swallowed water. Feeling humbled, his physical inferiority laid bare, he felt litost. He recalled his sickly childhood, lacking in physical exercise and friends and spent under the constant gaze of his mother’s overfond eye, and fell into despair about himself and his life. They walked back to the city together in silence on a country road. Wounded and humiliated, he felt an irresistible desire to hit her.…and then he slapped her face”. Literary criticism is often a platform for the unbridled ego. Kundera’s latest novel attests to the untamed imagination of the author, regardless Acute awareness of what he does grudgingly translate as: “a state of torment brought upon by the realization of one’s inadequacy or misery”, helps us understand the origin of so much anger and the antidote to it. Kundera turns an isolated word in a minor European language into a near-universal susceptibility. In literature a mark of genius is to make the original seem obvious. We become one with the writer. Kundera’s most recent work does leave an impression of incompleteness compared to previous more substantial novels but certainly not to the extent of Hoffman’s outlandish assessment. It contains a number of powerful insights: first there is his development of the archetype of the Narcissus that might serve as a lesson to some clever men who cannot understand how an objective of desire resists their advances. He writes: “When a brilliant fellow tries to seduce a woman, she has the sense she’s entering a kind of competition. She feels obliged to shine, to not give herself without some resistance. Whereas insignificance sets her free. Spares her the need for vigilance. Requires no presence of mind. Makes her incautious, and thus more easily accessible…”. The Narcissus on the other hand is not proud: “A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person’s eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes care of all his mirrors”. The Narcissus is thus reduced to a person of little significance, the unlikely partner, his skill like that of a successful spy who gets under the covers almost unobserved. His interlocutor contents

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Civilisation under threat

by Frank Armstrong 22 February, 2016

The slaughter of 129 innocents in Paris by the so-called Islamic State (IS) instils, by its casualness, fear into most of Europe. It is a new venture and one which is likely to be repeated perhaps until it affects all of our daily lives adversely. But IS operates on many fronts. Another comprehensivist IS policy covers culture. IS deplored Paris as the centre of licentiousness and adultery. But it also deplores any culture incompatible with stringent Sunni extremism. History has no value for IS. Idolatry must be obliterated. In August 82-year old antiquities scholar Khaled al-Asaad was beheaded by IS and his head suspended from a pole in Palmyra in Syria, after he apparently refused to reveal under torture the whereabouts of artefacts IS wished to plunder. The act subverted heroism, culture, civilisation itself. History has no value for IS. Idolatry must be obliterated Since IS overran Palmyra in May, it has gradually been destroying the site using barrels of dynamite. The 2000-year-old Arch of Triumph, the Temple of Baalshamin and a large temple, dedicated to Bel, have been blown up. Palmyra was one of humanity’s great treasures. It may seem obtuse to draw attention to the destruction of architectural heritage considering the casualty and refugee tolls of the war but Palmyra reveals the proto-state and terror-supporting Islamic State (IS) as a totalitarian regime that eradicates reminders of competing narratives in Orwellian fashion. Sadly, it is difficult to convey the serene and fragile grandeur of Palmyra in Syria. I visited it in 2004. Such was my solitude – even at that time there were few visitors to this remote outpost in Assad’s Syria – it felt like I had been given permission to wander around a vast outdoor museum after closing time. What remained were a series of structures conforming to neo-Platonic ideals of orderly beauty, integrating stone that blended with the shades of the desert for an effect that revealed the highest expression of human achievement. It was an oasis of affecting scale and flickering artistry that civilised a harsh environment whose form has withstood a steady stream of Romans, Arabs, Ottomans and Europeans conquerors. Deriving wealth from a strategic location along the spice route that for millennia channelled Asian riches into Europe, it is a wrenching reminder of how civilisations decline but, conversely, endure to inspire future ages. This ancient city challenged Rome itself under the rule of queen Zenobia. Khaled al-Assad in all his pride named one of his daughters after that formidable matriarch. Palmyra is a reminder of how civilisations decline but, conversely, endure to inspire future ages Palmyra conjures a plurality of narratives. For example early Islamic scholars greatly esteemed Greek philosophy. Indeed much of our Classical heritage was brought to Christian attention through contact with the Islamic world in the early Middle Ages. Such nuance is ignorantly rejected by IS as well as by those commentators in the West who promote the false idea of a timeless clash of civilisations. Considering the expunction of other sites in Syria there is a strong chance that what remains of Palmyra will be destroyed like other sacred monuments in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia in the name of obscure branches of Islam. IS ideology can be seen as offshoot of Wahhabism – a violent interpretation of Islam articulated by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) whose ideas were adopted by the Al-Saud clan in the eighteenth century, helping them become the dominant force in Arabia until they were finally defeated by the Ottoman Empire. The resurgence of the Al-Sauds in the early twentieth century was under the banner of Islam, infused with Wahhabism. A crack force, known as the Ikhwan (brotherhood) helped the Al-Sauds, led by Abdulaziz ibn Saud, to re-conquer Arabia. On seizing Mecca and Medina, the Holy Cities of Islam, from the ruling Hashemite family, who would subsequently supply monarchs for Iraq and Jordan, tight controls were imposed on forms of worship such as playing instruments and dancing in religious processions. Medieval executions, oppression of women and persecution of other religions followed. These barbarisms have subsisted in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia since its foundation in 1932. Shared opposition to Arab Nationalism and Communism, combined with oil and associated wealth, brought support from the United States. Where the Saudi authorities have been unable to control their own extremists, as first with the Ikhwan in the 1930s, they have been brutally supressed and use of torture has been commonplace despite its prohibition under Islamic law. Once the genie of militant Islam is released into the political sphere it is not easy to put back. The Taliban, as well as the specialists in global terror, Al-Qaida, and now IS have gone beyond the tenets of Wahhabism. In the face of a global order characterised by economic inequality, and the failure of Communism and Arab Nationalism to adequately address these problems, in many countries Islam became the political answer, notably in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 which though Shi’a served as an inspiration to other parts of the Middle East. Political Islam’s appeal derives from rejection of alien cultural norms. Though the Ottoman Caliph imposed homogeneous orthodoxies, its modern articulations are characterised by radical diversity. Since the end of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1923 Islam has become increasingly malleable, and even post-modern, with a variety of online rulings now available to adherents. In a stable relatively prosperous country such as Turkey it has bred a political movement under Tayyip Erdogan akin to an authoritarian Christian Democracy. But more reactionary interpretations have found fertile ground in the turmoil of the Levant since the defenestration of the Ba’athist regime in Iraq and its weakening in Syria. An influential article by Graeme Wood in the March edition of Atlantic Magazine makes the nightmarish case that the apocalyptic tendency derives from a not implausible interpretation of the Koran, and indeed that acute terror is mandated in the period between the restoration of the Caliphate, which IS of course claims

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Coming soon to your phone, and then everywhere

by Gerard Cunningham 22 February, 2016

A few years ago, as print media watched their subscription and circulation plummet, digital advocates were fond of reciting the adage of internet guru, Clay Shirky, that “no medium can survive the indifference of 25-year-olds”. The advocates had a simple solution. Readers didn’t care about paper and ink, they wanted content, so move the content to where the readers were, establish a presence online, through the web and apps, get rid of the unsustainable dead-tree costs, and pursue a combination of advertising and subscription revenues. A few – a very small few – have managed the transition successfully, The Times and Financial Times are bullish about their subscription-only models, the New York Times seems happy with its constantly tweaked mix of leaky paywalls and advertising, the Guardian and Mail open their content to all and bet on advertising alone. But for most newspapers and magazines, the economics of a sustainable online product are still at least one more iteration away, and readers are rebelling against the one constant of all publishers: advertising. Ad blockers in one form or another are almost as old as the internet, and over the years have ebbed and flowed in popularity. Their first appearance in the 1990s was prompted partly by the intrusive nature of early web advertising – who remembers flashing and blinking pop-ups? Their tendency to inflame became less of an issue as the growth and spread of viable broadband made loading times and worse still download times if you made the mistake of clicking on it, less of a concern. Blockers still live on some desktop computer browsers, but the numbers there stabilised a long time ago. But bandwidth issues resurfaced again in the last decade, as smartphones consumed more and more of readers’ attention. In the first five years of this decade, the number of consumers globally using ad blockers grew tenfold. The smaller screen size on even the largest phones makes advertising more noticeable – and more of a nuisance – than on a full-size computer screen, and the combined constraints of slower chips and constrained wireless speeds mean that the ad blocker’s promise to improve loading speeds by blocking useless advertising is highly appealing. The result, as outlined in the 2015 PageFair/Adobe report on The Cost of Ad Blocking, is a phenomenal growth in ad blocking, with worldwide 41% year-on-year growth since 2014. In the EU blockers grew by 35%, and are now used on 77 million devices. Notably, the report found that 93 percent of phone adblockers are installed on Chrome and Firefox browsers – that is, on Android phones. With Apple’s Autumn announcement that it will allow ad blocking on its own Safari browser, the problem seems set to increase. The global cost of ad blockers to date is estimated at $21.8bn [€20.5bn]. In the second quarter of 2015, 17.7% of monthly users in Ireland had ad blockers installed. That number is low by international standards, and that should worry Irish media outlets. The comparable US number is 47%, in the UK 39%, and where the US leads, the UK tends to go also, followed shortly afterwards by Ireland. In hard cash terms, the Irish Times expects to earn €8m from digital advertising in 2015, while INM expects digital revenues of around €12m. Circulation and print advertising revenues continue to fall at both companies. The Irish economic recovery means digital revenues are increasing for both publishers, just about offsetting print declines, but as international experience is sowing, that growth depends not only on the Irish economy prospering, but on readers continuing to accept advertising taking up their attention,bandwidth, and phone screens. The state of the Irish market can be understood by noting the Irish Times profitability increased in 2014 in part because it gained contracts to print the irish Examiner following its receivership. INM revenues in the same year were helped by a contract to distribute the Irish Times. Newspapers are consolidating their print and distribution efforts, thus shaving costs, but this activity is based on the ever-shrinking print sector. Cost savings and managed decline can only sustain the industry for so long. Advertising and editorial departments both need to adapt. User-hostile strategies, such as blocking browsers which use adblocking, seem unlikely to succeed. Those indifferent 25 year olds will simply go elsewhere, and there’s a whole wide world of web content out there. More favourable options may include increasing use of advertising formats such as sponsored content/branded journalism (the advertising formerly known as commercial features) or new forms such as sponsorship of podcasts (and perhaps vidcasts) or interstitial advertising in ‘casts.

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We don’t all have to love business

by Michael Smith 22 February, 2016

Enda Kenny’s real vision is to make Ireland the “best little country in the world in which to do business”. Business doesn’t deserve him. Worse, business doesn’t deserve the rest of us. Business in Ireland is utterly corruptible. Big business in particular, Perhaps small businesses do their best but even there farmers are over-subsidized and led by millionaires, retailers and restaurants are homogenised and over-priced, and builders have for generations specialized in sprawl and mediocrity. BIG BUSINESS Let’s have a look at bigger businesses. Biggest indigenous companies Big business is most obviously represented on the Irish Stock Market whose members’ average capitalisation is around €2.5bn. Member companies typically eschew the tedious rigors of ethics. Village did several pieces recently documenting the dubious history of building materials group CRH, Ireland’s biggest company with a worldwide turnover of €19 billion (2014). Why would Enda Kenny in God’s name think the most important thing is to be the best little country in which to do business? Since the 1930s CRH has been intermittently beset at its edges by conspiracies, scandals and corruption, together with repeated allegations of its involvement in criminal price-fixing and market-sharing. When, 40 years ago, Roadstone Ltd took over Irish Cement which had a monopoly in cement production in Ireland, Roadstone had a dominant position in downstream operations such as quarries, concrete and tarmac. Bad start. There were political fingerprints everywhere. The first Chairman of the new Cement Roadstone Holdings was the retired Taoiseach, Sean Lemass. After Lemass’s death in 1971, there was an abortive attempt to make Charles Haughey chairman. Richard Bruton once worked for CRH as an accountant. In February 2000, Mary Harney gave an undertaking that the Revenue Commissioners, Competition Authority and the soon-to-be-instigated Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE) would carry out a comprehensive investigation into CRH, but this has never happened. Patrick Massey, then head of the Competition Authority, resigned his position that very same month stating: “it is no longer possible for me to continue as director of competition enforcement due to the failure to provide adequate resources to enable me to do the job properly”. Depressingly, in May of this year Gardaí and officials from the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) raided Irish Cement’s offices in an investigation – but only into the €50m bagged-cement industry. DCC is Ireland’s second biggest indigenous company. The Supreme Court found that, when DCC sold its stake in Fyffes, a fruit and vegetable distributor, for €106m in early 2000 at an €85m profit, DCC had inside information – price-sensitive trading reports . But no prosecution ensued as the CEO had been following legal advice, albeit as it turned out bad legal advice. The lesson is get yourself a bad lawyer. Since the 1930s CRH has been clouded by conspiracies, scandals and corruption, together with repeated allegations of its involvement in criminal price-fixing and market-share Banks Until seven years ago the banks were the biggest forces on the stock exchange here. In 2008 Ireland’s banks were bailed out by the state for €64bn – €14,000 per head. Ireland’s bank bailouts cost the country the equivalent of nearly 40% of its annual economic output, most of which it is unlikely to see again. Ireland topped the chart, spending 37.3% of GDP, followed by Greece at 24.8%. France, Italy and Finland, spent next to nothing on bank bailouts. In the US the Treasury expects to recover all but $42bn of the $370bn it lent to ailing companies, with the portion lent to banks actually showing a slight profit. It is clear we owe the banks nothing. In fact, after an awful lot of moral hazard, luck and heartache, the State could eventually recoup all the cash used to bail out AIB, Bank of Ireland and Permanent TSB. This would leave the €35bn cost of bailing out Anglo (€29.6bn) and INBS (€5.4bn). For that is down the tube. Anglo Irish Bank – to say the least – overdid it on the commercial side, was nationalized and closed down after costing the state €29bn with its protagonists facing, or having faced, criminal charges, its CEO a fugitive, and off-account loans to directors. Its head of capital markets admitted they initially asked for 7bn to suck in the government which would then be so committed that it would have to give the balance. He said he ‘plucked the figure out of his arse’. That’s Business I guess. Nama The State-owned bad bank, NAMA was created to work through Ireland’s largely problematic commercial loans which it is parceling up into packages which it calls Projects and to which it gives irritating names, like ‘Eagle’, before flogging them at bargain basement prices to vulture funds. Often since the banks in Ireland are still dormant, US ones. The sellout is masked by the boom which means NAMA will still realise a profit on the prices it paid in 2008 in an imploded market. Mick Wallace, an Independent TD, has made allegations – significantly, in the Dáil – over the €1.6bn Project Eagle portfolio sale to US investment trust Cerberus by Nama which got approx 27c in the dollar. That missing 73p has been picked up by the Irish taxpayer, Wallace has claimed £Stg 45m has been paid to fixers. Investigations are ongoing over €9.5 m discovered in an Isle of Man off-shore account. The UK’s National Crime Agency and even the US Department of Justice are investigating the matter. Wallace claimed that Irish taxpayers had covered the cost of massive losses on the deal while the US investment fund, which boasted former US vice president Dan Quayle among its senior ranks, Moribund Democratic Unionist Party leader Peter Robinson has vehemently rejected allegations he was to receive any payment linked to the Project Eagle sale after he was named at a parliamentary committee in the North. Mick Wallace is a failed former big developer and his loans have now actually been bought by Cerberus. Wallace has claimed a representative of Cerberus

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No to €350m

by Niall Crowley 22 February, 2016

It has been a long and hard struggle for a Financial Transaction Tax in Europe. Now it looks like a breakthrough is possible. This has yet to make an impression on the Irish media and there has been no critique of the Irish Government’s refusal to participate. The European Commission had proposed an EU-wide Financial Transactions Tax but failed to get the necessary unanimous support. Eleven Member States decided to proceed with introducing it through what is called the ‘enhanced co-operation’ procedure. These were Belgium, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia and Slovakia. It was given a green light in January 2013. Even the International Monetary Fund has stated that the financial services sector is under-taxed Britain took a case to the Europeaember States as to what they were actually going to do. Now it’s down to the wire. The December 8th meeting of ECOFIN economics and finance ministers is widely seen as the make or break moment for the Financial Transactions Tax. The prospects are surprisingly good. France is pushing it, as it really needs new sources of finance if the COP 21 climate outcomes are to be ambitious and to be implemented. Germany remains determined but warns it must happen now or never. Angela Merkel has been clear all along “that financial markets have to contribute their share to the recovery of economies”. The final proposal must be agreed unanimously by all participating countries. They are working towards the progressive implementation of a tax that would involve a harmonised minimum 0.1% tax rate for transactions in all types of financial instruments except derivatives (to which a 0.01% rate would apply). It is suggested that this would enable the financial sector to make a fair and substantial contribution to tax revenues and complement regulatory and supervisory measures by creating a disincentive to transactions that “do not enhance the efficiency of financial markets”. There are blocks to be overcome. It seems that there is agreement to tax shares, corporate bonds and all derivatives with the exception of derivatives linked to sovereign bonds. This means particular issues for indebted nations are addressed. However, agreement has still not been reached on how the Financial Transactions Tax should be levied. Some Member States have also put forward specific proposals to meet their particular needs. If they do get agreement the Financial Transactions Tax would be levied from the second quarter in 2017. This is a small tax but with the potential to raise significant revenue for hard-pressed national budgets. It is estimated that the tax will raise between 30 and 35 billion Euro for the eleven Member States involved. NERI, a thinktank, has estimated that the tax would increase exchequer revenue by €350 m per annum in Ireland. Who could say no to that? At a time when tax revenue is needed to address alarming levels of poverty and homelessness and to restore damaged and diminished public services, why would an Irish Minister of Finance say no to an additional €350m? At a time when new revenue is needed to fund global development and the Sustainable Development Goals and measures to respond to climate change and the conclusions of COP 21 why would he say no? It is ultimately a measure of the power of the financial services sector in Ireland and its ability to influence politics. Michael Noonan says there would be job losses and that financial services would desert us for London. This argument fails to reflect the low level of tax proposed and the very favourable conditions enjoyed by companies in the Irish Financial Services Centre. Those campaigning for the tax – in a campaign organised by Claiming Our Future, argue that it would actually increase jobs because of the additional public expenditure. The Irish government put €64bn of public money into rescuing the banks. Some €42bn of this was borrowed. Over 20% of our public debt is now a result of the bank bailout. The Irish people are estimated to be paying €9,000 Euro each for the banking-crisis debt – the highest in the world. Across the rest of Europe, the average cost per person is just €192. Even the International Monetary Fund has stated that the financial services sector is under-taxed. It is not too late. Member States can sign up to enhanced co-operation at any time. We need a Minister for Finance who will say yes to a tax that would yield much needed revenue, reduce financial speculation, and ensure the financial sector pays its way.