Author Archives: Eithne Tynan

Here’s my dog. ‘Like’ my dog.

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IF you’re not on Facebook, or if you left it before it got uncool – or even if you just have a healthy sense of perspective when it comes to social networking – then you may be sickened to learn that my dog is on it.

To be fair, it’s because he doesn’t have much to do all day, so he logs on and updates his status with, “They don’t walk me enough”. Then he ‘likes’ his own post. He has friends I’ve never met, even though, as a dog, he doesn’t call you a real friend until he’s had a good long sniff of the business end of you. (Even dogs don’t have real friends on Facebook.)

So the dogs in the street know Facebook is habit-forming, but it appears it’s worse than that – it’s addictive. A survey this week concluded (or, I suppose more accurately, leapt to the conclusion) that Facebook is more addictive than alcohol. Researchers from the University of Chicago found that the temptation to check in with Facebook is harder to resist than the temptation to have a drink.

This came as a shock to some people. “What?,” we cried, throwing back another schooner of Shiraz while simultaneously posting a photo of our lunch, “You’re supposed to resist?”

Of course Facebook is addictive – to a certain sort of person. Answer yes to any of the following questions to see if you fit the profile. Do you enjoy looking at other people’s holiday snaps? Do you regard clicking the ‘Like’ button as a form of social activism? Do you get improbably furious about minor changes to an interface? Do you like to share inspirational quotes with your friends? Do you mind not playing fast and loose with the word ‘friends’?

Don’t be deceived by the condescending tone. Most Facebook users don’t fit that profile, and yet we keep using it anyway – at least for now.

Facebook is useful for some things – staying in touch with an uncle you don’t see often enough; spying on your ex’s partner and your partner’s ex; gathering tangible reminders of why you never liked so-and-so; and keeping your mental arithmetic sharp, as you calculate from time to time just how many people would be left if you unfriended everyone who doesn’t even try to be funny…

The world’s biggest social network announced an IPO this week in which it intends to raise $5bn. It’s a peculiar bit of timing, though, since everyone who was going to join Facebook must surely have joined it by now (except for everyone in China, obviously), and the rest are starting to leave. It has more than 800 million users worldwide, of whom around two million are in Ireland. And if you can believe what they write on Facebook at least, they are tired of it already.

There are several reasons for this, although Facebook’s dubious privacy policy is not the main one. Seriously – ‘I’m knowingly and without coercion publishing videos of my baby/ my cat/ the cake I just made/ me and my friends with our tongues sticking out… But privacy is a top priority for me. It really is.’

In any case, there are ways around the privacy problem. You can always quit, although Facebook does make that very difficult: when you try to deactivate your account, it shows you photos of your friends looking all lonely and hollow-eyed, as if you’d died. “X will miss you,” it whines.

Alternatively, you can pretend to be someone else. For instance, if you take ten years off your age on Facebook, suddenly you’re no longer shown advertisements for an ‘instant brow lift’, which is some sort of sellotape that holds your eyelids up. The relief of that. It’s like being ten years younger in real life.

No, the main problem with Facebook is not data collection, or targeted advertising, or even the loathsome new ‘timeline’. It’s the blandness.

Perhaps conscious that employers or other influential people might look them up on Facebook, people are afraid to say anything controversial. Instead they post smug updates on their latest triumphs (damn them and their triumphs) and click ‘like’ repeatedly while the tributes flow in: Congrats, yay, XOX.

They’ve just climbed a mountain, but it’s always some secondary local hillock – never Kilimanjaro. They’ve just had a baby, but it’s always one baby, safely, under medical supervision – never octuplets in a blizzard.

Even Pancho, bless him, is only a Jack Russell and not something fascinating like a Weimaraner. And he never rescues Little Timmy from a mineshaft; all he ever does is find something unspeakable and roll in it. LOL, says everyone, obligingly.

Facebook, it turns out, provides nothing more than a safe environment in which to be as boring as anyone else, which makes it a lot like real life.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 5 February 2012

Lighthouse in a German bog

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Lighthouse, by Adam Pomeroy

 

AROUND 1,000 people submitted ideas to the government about ways to cut public spending, it was reported this week. A thousand people. I make that approximately 0.03% of the adult population. So much window-dressing, so few people to admire it.

The scheme was launched by Public Enterprise minister Brendan Howlin last June, when he invited people – anyone – to suggest “creative and constructive” ideas to eliminate wasteful spending.

“The challenge facing our country is so great that no reasonable PR exercise” – sorry, I mean proposal – “no reasonable proposal can be ignored,” said Howlin at the time. And roughly one in every three thousand of us complied. Statistically, this means Minister Howlin’s office has a slightly better chance of being hit by a satellite than of hearing ideas from the electorate.

A selection of the submissions to Howlin’s department was revealed last week under a Freedom of Information request, and reported in the Irish Times. I wish I could tell you I had seen the whole list, but the information must be top secret, seeing as how John and Mary’s opinions on welfare scroungers and public service fatcats are so sensitive to the national recovery and all.

And anyway, while you’re waiting for some Godot in the Department of Public Expenditure to return your phone calls – or even send so much as an automated email response acknowledging receipt of your query – despair overtakes you. It’s hard to explain, it just happens. Must be something to do with the zeitgeist.

Other things happen, too, while you’re waiting to hear back from the department. Mountain ranges weather away to dust; new stars are born and die; we pay off the national debt. (No, that last is just whimsy.)

From the selection published, it appears people have ideas about welfare, which is typical of the divide-and-rule nature of campaigns such as this. Ideas about welfare tend to involve making sure that no one on welfare can afford satellite television, or cigarettes, or alcohol. And if that doesn’t make them miserable enough, let’s make them do community work as well – maybe they could pick up rich people’s litter? And is there any way we can stop them from spawning?

I’m sure everyone has a few “creative and constructive” ideas about saving the state money, even if we didn’t go to the trouble of submitting them to Brendan Howlin’s office, held back as we were by the sheer, unendurable futility of the exercise.

There are the obvious ideas, to do with forcing reckless European speculators to stomach their own losses, thank you very much; and not giving pensions to politicians until they reach the age of – oh, I don’t know, let’s pick a number out of a hat and say 65; and putting a stop to ‘unvouched’ expenses; and maybe making do with even half the usual number of political consultants…

There are the less obvious ideas, such as establishing a  fresh air utility company and then privatising it. (The IMF would be all for that.) Or couldn’t we just sell Kerry to the Americans? No offence, Kerry. I’m as fond of you as the next person but these are desperate times and you still owe us big for John O’Donoghue. You know how much the Americans would love you, and we’ll buy you back as soon as we can afford you again – once we’ve got rid of the Healy-Raes, say.

And then there are the ideas about welfare. For instance, what about giving people on the dole responsibility for running the country? It would work like this: as soon as you become unemployable, you get appointed to political office. Oh, I forgot, we do that already. It’s called the Seanad.

However, as we know, these crowd-sourcing schemes are about as useful as a lighthouse in a bog. And since the Cabinet now has about as much influence over this country’s economic fortunes as you or I, let’s call it a lighthouse in a German bog.

Remember the ‘Ideas Campaign’, launched a few years ago? There were 5,000 submissions to that, many of which have to be commended for at least bestowing on us the priceless gift of laughter. Then there was Martin McAleese’s ‘Your Country, Your Call’ campaign, now better known as ‘(Whatever Happened To) Your Country, Your Call’.

These schemes are presented as a way of making us feel powerful, even though we’re not. What they’re actually doing is making us feel responsible, even though we’re not.

“Plucky little citizens,” says the government, “we have a long and proud history of overcoming adversity and so on and so forth. Now stick out your chin, and grin, and say…” And we all – or one in 3,000 of us at least – join in in the chorus: “Morgen, morgen, Ich liebe dich, morgen”.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 22 January 2012

Nooseworthy

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‘PIERREPOINT’ has become a useful nickname for anyone who would knowingly hang you – or at least, anyone who wouldn’t lift a finger to help, should you happen to find yourself blindfolded and standing on a trapdoor with your ankles tied together.

Isn’t it surprising, then, to discover how principled the Pierrepoints – the family that, in an early example of outsourcing, gave this country three of its most memorable executioners – actually were?

In March, it was reported this week, Mealy’s will auction an expenses claim submitted by Thomas Pierrepoint for a double hanging at Mountjoy in August 1925. Let’s put it this way: Ivor Callely is not likely to be among the bidders.

The occasion was the hanging of the last woman ever executed in this state. Annie Walsh, 31, was put to death together with her nephew, Michael Talbot, for the murder of Annie’s husband Edward who, I think tellingly, was 30 years older than her.

The usual price for a hanging was £10, but Thomas offered to do the second for half-price. This suggests that, had a third malefactor been implicated in poor Edward’s demise, the state would have been able to dispatch three for the price of two. It’s a very competitive way of doing business, you must admit, and if Thomas were alive today, he’d surely be running a discount supermarket, or an airline.

Thomas and his assistant spent the night before the hanging at Mountjoy, saving the state the expense of their lodgings, and claimed only 10 shillings each for “refreshments”. Drinking before a job was frowned on. Thomas, after all, was the brother and successor of Henry Pierrepoint who, British Public Record Office documents lately revealed, was discreetly removed from the Home Office executioners’ list after turning up for one hanging, in July 1910, “considerably the worse for drink”.

Having said that, Thomas was no teetotaller either. Myles na gCopaleen went drinking with him at least once. In 1959, he wrote: “Although I am neither a murderer nor a politician – the distinction is often nominal – I have had the distinction of ingesting pints of plain porter in Fanning’s old pub in Lincoln Place, Dublin, in company with the late Mr Pierrepoint, Hangman Plenipotentiary to the Eerie Government of Occupation.”

Myles, in his unique way, was quite taken with Thomas’s personality. “Of Mr Pierrepoint it could truly be said that ‘milder-manner man never scuttled ship nor slit a throat’. He was most gentlemanly and had no hesitation whatever in discussing most objectively the nature of his craft, its skills and difficulties, and mildly deploring the squeamishness of certain Irish warders.”

Thomas was also uncle of the more famous Albert, who acted as his apprentice for a decade or so before gaining a reputation for himself as the most efficient executioner in British history.

Hanging had once meant slow strangulation, but by Albert’s time, the authorities had discovered that, by placing the knot in the noose correctly (to the left of the chin), the prisoner’s second and third vertebrae would break and death would be humanely expedited. This meant weighing the prisoner to calculate the appropriate drop. Albert’s fastest execution is said to have taken just seven seconds, easily beating his uncle’s record of 60 seconds, and he was very proud of this competence.

However, in 1974, Albert wrote his autobiography, Executioner: Pierrepoint, in which he amazed everyone by revealing that he had never been in favour of capital punishment after all.

“I do not now believe that any one of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder,” he wrote. “Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.” Good for you, said everyone. Laudable sentiments indeed, if a bit belated.

Albert was responsible for at least 400 hangings in his career. The first he ever attended was at Mountjoy in 1932, when his Uncle Tom executed one Patrick McDermott for murder. He performed or assisted at 13 executions in Ireland, including the last ever carried out here, when Michael Manning was hanged in 1954.

Ironically, Albert resigned in a quarrel about expenses. In 1956 he went to Strangeways to execute Thomas Bancroft, but the man was reprieved after Albert arrived. The sheriff of Lancashire offered him only £4 in incidental expenses, instead of his full fee of £15. Albert’s pride was wounded and he quit. You can push a man’s sense of fair play only so far, it seems, even if he’s a professional killer.

Mealy’s Auctioneers believe Thomas Pierrepoint’s parsimonious claim for expenses might fetch at least €600. Add in the mere 55 cent it would cost to post it to whichever politician you think hanging is too good for, and you’ve got yourself a salutary lesson for a relatively modest price. However, it’s unlikely to act as a deterrent, even now.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 8 January 2012

Blessed are the routemakers

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NOWHERE in the gospels does it say Jesus Christ was born in a stable, only that he was laid in a manger afterwards, somewhere in Bethlehem. And that turns out to be but one of the differences between the messiah and Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary.

O’Leary was invited to speak at the European Commission’s ‘Innovation Convention’ this week, and the biography he supplied raised a laugh here and there – mostly that choky, reluctant laughter you experience when someone you don’t like says something funny.

(O’Leary’s contribution to the convention was billed as “a masterclass on doing innovation”, but as there are so many things wrong with that phrase, let’s just pretend we didn’t see it.)

“Born in a stable in 1961, he was a boy genius who excelled both academically and at sports,” wrote O’Leary, or if not O’Leary then one of those springy little subordinates of his, like Stephen McNamara. “Having represented Ireland internationally at bog snorkelling and flower arranging, he graduated from Trinity College in Dublin as soon as they could get rid of him,” he went on. “He then became another boring KPMG accountant until divine inspiration sentenced to him to a life of penal servitude in the airline business.”

After a paragraph of slush about Ryanair, the biog concluded: “It is widely known that women find him irresistible”, though that line was later removed for reasons unknown…

“Oh, there goes Michael O’Leary again, ha ha,” chuckled everyone indulgently. “Born in a stable indeed. What a card.” And yet, the idea lent itself to scrutiny. Once Michael O’Leary has compared himself to Jesus, what can you do but imagine him as a sort of ‘Monty Python’s Life of Michael’ figure, but one who really, really wants to be the messiah?

Picture the scene. You’ve got Christ on one hillside, preaching no-frills Judaism to the masses, and O’Leary on another, telling his baffled followers that even a rich man can enter the Continent if he will only swallow his pride.

By all accounts, Jesus’s mother appears to have travelled an awful long way to give birth, and yet still not quite arrived. It would make you wonder which carrier she chose. That manger in Bethlehem might be the Palestinian equivalent of Beauvais. Yea, though I walk in the valley of the shadow of Bratislava, Ryanair assureth me I’m in Vienna.

This is a man who probably punches pilots (alright, that’s a pun too far – I’ll get my coat). And to be fair to O’Leary, he does honour certain Christian tenets. For instance, unlike many native tycoons, he favours rendering unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s – to wit, he pays tax here.

However, O’Leary is not one to resist the temptation of a fiver. “I am not the Messiah,” he might have mumbled, as on Friday he whacked €5 onto the cost of checking in a bag. The new charge takes effect on 15 December – just in time to cream the emigrants coming home for Christmas with suitcases full of maize for their indigent families, prompting mothers across the country to write, on tear-stained vellum: “Don’t come home, son. Just send blankets.”

So much for the three gifts of Christmas. ‘You can’t take that frankincense and myrrh on board; you’ll have to check it in, for a fee. The gold should just about cover it.’ Suddenly the soundtrack to O’Leary’s messianic delusion is less ‘Little Donkey’ and more ‘Carmina Burana’.

In other aviation news this week, actor Alec Baldwin has been publicly criticising the service on US airlines. He complained that flying had become an “inelegant” experience. That word again? Inelegant. Air travel… elegance… Nope, can’t put those two together in a sentence; it’s been too long.

Perhaps ironically, Baldwin is best known for playing arch-capitalist Jack Donaghy in the sitcom ’30 Rock’. Donaghy is a sort of dignified Michael O’Leary – as in, ruthless ambition and employee blood-letting are all very well but no respectable man should open his mouth that wide in a photo… or dress like Jeremy Clarkson.

Baldwin has clearly never flown Ryanair.“It is sad, I think, that you’ve got to fly overseas today in order to bring back what has been thrown overboard by US carriers in terms of common sense, style and service,” he wrote, as his European readers wept with mirth.

So once again the Ryanair Christmas message is more Satan than Santa. “Ryanair continues to incentivise passengers to travel light by raising our online checked-in baggage fees,” was Stephen McNamara’s typically overcooked comment on the increase.

We know what O’Leary’s comment might have been: “When you’re chewing on life’s gristle, don’t grumble, give a whistle… And always look on the bright side of life.”

 

Published (heavily edited) in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 11 December 2011

Turn into a greased baking tray, for your own sake

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THE legend about Home Economics was that you could get an honour in it in your Leaving Cert without doing any study. Even boys – even the kind who were archetypes of domestic ineptitude – were able to distinguish themselves in the field of Social & Scientific. After all, each of the questions could be answered with either common knowledge or common sense. Anyone could do it.

This legend turned out to be completely untrue, and the memory can still produce a small flare of embarrassment. It is possible to flunk Home Economics, and to feel even more ridiculous in the eyes of your peers than if you had applied yourself to the study of it and failed creditably.

I vaguely remember a question about the spoiling of fish, and some arcane lore to do with lipids. More distinctly I remember insisting that oak panelling would be a cheap and easy way to decorate a wall. What ho, Cuthbert, fancy a spot of tennis? The examiners must have assumed I was too posh to do anything other than simply marry well, and reasoned that a good Leaving would be neither here nor there in my case.

As a student at an all-girls’ convent school, the study of home economics was compulsory, at least for a year. After that you could give it up and go back to using safety pins as a fashion statement instead of a tool for holding bias-binding in position.

Interestingly enough, Physics was not a subject at that school, and nor was Honours Maths, and there was only one computer, which none of us was allowed to touch. But let it not be said we would leave school without being able to coax the flavour from a bit of silverside.

Our teacher was Sister Regis. Picture a stout, durable torso, a decisive nose, glasses on a chain, cankles, the works. Now imagine the effect on such a woman of the emotions brought on by teaching an unwilling remedial student for several months. First disbelief, then fury, then resignation, then pity and finally, at the end of the academic year, a tiny, barely perceptible flicker of amusement.

We were set to the task of making a gingham apron, which naturally meant buying some gingham cloth. I acquired a metre or two of some sort of satin lining material in a memorable shade of midnight blue, and decided it would do. Sr Regis was put to the trouble of exchanging it.

Sr Regis was also put to the trouble of taking the measurements, cutting out the pattern, stitching it together, attaching the binding, laundering it and pressing it. On the last day of term I tried the apron on. “It fits very well,” remarked Sr Regis, “though I say so myself.”

But Home Economics, once disdained by young women with ambitions beyond a wedding and a nursery and the gradual accumulation of a jewellery collection, has made a comeback. Deirdre Madden’s former Inter Cert textbook, ‘All About Home Economics’, has been reissued by the author’s daughters, in response to clamorous demand.

Life, as Shirley Conran said, may be too short to stuff a mushroom, and certainly I’d wager it’s possible to make your way happily and productively into your dotage without ever finding out what forcemeat is. But you always have to clean the windows. So it is that we uppity girls go crawling back to the Ms Maddens and Mrs Beetons, begging forgiveness and help.

“This recipe says I have to turn into a greased baking tray. How am I to do that?,” you whine, adding: “By the way, this show of weakness doesn’t mean I’m with you on the subject of margarine. You’re on your own with the margarine, Missus… And the pig’s cheeks.”

Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management is full of rigorous instructions, none of which involves lying in your own filth with a bottle of wine, even though that is the most likely consequence of reading it.

“Cold or tepid baths should be employed every morning,” she exhorts, although allowances can be made if you’re sick with the ague or the pox or the gout or whatever.

On preparing chicken, she instructs: “First, catch your chicken.” And she is quite severe on the subject of trivial conversation: “Trifling occurrences such as small disappointments, petty annoyances and other everyday incidents should never be mentioned to your friends.” Heavens, how is a person supposed to put together a newspaper column?

Mrs Beeton also has exhaustive advice on the treatment of servants, but that’s just for the oak panellers among us. The rest of you can go back to your spoiled fish.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 27 November 2011