Love it or hate it, if you want absolutely up-to-date information on the General Election over the next few days then you have to be on Twitter. Don’t worry, for most of it you don’t have to setup an account.

So the main feeds you’ll probably be interested in are:

• #GE11 – This will be a firehose and only for total politics junkies. A huge percentage of Tweets about the election by everyone on Twitter will have this tag
• #CSW – This is much quieter and is specifically for Cork South West Tweets
• @RTEcorkSTHWEST – This is for RTE’s coverage of the count in Cork South West
• @RTE_Elections – Despite my many criticisms of RTE, this has been a brilliant feed of general election coverage
• General Election Candidates – This is Suzy Byrne’s list of 265 General Election Candidates accounts.
• General Election 2011 – A small list I created of people/accounts talking about the election

And finally, my little geeky project over at CurationByMe. It allows you to pop in a List like Suzy’s and then filter it by a tag. So you can see just #ge11 related tweets by everyone in a specific list, not everything they are saying. Unlike all of the other above, you do need a Twitter account to use it.

Any other hashtags, accounts or lists that people can recommend for Cork South West coverage? Radio stations, newspapers etc?

Please don’t abuse it, they are watching out for that.

Current stats for CSW are very interesting. I’d be very surprised if they match the outcome assuming that the number of remote mountain farmers on boards.ie is pretty small!

In an ideal world i.e. not Ireland, you would see new parties forming that build on the anger of the populace and offer something radical, new, modern, urban and focused on National issues. Unfortunately in Ireland, if you want to skip the usual suspects,  you can choose between:

• a bunch of right-wing religious nut-jobs or
• a bunch of old-school pinkos in suits or
• a bunch of  murderers in suits

Even if you did form a new party, it would get almost no votes since it would need to spend years playing the bullshit local politics game that lies at the heart of all of our problems.

Here’s how you currently get elected to run the country:

1. Be a teacher, other public sector employee, accountant, solicitor, publican or auctioneer
2. Join the local branch of your favourite party
3. Get involved in “local issues”.
4. Build up a support base.
5. Be seen as a “family man/woman” and be heavily involved in sport
6. Run for the local council and get elected. In Bandon you only need 100 votes to do this.
7. Bide your time
8. Become an expert in street lights, water pressure, roadworks, church gate collections, removals and funerals
9. Run for the county council. Get elected.
10. Pick the man/woman who you are going to piggy back on e.g. Mini Martin or Batt in Cork. This is critical, pick the wrong one and there goes any chance of you making it to the big leagues when they are promoted/retire.
11. Bide your time
12. Finally when the opening appears through death/retirement/MEP-ship, “throw your hat in the ring”
13. Get picked by the party to run (you have been networking during all these years to make sure you are the one who is picked, haven’t you? )
14. Hurrah, you now have a seat in the Dáil. You can chill for a few years so you don’t rock the boat.
15. Make sure your local constituency office is very active in the community. If you forget this bit, you’ll be out in the next election.
16. Claim credit for everything the County Council, Public Sector or Government does in your constituency or county. Anything from a new light on the bypass to the actual bypass itself
17. Make sure the locals see you regularly in your constituency office and make sure they see that you are solely responsible for sorting out whatever it is that they were already entitled to if they had just contacted the relevant department themselves.
18. Run the next time and get elected

Or

1. Be a son/daughter/nephew/niece of a TD
2. Wait until Mammy/Daddy/Uncle/Auntie retires/dies and take their seat.

This is why our Dáil is full to the rafters of people you wouldn’t hire to work in your own business in a million years. But they are not to blame, you are. As long as you expect the people who are supposed to be running the country to sort out your mickey-mouse local problems, you are going to elect completely the wrong people to the Dáil. The idea that you contact your National Representative when you have a local problem is so utterly ridiculous it’s staggering.

How do we solve this? Well people are too lazy to change so they’ll probably have to be forced to (plastic bags anyone?). What if it was made illegal for a sitting TD to contact any government department or public sector body about a constituent’s problems? Based on the potential for corruption? Would that sort it out?

Until we fix this local nonsense out and start electing National politicians with the skills and aptitude to run a country, Ireland will remain a tin-pot banana republic with delusions of grandeur run by a cabal of small town operators.

But let’s pretend the Irish voters get a clue and start realising they are the problem and they start thinking about the future of their country rather than their townland. Imagine a party with no ties to the past starting with a blank sheet of paper. What would I like to see in their manifesto in order for me to be able to vote for them. Here’s a random unordered, incomplete list of the stuff that’s been bouncing around in my head.

1. As I said above, make it illegal for a sitting TD to contact any government department or public sector body about a constituent’s problems
2. Force all public sector employees to resign from their positions if they are elected TDs. Yes teachers I’m talking about you.
3. Complete and utter re-structuring of the HSE from the ground up. Removal of layer upon layer of health board legacy management.
4. Firing, demoting or “early retirement” for every senior civil servant in Dept of Finance (and elsewhere) involved in the destruction of the Irish economy. It shouldn’t just be the temporary government that gets the bullet, it’s time the permanent government took some responsibility for their actions.
5. The titles and responsibilities of all senior Civil Servants to be regularly distributed to the public and those Civil Servants interviewed regularly by the media about their roles, recommendations and decisions.
6. Cancelling of all state and semi-state contracts with the audit firms that were involved with Irish banks over the past 5 years. Those firms blocked from new contracts for another 5 years.
7. All public sector pay and promotions based on strict performance metrics.
8. A 4-week review of every quango in Ireland with the aim to shut down 60% of them in 6 months. Any quango whose only job is to formulate policy, replicate what another quango does or spend training grants to be the first to go.
9. A rapid-fire review of what FÁS does and whether it provides any lasting value to the people being trained or to the country
10. A 4-page summary of every contract to the big consulting firms to be delivered by the relevant departments. These would list the intent, projected deadline, projected cost, current actual timeline and current actual cost. Aim to shut down 60% of them in 6 months with no new contracts to the big firms.
11. Creation of position of Government CIO/CTO (possibly the only decent idea Brian Cowen ever had. Where is that person Brian?) Every public sector IT project over a certain value to be vetted and monitored by small team of full-time IT experts working for that person, not the big consulting firms.
12. Upskilling of people at every level in the public sector so that IT initiatives become driven by needs from the bottom-up
13. Mandating of online communications tools wherever possible to reduce public sector travel, both for cost and environmental reasons. This includes things like IM, Yammer, Wikis, desktop sharing, webcam-based video conferencing  etc etc
14. A guarantee to deliver, before the following election, a list system to bring real expertise into the Dáil.
15. Either shut down the Seanad or make it directly electable. We can no longer afford a dumping ground for has-beens or never-weres who like the sound of their own voices.
16. TDs, Ministers and Taoiseach’s salaries to be brought down to acceptable levels.
17. Banning of all Government appointments to state and semi-state boards.
18. Splitting of RTE into three independent businesses:
    1. Commercial business spun off as a private entity funded only by advertising.
    2. Semi-State Public Service Broadcaster funded by a much reduced licence fee. The IMF bailout coverage fiasco was a new low point for RTE public service broadcasting. This needs to be fixed.
    3. State body managing the network and providing it on commercial basis to all comers, including the previous two (see next point)
19. Creation of a National Infrastructure Management Agency (NIMA). I was a fan of the privatization of Eircom back in the day but as I sit here on rubbish ADSL in Bandon with no fibre to the town I have come to the conclusion that there are certain things a country should own and control itself. All that talk about sovereignty recently and yet we don’t own our telecommunications infrastructure. Who, other than the state,  could build a Fibre to the Home infrastructure in Ireland given the investment required and the long period over which it would make a return?  NIMA would own and manage:
    1. ESB Networks
    2. Eircom’s infrastructure (this would obviously have to be bought back. What sort of cost?)
    3. All of the MANs. Any future MAN based on need, not political influence.
    4. Any strategically important fibre
    5. RTE TV/Radio Network. An Ad-free, foreign-programme-free www.rte.ie probably fits here with the RTEPlayer
20. Twitter has made the leap to being a Public Service Utility and should become a mandatory reporting system for all County Councils around the country. It was invaluable for weather and road reporting over the past few weeks. See Irish Weather Online and my TERROR post here
21. Some other very technical things I want to see (via the Ireland CIO/CTO) from a post I did a year ago include:
    1. Mashups and data mining across departments/areas to be promoted
    2. No new public sector IT projects to be approved without an API even if that is just RSS
    3. APIs to be freely available for use by the public wherever possible. Only exception is where individual’s privacy may be impacted. Where this is an issue, anonymised aggregated data provided.
    4. A CIO Solutions Catalogue to be created with examples of successful projects from all areas of the public sector that can be re-used
    5. Strong ongoing data-mining of e-tenders system to find repetition and redundancy and to guide those putting up RFTs to re-use or customise existing solutions
    6. An agile approach to all projects. Quick prototypes mandatory
    7. An avoidance of boil-the-ocean projects and a move towards simple quick wins locally which bubble up nationally
    8. Metrics for success defined at early stage of all projects and reported on at regular intervals
    9. Off the shelf Open Source to be preferred for all projects
    10. Once per quarter IRLCamp where public sector and private sector get together and present interesting projects, ideas and technologies and learn from each other. These lightweight BarCamp style events will have people at every level, not formal Powerpoint from senior people.
22. OPW to be made self-funding with a profit-making mandate.
23. Is Failte Ireland self-funding? It should be.
24. Ditto Coillte.
25. Coillte, OPW, Tourism Ireland, Failte Ireland mandated to generate additional €100m p.a. in revenue from castles, buildings, forests, parks, beaches, camp-sites etc etc in conjunction with new tourist/leisure facilities in all of those. Fees only for the facilities.
26. Coillte, OPW, Tourism Ireland, Failte Ireland and other tourism quangos mandated to work with private sector to generate new tourism/leisure revenue streams of at least €100m p.a.
27. Temporary removal of all fees and travel taxes for those travelling to Ireland by air/sea.

As I said, an unordered collection. But most of it very achievable by a new competent skills-based government in 6 months.

Or if you want real belly-laughs just head over to Jim Corr’s site.

Now you can be informed.

What John Handelaar has done over at kildarestreet.com with the help of some other great people is deeply important. Quite simply, the Dáil record is now properly accessible rather than just available. The site enables you to do the following:

• Read a dramatically-more-legible version of the Dáil Record going back to January 2004
• Search that record by speeches or written questions, or by speaker, or by date or date range
• Sign up for email alerts for when a search query you’re interested changes
• Sign up for email alerts whenever a TD of your choosing says something or asks a question which generated a written reply
• Subscribe to RSS feeds for individual TDs or for search queries

This isn’t just important for the content you find but also for the content that you don’t find. I will not be voting for any sitting TD in any future election unless I see continuous active engagement by them in the Dáil. If they don’t have anything to say, they shouldn’t be there.

The days of some gobshite getting elected because he got your daughter a job in the Civil Service or claims to be responsible for every penny spent in your constituency have to come to an end. kildarestreet.com will hopefully help usher the beginning of proper national politics involving those who care about our country and what it can become.

We all sat idly by as those running this country ran it into the ground. It’s time we started paying attention.

UPDATE:

I just used the site to check on our three TDs in Cork South-West. Summary as follows for the past year:

• Christy O’Sullivan (FF): Has spoken in 5 debates in the last year — well below average among TDs. Has received answers to 8 written questions in the last year — below average among TDs
• PJ Sheehan (FG): Has spoken in 81 debates in the last year — above average among TDs. Has received answers to 101 written questions in the last year — average among TDs.
• Jim O’Keeffe (FG): Has spoken in 51 debates in the last year — average among TDs. Has received answers to 173 written questions in the last year — above average among TDs.

After seeing this, I take back any ageist comments I made in the last election about PJ Sheehan and I’m disappointed to see my predictions about Christy O’Sullivan have proven true.

Unfortunately for these hypocrites, this restaurant owner is Irish and (like the rest of us) he doesn’t like people telling him what to do. I was then thrilled to discover who he was. The restaurant is Knife + Fork and he is Damien Brasel. He was made head chef in Peacock Alley in Dublin at the age of 20! Two of my top ten meals of all time were in Peacock Alley in its heyday before it all went pear-shaped.

His response to these lazy cause-of-the-week nitwits? Put a fois gras tasting menu on! The outcome? His business has improved. Result

If you are in New York and wondering where to eat, can I recommend you try Knife + Fork? Bring some chicken nuggets with you to throw at the wastes-of-oxygen picketing outside at the weekend.

Here is the original RTE piece on the Cowen nudes that they removed from their site and then apologised for mentioning. Thanks to Mr Mulley.

“Against us are… all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty… We are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils..”

It is a site that watches for any blog posts that mention a TD’s name and provides a summary of that post on the site. It is party neutral and is in no way partisan.

Those with blogs can add a widget which displays the latest politics posts on their own blog sidebar. Of course readers can now subscribe by email to get all the latest posts.

And of course his website doesn’t load!

Inserting this nobody over a well known local politician like Alan Coleman is a huge mistake by FF. I don’t know how well Coleman would have done in this climate but at least he has a known reputation.

I will not vote for anonymous candidates from any party.

If I want to buy fat-laden, carb-laden, salt-laden Tayto, I bloody will and they chances of me looking at some insulting graphics are zero. When I smoked, you could have put pictures of sliced open cancerous lungs on the box and I’d happily have puffed away.

Information is only useful to those seeking it. If we want nutrition information then we’ll use the amazing human ability to read to find out what is in the box. “oh but people don’t know what a safe level of salt is, so our traffic light system will enable them to figure this out without actually ever having to think”. “Next year, we’ll be bringing in a system which does an instant analysis of your blood and won’t let you buy anything with too much salt or sugar”.

I was pleasantly surprised that FF told the opposition to get a clue and that they would not be bringing in such a scheme.

The first political party which starts a campaign to destroy the ever growing nanny state gets my vote.

You want people to eat properly? Then make Home Economics, Social & Scientific, Cooking compulsory in schools for both boys and girls starting around age 7. Hell, you could do a double whammy and teach it through Irish.

Technorati Tags: Traffic+Lights, Food, Labour, Fine+Gael, Marxism, Nanny+State, Nutrition, Intelligence, Cop+On, Information, Knowledge, Cooking, Tayto

I’m surprised that so many of the old left in Britain have been able to move to a place politically where I can agree with much of what they say. It is a pity that the Irish left can still be found associating themselves with Ba’athist-hugging scumbags like George Galloway or Pol Pot groupies like Noam Chomsky.

[tags]Lebanon, Israel, Norm Geras, Pol Pot, Noam Chomsky, George Galloway, Baath party[/tags]

I was just reading the latest edition of my local Bandon Opinion and saw an ad by Sinn Fein Bandon encouraging people to wear the Easter Lily.

Let me just quote the important bit: “combining the green, white and saffron of our national flag”. Green……White…..SAFFRON? Which national flag are these cretins referring to? That of Tuvalu maybe or Micronesia or maybe Latvia?

Obviously Sinn Fein is now run by middle class foodies who like nothing better than a delicate saffron flavoured risotto.

Just when you think they are getting a clue, you are reminded of what you are dealing with.

[tags]Sinn Fein, National Flag, Green, White, Orange, Saffron[/tags]

I was a bit suprised that he referred to my blog as political because apart from the odd dig at Islamo-fascists and their apologists, I mainly talk about food!

Start Rant:

But I have always been deeply angry about what happened in Rwanda and how the world just stood back and let it happen, just like they are doing all over again in Darfur. Rwanda was the nadir of the Clinton adminstration and should surely have precluded Kofi Annan from ever becoming Secretary General of the UN. The same people who call George Bush and Ariel Sharon mass murderers seem to have no problem idolising those two cowards with their hands soaked in the blood of Africans.

End Rant.

In any case, apologies to Eoin for not posting this sooner. If you want to find out more about the movie (given that I know nothing about it!) head on over to the Official Blog and  The Rwandan Survivors Blog.

[tags]Rwanda, Rwandan Survivors, Shooting Dogs, Genocide,  UN, Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton[/tags]

More usefully, I put the mincer attachment in the freezer for the day and used meat which had barely defrosted. Lo and behold, the meat flew through the mincer. I was using the coarsest holeage (I’m tired, I have no idea what the right term is for that) and so had to run the meat through again. Even tho I had re-cooled eveything (I lay in a bath of ice water for 10 minutes), it must not have been enough because the second run had a bit of jammage (feel free to use that new word in conversation). But still far far better than before.

I went with a very simple flavouring of a hint of parsley, sage, thyme and oregano all fresh from the cat wee area at the front of the house, a good blast of white pepper and some salt. I probably didn’t use enough bread crumbs. This time I went with hog casings which are the bigger ones. The fillage was a bit fiddly but went fine and the linkage was a disaster with the resulting sossies ranging from 1 inch to 6 inches (or 0.25cm to 3cm on a female ruler).

The hangage went fine overnight and I cooked them up the following morning. During frying I realised my biggest mistake – overfillage of the sausages. The meat started pushing out through the ends of the casings and after ten minutes I must have had over a centimetre of liquid in the pan.

It was therefore no surprise that they were very dry again and the texture was too dense due to the lack of bread crumbs. But they tasted really great, as good as shop bought in my humble estimation. I had them with a lovely organic egg from Tesco and some very succulent Danish rashers from the same source.

I highly recommend that you temporarily buy these tasty offerings from Denmark, at least whilst Riots R Us are having this week’s riot on the topic of cartoons. Next week’s riot will be back to the usual topic of why America is the great satan and will be protesting NBC’s cancellation of “Jihad Idol”.

Actually, it might be a good idea to stock up on bacon in general. At the rate our dear president is offering to swap our rights for improved business in the Middle East, she’ll probably have got the eating of pork banned in Ireland by the end of her trip.

Three attempts at sausage making and still not perfect. A lesser man would give up and just buy Denny. But then I’ve been cooking steaks for 20 years and I still get that wrong on a regular basis. I think the next attempt will focus on keeping them juicy. One question I still have on filler is whether the 20% or so that is recommended is by weight or volume. It’d surely take a whole hell of a lot of breadcrumbs to make up 20%?

[tags]sausages, Kenwood Chef, Danish Bacon, Mary McAleese, The Irish People, The Life of Brian[/tags]

As ever, someone else expresses this thought so much better than I can.

From Prickly City:

An impressive site. Sign up here:

Unite Against Terror

Well worth reading Christopher Hitchins, John Strawson and Alan and Franziska Norman.

30 years of bombings by IRA scum achieved nothing. Mass murderers like Martin Ferris may think that cowardly bombings in places like Warrington were different to what happened last week. Civilized people know there is no difference between the actions of Irish fascists and Islamo-Fascists. These words from a Londoner say it all:

A Letter To The Terrorists, From London

Amen brother. You have the support of all Irish democrats and always will have.

And for a bit of lighter-hearted support:

Fuck Yeah!