Dealing in Hope

According to Napoleon, a leader is a dealer in hope. There are all the technical changes and tough cuts that have to be made at a time of recession, but more than anything else, a political leader needs to deliver hope to his or her people.

Like every other commodity, there are different types of hope. There is false hope, which was groundless from the beginning. There is dashed hope, which could have come to something, but didn’t for whatever reason. Then there is real hope, which is often a tiny glimmer at the bottom of a box of troubles.

So if you want to get some hope in post-celtic tiger Ireland, who are the main dealers open for business, and what’s the quality of the goods they are offering? For starters politicians have mostly missed out on buying into a hope franchise. They believe that they if they stare at the numbers long enough and argue enough, that they can bypass the hard reality. They can’t. Our economy has a serious issue. There’s no point pussy-footing around it. Painful decisions have to be made, and they are the people who are going to have to make them.

But there are alternative suppliers in the marketplace. The Ideas Campaign is the latest dealer in hope. From the website: ‘The Ideas Campaign is about asking people for ideas to stimulate economic activity. It is challenging people in Ireland to be innovative and creative and to play their part in planning this country’s economic recovery.’

However, there is a risk that this will turn into false hope. The one idea that have come from the campaign so far seems naive. The Irish Times reports that Aileen O’Toole, the founder of the Ideas Campaign “cited one idea from a man who works with a social housing group who sees plasterers and plumbers walking past his rundown houses on their way to collect social welfare payments. He believes many tradesmen would be willing to lend him their skills for the greater good during a period of unemployment. ”
It seems like a nice idea to have people work for free whilst they are on the dole. But this hardly seems fair. For one thing, it will undermine contractors who are tendering for work with social housing groups (and who presumably have to pay their tradesmen). For another, adding more housing to an already oversupplied housing market is unlikely to do much good. Still another problem, it seems wrong that distributors and manufacturers would get money for the raw materials they supply, but that tradesmen who work and install them get nothing. The idea that there is a quick fix to our economic woes would be a false hope.
But still, the Ideas Campaign is onto something here, something that can be the foundation of real hope. Even if the idea isn’t quite as feasible and simple as it might seem, it stimulates thinking. More importantly, it stimulates involvement. People are involved in the economy. The undoubtedly hard changes that are coming will then seem like part of a recipe for getting things moving again, rather than a relentless parry of wage cuts.

Thats where hope arises. The belief that we are engaged together in doing something that will make a difference, even if that difference will take a long time to achieve and will take a lot of pain.
Look at the issue of unemployed tradesmen – maybe the problem is that the social housing group can’t afford to employ tradesmen, because rates are too high? Then we need to make it possible for tradesmen to work for an acceptable price, rather than hoping they will work for free. Maybe we just have too many tradesmen, in which case we need to retrain some of them. We should look at everything, including the minimum wage, if that’s what what it takes to get things working again. Or maybe we need to look at the structure of the housing market, to make the existing housing stock available to more people, then that’s what we should do.
Hope is not about coming up with fast, simple answers. There are few or none of these for an economy that is in the mess ours. However, there are lots of ways to make things better and every possibility that things will turn around, if we focus on our strengths and keep working at it.

So to succeed in dealing hope, the Ideas Campaign needs to focus on the process as much as the actual ideas. As well as trying to pick winning ideas, I hope they will put all the ideas they have out there for people to think about and discuss, maybe in a discussion board format. They should certainly get the opinions of the great and good through an advisory committee, but they should also take the time to engage with people, to listen and to explain. Where has the money gone? What will we do? What are our economy’s (and our country’s) strengths?

If it does that, it will make more progress in moving us forward than the politicians have so far.

Irish Times article about public transport in Dublin

Margaret O’Mahony has an interesting article in the Irish Times about Dublin Bus and the cuts there. It’s interesting, and mostly right, but it is wrong about some things.

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Electronics project

I have a little project that I want to get together that involves modifying a Fonera to do various things. I need some help with the electronics part of it. Is there anybody around town who can help with this?

Shinsei Bank – a model for Irish banking reform?

J.C Flowers is one of the companies apparently interested in investing in and restructuring Irish banks, in particular, Bank of Ireland. The same company took over Long Term Credit Bank of Japan and restructured it into Shinsei (‘rebirth’) Bank which according to Joichi Ito describes as ‘an example of how legacy companies in Japan can be turned around with good management and smart methods’.

A lot of people are concerned that foreign investors will do something radical with the Irish banks. But the reality is that this is what is required. Our banking is not anything like as efficient as it could be and our bankers are nowhere near as smart as they thought they were. If the sector does not restructure itself now, it will have restructuring forced upon it by competition from across the eurozone within a few years. It is worth reading what former Bank of Ireland CEO Michael Soden has said. Leaving things the way they are is just not an option.

Court goings-on

So, my solicitors and I spent a day in Court with Swords Express, the public transport company I started to provide decent, fast transport to the people of Ireland’s biggest town last year. You only go to Court when there is something really big at stake, and you only go to Court with the government if you think you are very likely to get a favorable outcome. The costs involved are tremendous. The government has limitless resources and is not afraid to bring them to bear. Even for our one-day event and even though no evidence was heard in Court and the State decided to settle on the day, the costs will be into six figures, money which the taxpayer will end up having to pay.

Nice review of my book!

Someone (Mr P. Stewkesbury) wrote a nice review of my book on Amazon. (Scroll down to the bottom.) It is very kind.

Consumer rights are not protected

This article in the Irish Times (now free) is an important description of the problems with the National Consumer Agency and other bodies by Michael Casey, a former assistant director of the Central Bank of Ireland.

UPDATE: Ann FitzGerald of the National Consumer Agency responds.

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Solving intercity transport in Ireland

Read this plan for an intercity coach system based on Motorways, conceived for the UK, but very applicable to Ireland.

GPSIreland Postcode ideas

I’ve written loads about postcodes before. GPS Ireland have published a concept for a postcode system, and Garmin have implemented it in a limited way on their devices. Good for them for publishing their idea.
However, there are a number of big issues with implementing such a system.

- The problem is that it is not much help in and of itself to actually deliver anything, except maybe by helicopter. You need to cross-reference the code against a map database to have any idea of how to effect the delivery or to estimate how long the delivery might take. This means that you are in a proprietary situation right away. There is no free road map database of Ireland.
- Packets and parcels with the code (and packets and parcels will represent 80 percent of delivery items within 20 years) would be practically impossible to sort by hand. You have to key ‘em or scan ‘em to have any idea which bag to put them in. Manual sorting of letters by unskilled workers is still a reality of the Irish postal system at the busiest times. Many other items (like registered letters and packages) are also manually sorted.

- You can have very ambiguous codes. For example, if you have a short back garden, you could end up with a code the same as the guy in the house backing on to you. In some cases, it could be a one-mile drive to the other property.

- The resolution of the system is just not that high for central areas. It’s only 5m. A significant number of houses in Ireland are smaller than 5m on one or other dimension.

- You really need a centralized database of addresses to do most useful tasks with the code (for example, verifying an address as valid). Sorting out this national address database is the big challenge for any postcode implementation. To do the surveys required from scratch for this system would cost at least EUR 15m, and maybe more.

- Google maps is just not an accurate way of determining longitude and lattitude. It is often many inaccurate by tens or even hundreds of metres, because of the way the projections work.

- letters in codes are not a good idea. They make it more likely that the code will be misremembered, misheard or misread. Letters that look alike, or like numbers, such as  ‘S’, ‘Z’ and letters that sound alike, such as ‘N’ and ‘M’ in particular are going to cause confusion and errors.

My own suggestion, which I have worked on with Michael Everson, is to use an all-numbers 5+4 code and base the code on existing administrative divisions, subdividing to road/street and individual delivery point level as necessary, and to number the codes geographically, i.e, the district in the top left of a county is numbered 101 and the district in the bottom right is number 909.

This has the following advantages:
- keeps the implementation costs to a minimum at the outset

- allows items to be be easily sorted manually or by machine

- can be implemented in a basic way without any proprietary databases (although it can conveniently link to proprietary databases)
- integrates well with existing databases (like census, rates office, electoral register and geodirectory)
- does not absolutely require a single address database at the outset (although one may have to be constructed over time on the basis of existing databases)

- allows the system to be extended where necessary (subdivision to provide a unique address for each home is not a big issue in Dublin City for example, but it is a big issue in some rural areas and is more likely to be cost-effective there).
- can cope with certain areas of the country becoming much higher density over time

- makes it obvious for a non-specialist withough special equipment as to where in the country a particular address is located.

This scheme isn’t perfect either of course, but after talking to a lot of people and considering a lot of options, it seems like the best way to do it. We also have a plan for giving the postcode legal backing, without requiring an Act of the Oireachtas.

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