(This incidentally, also applies to the government. It cannot hope to win back support through a series of small local campaigns, supported by politically driven local projects, or by intensive local campaigning and handing out Cabinet posts or Seanad seats. This worked before, but it will not work now. The govnernment has to put forward coherent, radical, large scale, national level change to make a difference to people’s situations and people’s perceptions. (And it has to start with the cabinet reshuffle.)

Simon has pointed out that if you enter the competition, you are giving your IP to them. What this means is not made clear in the discussion. What it actually means is that you are giving the organizers the option to take your idea and implement it, and also to prevent you yourself from implementing it. They can pay you any amount they wish when they exercise this option. They are not bound to pay you EUR 100,000. The amount of the prize is not specified in the terms and conditions which you sign up to. And anyway, the organizers can change the terms and conditions  any time they want.

I would really put this down to failure to think the issues out rather than any real malice. I doubt if the organizers plan to operate in this way, but that’s not the point. The point is, they can if they want.

So it’s vagueness, rather than malice. But the vagueness goes on. What the organizers are looking for is as vague as the terms and conditions. When you analyse it down, ‘transformational proposals’ is what it seems to boil down to. The last time we heard the word ‘transformational’ it was John Gormley talking about the revised Program for Government. And he was using it very vaguely indeed.

Still, it’s not YCYC’s fault the word has been sullied. But what do they want? Suppose we agree we need to transform Ireland (I agree with that) how do we do it?

The problem is that transformation is a fancy word for ‘change’. Change is difficult, and in practice, change is expensive and takes a long time. It involves upsetting people and causing a lot of trouble.

In general, you don’t get much change on a national scale for half-a-million euros. If you are depending on government help to drive change, well you will be in for a disappointment. Governments (and institutions generally) are like Dublin Bus. It’s very hard to get change on-board. This isn’t because governments and institutions contain bad people. It’s just that that’s the way institutions are.

Are there things we could do? For sure there are. But they won’t result in the sort of change YCYC seems to be envisaging, at least not in the short term. You could do a pilot project of some sort for EUR 500,000 for something like an International Content Services Centre, or you could develop a new brand identity for Ireland. These could well be the catalyst for change. But they probably wouldn’t be, or at the very least would require a lot of other similar scale initiatives to get them to take off.

Equally, I could say that there is a need to transform banking in Ireland. I could certainly give you a blueprint for doing that over six weeks, but there is no chance that I would get support within Ireland for doing that. One or possibly two of the sponsors would have a conflict of interest and the whole thing could not possibly be judged on its merits or even on the actual facts (i.e., that the two main banks in this country have run out of equity capital).

The vague thinking has led to another problem in YCYC, the idea that you might be able to jettison the guy with the idea before you even get going. This is like throwing the pilot out of the plane once the plane has got clearance to take off from the tower. It just doesn’t work like that. Great enterprises and great change need someone to champion them. It’s nice to think you could wheel in a few lawyers or PR guys to get the idea into the sky, but it just doesn’t work like that.

There is also vagueness about the funding. It’s far from clear whether the organization actually has the funding to do what is promised. It’s not at all clear where the money is coming from.

We don’t even know who is organizing this, apart from the chairman and one other brave soul who has bravely exposed himself to the ravages of Twitter.

One thing we have to do as a nation is to get rid of the vagueness. We have to deal with the tough problems head-on, not just hope they will go away.

Hopefully the Your Country Your Call organizers will recognize this and face the issues they have head on, so that they and the nation can get the maximum return from their investment.

Most interesting are Michael Soden’s comments on RTE Radio’s News at one yesterday:

Mr Soden said the likelihood of either foreign or domestic investors taking a stake in the bank is remote while the prospect remains of the Government’s shareholding getting bigger.

He also has a money-generating idea:

[He] said that the bank could generate a considerable amount of money if it sold its payments system.

The bank’s payments system is the infrastructure over which bank customers are charged for processing cheques and using bank cards, which Mr Soden says generates significant cash flow each year and would be worth a substantial sum of money.

This idea is also applicable to AIB and other banks. As rescue ideas for the banking sector in Ireland go, this is one of the better ones so far. The payments business is certainly worth something. There is no inherent need for it to stay as part of the bank itself.

You could also go further. The parts of the bank network that are related to cash handling  could be hived off into the payments company. This would include a large part of the branch operations.

Customers of any bank could get their payments facilities (lodging cheques, getting change, etc.) from this new payments/cash handling company. This company would also operate the ATM network.

The main Bank of Ireland business would then concentrate on providing credit and deposit facilities. It would no longer have the benefit of a branch network (which is an effective way of keeping coin and banknote intense companies loyal).

This would have a positive benefit for competitiveness in the Irish banking marketplace. Cash intensive SME’s wouldn’t be stuck with using a high-street bank for their banking needs. They could shop around and get the best deal on credit.

So that’s the idea. It’s basically a good system. It removes the need for the driver to keep a pile of coins on-hand and to find a working meter to buy a paper ticket from. Equally, it saves the City Council the bother of maintaining all the parking meters and collecting the money out of them. If the system gets popular enough, DCC will be able to get rid of the meters altogether. It is also fast and easy to check that cars are properly paid up.
Parkingtag.ie is run by payzone, who sell phone credit and other ‘virtual’ vouchers through most grocers, supermarkets and convenience stores in the country.

So far so good. The product is good. The benefits are good. There is a wide network. So what are the problems?

First, the communications. There is no clear explanation of how the system works on the parkingtag.ie website.  There is an explanation of what it does, but not of how it works. There are no specific instructions on how to operate the service either. The FAQ section is poorly written, with misspellings and missing text. There is no indication of where to buy a parking tag. A video or animation wouldn’t cost too much and would greatly clarify things.
There are some instructions on the dublincity.ie website but that’s not where you would expect them to be.

Next thing is the pricing. The pricing is bizarre. For no good reason, Payzone and Dublin City Council charge more for using the tag than for paying by cash. This is despite the real, substantial savings that DCC will make if it can get even 10 or 20 percent of its customers to switch over to parkingtag.ie, as a result of reduced requirement for machine servicing and cash collection.

More bizarrely, you get charged 50c per month whether you use the service or not. This is sure to scare off infrequent users. It is hard to understand why parkingtag.ie would do this.

The situation is even sillier for customers who opt to use the ‘cash’ or prepay option (calling it a ‘cash’ account is a bad idea). For prepay, you have to pay a few euros up-front for a parking tag.  This is unreasonable and makes no commercial sense. The ‘tag’ is only a printed barcode. It costs very little to produce. It is well worth sending out for free, if it gets people to join the system.

According to the Irish Times, Payzone is having a tough time at board level and on the financial markets. Hopefully this will not cause any problems for the scheme.

View 1. The Green Party was doing the right thing when it focused on Green issues within government. They could have kept a clear line around themselves on these issues and been measured on success in these areas. They did not do this, and now they are blamed for everything that has gone wrong for the government. The natural continuation of this line will be to leave government. If they do this, they will lose everything at the next election, whether this is sooner or later. This is what happened to the PDs. What happened to them will now happen to the Greens.
View 2. The Green Party had an opportunity to define itself as something greater than its old self and tried to do this in the run up to the election. It has failed in this. Fianna Fail now has a great deal of power over the Green Party. They can precipitate a crisis, and put the Green Party in a position where its supporters feel they have to leave government. The members of the party can force this to happen through the democratic structures, even if the TD’s don’t want it. The electorate will blame the Green Party for causing instability and an election. Fianna Fail (and everybody else) will embrace green issues like never before going into a general election. The Green Party will be destroyed.

Neither of these views looks too good for the Green Party. What happens may in fact be determined by the ‘pension before principles’ system that gives ministers a very good reason to stick around for at least three years before having doubts about their cabinet colleagues.
I think the core problem is that the Green Party does not have a strong ideological position to defend and that is part of its weakness. Aside from being against corruption in the planning process and in favour of low energy lightbulbs, what exactly is the distinctive policy?

The Green Party is fundamentally a consumerist party, the same as all the other parties. It believes that what matters is what we consume and that by somehow moderating consumption, or by consuming different kinds of things, that we can solve the world’s problems, which ultimately boil down to resource shortages. As people, we are identified in terms of what we consume – what kinds of cars we drive, what clothes we wear and so on. In fact, this will not work. At best it will slow down the world’s problems. It will not stop or reverse them.
The line the Green Party should have taken is to look at productivity. How do we add more value, consuming less, but producing more? Producing in the sense of creating new things that somehow make life better or achieve some set of goals.

For example, switching to long-life lightbulbs will not achieve any benefit for the environment if we construct buildings that require more lighting (for example, buildings with walls of glass) or if the people coming to the building to work under the light don’t actually produce something that they couldn’t have produced just as well at home.

Outputs, not inputs.

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So the problem is simple: the banks’ net assets are less than zero. The loans they have given out, for which they borrowed money from depositors and other lenders, are no longer considered likely to be repaid in full, or anything near it.
Solving the problem is far from simple. The following issues arise.

Financial: how do you re-shape the banks, so that the banks become viable again? The trick here is that you can’t just give the banks more money which they have to pay back later, nor does simply buying assets from the banks to free up cash help. All these things do nothing to improve the state of the bank. It’s just moving deck chairs around on the deck of the titanic.

Economic: what you do has to result in a banking system that actually supports the economic needs of the country. We are already running into trouble in Ireland on this score. The banking system we have is not fit for purpose. Even if our banks were to miraculously recover in the morning, it really has to be asked whether we really need so many small local banks. More signficantly, we have no bank with a growth plan that will see it through the consolidation of European banks that will inevitably be at the end of this.
Entepreneurial: This is the least-considered part. Banking is an entrepreneurial activity, just like opening a restaurant or developing a new product. You need entrepreneurial energy and risk capital to get the banks going again. There is no entrepreneurial plan (private or state) whatsoever for Irish banks.
Political: You have to actually get the job done. You have to bring all the various political players along with you to fulfill the plan. This is the politicians’ job. They would be good at getting something done, if they knew what to do. But really, the reality is they have no idea what to do. I wonder whether there is the basic understanding of the mechanics of a bank balance sheet at the government table. But it isn’t their job to come up with the plan, they just have to find it and implement it.
Legal: When you come up with some solution, there is going to inevitably be a loser, be it bondholders (people who lent money to the bank), shareholders (people who own the bank), depositors (people with money on deposit) and the government. You need to be sure that whatever you do is actually legal. Now this shouldn’t necessarily be a problem. There is a lot of law and a lot of precedent covering debt, the sale of debt, and so on.
So as I was saying – we are getting absolutely nowhere. The guy who is supposed to be in charge, of actually operating and running the rescue package, Michael Somers, seems to be concerned about the details of how the plan will be implemented. Presumably he knows more than anyone else about what the plan actually is. We have been told in very broad general terms what the plan is (buy bad loans off banks) but we don’t know the detail (what price will be paid, how will this actually effect the balance sheets of the banks, how the loans are to be collected from).

So why can’t we sort this out?

It’s because, under our system, people don’t work together. We have all these groups working in parallel silos. It’s great for coming up with observations and views, but it’s not much good for coming up with solutions.

To make this work, we have to bring all these different groups together. We need interdisciplinary thinking.

I recently read this op-ed about the lack of interdisciplinary work to solve real-world problems in universities. Mark C. Taylor argues that academics are getting every more specialized and isolated. But to actually solve real problems in the real world, all these thoughts have to be brought together.

It isn’t just academics who have this problem. Government departments and even colleagues in government don’t work together. They don’t have a shared vision.
Politicians or economists or bankers cannot resolve this problem alone in their silos. They have to work with others. Until that happens, we won’t be able to fully understand the intricacies of the problems we face with our banking system and our economy, and we certainly won’t be able to solve them.

Note: someone asked me if this meant we should have a national government, with all the parties in it, or else some sort of one-party government. I do not think we should do this.

The problem is a problem of leadership, but it is not a political one. If all the people in the actual government we have and in the various parts of Irish life worked together, we would probably be OK. It’s the technical and creative job of coming up with a resolution that is causing the trouble.

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.

A loss of 5 percent of business is enormous for a bus company, far greater than it might seem. For a start, it should never happen. O’Mahony makes a good job of explaining the things that might have led to it happening (late buses, low quality, poor monitoring)

In a bus company, unlike most other companies we might think of, your costs are all fixed. If you do lose 5 percent of your numbers on a bus service, you have to cut, and fast. You can’t absorb the loss.
The result is that a 5 percent reduction in numbers is as severe as a 20 percent drop in sales in a convenience store.

Fewer buses doesn’t necessarily mean poorer operations (though it might). All the things that O’Mahony suggests, you can do with fewer buses.

Obviously, there are no right answers here. Cutting back buses when you are trying to promote public transport is obviously a catastrophic thing to have to do. But the problem is that Dublin Bus has painted itself into a corner. Now it’s just going to have to wait for the paint to dry, and make sure it never traps itself like this again.