Archive for the ‘Citizenship, migration, race, and ethnicity’ Category

Dana’s allegiance issue

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

It feels a little unfair to pick on someone when they're down - Dana's trailing the field in the presidential campaign, behind even Mitchell - but this is a fairly basic thing. Background: Dana Rosemary Scallon became a US citizen shortly before running for president of Ireland in 1997. The red herrings: ...

Communicating in a crisis – what the Irish government did wrong (part 1 of 80-180 billion)

Sunday, November 21st, 2010

When I talk with my students about PR I explain that the first rule of crisis communication is to 'fess up - get out in front of the rumours and claims, admitting the truth (in order that you can have a say in framing that truth). This week the Irish ...

Media Participation at IAMCR2010

Monday, July 19th, 2010

Sitting in on my first IAMCR session - past of the Participatory Communication theme. Interesting to see some of the techniques used to facilitate participation in news programming, in particular. Currently watching a presentation about PeoPo in Taiwan. Nice schematic by the presenter, explicating the different ways in which users ...

War declared! (kind of)

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

Well this could be awkward. (Are we expected to cut off all communications?) The EU is threatening a visa war with Canada, because of its withdrawal of visa waivers from visitors from the Czech Republic. That decision, in turn, had been prompted by a large number of applications for asylum ...

Following the Irish election, at home and abroad

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

This is the first Irish election in many years where I have not been following the results from the counting centre. I remember in 1987 heading in to see the last few hours of the Galway-West count, as Michael D. regained his seat in the Dáil. There's something special for ...

Abuse was not a failure of the system. It was the system.

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

The Irish Times aren't generally known for coherent or incisive editorials, but their reaction to the Ryan report makes for sobering reading: We have to call this kind of abuse by its proper name – torture. We must also call the organised exploitation of unpaid child labour – young girls placed ...

This is integration

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Amidst a BBC report on Roma migration in Europe is this note on education policy in Hungary, which : In Hungary, an earlier policy to give money to schools for the mentally disabled, to which a disproportionate number of Roma were sent, was abandoned when it was realised that it encouraged ...

GRC summary

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

I had planned to blog more from GRC, but my airport card stopped working on Friday, which was somewhat of an annoyance. I was pleased that my session on podcasting was reasonably successful - we didn't get into discussing much of the more arcane aspects of adopting podcasting for community ...

Visiting New Orleans

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Approximately 225,000 people left New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina flooded most city neighborhoods in August 2005. A sizeable number came from the 9th ward. Some 1800 people died during the floods; later, hundreds more succumbed to stress-related ailments. [Saul Landau] My parents visited the US recently, and we took the opportunity ...

Activism compendium

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

A number of items today, from a range of sources. First, the picture to the left is of Labour TD Joe Costello, who for the last 5 years has run a weekly protest outside the Mater hospital, calling for better healthcare. Second, potentially good news for grad employees in private universities in ...