At first - indeed, second - glance, the premise of the campaign seems flawed. Surely the energy and imagination of the many individuals who had tried to get Branson’s attention - the long distance swimmer was only the last of a long line - could better be spent in raising small sums from a larger number of individuals, than on this long shot. And digging deeper, it seems that those at the station recognize this point:

But our decision to ask a billionaire for financial support shouldn’t be the concern. What’s really concerning is this: a station commanding a listenership of nearly a quarter of a million can’t rely on the community to put their money where their preset is.

The story at the station is not so much a parable as a series of parables. The station spent AUS$0.5m on its legal struggle to get on air. The recession has hit their normal fundraising hard - youth employment has been particularly hard hit. The station now faces a AUS$1m hole in its finances. The station has been, in any event, getting limited direct financial support from listeners: “FBi has 219,000 people tuning in every week. 2% of these are financial supporters.” There’s a billionaire, with his own private island, based inside the station’s coverage area.

Still, seeking large donations of this nature is a rather long bet, and speaks to the need for more sustainable models of support. Community radio can be - and is, in many communities - an important tool for community building, something that’s perhaps particularly important in economically troubled times such as these. But because of the indirect, and not always obvious, linkages between community radio and such development, it’s difficult to solicit support - from government or individuals, let alone corporate donors - at times such as these, when budgets are stretched and there’s an increased demand for public support, and a need for quick-acting economic boosts.

This is why it’s important for community stations to develop mixed-funding models, including support from government agencies, tariffs on commercial broadcasting revenues, and direct listener donations. Some stations may also be able to develop side-businesses, such as sound recording and professional services (space rental, training). Each of these will be hit when the economy takes a turn for the worse, but diversification of revenue sources will minimize the risk to the operation as a whole.

In the meantime, best of luck to FBi in their fundraising campaign!

The technologies in use have changed through the years. When I started tallying, we collated the master tally on paper; within a few years, most parties were using Excel or similar. Sometimes someone would bring in a small portable television, and people of all parties would gather around it when there was a particularly momentous development relayed through RTÉ. In the last election or two there was an increasing amount of SMS messages and calls to friends in other count centres, as well as some activity on sites like politics.ie.

Fast-forward to this election, and how things have changed. Although I’m missing hanging out at the count, and the catching up with old friends that that entails, there’s been a constant stream of data online. I gather from disgruntled voices that RTÉ’s web presence has been far better than their (intermittent) broadcast coverage, so I’ve been able to keep up on the running totals of seats won by each party, and to drill down to individual councils if and when I desired.

Even better has been the coverage at IrishElection.com, where they’ve been collating a mix of twitter-style feeds and original content. Moderated, so none of the to-and-fro sniping and off-topic rambling you get on the more traditional web forums, but still with a bit of character to it. As Simon McGarr, in common with several others has noted, “it has outperformed any other source of information and original reporting in the entire country.” Pointers outward to various analyses of progress in different areas, or other bits and pieces. Also - and this brings us back to the technology issue - the feed includes pointers to Alexia Golez’s live video snippets from the Dublin count centre. Using Qik’s phone-to-web tool, she’s able to provide real-time streams of the results, which are then archived online. I leave the window open, and whenever she starts to ‘broadcast’ it starts up in my browser.

Between all of this, I’ve been able to keep a steady stream - or at least a steady drip - of information coming my way, and to have a mix of solid reports and the rumours and analysis that are such an integral part of the process. However, there’s only so much that the internet can do, which was why I was grateful to the friend who thought to call me late last night, after coming home from the Galway count (which finished around 3:30am), to give me an update from there, and share the free-ranging discussion and speculation that I was missing.

Some other thoughts:

• Some political junkies have complained about the lack of live coverage on RTÉ television, in particular, but also on the other broadcast outlets. I think there’s a role for more regular reports, but the play-by-play is mainly of interest to insiders and junkies, and will be of limited importance, compared to the final results, or the overall trends, once those results are finalized in a day or two. It seems reasonable to taper off the constant live coverage as the results from the counts turn to a trickle, while continuing to provide data on the web, or by SMS/twitter, as RTÉ, at least, has done.
• One shortcoming with the generally useful and comprehensive RTÉ data: they’re only reporting first count totals and candidate status (elected/eliminated) on the web, and then collating total party numbers by council and nationally. I don’t see why they couldn’t be including individual count totals (for the second and subsequent rounds) in their database, particularly since their reporters need to be listening to those numbers when they’re announced, in order to then report on who was elected or eliminated. It would allow those of us who want to drill down into the numbers to use the data for more sophisticated analysis, and build a pool of data that RTÉ could have available for future election coverage. The front end is fine, but I find myself wondering “why was that candidate eliminated?” and “how did those transfers scatter?” RTÉ, with their comprehensive coverage, are in a position to provide that information in a timely fashion.
• I should note that ElectionsIreland are now providing count-by-count updates for the European results. I’m guessing reporting the locals in real time was a bit beyond their reach yesterday. Another indication of what the organizations with paid staff can do, which the volunter-run spaces can’t….
• If RTÉ are the people who should be providing the comprehensive numbers, the web seems to be a better space for the analysis and speculation to thrive. It’s the junkies who want the ongoing coverage, and they are also often best placed to provide the speculation. Better that than constantly-revolving talking heads on TV (though the . A fair division of labour, it would seem to me….
• Counts have always been spaces where there’s been some interaction between the various political camps, as acquaintances (or even friends) who fall on different sides of the party line will often overcome those differences to swap updates and discuss campaigning experiences. That’s also the case in the online space, where activists are discussing updates in a shared space.

Of course, there’s also the substantive matter of the elections themselves. This looks to be a poor election for the left across Europe. We’ve seen a drop in support for PES parties over the past while, and that continues in this election.

Ireland looks to be an exception. Even though Ireland drops from 15 to 12 MEPs, we’re going to go from 1 Labour/PES representative (de Rossa in Dublin) to at least two (Childers in Ireland East), and possibly a third (my old Labour Youth colleague, Alan Kelly, in Ireland South). That last result depends on whether Alan can stay ahead of Toireasa Ferris of Sinn Féin - he was 500 behind her after the first count but is already 300 ahead after the second (thanks ElectionsIreland!). Given that they’re both on around 66,000 votes, and the quota’s over 124,000, there’s still a long slog to go, but I’m optimistic.

Joe Higgins, Socialist Party candidate, looks likely to take a seat in Dublin, and unseat Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald. Four seats out of twelve for the Left/centre-Left is good for Ireland. Fianna Fáil have had a bad election, dropping from 300 local council seats to something around 200 (196 at time of writing, with 67 still to be declared). The seat gains have been split fairly evenly between Fine Gael and Labour, though Labour is still sitting in third place, at 125 as I write. Fianna Fáil will also likely end up with 3 MEPs, tied with Labour and behind Fine Gael.

Declan Ganley, US defense contractor, and founder of the Libertas rag-tag band of reactionary candidates, is polling better than one might hope in Ireland North-West, but still looks out of the running for a seat. Looks like that will stay with the same 1FF/1FG/1IND split, though with a personnel change in Fianna Fáil that will necessitate a by-election sometime soon, if there isn’t a general election in the interim.

Speculation in some quarters that the Greens might pull the plug on the government, after a disastrous showing - they’re sitting at 3 council seats, down from 18 after the 2004 election. I don’t see that happening. They’re so tied into the government’s fortunes that they would be annihilated in a general election. More sensible from their perspective was Ó Brolcháin’s call for FG and Labour to make a proposal to the Greens for them to pull out of government, and create an alternative coalition without having to go for an election, though I’m not sure I see that happening either. It’s worth remembering that we’re heading into the summer months, and once we reach the Autumn, any parliamentary developments will require fresh events to provide impetus for the Greens to pull out of government, or whatever other changes we see.

So goes a headline in tomorrow’s Irish Times. Intrigued when it showed up in my daily email bulletin, I clicked through. Had there been a survey showing annoyance on the part of the public? Were the opposition failing to strike a chord with the public?

No. In the second paragraph we see that Brian Cowen “also said that people were beginning to get “fed up” with the negativity of Fine Gael and Labour.” That’s a very different story. The leader of the Government is claiming that opposition criticism isn’t popular. Quelle surprise!

This is just sloppy. Cowen has no evidence for the remark - it’s just a rhetorical flourish used to shrug off criticism. There’s nothing reprehensible about his claim; it’s a predictable and understandable deflection.

The IT, on the other hand, should be presenting the situation accurately - in their reports, and in their headlines. A more accurate headline might read:

People ‘fed up’ with Opposition, claims Cowen; or

Cowen: Public ‘fed up with Opposition

Maybe there wasn’t enough space for one of these, so the sub-editor decided to just trim out a few words. But in doing so (s)he changed the core sense of the headline. No longer was it clear that the article was about Cowen’s remarks. Rather a reader will believe (as I did) that the reference was to some independent source that was making the claim.

Sure, it’s a small thing. I don’t expect petitions and protest rallies (though perhaps someone will fashion a letter about spotting the first misleading headline of the season). But this is what the Times does - if you claim to be the newspaper of record, surely it matters how you construct that record.

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 in charge of babies “on a 24-hour basis” or working under conditions of “great suffering” in the rosary bead industry; young boys doing work that gave them no training but made money for the religious orders – by its proper name: slavery. It demands a very painful adjustment of our notions of the nature of the State to accept that it helped to inflict torture and slavery on tens of thousands of children. In the light of the commission’s report, however, we can no longer take comfort in evasions.

I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to read the report itself.

“Expand the range of professional options for graduate students” he says - but offers no suggestions as to how to go about this process, or what (other than ‘not teaching’) those roles might include. “Abolish tenure” he adds, suggesting that it will allow institutions to reward “productivity” - without any problematizing of that concept.

And if you’re going to abolish tenure in the hope of creating space for young faculty - first, you’re going to need to “expand the range of professional options” not only of grads, but of faculty deemed no longer relevant; second, you’re going to dissuade many sensible people from entering academia. After all, if you no longer even have the illusory promise of a tenure-track position, who’s going to rack up so much debt?

His approach to distance learning is pedagogically impaired. He casts it almost entirely as a cost-saving measure (teach courses at half the cost), and aimed at real-time instruction. Compared to this, Joe White’s ‘global campus’ at the U of I seems almost progressive.

His emphasis on an inter-disciplinary academia reflects what is an evolving consensus, though his proposal to abolish departments is novel. Think this through though: instead of having essentially permanent mini-institutions within the university, we would have a rush every seven years to push for *my* recasting to triumph, or for each mini-institution to continue. The bureaucratic and administrative overhead would be far higher than for mere re-accreditation. First, each unit would not just have to meet the standard set by an accreditation body, but have to defend itself against every other proposed recasting, which might threaten to steal personnel and resources from it.

Further, what happens if the top choices for ‘centers’ are not mutually compatible - if two proposals each require the same faculty members or labs? Cue a complicated mediation process. And note that it’s not as simple as splitting percentage appointments between units - there’s also labs, seminar spaces, etc. What happens to a grad student who’s thinking of entering grad school 5 years into a seven-year cycle, uncertain if their grad program will exist (and be supported) 2 yers into the future? Universities spend far too much time on realignments as it is. Doing so across the institution every seven years is just crazy.

[Note one: I should note that Taylor's article seems to jump between the arts and the academy as a whole at several points, without acknowledging the fact that situations may differ across the academy. He seems to be generalizing his own experience to the academy as a whole without providing sufficient justification. Not that some of his critiques don't carry over, but his approach is clearly skewed by his own situation.]

[Note two: at the U of I we already have units, institutes and programs that operate *across* department and disciplinary lines. This makes far more sense to me - and in some cases (as with the ICR, within which I study) over time an inter-program Institute will evolve into a more permanent entity.]

Finally, for now, the author opens by seeming to lament the exploitation of grad students - but none of his solutions address this problem, and indeed several will work to heighten the prospects for exploitation of both grads and other staff (including faculty). The author proposes ‘radical’ solutions to appear visionary and open-minded, but instead exposes his own lack of understanding of the actual issues at play.

[I should note that I'm using two sets of data here - first the latest live register figures, which records those receiving Jobseekers Benefit and Jobseekers Allowance. As the CSO notes, it doesn't measureunemployment directly as it also includes some part-time and seasonal workers. However, insofar as we might think of these people as underemployed (particularly when we see such a rapid increase in numbers) it suits our purposes. The second set of data, the CSO's 'principal statistics' for Labour Market numbers, are, I believe, drawn from the Quarterly National  Household Survey (QNHS), treated by the CSO as the most reliable ongoing measure of economic activity/classification.]

Using the QNHS the CSO has estimated the ‘Standardised Unemployment Rate (SUR) at 10.4% in January - up from just 5.0% in February 2008, and just 9.4% a month ago.

Now, my first thought was that men make up a greater portion of the workforce, so one would expect them to make up more of those losing employment. But men, in 2007 (the latest figure I could readily find on the CSO site) made up 57.7% of those in employment in that year, so they are obviously over-represented in those losing jobs.

How to measure that over-representation. I figure ‘% chance of losing employment’ is a reasonable measure. Taking those 2007 figures as our baseline for ‘numbers in employment (not precise, but good enough for our purposes), the 164,952 increase in the live register last year represents 8.19% of the total number ‘at work’ in 2007 (2,013,300). Men stood a 10.4% chance of moving from work to the live register, while women stood a 5.66% chance.

That means male workers are 77.38% more likely to have moved to the live register than are female workers.

Maybe the fact that the proportion of women in the workforce has increased significantly over the past decade or two is playing a role here - perhaps older workers were more likely to lose jobs, and men were over-represented in that part of the workforce. Looking at a breakdown of age and sex for the 164,000 people we see that men under 25 made up 14.78% of the 164,000, while women under 25 made up 7.34% (just less than half as much as the men). Of the over 25 population, men made up 56.02% of the 164,000 while women made up 21.85% - about 40% as much. So, that would tend to support the suggestion that it’s jobs held by older workers,who are  disproportionately men, that are being most affected.

But that doesn’t account for everything. In February 2007 the number of women under 25 on the live register was about 67% of the number for men under 25. Now it’s 52% - the number of women under 25 on the live register has doubled in those two years, but the number of men has increased by 168%. In the 25-and-over population, in February 2007 the number of women on the live register was 66.62% of the number of men. Now it’s 47.04%. The number of women on the live register (in this age range) has increased 73.68% in this period, while the number of men has increased by 146%.

So, what’s up - why do men appear to be harder hit by the economic fall-out, if one looks at live register figures? Are women less likely to appear on the register if they become unemployed? Are sectors with greater male involvement being harder hit? What other measures should we look at to examine the impact of the economic decline - poverty rates from the QNHS and elsewhere? The QNHS, when it’s next published in June, may also allow us to break data out by family type. Earnings reports for the public sector and construction are due out by the end of March, with ‘business services’ numbers due in April. That will give us more granularity on certain industries and sectors - though the decline is now so rapid (from 9.6% to 10.4% in one month?!) that the numbers become out of date as they become available to us.

Following on from news that the economy fell into recession in the second quarter of 2008 (with two consecutive quarters of declining GDP), new figures out today (but not yet reported on RTÉ!) put the exchequer deficit for the year to date (the Irish government now operates on a calendar financial year) at €9.4bn, with full year predictions of €11.5bn. Some of that deficit is for capital spending, which is, of course, seen as an investment, and therefore worth borrowing for (on the basis that increased capacity in the future will more than counteract the cost of borrowing the money today). However, much of the - unforeseen - deficit is for current spending, and results both from cost overruns and decreased tax revenues.

There is, of course, a difference between government spending and the broader economy, but in this case the government figures reflect trends in the economy that are quite worrying, as well pointing to the contribution of government policy to our current difficulties. Tax revenue is already €3.6bn behind budget, reflecting declining economic activity (as VAT and stamp duty revenue declines), weaker markets (with falls in capital gains taxes), and substantial job losses. Current spending is €600m above target, despite well-publicized spending freezes, due at least in part to the increase of 80,000 in the live register (=unemployed). The Irish government will breach the EMU deficit limits this year, with, as Joan Burton of Labour notes, “a General Government Deficit of 5.5% of a falling GDP.” Figures would be worse were it not for significant increases in non-tax revenues (which includes dividends from semi-state companies among other things).

A large part of the problem for Ireland has been that Ireland is a small ‘open’ market economy, making us particularly responsive to changes in the global economy. When the dot com bubble burst, the spectacular economic growth of the mid-1990s disappeared. Now that the global economy has entered a period of serious crisis, the Irish economy risks catching pneumonia.

With a 50% rise in the numbers unemployed in the past year - to their highest rates in 10 years - the St Vincent de Paul Society (one of the larger charities providing aid to the poor in Ireland) has seen a 40% increase in calls for help to its offices in Dublin in the past year, and expects to spend €50m on aid this year. Next year, for the first time in a decade, Ireland is expected to have net outbound migration.

The government response so far has been to bring forward announcement of next year’s budget (widely expected to be an austerity budget) and to issue guarantees on savings in Irish-owned banks - itself not a bad way to calm nerves and improve confidence, but not a well-thought out plan, as it immediately fell foul of EU rules, which means the government is going to have to extend guarantees to banks with an Irish presence (though hopefully only on savings held by Irish residents), which will bring the potential exposure to well over the initial estimate of €440bn. By contrast, Irish GDP last year (and remember, it’s dropping) was €190bn.

Expressions of Interest are an initial step in which groups encourage the BCI to issue a call for applications for specific stations (usually covering specific areas or audiences). Thus, at this stage groups are not competing against other applications (though there are practical limitations to how many stations the BCI is likely to look to contract with at any time). The Application stage, on the other hand, is competitive, and the BCI usually decides to contract with only one applicant in any area, or sometimes not to move forward with any applications.

I’m limited my my availability at the moment, but will try to provide advice to any interested groups who wish to make contact with me. (Specific questions are always more useful than ‘how do I go about this project’-style general queries.)