Born in 1982, Ed Atkins lives and works in London. The artist is well known for his immersive environments and association of high definition digital images and syncopated sound montages. A literature connoisseur, he writes his own scenarios, creating a world of digital illusions and fantasy sometimes verging on the grotesque.

Atkins subverts and exploits the conventions of high-definition moving image and text. Referred to as “part musical, part horror, and part melodrama,”. For Atkins, virtual space is liberating; “you can treat it as a surrogate world – a fantasy, or a hell, or more likely a purgatory”.​

The protagonist in his film Ribbons is a white male avatar called Dave, who moans, monologues, sings, smokes and drinks profusely. Dave is often referred to as an avatar, Atkins calls him a surrogate. In contradiction with his hyperreal resemblance, he sits there in place of a human body. His digital self reflects how with online communication we can be present remotely; the body is no longer the bastion of authenticity, our identities now constructed from information.

Both compelling and repulsive, with all the compulsion of a sweet love song, Dave does not so much tell us how he feels but rather goes through the motions, hopelessly performing the act of emotional outpouring on repeat.

Even Pricks (2013) comprises a series of hyperpolished digitally rendered vignettes that relate the idea of depression—both physical and psychological—to the immaterial surfaces of images.

“Ed combines a good, dexterous grasp of new technology and an ability to infuse it with profound feeling, and that’s rare,” Polly Staples, director of the Chisenhale Gallery

Anzac day, another reminder of the horrors of war, a day to respect the fallen, or blind pride for state and glorification of bloody conquest.

Anzac Day is observed on 25 April every year and honours members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) who lost their lives in foreign conflicts. Originally inaugurated to mark the anniversary of Anzac troops entering the fray against the Ottomon Empire at Gallipoli in the First World War, the scope of this national day of remembrance has since been broadened out of respect for those killed during the Second World War and on subsequent peacekeeping missions around the globe.  @JoeSommerlad

“I wept because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”

Recently Anzac Day has rebranded itself to commemorate all soldiers in all wars which has caused a bit of controversy in Australia as there has been a growing movement to recognise Aboriginal people who died in the so-called ‘frontier wars’ of colonisation, but Australia doesn’t like to talk about that.

So for this Anzac Day make sure you share a story about the indigenous people of Australia and their fight against colonisation.

More than 200 years after the First Fleet landed at Sydney Cove, white Australians are still struggling to come to terms with their colonial past. Long erased from official accounts, the clashes and massacres that took place on the frontier remain a contested area of history, often replaced by more palatable stories of rugged pioneers conquering an inhospitable land. @kathymarksoz

Certainly the stories of massacres of Indigenous Australians are everywhere in the archives of the major cultural institutions of Australia and Great Britain. The diaries, letters, journals and memoirs of colonial and postcolonial officials, troops, police, farmers, frontiersmen and women are replete with accounts of fights against – and massacres of – the “marauding blacks”. Early newspapers also offer remarkably detailed concurrent and retrospective accounts of frontier violence. Such stories are so often defined by a chilling, deeply disturbing candour, so detached are the killers from the humanity of their victims. Paul Daley The Guardian
​
A group of settlers on the Hawkesbury river, reportedly in reprisal for an attack on a settler and his servant and the theft of their clothes some days prior, armed themselves and killed seven or eight members of the Bediagal clan. The massacre occurred on a bend in the river at Cornwallis, about 4km from what is now Richmond. According to a 2011 book by the historian Peter Turbet, one of the sources cited by the University of Newcastle researchers, it was the largest massacre committed by settlers to date.  Another seven or eight Bediagal were killed nine months later, just over 6km away on what is now a thoroughbred stud. Their murderers were two officers and 66 soldiers of the New South Wales Corps, dispatched by Captain William Paterson, who would later be promoted to colonel, serve as the lieutenant governor of NSW, be celebrated by history as an explorer, and have a river in the Hunter Valley named after him. According to a temporary account, Paterson ordered his men to “drive the natives to a distance; and, in the hope of striking terror, to erect gibbets in different places, whereon the bodies of all they might kill were to be hung”. @callapilla 

It’s often the case that when Sinn Fein come on TV no matter what they say they get dragged into some debate by ivory tower politicians trying to win some moral high ground in the perpetual battle on whether screwing the country financially was better than being involved in an armed conflict with a known oppressor.

So you might not get to hear from bright young people like Eoin O’Broin (@EOBroin ‏) unless you go to a Mary Lou tea party or listen to his outstanding presentation on the Echo Chamber Podcast
As it turns out not only is Eoin O’Broin well versed in the Housing Crisis but he has some very sensible solutions that can work. The following was taken from a post on the SF party site and well worth digesting:

Sinn Féin Housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin TD has described Minister Eoghan Murphy’s affordable housing package as “deeply disappointing”.

The Dublin Mid-West TD was responding to the announcement by Minister Murphy of a revised Council loan scheme, an affordable home scheme and an affordable rental scheme.

Deputy Ó Broin said: “The affordable housing measures announced by Minister Murphy today are deeply disappointing. They will have little impact on the affordability crisis and have the potential to cause real problems in the future."

“The revised council loan scheme for first time buyers is a rehash of the existing scheme. While the 2% fixed interest rate will be of benefit to some people, the scheme itself is badly designed. The scheme allows first time buyers to breach the central bank lending rules in order to buy overpriced homes. The existing council loan scheme has had a very poor take-up and a large level of significant mortgage arrears. I am genuinely concerned that the revised scheme will lead to the same results."

“The new affordable housing scheme is very unclear. Granting the Local Authority an equity stake in the home is cumbersome. The basis of the stake and the reasons for it have not been explained. It is also not clear what the relationship to the Local Infrastructure Fund and the €25m affordable housing fund is. Again, the concern is that public funds will be used to facilitate the purchase of overpriced homes."

“Most disappointing of all is the absence of any real affordable rental scheme. There has been a government commitment since 2014 to introduce such a scheme, yet all the Minister has said today is that there will be a pilot at some undefined point in the future. Struggling renters will be asking themselves why it is taking so long to get this off the ground."

“The Governments focus should be on providing a stream of genuinely affordable homes ranging from €170,000 to €260,000 for those earning between €45,000 and €75,000. This would be best achieved by Councils developing affordable homes on public land accessing finance from the Housing Finance Agency or the Strategic Investment Fund."
​
“While a small number of families may benefit from today’s announcement, it will do little to address the growing affordability crisis for tens of thousands of struggling working people desperate to buy or rent at genuinely affordable prices.” 

Something that really bothered me this week was fast fashion giant H&M limply apologising for using a black child to advertise an eight pound hoodie with the slogan “coolest monkey in the jungle”.

Here is a list of people who didn’t consider this racist:
The Model’s Agent
The Photographer
Senior Designer
Graphic Design Department
Art Director
Creative Director
Web Department
Pricing Specialist
Department Manager
H&M Staff

One can also draw the conclusion that the boy’s parents were not involved in the decision making process which raises further ethical questions.  

To anyone who dismisses H&M’s roll out of the shot please consider the following:

Monkey chanting has been used by football hooligans for over thirty years to discourage black players from both performing and playing the game.

Carl-Gustaf Scott writes about racism in Swedish football in the 80’s and 90’s in his book - African Footballers in Sweden: Race, Immigration, and Integration in the Age of Globalization

He writes; “Djurgarden’s  supporters for instance chanted ‘Samir Bakaou belongs in a zoo’, whereas IFK Goteborg’s fans made monkey noises shouting ‘ugh, ugh, ugh’ every time AIK’s Pascal Simpson touched the ball. In news footage taken from a match in the summer of 1988 AIK followers can be seen yelling ‘Kunta Kinte’ at Djurgarden’s Glen Myrthil”
 
The Guardian 19/11/2004
Tony Blair and the Spanish prime minister yesterday condemned the racist abuse of black England footballers by thousands of Spanish fans as the disgraceful scenes on Wednesday night prompted outrage in Britain and threatened to escalate into a diplomatic row. Several black England players were taunted with monkey chants and chants by large sections of the crowd at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium during England's 1-0 defeat.

BBC News 07/05/2014
Villarreal have been fined €12,000 (£9,850) by the Spanish Football Federation after a fan threw a banana at Barcelona defender Dani Alves. The Brazilian, 30, picked up the banana and took a bite as he prepared to take a corner in the La Liga match between the sides last month.

The Guardian 29/09/2016
Russia’s FC Rostov face sanction for banana-throwing in Champions League

The Mirror 21/02/2017
Everton Luiz has vowed to continue playing in Serbian football despite racist abuse bringing him to tears whilst playing for Partizan Belgrade last weekend. The Brazilian was abused during the fiery encounter with fierce rivals Rad Beograd last Sunday with what the player describes as monkey chants.

Wikipedia
Shock advertising or Shockvertising is a type of advertising that "deliberately, rather than inadvertently, startles and offends its audience by violating norms for social values and personal ideals". It is the employment in advertising or public relations of "graphic imagery and blunt slogans to highlight" a public policy issue, goods, or services. Shock advertising is designed principally to break through the advertising “clutter” to capture attention and create buzz.

Conclusion
The racial slur ‘monkey’ is an ugly feature in football hooliganism across Europe including Sweden and the UK. Too many people involved in the production and publication of this photograph not to notice the reference and one can only conclude there was intent to create ‘buzz’ by dressing an innocent child with racist slogans.

This post is cut together from various sources. Serious question at the end, please consider.

Wikipedia:
The Kingsmill massacre took place on 5 January 1976 near the village of Kingsmill in south County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Gunmen stopped a minibus carrying eleven Protestant workmen, lined them up alongside it and shot them. Only one victim survived, despite having been shot 18 times. One catholic man, also on the minibus, was allowed to go free. A group calling itself the South Armagh Republican Action Force claimed responsibility. It said the shooting was retaliation for a string of attacks on Catholic civilians in the area by Loyalists, particularly the killing of six Catholics the night before. The Kingsmill massacre was the climax of a string of tit-for-tat killings in the area during the mid-1970s, and was one of the deadliest mass shootings of the Troubles.

Belfast Telegraph 02/01/2016:
“For years, I didn’t tell the truth to protect the bereaved,” says Alan. “I said it was over quickly with one round of shooting and nobody suffering.
“But it wasn’t like that. The men didn’t die in the first round of fire. I can still hear them screaming in fear and agony. The gunmen shot everyone again in the head  to finish them off as we lay on the ground. After that, there was no screaming, only silence. I knew I was the only one still alive.”
A total of 136 shots were fired. Despite being hit 18 times, Alan survived. “The bullet to the head didn’t penetrate my skull,” he says. “I remember being in awful pain and the rain trickling down my cheeks. 
“I was so grateful for the rain because my body felt on fire. I must have been lying on the roadside 30 minutes before the ambulance came. It felt like eternity.”

Irish Independent 06/01/2018:
A SINN Fein MP has been accused of “poking fun” at the victims of the Kingsmill massacre after he posed with a loaf of bread on his head.
In a video posted on Twitter last night, Barry McElduff is seen walking around a service station with a batch of Kingsmill bread resting on his head. Friday, January 5 was also the  41st anniversary of the massacre which saw 10 innocent workers gunned down in cold blood by the Provisional IRA.
​
Question:
Was a three month suspension with pay a suitable punishment for the loafer or does paid leave equate to a 12 week holiday? 

For a few years I ran various blogs on different topics but I soon grew tired of sites continuously barraging people with ads and click bait. In 2014 I decided to set up my own site and committed to making it an ad free space so I could write in peace. The result was all my random thoughts, opinions and interests coming to the one place, thechampsvoice.com

Social media presents its own problems with sharing content and the modern day blogger has become a slave to algorithms. For example Facebook prevent you from reaching your own audience unless you’re willing to boost posts, which in effect is paying to advertise posts to reach people you’ve already connected with.

With the start of a new year what I’m looking to do is to set up a mailing list, so if you’d like to receive a monthly letter from the site feel free to drop me a mail at thechampsvoice@gmail.com or hit the subscribe button.

This is a shortened version of a very interesting article taken from washingtonmonthly, written by Roger McNamee (@Moonalice) originally titled How to Fix Facebook – Before it Fixes Us

In my thirty-five-year career in technology investing, I have never made a bigger contribution to a company’s success than I made at Facebook. It was my proudest accomplishment. Not surprisingly, Facebook became my favorite app. I checked it constantly, and I became an expert in using the platform by marketing my rock band, Moonalice, through a Facebook page.

Facebook, Google, and other social media platforms make their money from advertising. As with all ad-supported businesses, that means advertisers are the true customers, while audience members are the product. Until the past decade, media platforms were locked into a one-size-fits-all broadcast model. Success with advertisers depended on producing content that would appeal to the largest possible audience.

Whenever you log into Facebook, there are millions of posts the platform could show you. The key to its business model is the use of algorithms, driven by individual user data, to show you stuff you’re more likely to react to.

Algorithms that maximize attention give an advantage to negative messages. The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance.

It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic. I’m no expert on British politics, but it seemed likely that Facebook might have had a big impact on the vote because one side’s message was perfect for the algorithms and the other’s wasn’t.

The “Leave” campaign made an absurd promise—there would be savings from leaving the European Union that would fund a big improvement in the National Health System—while also exploiting xenophobia by casting Brexit as the best way to protect English culture and jobs from immigrants. It was too-good-to-be-true nonsense mixed with fearmongering.

Meanwhile, the Remain campaign was making an appeal to reason. Leave’s crude, emotional message would have been turbocharged by sharing far more than Remain’s.

I did not see it at the time, but the users most likely to respond to Leave’s messages were probably less wealthy and therefore cheaper for the advertiser to target: the price of Facebook (and Google) ads is determined by auction, and the cost of targeting more upscale consumers gets bid up higher by actual businesses trying to sell them things.

As a consequence, Facebook was a much cheaper and more effective platform for Leave in terms of cost per user reached. And filter bubbles would ensure that people on the Leave side would rarely have their questionable beliefs challenged. Facebook’s model may have had the power to reshape an entire continent.

The most important tool used by Facebook and Google to hold user attention is filter bubbles. The use of algorithms to give consumers “what they want” leads to an unending stream of posts that confirm each user’s existing beliefs.

We now know, for instance, that the Russians indeed exploited topics like Black Lives Matter and white nativism to promote fear and distrust, and that this had the benefit of laying the groundwork for the most divisive presidential candidate in history, Donald Trump. The Russians appear to have invested heavily in weakening the candidacy of Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary by promoting emotionally charged content to supporters of Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, as well as to likely Clinton supporters who might be discouraged from voting.

Once the nominations were set, the Russians continued to undermine Clinton with social media targeted at likely Democratic voters. We also have evidence now that Russia used its social media tactics to manipulate the Brexit vote. A team of researchers reported in November, for instance, that more than 150,000 Russian-language Twitter accounts posted pro-Leave messages in the run-up to the referendum.

We hypothesize that the Russians were able to manipulate tens of millions of American voters for a sum less than it would take to buy an F-35 fighter jet.

In the case of Facebook and Google, the algorithms have flaws that are increasingly obvious and dangerous.

Thanks to government’s laissez-faire approach to regulation, the internet platforms were able to pursue business strategies that would not have been allowed in prior decades. No one stopped them from using free products to centralize the internet and then replace its core functions. No one stopped them from siphoning off the profits of content creators. No one stopped them from gathering data on every aspect of every user’s internet life. No one stopped them from amassing market share not seen since the days of Standard Oil. No one stopped them from running massive social and psychological experiments on their users. No one demanded that they police their platforms. It has been a sweet deal.

Facebook and Google are now so large that traditional tools of regulation may no longer be effective. The European Union challenged Google’s shopping price comparison engine on antitrust grounds, citing unfair use of Google’s search and AdWords data. The harm was clear: most of Google’s European competitors in the category suffered crippling losses. The most successful survivor lost 80 percent of its market share in one year. The EU won a record $2.7 billion judgment—which Google is appealing.

Unfortunately, there is no regulatory silver bullet. The scope of the problem requires a multi-pronged approach.

First, we must address the resistance to facts created by filter bubbles. Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies. Helping those people accept the truth is a priority. I recommend that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others be required to contact each person touched by Russian content with a personal message that says, “You, and we, were manipulated by the Russians. This really happened, and here is the evidence.” The message would include every Russian message the user received.

This idea, which originated with my colleague Tristan Harris, is based on experience with cults. When you want to deprogram a cult member, it is really important that the call to action come from another member of the cult, ideally the leader.

Second, the chief executive officers of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others—not just their lawyers—must testify before congressional committees in open session. Forcing tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg to justify the unjustifiable, in public—without the shield of spokespeople or PR spin—would go a long way to puncturing their carefully preserved cults of personality in the eyes of their employees.

We also need regulatory fixes. Here are a few ideas.

First, it’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans.

Second, the platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition.

Third, the platforms must be transparent about who is behind political and issues-based communication. The Honest Ads Act is a good start

Fourth, the platforms must be more transparent about their algorithms. Users deserve to know why they see what they see in their news feeds and search results. Consumers should also be able to see what attributes are causing advertisers to target them.

Fifth, the platforms should be required to have a more equitable contractual relationship with users. Facebook, Google, and others have asserted unprecedented rights with respect to end-user license agreements (EULAs). If there are terms you choose not to accept, your only alternative is to abandon use of the product. For Facebook, where users have contributed 100 percent of the content, this non-option is particularly problematic. All software platforms should be required to offer a legitimate opt-out, one that enables users to stick with the prior version if they do not like the new EULA.

Sixth, we need a limit on the commercial exploitation of consumer data by internet platforms. Customers understand that their “free” use of platforms like Facebook and Google gives the platforms license to exploit personal data. The problem is that platforms are using that data in ways consumers do not understand, and might not accept if they did.

Seventh, consumers, not the platforms, should own their own data.

The Full article is a much longer read but enjoyable:

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january-february-march-2018/how-to-fix-facebook-before-it-fixes-us/

​Bank Of Ireland have felt the wrath of the angry Irish twitterati over a recent advert which attempts to normalise the out of control rental and property market in Dublin. The advert is part of a campaign which also published a post on the BOI blog which unintentionally mocks the state of education inflation in Ireland.

The protagonist, Orla, who leaps through the hoops of the Irish education system studying digital marketing, finds herself as a highly skilled employee in of ‘the world’s largest airlines’. Unwittingly she moves back home to live with her parents as the accepted norm, as a joint income is not enough to secure a deposit in a growing housing market in Ireland’s capital.

The advert highlights a lot of problems in socio-economics in Dublin and tries to work the old angle that paying rent is dead money, but it’s angered middle class first time buyers who are faced with a harsh reality that owning a property in 2017 is near on impossible for a couple with parental accommodation available, not to mind a single worker in their mid twenties who has no alternative but to pay rent at something close to €1000pm, and that’s probably sharing a house with a couple in their forties, a convict, and the crayon magician who you’re not sure works or just draws the dole and steals food from McDonalds.

Presumably the blog post will be taken down, so for posterity I’ve made a copy. Angry we must be until we realise we need radical change, the conservative parties must be replaced. We cannot support the upper half of a two tier society who profit from housing bubbles and extortionate rent rates.
 
Orla grew up in Sutton on the north side of Dublin. She studied Marketing at college then launched her career in digital marketing and now works for one of the world’s largest airlines in the area of ecommerce. In order to save up the deposit for a home, Orla and her boyfriend gave up their rented apartment and moved back to their separate family homes.

I studied marketing at college then went into the digital side.
I studied at DIT in Dublin on Aungier Street so I stayed living at home when I went to college which was great because it was so convenient and that kept the cost of going to college down.

I started off in an Irish start-up, an architectural company, where I got to experience a bit of everything.
I was there for two years then I left to go to start another marketing role that was solely focused on digital. I worked there for three years and then moved to my current role earlier this year. I’m in my current role just over 8 months now.

Two years after graduating, I moved out from home to live in Portmarnock, which was only 15 minutes away, to live with my boyfriend.
We wanted our own place. We were both in our careers a couple of years by then and both had the money to move out but didn’t want to move too far away from family and friends. We got a 2-bed apartment in a good, safe area with plenty of amenities so we ended up staying there for four years. We only moved out just after Christmas.

My boyfriend moved back to his parents and I moved back to mine.
That gave us the opportunity, from January 2016, to get the MortgageSaver account, start saving and to kind of chip away at the deposit. As much as we loved having our own place it just made so much sense to move home and see how much we can save. We’re both very lucky to have such supportive parents who understand how difficult in can be to save a significant deposit amount.

We’re trying to save a decent amount each month.
It was easier to move back home separately because we each live close to each other anyway and work at the same place so it just made sense. We both knew that if we were really going to make a stab at saving a significant amount this would be the best way to do it.

I am back in my old bedroom at home.
Our parents have been fantastic, it nearly broke their hearts that we paid nearly €40,000 over four years to rent when we were only just down the road and now that’s pretty much what we need to save now to buy a house. They are happy for me to be home because they know that the money I’m saving will be going towards something long-term. Obviously it was great to have our own space and to be able to entertain but when we can see just how much we can save I don’t even miss the apartment. I just see it as dead money.

We only started officially saving for the deposit at the end of January 2016 but we’ve been able to save more than we thought we would be able to.
We never considered the savings you can make on small things. Even though we contribute to the upkeep, it does work out cheaper living at home.

I quit the gym but I had to set a goal for myself. Exercise was always my outlet so I signed myself up for the Dublin Marathon instead…
…and I said to myself I’ll just be a runner for a year. Cancelled the gym membership and saved €45 a month and just ran – it’s free. It’s really hard! I’m taking on a lot moving home, a new job, saving for a home and a marathon. I don’t do things by halves! It’s my first ever marathon. I’m following a weekly schedule of distances and times.

Next year we have eight weddings to go to.
Two abroad and the rest at home here in Ireland. They are close friends and family. Events like this are a great break from the working week and a chance to get a break away too.

We’ve always said we want to buy a house rather than an apartment and I suppose that’s maybe a real Irish thing as well to own your own house.
We initially thought will we buy somewhere small and short term and get on the property ladder then buy something bigger but then we said why not just bite the bullet, do this once, go through it and buy the ‘forever home’. Maybe it takes longer to save but it’s worth it in the end.

We want to live where we live now within a 6 km radius.
Where our parents live would be out of our reach in terms of affordability. We said what kind of new builds are happening in Swords, which is still very connected, it’s not far from where we both work and there’s value there.

It’s hard to get the balance of a new development in a good location
Because all the villages, say Swords or Raheny, are so established that the new builds are outside them not in the villages themselves. I don’t want to have to drive to the shop for a pint of milk and want to have the option to walk to the local for a few drinks without having to get a taxi home. Looking to the future when we do have, hopefully, our own family, I don’t want to have to give my kids lifts everywhere either.

We’ve started the approval process now and have gone to the banks.
I’m conscious of our ages if we’re going for say a 35-year mortgage then I want to speed it up as much as possible so we don’t go over our retirement ages. We probably rented for too long. But we wouldn’t be able to save the amounts we’re saving now two years ago.

We’ve actually gathered all the paperwork. And that’s like a labour.
It’s exhausting! Of course it has to be done, and I get that completely, but it’s annoying! We’re lucky that we don’t have to give notice, we don’t have to get out of a lease or sell a property to buy. It’s very difficult for people our age to rent and save a decent amount each month while still maintaining a certain quality of life.


The entire mortgage process was very new to me! I didn’t even know why I’d even need a solicitor when I first met the bank about a mortgage.
It’s daunting because you feel like you don’t have the upper hand because you don’t know the process. I’m not young but I felt young and naïve when I went in to the bank. There’s a lot of jargon I wouldn’t be familiar with. What if we came into money in 15 years’ time? What would the charges be to pay it off and what kind of a mortgage would we need to have if we did want to do that?

In my circle of friends, it’s been great to get advice from those who have gone through the process recently.
I try to get as much information out of them as possible. You can ask them anything because you don’t mind telling them you don’t know. And then I’m also conscious not to bore my friends to death talking about interest rates when they’re not looking to buy and couldn’t care less.

I’ve started going to viewings of new builds and I find that daunting too.
We’d usually go on a Saturday morning and afternoon and there could be up to 15-20 people there. Couples with parents – they mean business! We’ve seen a number of houses so far. I do fear investing in a property and then seeing one that I love more. Another fear would be if in five years’ time if the market took a dip, would we lose a lot of value when the property won’t be a new build anymore?
​
Going back home was actually easier than I thought it would be.
I have a new-found respect for the Mam and Dad. I mean I won’t leave the lights on at home now. When I leave a room I turn out the light. I know now how much it costs to run a home and the sacrifices they’ve made. I have a totally different perspective now.

With articles supporting water charges and others which attack the rise of the alternative left in Irish politics it is no surprise that Noel Whelan has found a few enemies in Ireland and even further afield.

Where he might be cast aside by some of the better established ‘left of centre’ parties and simply labelled a proponent of traditional free state politics, he is however more of a concern to the people who are literally fighting for change, as his toxic neoliberal views give reason to ignorance and make excuses for a conservative political landscape which is not adapting quick enough to make any difference to the problems we are facing as a society.

The fact that we are facing larger geopolitical issues than ever before, from global conflict, to the extinction of species, to the rise in inequality, global warming, pollution of our oceans, etc is proof enough that the way we do business, and the way we do politics is not working. Quite simply we need change, and gradual change is no longer good enough. This fact alone is proof that the revolution is coming.

Anyone who hinders progress in the growth of the left is blind to this revolution, and most likely they have an invested interest in maintaining the status quo, to maintain their wealth position, because they’re not psychologically prepared to embrace a society built on equality. Without a progressive shift in the way we think, the way we do business, and the way we do politics our planet will die.

Noel denies this with articles such as:
‘Far left’s high profile contrasts sharply with modest electoral reach’ in which he writes;

“They are political minnows in the Irish party system so they lay claim to being part of larger international movements or trends.... their history is one of an inability to work with others and of deep personality conflicts between themselves”

Unquestionably such articles do not go unnoticed. Jill Bryson’s response on July 12th to the Irish Times is a prime example of the fight the left must endure to make change happen. Thankfully the editor of the Times found it worthy of print, whether to patter to a large segment of it's readership or out of respect for Jill we will never know. The following is the letter as it featured:

Sir, – Noel Whelan’s article “Far left’s high profile contrasts sharply with modest electoral reach” (Opinion & Analysis, July 7th) describes the Solidarity-PBP grouping as minnows. The Labour Party has seven seats to Solidarity-PBP’s six. If we combine, as Mr Whelan does in his article, Solidarity-PBP’s seats with those of the Independents 4 Change grouping and other left-wing TDs, the left comfortably outnumbers Labour.

Yet Noel Whelan does not call Labour small fish or “fringe deputies”.

The thuddingly dull comparison between Donald Trump and the left, as constant in your newspaper as the Angelus, on the basis of criticism of the mainstream media, is fatuous. It should not need to be said that the basis and method of the left’s critique of certain sections of the media differs ever so slightly from Mr Trump’s lying, egomaniacal Twitter outbursts against CNN.

Your columnist manages class snobbery and reverse class snobbery in the one paragraph, suggesting that the kind of people who vote left are not natural Irish Times readers and, heaven forbid, that some left-wing TDs have the temerity to have been born to middle-class backgrounds. I can assure him that many supporters of the left of all classes read this newspaper, either as its de facto status as the paper of record or as a means to keep abreast of the latest fashionable delusions of the bourgeois hive-mind, of which Noel Whelan is such a stalwart proponent. – Yours, etc,

JILL BRYSON,
Walthamstow,
London.

As per @noelwhelan bio Noel Whelan is a barrister, author, political analyst and columnist with The Irish Times. Unfortunately I could not find a bio for Jill Bryson but I'm pretty sure it reads hero. 

​When I first started writing someone asked me why bloggers feel every random event in their life is suddenly worth reading about. I’ve always bore that in mind somewhat so I try to keep things relevant, but at the same time I’m not being commissioned to write so the boundaries of the page are limited to my life and my personal experiences.
Lately I’ve been listening to this band quite a lot and this one song called ‘London Can Take It’ seemed particularly significant in the last few days, so I thought I would share. 

The following s a short review from The Guardian of the band called ‘Public Service Broadcasting’ written by Phil Mongredien

You can visit the band @  www.publicservicebroadcasting.net/
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Pseudonymous London duo Public Service Broadcasting hit upon a winning combination of guitars, electronics and vintage public information films for their 2013 debut, Inform-Educate-Entertain. The follow-up focuses on the US-Soviet space race, between 1957 and 1972. It’s a smart move. Archive samples evoke the wonder and majesty of mankind’s most giant leap, and they’re complemented by finely judged soundscapes, from the mournful, static-soaked drone of Fire in the Cockpit (detailing the tragedy of Apollo 1) to the pulsing euphoria of Go! (the successful July 1969 moon landing). Even more powerful is the palpable suspense of The Other Side, as Apollo 8 orbits the moon and loses radio contact on the far side… before regaining it after an agonising wait.