Tuppenceworth.ie blog | A companion to Tuppenceworth.ie, this is also interested in art, opinion and ideas

No. 95 Merrion Sq: Let’s ask some questions

Posted on 22/03/2012 by Simon McGarr

Number 95 Merrion Square- known as Apothocaries’ Hall- is a listed building. It is, depending on which property website you read, sale agreed or was sold to an unknown ~~foreign~~ overseas buyer last November. It stands on the corner of Merrion Square, facing the Oscar Wilde statue, at the end of the Nassau Street/Clare Street tourist trail. It was one of the Square’s first buildings, finished in the 18th Century as part of the square’s transformation into the city’s most desirable address.

Currently, it has a number of broken window panes, a poorly maintained front portico, a damaged front door and broken guttering. There may be other issues inside the building, but these are the degradations visible from the street.

I regularly walk past Apothocaries’ Hall. A few weeks ago, I noticed the broken glass and general air of neglect. I’ve always particularly liked that corner of the Square- it’s near TCD and it used to have Green’s bookshop next door. The Hall has a slightly eccentric first floor greenhouse and some really attractive stained glass windows (now almost hidden under layers of grime).

I felt I ought to do something about it. Standing on the side of the road, I took some pictures and then looked up on my phone whatever I could find out about the Building’s history. I also looked the building up on Google Street view. It looked a lot happier then, and was clearly occupied when the Google car passed it by.

Because I’m a lawyer, I also looked up if there was any legal protection for the building. It is on the Dublin City Council listed buildings register.

Section 58(1) of the Planning and Development Act 2000 says;

58.—(1) Each owner and each occupier shall, to the extent consistent with the rights and obligations arising out of their respective interests in a protected structure or a proposed protected structure, ensure that the structure, or any element of it which contributes to its special architectural, historical, archaeological, artistic, cultural, scientific, social or technical interest, is not endangered.

This fundit proposal is to commission freelance journalist Gerald Cunningham to write a feature article on Apothocaries’ Hall- its history and its current state. I have agreed the rate with him for this article.

He will write a feature article on the topic. He will then be free to have that article published -for pay or otherwise, at his own discretion- to the widest audience possible.

When we see our built environment being degraded as we walk around our depressed home towns and cities, it is hard to know where to start a fight back.

The first thing we need to do is to start a conversation about the value of what we have.

Please back this fundit.ie project.

Let owners of listed buildings know that Dubliners don’t stand silent if we see our shared heritage being lost.

Let’s shine a light on this one spot. Let’s make a difference.

UPDATE: Hello all. Thanks to all the excellent people who chipped in on the Fundit proposal, this article is currently being researched and written.

If you have any information about Apothocaries Hall’s past, present or future please do give Gerard Cunningham, who is the journalist writing the piece, a call on 086 6073060. He’d love to hear from you.

Posted in Apothecaries' Hall | 3 Comments

Stuck In A Moment We Can’t Get Out Of

Posted on 08/03/2012 by Fergal Crehan

And so, it begins. The annual exercise in counting our national blessings, looking ourselves up and down, and concluding that Ireland, all things considered, isn’t a bad old place.
Except, it’s not beginning, because it never really stopped. National self-examination is no longer a periodical or commemorative exercise, but a constant, ongoing affair. It is becoming clear that there is no answer to the question of what it means to be Irish – if there was, we would surely have stumbled upon it by now. Nonethless, every other week it seems, yet another twitter hashtag thread seeks to plumb the depths of our identity, as represented by Bosco, Red Lemonade and Sally O’Brien.

#Iristhings, all of a month ago, was followed in less than a week by #advicefornewcitizens, which purported to tell newly sworn-in citizens how to be gas characters like ourselves. The possibility that these new citizens might be a bit fed up with our self-congratulation, or that they might play a part in creating a new, more diverse Irishness was mostly not touched upon. Meanwhile #ThatsIrish runs more or less permanently, as does #SoIrish and #PureIrish. I started writing this post after the #Irishthings hashtag and then forgot about it until it was too late. I needn’t have worried. A few weeks later, just in time for our national holiday, here come #BeingIrishMeans and #HowToBeIrish

It’s interesting, if you take a look at the hashtag streams, that they focus on the old-fashioned, the rural, the defiantly unfashionable. There’s much talk of “hang sangidges” and “tay”. Regional colloquialisms for bad weather and drunkenness abound. There’s plenty of the sort of thing that gets shouted from the stands at GAA matches. These things were out of favour during the boom years, but are now talismans of an older, better place, an Ireland before it all went wrong. Soon enough though, these streams always degenerate into a weirdly vacuous narcissism where quite commonplace things are claimed for Ireland. A good third of this Joe.ie compilation from the #GreatIrishWords stream is actually English. Similarly, #Irishthings included such essential parts of Who We Are as “talking shite” and “Drinking lots of drink and getting drunk” Before long someone will be claiming that oxygen, gravity and back pain are #uniquelyIrish.

All countries are guilty of this self-regard (yet another way in which we are not unique). “Only in America” is appended to phenomena that exist in literally every country in the world. “Quintessentially English” summons up an insufferably smug catalogue of reactionary tweeness and contrived eccentricity. But in those cases, there’s much less embarrassing neediness on display. Current or former superpowers don’t need to reassure themselves the way a small, broke, marginal country does.

Can it be as long as a year since the last St. Patrick’s Week? If it seems less, that is mostly because we laid on an extra one last year for the visits of Queen Elizabeth and Barack Obama. The QE2/Obama week was an instructive one. It said a lot about where we are as a country. We were visited by two of the most personally famous Heads of State in the World, representatives of two of the world’s most dominant cultures. You’d think we might show an interest in their respective homelands. But we didn’t really. The visits were not about America, or England. The whole thing was pretty much all about us, as reflected back to ourselves via our illustrious visitors. “You like us!”, we said, “You really like us!”. Then, when they were gone, we were able to get into the real purpose of the whole exercise: sitting down to watch a highlights show on RTE called “Reelin’ In The Week”.

Shared cultural moments are no longer fleeting instances that you either experience live or miss forever. If you were out when something momentous happened, you can quite easily see it later. And if you were in, rather than allow the moment to take root in your mind, as memories used to do, you can watch it over and over again, then email it to your friends. Media moments are thus “shared” in a very different way these days. Nothing can just happen anymore. Indeed, nothing can really be said to have truly happened unless it creates a social media buzz. In the past, such moments were shared due to a perceived significance, hence the old question of “where were you when you heard…?” These days, there is only one answer to that question, “I was on Twitter”. Everything is a shared moment now, whether it deserves to be or not.

This is a particularly hyper-actively self-regarding atmosphere in which to have a national identity crisis. Irish people have not been this insecure, figuratively or literally, for generations. Not only is there grinding recession, there is also no certainty that things won’t get radically worse. On a national level, embarrassment at the folly and excesses of the Celtic Tiger era, plus the fact that our sovereignty is now in question makes us defensive about our national identity. No wonder we are keen to wrap ourselves in the warm blanket of old certainties and repeat to ourselves in our national mirror “I am a good country. I am unique. I am great gas altogether”. At the same time though, we are angry at the people who got us into this mess. There’ll be no forgiveness for as long as austerity lasts. When we’re not patting ourselves on the back for being such great gas, we’re lacerating ourselves for our hypocrisy and greed. We are so committed to the rut we’re in that we take offence at the words “move on”. And so, trapped in a perpetual present, we thrash about in a time-loop, reliving the same experiences over and over. We look back no further than the 1980’s (the childhood of the pope’s children, the most self-obsessed generation in Irish history), and we don’t look forward at all. We watch and read retrospectives of the economic crash and fume as if it were yesterday. We buy tickets to reunion shows by the bands we liked in the 90’s, and we dance as if that was yesterday too. We buy re-issued editions of our old school text-books, for goodness sake. These are not the activities of a people embracing the future. We have become nostalgic for our own present, the most abject form of conservatism imaginable.

Posted in General, Irish Politics | 2 Comments

SOPA Ireland: Irish State is dancing to record labels’ tune

Posted on 22/02/2012 by Simon McGarr

State enters Appearance on 17th January 2012, originally uploaded by Editor_Tupp.

One of the more perplexing questions arising from Sean Sherlock’s efforts to ram a law he, by now, knows to be bad into force is why he hasn’t just taken the time to get things right.

The screen shot above gives the answer. It is taken from the High Court Search database on the Courts service website, Courts.ie.

It shows that, after EMI Records [Ireland] Limited & Others sued the Irish State and the Attorney General, the Chief State Solicitor entered an appearance on the 17th January 2012.

Once a defendant enters an Appearance they have 21 days to enter a defence. Before the StopSOPAIreland.com campaign, the plan appears to have been to give EMI the law they wanted and then try to settle the case without entering a defence. Perhaps they would also use public money paying EMI and the other record labels to buy off their claim of damages.

But the 21 day deadline has now come and gone. There’s still no sign of a defence being entered on the Courts website.

If you miss the 21 days, your opponents may extend time for a further 21 days. After that they’ll usually issue a motion seeking a kind of undefended win. Even if you rush in with a defence after that, you’ll have run up extra legal costs.

42 days from the 17th January is the 28th February 2012.

Ministers Bruton and Sherlock have just under a week to pass the Alternative Statutory Instrument sent to them weeks ago by Catherine Murphy and Stephen Donnelly.

Or they could demonstrate that local offices of UK record labels, with bare handfuls of staff, can dictate laws that damage our country’s reputation and economic wellbeing.

Not long now to find out which it is.

Posted in General | 3 Comments

Noises Off

Posted on 14/02/2012 by Simon McGarr

Contrary to appearances, I have been plugging away at a couple of different things this month.

Primarily, I have been involved in the campaign to stop the government bringing in a Statutory Instrument which would allow copyright holders (ie record labels) to block access to bits of the internet to Irish users. See the Campaign site http://www.stopSOPAireland.com and more particularly the news section giving updates on the campaign’s progress for more.

I’ve also been struggling to write a children’s story. No link for that, I’m afraid.

In addition, I’ve been having all the fun of the fair learning how to work some of the plumbing of our office blog and our website for people making Personal Injury claims. It mostly involves the laborious resizing of pictures, in case you were ever wondering. In particular, as a result of a new section relating to the faulty breast implant scandal I had the profoundly dubious pleasure of searching for a suitably licencable image to go with the phrase ‘breast implant’.

I assure you from newly gained personal experience, Google Image search is not the way to go with this.

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Template Complaint Letter to Data Protection Commissioner about CityDeal.ie (Groupon)

Posted on 12/01/2012 by Simon McGarr

Dear Sir,

I write further to the failure of Groupon-CityDeal (Ireland) Limited having their registered office at The Black Church, Mary Street, Dublin 7 to remove me from their electronic database following repeated requests.

I have twice clicked the link at the bottom of Citydeals emails asking to be unsubscribed from their mailing list. For the avoidance of any doubt as to my intentions I sent this message on the 10th January 2012 to the support link found in paragraph 8 on the Privacy Page of Citydeal.ie http://www.groupon.ie/data_privacy

“Please unsubscribe me from any and all emails lists

In addition, please erase all information you store regarding me with the exception of this email.

Please confirm to me when this has occurred.

Yours faithfully
Simon McGarr”

This message was later returned as undelivered as the link given on the data policy page is incorrect.

I then sent the following message to support@citydeal.ie

“Data Protection S.5 Request

Dear Sirs,

Please unsubscribe me from any and all email addresses.

In addition, please erase all information you store regarding me with the exception of this email.

Please confirm to me when this has occurred.

Please also note the link to email support contained within your Privacy Statement is broken.

Yours faithfully

Simon McGarr”

I did not receive any confirmation from the company, or any response at all to my request.

What I did receive, at 10:51am on 12th January 2012, was a further unwanted marketing email offering me discounted fairy lights.

This was followed by another unwanted marketing email at 5.28pm enquiring why I had not taken the company up on an offer of “Premium” membership.

I contacted Groupon’s Twitter customer account to complain about these matters. Their response was to ask I contact a UK registered company MyCityDeal Limited (t/a Groupon UK).

Please can you take such steps as are necessary to ensure that my requests under the Data Protection Acts are responded to correctly by the Irish registered company processing Irish information under Irish laws?

Yours faithfully,

Simon McGarr

Posted in General | Leave a comment

National Digital Research Centre: Making Investments or “Investments”?

Posted on 09/01/2012 by Simon McGarr

It’s taken me a while, but I wanted to give my thoughts on the NDRC’s response to my previous post regarding the level of Return on Investment the state seemed to be getting on its investments with public money made though the agency.

I’ll quote most of the NDRC’s response and then reply to each bit. Like one of those ancient Greek discussions but without all the wine.

You’re right; the ‘1.2x return on investment’ deserves a bit of explanation, and so we will prepare a more detailed statement to publish on our website. I’ll also provide some detail here which I hope makes clear our ‘return on investment’ figure.

Great! Clarity is excellent.

NDRC’s 1.2x return refers to the amount of commercial, return-seeking investment in the outputs of NDRC projects compared with the NDRC input investment in those collaborative translational research projects.

Does this mean that the NDRC “investment” isn’t seeking a return for the NDRC? In contrast to the commercial, return-seeking sort of investment? When you put money into a company or business project but don’t expect or seek any form of return, is that still called an investment? I think the cause of clarity would be better served by referring to that money as a ‘grant’.

Of the projects that have reached completion by August this year, committed commercial follow-on investment was 1.2x the amount that NDRC invested into those projects (this figure includes attrition costs – costs incurred by those projects we have stopped early where we have identified that they will not accrue a return on investment).

So the 1.2x Return on Investment, cited in the Annual Report for 2010 doesn’t measure the NDRC’s return on its investment at all. In fact, it doesn’t seem to measure Return on Investment by any known standard. Instead it just seems to be intended to reassure us that the NDRC hasn’t been backing complete no-hopers with public funds. For every €1 of public money put into these companies, some private investor has committed (though not necessarily, actually handed over) €1.20 to the same companies. Of course, even those private companies haven’t necessarily seen a return on their investments yet, but at least they presumably have taken some equity or other shareholding or lien in these projects that will ensure that they can do so when the happy day of going to market comes.

Unless that figure includes loans from financial institutions. Which could fall within the definition of “commercial follow-on investment” if the NDRC were to be very elastic in its use of words. But that seems unlikely, as it would be more than a little misleading.

The 2.6x return that you quote is a return on commercial, return-seeking angel investment for commercial investments made, which is a different type of investing to that which NDRC is making.

Fair enough. I am far, far away from my areas of expertise here. I know nothing of the terminology for the different classes of investors in technology businesses. From what I’ve been able to make out from an utterly superficial amount of Googling, angel investors are usually the second layer of investors after the FFF grouping. FFF here standing for “Family, Friends and Fools”. State involvement at this early stage is an admirable move to bridge a possible funding gap. But, unlike the usual Family, Friends and Fools, the public money doesn’t appear to lead to any equity or shareholding. And certainly, FFFs, when you meet them over the Christmas Dinner table, would be dissatisfied with being told how much other people had put into your company as an alternative to getting their money back and then some.

Even Aunty Doris would expect some return on her investment. If it was an investment, and not a gift.

We are committed to using the term ‘investment’ to describe financial support we make into projects because we expect projects to be focused on making a return from the outset, unlike other pure research funders.

That’s great! Projects intended to make money ought to make money. Who could disagree? But giving money still isn’t an ‘investment’ unless something is coming back to the investor, sometime. That doesn’t change regardless of how committed the organisation is to the misuse of words. What you get back depends on what you received in return for your investment. But, as far as I can see from the NDRC’s CRO-filed financial statement, they haven’t booked any assets in exchange for their grants.

While the overall goal of NDRC is to create market capital, follow-on investment from third-party commercial sources is the immediate return sought by NDRC investments.

Eh, ok.

It is this follow-on investment that the State/Economy gets in the short terms in return for the investments NDRC is making with the taxpayer funds. This follow-on investment goes towards building sustainable businesses and creating sustainable jobs.

That is all a reasonable position for a grant-agency (particularly one involved in unusually early-stage grants) to take. After all, if successful, the state will benefit from high technology companies which might otherwise not have come into being. And the description from the NDRC up to this of the form of return they expect from their money is largely consistant with the return being in the nature of a better national economy rather than actual cash money flowing back to their coffers.

But, and my excuses if this sounds familiar from earlier comment, if that is the case why the qualification that this is just the sort of thing we can expect in the short term? What could change in the longer term?

We are only 3 years from our initial investments into projects. It will take quite a few years to realise an income returning exit which explains why there is no income return recognised in our accounts. As a young organisation follow on investment into technologies and ventures is an important indicator for us, and goes further than simply stating number of companies forms/ number of technologies patented.

Emphasis added.

I’m sorry, but I find this inexplicable. Either there are actual investments being made- which is what a reference to “an income returning exit” would have suggested to me- or there are non-recoverable grants being handed out for the good of the nation’s economic future. Either could be a perfectly legitimate use of public funds.

But what are we to make of a financial statement which shows no shareholdings? And how does it jib with talk of income returning exits? And if we are expecting a return but it hasn’t appeared yet, would citing a figure in the meantime in the organisations’s Annual Report of 1.2x as a current Return on Investment not be rather misleading?

My final point: I am not an accountant. I am not even numerate in any meaningful way. It is possible I have simply misread or misunderstood the NDRC’s Financial Statement. Please let me know if you can see something I’ve missed.

UPDATE: I asked Dr. Neale from the NDRC a question on Thursday last by email : “What shareholding, lien or other instrument does the NDRC hold in the companies it has given money to which would generate such a potential return?”

Dr. Neale expects to be able to get back to me some time this week with a reply, work permitting, which is very responsive of her.

In the meantime, I noticed that Mr. Gary Leyden of the NDRC’s LaunchPad programme gave an interview to The New Tech Post in April of 2011 setting out the relationship between the NDRC and the companies it gives money to.

The initial investment and any prize money awarded “is actually an investment in the company”, but Gary stresses that the NDRC does not claim any intellectual property rights from LaunchPad participants. “We just become a shareholder in their company. It’s a very clean, straightforward arrangement”.

Posted in General | Tagged Launchpad, NDRC | 1 Comment

Old Timey News: Phil Hogan’s Assurances

Posted on 05/01/2012 by Simon McGarr

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Old Timey News: Page One Scoop!

Posted on 02/01/2012 by Simon McGarr

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2011: The Year in Mischief

Posted on 01/01/2012 by Simon McGarr

Ireland is a staggeringly conservative and conformist society. Conventional wisdom riddles every conversation be it private or broadcast, in print or in the home. Consequently, the impulse to cause mischief should be welcomed as a healthy corrective to stagnation and the denial of reality. Not every mischievous act is admirable, but mischief is, on balance, a force for good. Here then are the top pieces of mischief from 2011, as suggested by my Twitter followers.

Tweet during Presidential Debate which was put to Sean JOBS! Gallagher and caused him to mention envelopes. Was always going to top the poll, unlike the candidate. (per @faduda and everyone)
Gavin Sheridan’s victory in having NAMA declared a public authority and therefore amenable to requests for Information under EU law. The most secretive of creatures meets the most remorseless. (per @ElaineEdwards)
Throwing FF out of their traditional big meeting room because they didn’t have the numbers after the election to justify it. Somebody just got a burst of mischief and ran with it. It was sweet. (per @Oireachtas_RX)
Occupying Dame Street. Setting up and manning a shanty town at the foot of the Central Bank is a very useful reminder to the weekly visitors from abroad that there are limits to what can be imposed on a society. And it looks pleasingly homespun. (per me)
Hacking the FG database after FG denied they had any potential security problems with their data system. (per @Daraghobrien who was the person who first warned they were at risk)