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

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”.

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.

1. 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)
2. 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)
3. 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)
4. 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)
5. 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)

Here’s a New Year’s resolution suggestion for you.

By all means keep using facebook, twitter and google+ to chat with people, meet new ones and keep up with old friends. But for goodness sake, when you have something real to say- something that needs more than 140 characters- don’t stick it on a site owned by someone else.

Just go and buy yourself a little corner of the internet and put your words there. It isn’t expensive and, provided you don’t try to fancy things up too much, it isn’t hard to keep it going. I used Blacknight, who are good and based in Ireland, for hosting and I bought my domain name from them too. You use whoever you like.

The thing is, you see, I don’t think the internet is going to be uninvented any time soon, but various companies come and go. If you’ve been salting your words away on, say, Google+, ask yourself what you’ll do if and when that flops and goes the way of Google Buzz. And that’s Google. Who at least are richer than Croesus. I use Tumblr to host my Nesbit’s Children blog- but it is my fond dream that its final form wouldn’t be online, so I also have a copy of it in Scrivener along with additional links and background material. If and when Tumblr winks out of existence, I’ll have a copy of everything ready to repost.

I say if and when a company or service winks out of existence, but really, given the endless waves of innovation and destruction that characterises the technology sector, I ought to just say when. More than once this year I’ve been struck by how handy it is to have a single site to search for all my old posts and articles. I’ve been able to send out links which are close to ten years old, confident that as long as Tuppenceworth.ie is up, my words will be available on the same URL. As time goes on, I am increasingly aware of how important that becomes.

So, I think you ought to value yourself and your thoughts. They are, in part, the story of your own life. Buy some space for the price of a Starbucks gut-stretcher beverage a month, take back your life and own your own words.

The NDRC have been admirably responsive to the issues I’ve raised in my post.

Amy Neale of the NDRC has been good enough to come back to me with a graciously worded response to my self-admitted numeracy-challenged efforts to make sense of the Return on Investment for the public money invested by the Centre.

Dear Simon,

I am responding by email where there is no constraint on character count to ensure we are able to cover appropriately the points you have raised. 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.

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. 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).

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.

Angels tend to make less risky investments by choosing later stage technologies, or companies that have been operating for a period of time. NDRC is focusing at the hazardous earlier stage for new technologies and products, with a focus on bridging an internationally recognised gap that exists between investment into research and marketable products. We are focused on building this as a capability for Ireland, in order to translate publicly funded research investment into direct economic impact.

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.

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. 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.

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.

As a final point of clarification, we work with third level institutions across Ireland, not just Dublin.

I do hope this clarifies some of the questions you raised in your twitter feed, and also addresses the difference between the angel investment research you quoted in your blog piece and NDRC’s investment focus.

With best wishes
Amy Neale

I’d like to thank Dr. Neale for taking the time to respond to the issues I raised. I will probably have to think on her email for a little bit before I can fully digest it. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Readers will know that I have been following the looking-glass world of Your Country, Your Call for some time. I’ve lots of posts with facts and figures about the company. But there was a report in the Irish Examiner by Colette Browne recently about the competition which prompted me to write about the aims of the competition as I perceived them.

BILLED as a project that would “transform our economy”, the two successful Your Country Your Call projects have hired just a single member of staff, over a year after the two winners were announced.

Read more: http://www.examiner.ie/ireland/politics/your-call-competition-winners-hire-just-1-person-169534.html#ixzz1aw8MIGWo

Together with a rather offhand reference in an interview with the Chairman of YCYC’s parent company, former head of the Bank of Ireland, Dr. Laurence Crowley to criticism of the general governance of the company, it suggests that the media have decided that Your Country Your Call is an embarrassing dud.

While I have lots of reservations about the competition, I think it’s worthwhile to pause and point out that success should be measured by how well a project achieves its real aims and not the ones it announces to the world. By this yardstick, I think that it has been at least a partial success.

These aims are imputed by me to the endeavor. They represent mere speculation on matters of public interest but have an advantage over the declared motivations of all concerned. My explanations make sense.

Aim 1: Establish Martin McAleese as a political figure in his own right.

Result: Given the timing of the competition, it is tempting to say that the real aim was to run Martin McAleese a candidate for the Presidency, succeeding his wife. But that’s a bit of a stretch. Nonetheless, clearly the primary intent of this competition was to build Martin McAleese’s CV up a bit. Also required was to introduce him to the people of the Republic of Ireland, who had apparently looked through him for 14 years without quite noticing he was there.

The difficulty for the would-be promoter of the Martin McAleese political career path was that his primary claim to personal achievement in public life involved Northern Ireland, in some opaque way. And as far as the voters of the Republic were concerned that bread was well and truly eaten and forgotten.

Our hero was therefore placed in the centre of a circus dealing with the new National Question of the day- JOBS! He would conjure JOBS! from the air, by a feat of will and also by walking through the Phoenix Park. Not just a few JOBS! mind you. That is the sort of thing a man opening a Spar shop might be able to promise. Tens of thousands of jobs- an oil well gushing employment- springing like Athena fully formed from Martin McAleese’s head.

To become a national figure, Martin would “transform our economy”. He was, as he described himself in the peerless piece of puffery below, the man who went out for a walk from Aras an Uachtaráin wondering if the country would get out of the state it was in and returned saying to himself “you’ve got the answer, you know the way forward.”

That is some tour of the Wellington Monument.

As we now know, Martin didn’t quite make it into the Aras race. Probably, for all concerned, that was for the best. But you can’t deny that when Martin McAleese was made a Senator by Enda Kenny, Your Country Your Call hadn’t played its part. It, along with the aforementioned peace process arcana (and dentistry) was cited as his CV. That’s success.

Aside: I know this is off topic, but it is clear that Sean JOBS! Gallagher is currently being positioned in exactly the same way in the Presidential election (by the same FF sorts). We can expect that, like Your Country, Your Call, his campaign will consider itself successful if it can deliver one job. To him.

The New 27 Bus Route

Dear Sirs

I write further to my telephone conversation with Phelim of your office today.

I write to complain regarding the dramatic drop in quality of service on the 27 route since Monday, when the new route and timetable was introduced.

On Monday morning, I experienced a 20 minute wait at peak time for a bus to take me from Glin Rd towards city Centre. The new timetable promises one every 10 minutes.

The quality of the fleet has fallen. On Tuesday I got on a bus with a 99-D registration plate. Its suspension was certainly appropriate for a vehicle not from the last decade, but the decade before that.

Quite apart from age or comfort of the buses, these machines are particularly unfit for this route. While the 27 route for some time had been almost all low floor buses, I have repeatedly found myself on buses unsuitable for either wheelchair users or parents with prams.

This is a shameful retrograde step, as this new Route serves areas whose populations include large numbers of people in social housing with exactly those needs and no means other than the bus to transport themselves.

Today, I got on my bus (photo of ticket attached with details) to be told that it was terminating in Hawkins Street because the driver was going on his break then and there was meant to be someone taking over from him, but there wasn’t.

This simply is not an acceptable service. It is most certainly not an improved service.

If these service failures are not addressed- and they go much further than teething problems- I will be notifying the National Transport Authority.

Yours faithfully,

Simon McGarr

Unemployment levels by neighborhood, per 2006 Census. Map by pobal.maps.ie

Dear Sir,

I write further to my email of today.

I am standing at the bus stop outside the Central Bank, intending to travel Northbound.

The live signage has, in the past 25 minutes, promised two 27 buses. The first simply did not appear at all. The second stopped but did not allow us on as he intended terminating in Hawkins Street.

The signage is now promising a third bus in 6 minutes time- at which point I will have been standing here for half an hour at peak travelling time waiting to begin my journey.

I can only hope this one appears and feels like travelling further than one stop.

Yours faithfully,

Simon McGarr

Affluence levels by neighborhood, per 2006 Census. Map by pobal.maps.ie

Dear Sirs,

I write further to my emails of 11.13am and 6.18pm today regarding the 27 bus service.

I am currently (6.43pm) sitting on a 27 bus on the North quays. It has been parked here for 10 minutes. The driver tells us that he will sit here until 6.45pm, when he expects to be relieved by a second driver.

Our time is to be burnt up without an apology or a second thought, seemingly.

I attach a photograph of my ticket. Please note I boarded this bus-after a 35 minute wait in Dame Street- at 18.24.

I will be copying all three of today’s emails to my elected representatives and they will form part of a complaint to the National Transport Authority. I will not be waiting 15 days to do so.

I would also appreciate an acknowledgement of all three emails.

Yours faithfully,

Simon McGarr

Today, a number of very well known and established fashion and beauty blogs recieved the email below from RTE.

XXXX from the RTÉ Fashion site here, I hope you’re well.

We are relaunching the RTÉ fashion site (www.rte.ie/fashion
) in October with a whole new look, and as
part of the redesign we will be featuring Irish fashion and beauty blogs
in an aggregated feed.

This will be a great way to showcase the best of Irish online fashion and
beauty content. If you would be interested in being part of this feature
on the site, please email back and I can give you further details.

This will be a great way to give your blog more exposure and get your
content across to new readers!

All the best,

XXXX

Chortle, obvs.

When RTE gets around to relaunching their site on, em, whatever it is Tuppenceworth is about and they send us out one of these exciting emails this will be my reply.

Dear Ms. XXXX

Thank you very much for your interest in Ireland’s best and least read blog, Tuppenceworth.ie.

Please can you outline what form of license RTE would like to discuss for the republication of our material? We are always happy to be flexible on fees and access.

Yours faithfully,

etc

My appeal of the decision to turn down my FOI request for documents relating to RTE’s offer to licence video to members of the National Newspapers of Ireland has now been decided.

As you can see below, the original decision has been upheld by RTE’s internal appeal process. It is now open to me to send a final appeal on to the Office of the Information Commissioner.

RTE Reference: FOI2011/51
Your Reference: Mc673.RMcM.DB

Dear Mr. McMahon
In response to your letter of 12 August requesting an internal review of the decision made in this matter, I wish to inform you tha I have decided to uphold the decision made by Peter Feeney and given to you by letter on 19 July.

The records examined for the purpose of this internal review fall into four categories. Firstly, there is RTE’s PowerPoint format proposal as presented to N.N.I (National Newspapers of Ireland) entitled RTE Offer to Share News Clips with NNI Members. Secondly there are internal RTE papers relating to the development of this proposal. These comprise research including measures of traffic to the RTE.ie website, extracts from COMSCORE data about traffic to a number of websites, and estimates of costs of various options for the delivery of video feeds to newspapers. Thirdly, there are email records of correspondence initiation contacts and arranging meetings between RTE and N.N.I members. These emails bear dates in April, May, June and July of this year. Finally, internal RTE emails relate to aspects of the proposal including drafts of technical points for inclusion in the presentation mentioned above, assessments of the extent of interest being likely to be shown by N.N.I members, and diary entries for meetings between RTE and NNI.

Having considered these records and bearing in mind that the proposal made by RTE remains in discussion with N.N.I., I judge that Peter Feeney was correct to rest his decision on the exemptions provided for in sections 20 and 27 of the Act and I agree with the manner in which he has applied the public interest test in this instance. Accordingly, I confirm his decision.

I note that Peter Feeney has already advised you of the course you may take in the event that you find the outcome of my review unacceptable. I am not in a position to waive the fee for this internal review, as suggested in your letter of 12 August.

Yours sincerely,

Adrian Moynes

I will be asking my solicitor to appeal this decision. The grounds will include;

I will point out that the most important issue to be decided is a clear statement that RTE’s commercial interest is not the same thing as the public interest, just because RTE conflates the two. The potential of a breach of EU Law competition law discussed previously may even mean the public interest decidedly lies in getting full picture of deal in the public domain before contracts are signed.

Any potentially commercially sensitive details (pricing, licencing on offer) have been released into public domain already. Also, the matter cannot have a commercial sensitivity to RTE when they are not intending to charge any fee whatsoever for access to the video footage.

A claim that a deliberative process is ongoing in RTE is not bourne out even by the facts as outlined in the correspondence from RTE itself. The offer has been made already to the NNI. They may be considering it, but RTE’s decisions have already been made.  There aren’t even any emails listed as having been exchanged or created since July of this year.

I’ll let you know how we get on.

RTE Letter Re Free News Offer 8th Sept 2011

Throughout the Your Country, Your Call competition we were promised information would be made available later. When we asked who the donors were, were were told it would be released in a few weeks. When we asked for details of the competition’s finances, we were told that wouldn’t be released until after the results were announced. This, as anyone who has travelled through the looking glass with Alice knows, is known as Jam Tomorrow.

Nonetheless, there was one date that couldn’t be mentioned and then ignored to avoid questions. That was the mandatory filing of the accounts of the company which ran the Your Country Your Call competition, An Smaoineamh Mór Ltd (henceforth ASM). Every company has to file some statements every year with the Company Registration Office. These are public documents. I’ve uploaded one to Scribd, a document storing site, which you can see below. This one details the financial status of An Smaoineamh Mór as of December 2010 and covers its entire active existence during the Your Country, Your Call competition.

Headlines first, as I’ve been accused of burying interesting info in too many words.

1. ASM has loads of money in an account in AIB, right now. Like, loads. €1,188,203 to be exact.
2. Despite being regularly told that the entire YCYC team were donating their time and effort pro-bono, the document shows that there was actually one person employed by the company on a pay package of €80,934. It doesn’t say who that person was or what job they did.
3. Quite reasonably, the Directors’ statement says “The board of directors believes the company has sufficient funds to continue in existence for the foreseeable future, and in particular to bring the winning projects to the implementation phase no later than September 2011”.

More later.

YCYC/An Smaoineamh Mor Annual Report