Infobursts

There follows a few things I wanted to let readers know, but couldn’t think of enough to say about to warrant a full post.

1) Bernard, of Running with Bulls, has set up a T-Shirt shop. All the proceeds of his clothy wares are being donated to Digital Rights Ireland. Now you can get a warm glow, and keep warm at the same time. I particularly like his Rip Me, Mix Me, Burn Me, Sue Me design. Here are the rest of them. And, by special request of myself, he said that he’ll be getting some girl friendly gear shortly.

2) Tuppenceworth has been mentioned in print, to our absurd excitement. You may not have spotted it, but my piece on the mutual assitance in phone tapping legislation is mentioned this week in Conn Ó Muíneacháin’s column in La. My Irish is poor, but basically he is saying that Irish bloggers took an interest in Irish this week after the Minister brought his phone tapping bill to the Seanad though the medium of, apparently, a mangled version of the native tounge.

3) Piaras Kelly, of the Piaras Kelly PR blog, fell into a hole this week with his contribution to International Women’s Day. My contribution:

Come on Piaras, engage with the real meat of the question!

Your post’s implication, whether you were aware of it or not, was that women need to act more like men do to get ahead in business. Men are successful because they do X, so women should do X too to be successful.

Damien spotted that straight away.

But the thing is, if the world is to be bearable, it isn’t right that half of its inhabitants need to bend themselves to the expectations of the other half to be judged acceptable. So if men are more likely to be talking themselves up, and women are more likely to be quietly going about their work (a gross generalisation we’ll use for the sake of discussion) then what is to be questioned is not why women don’t behave more like one of the lads.

It is why the decision making processes for promotion do not take that broad difference into account. My tentative answer is that decisions are being made by men who are as unaware of their biases as your post suggested you might be.

That’s all folks!

2 Comments

  • Hi Simon! Actually, I must confess to having never heard Minister McDowell’s Irish, so I can’t personally vouch for it’s mangledness, or otherwise. 🙂

    In general, I don’t get hung up about the standard of people’s Irish. (I can’t afford to – “glass houses” and all that!) In fact, I think too many people are put off speaking Irish because they feel it is not up to some “standard” or other.

    The thing is, a living language has all sorts of “standards”. As I say, I’ve never heard Michael’s Irish – but I’d bet it’s better than Bertie’s English!

  • Simon McGarr says:

    My source for Mr. McDowell’s mangelation was the Sunday Tribune, rather than yourself.

    I think you’re suitably generous in the feeble efforts of people like me, who have regressed to An bhfuil cead agam dul go dti on leitheras levels of fluency.

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