Today is your chance to have your voice heard. Your vote is as important as every other person’s vote, even the President’s or the Taoiseach’s. For all the criticism we do or suggestions we make, if we don’t vote, we may as well have said nothing at all.
Use your vote wisely too. The balance of [...]

for those of you looking for live coverage of the Irish Budget 2009 (or the 4th attempt as some call it), have a peek at the live streams from the Oireachtas website, provided mostly by HEAnet.
Dail Eireann – Windows Media Player – http://asx.heanet.ie/oireachtas/dail_broadband.asx
Dail Eireann – Flash Player (new to me) – http://www.oireachtas.ie/viewdoc.asp?fn=/documents/livewebcast/DailFlash512KB.htm
Dail Eireann – audio [...]

I arrived at Tara St Station to see a commuter train waiting at the platform (16:00) and hopped on to get to Dun Laoghaire. As the train left, the guy in the seat across from me asked if the train would stop at Lansdowne Road and I directed him to the map above the door [...]

I read RTE this morning and was delighted to see the headline “Hi-tech cable to link US with Ireland” but incredulous when they stated that it was the first transatlantic telecommunications cable to directly link Ireland with the US. I got over it until I saw an even bolder claim in the Metro paper – [...]

did the auditors sign off on the EU accounts this year? Was there massive fraud?
RTE report “Auditors give first okay to EU books” while Sky references Iain Dale as the source that the auditors “failed to approve the EU accounts”
The clearest explanations come from the BBC and the European Parliament;
Although the accounts themselves have been [...]

I’m Joe the engineer but I did like what I heard in the encounter between Barack Obama and Joe Wurzelbacher.

My opinion after thinking a little about this is that the taxpayer must give people the chance to succeed in life, regardless of their background. I strongly believe in healthy competition and reward for risk and [...]

They are NOT the same family! Aldi North and Aldi South are run by two brothers and the international market has been divided up geographically by them. Aldi comes from “ALbrecht DIscount” and the brothers names are Karl Albrecht und Theo Albrecht. Legend has it that they separated because of a dispute over whether [...]

Via Irland Inside and The Sunday Times
“HSE’s 4-star hotel bill for evicted travellers”
The Health Service Executive (HSE) is picking up the bill for a family of eight travellers who checked themselves into Dublin’s Citywest hotel after being evicted from their home in Clondalkin earlier this month.
The Doherty family booked into the four-star hotel on June [...]

The easy and funny argument Spoofers guide to the Lisbon treaty HT: Paul Browne

If we vote yes to Lisbon the EU will work better. It will work for us in the areas of energy, immigration and sport amongst others which are added as competences. In times where energy prices are rising and climate change needs [...]

When I was in Germany, I took part in a driving-safety course at the ADAC Centre in Linthe

The course covered some useful issues such as emergency braking in the dry and the wet, the effect of ABS and ESP and braking on slippery surfaces going downhill and on bends.
This video shows one of the [...]