The recent HSE-related scandals about missing training funds and money not spent on care was really a more-of-the-same story, and the media reacted with familiar enthusiasm. The way they see it, death sells. For papers, newsagents and TV stations, nothing makes a good political scandal like a few dead people – women and children first. If you can toss in a few heartbroken husbands or mothers, then all the better.

The problem with these town-crier-style headlines is that they draw away from the real complexity of the issue; the issue of the many layers of gross incompetence in our health service. To start a rational debate on this matter, you must not give a damn about that one sick mother or father or child. You must look uncaringly at human pain and decide what is best, for the numbers alone., because sob stories just make bad policy.

Simplicity is key. A streamlined service with a simple chain of command is a must. But this chain is far from simple at the moment.

At the top rests the ineptitude of Minister for Health Mary Harney. Watching her defend herself in the Dáil is watching a person who seems oblivious to her failings. You start feeling physically pained every time she says that something is “the responsibility of the HSE”. Any good manager knows that your subordinates’ failings are your own. The HSE is simply her cast aside responsibility. The Organisational Review Programme noted something similar last week, saying that management was poor and that staff were unevenly allocated.

I have parents who worked in separate Health Boards. They had different forms and rules for the exact same procedures before the HSE was created. This doubled paperwork, and hence increased the number of civil servants employed. But then the HSE arrived, and the forms and the procedures stayed as they were. The letterhead did change to a wonderful new marketing-made logo. Why does an administrative body that needs real change only get a new logo? What has the HSE simplified? Make no mistake, simpler always means cheaper.

The Chief Executive was Professor Brendan Drumm, before eventually stepping down on September 1^st of this year. But why was a doctor ever made head of the biggest company in Ireland? I don’t want my head of health to specialise in individual patient care. I want him to care about dividing resources as well as possible and to be an expert in that field.

In the Organisational Review Programme last week, it was noted that the best managed, yet most understaffed sector, was the Revenue and Tax Office. This is because organisation is their professional occupation and training.

In my wildest utopian fantasies, Michael O’Leary is Chief Executive of the HSE. Whatever reservations certain people may have about his character, he is a brilliant manager.  Hand him the current health budget with one objective – the lowest death rate possible, for example – and he would more than likely achieve said aim.

O’Leary would ignore the publicity surrounding dying tabloid-attracting patients to secure the funds for the survival rate of the living. He’d stare at the lines of doctors protesting for “changes in work practices” and turn every newspaper against them with his brutal media tactics.

Furthermore, O’Leary would reduce most of the endless form filling which doctors are obliged to do, so they can get back to actual work. He would also ignore the proposed and pathetic “retrain the useless” program of Fine Gael and just fire the useless. If you can’t figure out what your job is, then say so, and stop stealing taxpayers’ money.

The Minister for Health has consistently ignored calls for simple cost cutting. While cutting payments to pharmacists, the pharmacists pointed out that cutting one simple law would save far more. Did you know that pharmacists legally could not tell you of a cheaper branding of the exact same drug? Two years later, Mary Harney suddenly announced this same law reform as a new amazing policy. That’s more than a year of millions being lost during a recession.

Who would notice that a paltry four million of training funds going missing among the mess of bodies and ministries?

The new chairman of the HSE, Dr Frank Dolphin, has started on the right path by targeting simple absenteeism to save “easily more than €100 million” and the moves to cut 6,000 voluntary middle management and administrative staff. But this needs to go much further.

Firstly, cap pay for the next four years at a generous €200,000 for everyone, including bonuses and overtime. Secondly, make a rule that any head of any department who fires anyone for not being useful enough in the next year gets that wage plus ten per cent back in their budget for actual treatment of patients. Finally, hire a group of the biggest businessmen and women you can find to run the behemoth.

Only cold, non-caring number crunchers can beat this level of human incompetence.

This year’s Nobel prize ceremonies have had their fair share of controversy, but despite this, it has still been a fascinating mix of background influences and giant cultural behemoths.

The 2010 Physics prize went to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for “groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene”. Graphene is a material that is one atom thick, completely transparent, impossibly strong and has better conductivity than copper. If we can scale it up, a process in which huge funds are being invested, it is thought that it could help solve the energy crisis. This would involve effectively piping renewable electricity across vast chunks of land with an insignificant energy loss compared to the incredibly inefficient transfer of energy via copper wire.

The prize was also notable for having one of the more curious scientists to win. Geim is the first Nobel prize winner to have also won an Ig Nobel prize for a paper he wrote on levitating frogs and has at one time listed a hamster as a co-author on another paper. The Ig Nobel prizes have become notorious for recognising scientists with research in unorthodox fields.

The prize for chemistry went to a team for “palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis”. In plain English, this means that they have found a new way to combine carbon atoms, which make up almost everything in existence.

The Nobel Prize for Medicine went to Dr Robert G. Edwards for his groundbreaking work on IVF. . Edwards is responsible for the births of millions of babies, despite huge social uproar and debate along with political controversy. This was largely because the Catholic Church had, and still does, a deep entrenched hatred of IVF.

Much of the controversy stems from the fact that IVF involves the destruction or freezing of the extra-fertilised eggs in the process. This of course brings to mind stem-cell research – if it got more funding from governments and less blocking from said church, these extra embryos could be used in another field of life, saving research instead of it being tossed out. The church has again waded into waters they neither understand nor belong in, by calling the Nobel committee “completely out of order” for awarding Edwards the Medicine prize.

While the Medicine prize controversy grabbed the headlines, the awarding of the prize for Economics has extraordinary relevance for this time of turmoil. It went to a team of a British-Cypriot and two Americans, who presented a theory to explain why people stay unemployed in a growing jobs market. While this work does not automatically offer easy solutions, it is vital for governments trying to get their citizens back in work in recession struck times.

Human rights protester Liu Xiaobo

The awarding of the Peace prize is very relevant, in contrast with the usually out-of-touch past awards systems (the discovery for the chemistry prize actually happened in 1970). In some cases, the awards are seemingly being used as a tool for international pressure towards peace. This was evident last year too, with the award being given to US President Barack Obama, under the debatable contention that he had made very progressive steps toward the achievement of peace in the Muslim world.

However, the awards continue to serve as a signpost to where we should be going. This year, the Peace prize was significantly given to Liu Xiaobo – a man in prison serving an eleven-year sentence for peaceful protests against human rights abuses in China.

With the awarding of the prize to Liu, the Nobel committee have rewarded a leader of a campaign for the most basic rights, who undoubtedly deserves it, but probably won’t be able to collect it unless he is pardoned. This is putting further pressure on a government who wants to look the part of a great and benevolent superpower, rather than just a powerful country, but still has huge strides to make before they can look eye to eye with the rest of the world.

Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian writer, won the award for Literature for highly politicised works, which have played an important role in the South American fight for freedom from tyranny. It is also a definite nod for the left-wing governments that South America has particular societal desire for. Llosa seems to garner much international acclaim, despite the definite local influences that permeate his work.

If the relevance of the awards is questionable, then look to this year’s set of winners, who are being awarded for their numerous impressive humanitarian efforts.

Another swathe of great people have aided the birth of many, or strived for the human rights of millions in the new world order. Some have written about the constant struggle of their own world and some have created works that describe a struggle underlining the realities of today’s crushed economy. And then to some scientists, who have made today’s world a more efficient place and attempt to make tomorrow’s world possible.

Most people seemingly have lives, and don’t spend all day checking technology news. If you’re one of these people, this catch-up on the world of tech and gadgets is for you.

Three companies have traditionally dominated individual parts of tech for the last few years: Google (the web), Apple (mobile and music) and Microsoft (operating systems). Google has dominated the web for a decade now and has total control over nearly all internet revenue with Google Adwords. However, the future is definitely more ‘cloud’ and less silver lining.

Google’s main problem is confusion: it’s panicked because it has no social networking services, and has tried to fix this by going all ‘mid-life crisis’, releasing more software than anyone wanted or needed. If I want to tell a friend ‘I got a dog’, I can use Google Chat, Google Voice, Gmail, Orkut, Google Wave and Buzz. Extreme geeks couldn’t be bothered telling you about their dog in six or seven ways, every single day, so the public definitely won’t. Google needs to clean this up – and badly.

Apple has redefined what it means to have a successful phone in the last few years. In this key space they are now facing new competition from Google – and soon from Microsoft. Google’s Android operating system (or ‘OS’ for the cool kids) is soon going to become the Windows of the phone world. It’s free, available for any phone maker, well-rounded and powerful – and the actual Google phone, the Nexus One, has received even better reviews than the iPhone. The iPhone now looks old to some, and is feeling the heat so much that Apple has started suing Android phone makers for silly things.

Technology becomes more interesting for the average person when we talk about mobiles. Everyone with a pulse has heard of the iPhone, and its domination is clear – but in the last few months, Google’s Android has gone from two per cent to seven per cent market penetration in the U.S. One problem is anyone who likes Apple can only buy an iPhone, which is pretty but has problems – you can only use one program at a time, for example. Android can be loaded onto hundreds of phones already and more are coming.

Microsoft has always been the Daddy of this group: big and important but definitely not cool. Windows Vista was the closest we’ve come to Hell on Earth, and although they’ve gone decidedly less diabolical with Windows 7, in the phone game Microsoft have been roasted alive.

Windows Mobile has, up until now, been an ugly unwanted offspring – trying to jam a computer OS onto a 2-inch screen. No one outside of the business community has heard of it, and no one cares for it. Microsoft had an App Store for a decade, and no one cared for that either. Then Apple makes it shiny, and everyone goes for it like magpies. That said, Microsoft have just announced a completely new phone OS (Windows Mobile 7), set for launch this November, to great reception.

Despite their respective screw-ups, what’s good and interesting for you is that everyone’s moving into each other’s space. No doubt you own a computer; you probably use Windows. Aristocrats and trendy graphic artists use a Mac. But have you thought about a Google computer? By the end of 2010, Google will release a range of computers with everything the average person needs to work and play – kind of. These machines will be ultra cheap – possibly €100 or less – and fast. The secret? Google thinks everyone is online all the time anyway, so all you really need is a browser. No dedicated music player, no software bundles or other programs… just a browser. Because they are so basic, these machines – running the Chrome OS – will be insanely fast.

This could be a major flop or the best thing to hit cheap computers in a decade – we’ll find out by Christmas. Apple’s OS X works wonders, so that won’t change, while Windows 7 almost works for everything and has kicked Vista to touch, so Microsoft will just improve on that bit by bit for the next few years.

The Internet should be the battleground of this century, yet Google have failed miserably on social networking and need to clean up their other programs. The company really making the ground here is Microsoft: its Bing search engine might acquire Yahoo! and although their normal search still throws up stupid things, their images and video search beats Google’s hands down. They might even be interested in Facebook, and for music their Zune service actually beats the iTunes store for value. Finally we are seeing some competition to provide worthwhile internet services.

One trend that’s both impossible to ignore and hard to understand is the rise of the tablet (or ‘slate’ if you’re cool). These are 10” touch-screen devices that nobody asked for but everyone wants. The iPad is the best-known and, technologically speaking, one of the worst, with a great but awkwardly-sized screen, but it seems people would buy dung in tinfoil if it had an Apple logo on it (iPod shuffle, anyone?) as the iPad sold over 300,000 units on the first day – better sales than even the iPhone. Google meanwhile have a few Chrome OS tablets planned – one from Dell and some from Asian firms, including one for under US$100. Microsoft is planning a slate with HP which looks OK, but we’ll see whether it can integrate some of the cool factor of Apple.

The big three are certainly up to their old tricks in certain areas, but have plenty of new tricks in others. There’s real competition for everything we can think of, and not a moment too soon.

Sex is okay. Sex dressed as a panda, though? Definitely a no-no to chat about to the friends you want to keep. Both acts start the same way – well, the foreplay may have different logistics – and both will inevitably lead towards the same conclusion. So is one wrong while the other’s cool? To claim to be a modern society, we must be able to examine how we, as a society, interact – without laughing in incredulity.

In olden times sex was seen as a base evil, only to be attempted within a set of the most contrived rules and preconceptions. Let’s look to see how far have we advanced, starting with what sex is now. Is it an evil, a good, a weapon or a tool? Can it be a commodity?

Sex is the only non-harmful consensual act you cannot provide as a service. As George Carlin said, “Sex is legal, selling stuff is legal, so why isn’t selling sex legal?” Its illegality dates back to the notion that sex is either ‘bad’ or ‘special’. While sex can be both, we must admit that it’s often either. The problem of, say, prostitution being abused, is irrelevant: in every other facet of business we don’t ban when abuses occur, we regulate. The notion that a select few should decide how degrading an act is for the rest of society is just laughable. If you wouldn’t work in Tesco, for example, you shouldn’t be allowed to automatically pontificate on whether Tesco might be a good enough job for me.

But I doubt this will happen any time soon, because society does dictate the limits of acceptable actions. Society decides what’s right, even if the law deigns not to. This is a ridiculous role – especially when it comes to sex. If I want to fight the most ancient of battles while dressed up as an endangered species, rather than in my birthday suit, it might be legal but it is most definitely taboo to mention at a dinner party. For some pathetic reason we still haven’t reached the point where, as adults, any consensual safe act is normal, and where we all have some sort of awkward (possibly furry) personal closet to climb out of.

It’s not that the law doesn’t preach in strange and unusual ways. We have taken a leap forward recently in bringing age of consent between boys and girls to a uniform 16. But as with all of these progressions, the end result is a half-baked law, unsure what to do with itself. One decidedly untrendy law pertains to pornography, roughly prohibiting the display of sexual material to people under the age of 18. Advancing this logic further, does this mean that we are allowed to have sex two years before we’re mature enough to actually view it? And doesn’t this mean a 16-year-old is breaking the law whenever he has sex unless he wears a blindfold? Or is he innocent if he keeps his eyes closed?

All nonsensical scenarios aside, there are actual serious implications of the group resistance we hold against any evolution to our sex laws. Some Irish people, for example, feel they can’t marry who they want in this country due to ancient preconceived social rules. So, to anyone who feels that there are religious traditions to be respected with marriage, or anyone who feels like screeching “think of the children!”, go bury your head in the sand: you mightn’t want to know that sexuality, for men, is most probably decided before birth (the evidence is weaker for women) so the children will be of whatever orientation their genes decide. And hey – if we’re wrong, the world needs better population control anyway. It is extremely irritating watching the Catholic hillbilly brigade being rolled out on talk shows as if their opinion is worth the 50c Bible it’s read out of.

Even if we were to get all these things sorted out, the general hypocrisy of society’s attitude to sex is amazing. Try this: find someone who you know wouldn’t go out with you, and ask them out every day for a week (Hint – mention panda suits a lot.) We all know that’s creepy, unless you’re good looking, of course. If I had a book’s worth of space for this piece, I could start to challenge the view that sex is something women own and give out to men when they feel like it. While this perception is mostly beneficial to women, it does give rise to the notion that while women become sluts, men become players.

To grow up about this issue we must all realise we are all different and that this is okay. We all have tastes, and when we get the law to stop talking about the bedroom and get our society to start talking about the wider world, it’ll be time to welcome in the twenty-first century.

There’s a famous story about a perfect scientist who, after seeing his life work being taken apart and destroyed for an hour by a younger colleague, went and genuinely thanked the upstart for teaching him something new. While the self-deprecating abilities of our brightest and best will never reach that level, we should hope they do better than they currently are doing. The elite and the famous have always found it hard to see fault in themselves while the rest of us are expected to be contrite if we screw up.

It is in the most important of things that this trait hurts and destroys people’s lives and hopes for the future. The Catholic Church carries an arrogance one might expect from an organisation that believes itself hand-picked by God. But the breathtaking superiority complex displayed by Cardinal Seán Brady when he said he did nothing wrong by the day’s standards, when he refused to report the actions of a paedophile colleague, goes beyond a joke when ‘nothing wrong’ meant allowing a mass rapist continue on his merry way. The Church has been an incredibly slow learner of the painful lesson that the sooner it fully admits to everything it allowed be committed on children in their care, the sooner it can move on and try to salvage its creaky organisation. We must wonder if the Church will ever learn this lesson, or try merely to placate the angry mobs every time the drip feed of horror stories starts up again.

The highest among us have the furthest to fall when they fail this test – and none more so than Seán Fitzpatrick, the shamed ex-head of Anglo Irish Bank, currently under investigation for fraud while loaning himself €87m from his own failing bank. Fitzpatrick acknowledged in an interview that it “would be very easy for me to say sorry”, but has failed to do so because (apparently) the bank’s problems had nothing to do with him.

Firstly, the banks wouldn’t have been affected by the global crisis if it had not loaned millions to those with no money to repay it. Secondly, Fitzpatrick fully admits concealing his loans from the public during his eight-year tenure. He has no regret, and his bank – and our tax bill – suffers for it. As long as he, and bankers still in such organisations, accept these positions and don’t pay for their mistakes, how will the organisations learn to do things differently next time?

We were given a lesson by junior minister Trevor Sargent, who resigned immediately once his name was tarnished, and before the tabloids had even gathered the breath to sling insults. This was sharply contrasted by Willie O’Dea, who screamed blue murder as Fianna Fáil desperately tried to stop a perjurer calling himself a ‘victim’. O’Dea has not clearly acknowledged his fault and has instead tried to portray his act as a misspoken word, rather than an attempt to criminalise his opponent in the eyes of the public.

No matter what road we take in life, we will all make mistakes. The three-year-old who catches his finger in the door learns his lesson and grows as a person. Our whole society made mistakes by turning a blind eye to the clerical abuse of children when it happened – and again by ignoring not only the stupidity of bankers, but also the stupidity of the people who took loans when they had no means to repay them. The mistakes of the credit crunch were made by everyone in Ireland, and all of us must hold our hands up and show our leaders by example. All our leaders need learn is that regret is the sweetest of poisons.

I’m told that a good comment article relies on being impersonal, dealing with the ‘you’ and not the ‘I’. I’m afraid that in this case, that rule goes out the window.

When people ask me what year I’m in, I tell them I did First Year last year. I phrase it like this, because I don’t know what I’m doing now.

I failed a major project-based module in the second semester of last year. I appealed the result in July, on the simple grounds that I suspected the grade had been wrongly inputted. In the meantime I repeated, doing some Second Year modules to pass time, following advice given to me by UCD. I received the verdict on my appeal at the start of February: I had passed.

After repeating a month of the module, after taking out a lease on a year’s worth of accommodation, after losing a year of my academic life, and after nearly seven months of staring at an incorrect grade, UCD tell me, ‘Actually, that’s fine, go home and come back in the autumn again.’

What was involved in this process? UCD received my letter of appeal, got a response from my school (which shall remain nameless, out of a respect they do not return), read the letter, and made a decision. This took almost 200 days – and now I’m left with a door slammed in my face, having wasted my parents’ money and a year of my life.

At this point I’ve paid my €1500 registration fees and a €230 repeat fee. I go to the Student Desk to ask for this back; I’m told I’m still enrolled in the course. I go back to the school to be taken off the list. Four meetings, two letters and two weeks later, I sit at the Student Desk, insisting that the poor lady there call my school and have my name removed, telling her I won’t leave otherwise. Completely by coincidence, I am disenrolled on the spot, allowing me to ask the now defensive and grumpy lady about my fees.

“Well, why would you get anything besides €230?” she asks me. I carefully and calmly point out that the huge incompetence of this college has just created, robbing a year of my life. “But you did do other subjects…” she shrewdly reads off the screen. “Yes,” I say, “in a year that shouldn’t have existed, taken on the advice of UCD officials.”

“You’ll have to take it up with those officials, then,” she replies. “It’s nothing to do with us.”

Yes it does, I think. You are part of UCD. You can take some responsibility for an organisation for which you are the student liaison.

While this quandary was becoming murkier, I was also dealing with my school, asking if I could take a learning exercise anyway, preparing in advance for next year. Three weeks later, I still don’t have a straight answer. Letters have to be sent, apparently, and words exchanged – between people who work in the same building.

Although the appeals board agreed with me that substantive irregularities occurred in my course – i.e. that my school was wrong – and though the school have changed their procedures due to what happened – i.e. that they were wrong – nobody has apologised, sounded sad, or even set two minutes aside to ask how they can help (aside from one person who has done everything he can, even calling me to offer condolences in the summer. My thanks to him; it has meant more than he can know.)

All this has shown me the arrogant and coldly dismissive attitude that an institution like UCD can have. Thousands of students feel this when their grants are delayed by mechanical, pointless inputs to fill up a mechanical pointless form, while they live below the poverty line. People’s lives are pushed aside like words on a page, and nobody seems decent enough to help out for even five minutes.

I genuinely hope that UCD staff realise what they are doing when they fob people off to other departments for the sake of their own ease. Taking seven months to read and reply to two letters, but not taking five minutes to call a colleague about a student’s future, is simply wrong. When staff are too arrogant to apologise for wasting a year of my life, and delaying a decision about whether I failed a module for inordinate amounts of time, it’s time to either consider their career choice of helping others, or reconsidering their mindsets in doing so.

The Green movement has a problem. Though a seemingly timeless cause, there is an immovable and imminent ‘kill’ switch inside its most important issue: global warming.

That switch is the ‘tipping point phenomenon’. Once the level of carbon in the atmosphere has exceeded a certain point, there is nothing we can do – an avalanche of change has been set off that no amount of measures can ever hope to reverse. This means simply that if the international Green organisations want change, it needs to happen soon, or it will largely remain forever pointless.

Though this all sounds a Doomsday scenario, the Green movement all round the world know that simple but strong cuts now can stave off this threat of irreparable ruin, but the world’s various Green Parties have no support to enforce such cuts.

In Ireland, the Green Party is a somewhat underrated entity. Though it has shrugged off most of the naïvety that its members once held, its approval rating in opinion polls still rests on its core support of three per cent. After two years in power, no new ground has been gained with the electorate – in fact, it has been lost, given the results of last summer’s local elections – and it must be admitted that most people simply do not care about the issues they see the Greens represent.

Let’s think for a moment about the headline ‘Green’ initiatives you can remember from the Programme for Government. The increase in investment on renewable energy was rather limited and mostly a positive spin of funds that had already been earmarked, while the two other headline issues that a straw poll might identify would relate to genetically modified (GM) crops and stag hunting.

This is where maturity and logic should come into it. Why should the Greens specifically attack stag hunting? Because there is only one Hunt in Ireland, and almost nobody within the electorate would be affected. But the Greens should be either seeking a ban on all bloodsports, or on none at all. A headline-grabbing ban on a single hunt in Connacht only marginalises the group, when the country is in economic turmoil with no large scale benefits. Meanwhile, GM crops have been eaten for more than 15 years by billions of people, with no recorded adverse affects – and some are endorsed by the FDA, WHO and Royal Society of Medicine. Artificially enhanced crops could save thousands of lives in many drought-ridden territories, but elitists like Greenpeace still attack GM foods on the grounds that they haven’t been ‘tested enough’. As one character in the political satire In The Loop coyly quipped, “We don’t need facts when we’ve got the truth!”

It is time for the Green Party to abandon the crazies in the closet and to face the real world. It must make its policy choices on a strictly scientific basis, and avoid the fiascos of GM crops and biofuels. This need becomes all the more evident in light of revelations concerning major British environmental committees, who have been found to have been basing their arguments on falsified statistics from unqualified members of Greenpeace. The idiotic mistrust of science needs to thrown out now.

The way to most clearly inform the public about this change of tack (and the easiest way to earn more votes) is to completely rebrand the party in the style of its counterparts from the Nordic countries. These Scandinavian organisations are not purist Green parties (for whom the average borderline income family will, in all probability, never vote) but a much more palatable type of Socialist Green. As the media focus switches from the environmental conscience of the party to its position on broader societal issues, so too will the focus of the general public. The Green Party must represent a larger portion of the population if it is to earn the power it needs to implement the changes it wants. If this means it must steal the headlines with economic decisions, and to sneak the environmental issues under the radar when it can, then so be it.

This rebranding would allow the party to deal with typically ‘Green’ issues, but to disguise them as being largely economic moves. Investment in new wind farms, for example, will become a ‘jobs boost for the local economy’ and ‘capital investment in the construction industry’.

The Green Party needs to learn to bury its environmental issues until it has the power to actually make their cases. The global environment doesn’t care for fanfare, and merely needs action taken any way it can. This will hurt the ideal of a single-issue party, but a singularly-focused party is a lonely one in modern politics.

This may be a cold and alien tactic to a relatively warm, open and honest party – but if flower power can’t help the environment, underhand tactics just might.

Ah, Copenhagen, you were filled with such hope. A time when all the world leaders came together to discuss what to do about this global warming. Things really looked up when our great world leader considered it worthy enough for him to drop in on the last day. And the world sat on the edge of its seat.

They emerged with the Copenhagen Protocol, announced and headed by the U.S. It started by stating proudly that they had agreed that Science was right, and that yes, ‘according to science‘, something should be done about climate change. They mentioned a few semi-desirable targets such as capping the temperature increase at two degrees, and that this would be nice to be stabilised by about 2050. And that was it. That took three days. And thousands of planes and people.

Now after the politicians had finished glancing flirtingly at the handsome American, they managed to release this fantastic work to the public. The world looked up, then down again, then up again in confusion, before finally coming to the realisation that yes, this self-inflated Post-It note was the agreement, then they started to get really angry. It was three A4 pages long. And most of that was filler.

But there was an agreement. We now all agree that deep cuts are required now. That’s  nice, isn’t it?

One of the most damning aspects of the talks was that the USA went in offering a 1.3 per cent cut from 1990 emissions levels by 2020, and came out promising even less.

Sadly the main conductor of this genocide of common sense was our new age Superman, Mr Obama, who has the unenviable position of now doing as little for the international environment as George W. Bush. Questions must now seriously be asked about when he will begin to fulfil the hype so carefully crafted fifteen months ago. An international agreement would be perfect, allowing him to go back to his Senate and say, ‘We have to do it now’. But no: he bottled it.

Also big in the shame charts with this agreement is our new favourite rising son, China (though in fairness, you must remember that it is now accepted internationally that ‘climate justice’ has to be given to China. Yes, that’s right: since China missed developing its country when we rich folk did, it must be given its turn to burn a trillion tonnes of coal). It’s the East’s turn to ruin the environment merry go round.

Not all countries entered so limply into the talks. Norway offered a 40 per cent cut. The EU total said up to 30 per cent. Even the developing countries offered promise: China had extraordinarily hopeful targets, yet soon backed away from commitment to them. Brazil offered a seemingly meagre zero per cent drop, although its 1990 emissions levels are a lot lower than the West’s. In the end, however, there was no commitment. No single binding agreement. It is telling that the only positive comments came from our Obama, and the head of China’s delegation.

An even more frustrating situation became clear in a reading of the agreement’s aftermath. The countries that proposed strong targets still don’t push on ahead on their own. This is because cuts in carbon have the unfortunate effect of hitting economies hard.

The international debate on this matter can be seen as a giant 194 man race to the bottom. And if someone does sprint out from the starting blocks early, their economies are going to take a hit while everyone else stands still, wondering if there was a starting gun at all, because they didn’t hear it. Everyone needs to start together, or nobody significant will start at all.

Another conference takes place in Mexico City in a few months, and perhaps something can happen there – indeed, there are signs that Mexico could be the starting gun we need. There are hopeful noises that Obama may be willing to agree to legally binding targets, and all EU leaders have said that a legally binding framework must be found.

Of course, we could all just start living efficiently right away, without having to be told by our leaders and get some things done ourselves. But that’s too difficult, right?

What makes this particularly colourful racist worthy of note is not the protestors labelling him “a disgrace to humanity” outside the gates of his office, but rather the two seats won by Griffin and his party in the European Parliament last summer, and the 22 per cent who now say they would seriously consider voting for the party in a general election.

In the ensuing cries of pain by the establishment, there have been calls to inform people that the BNP’s ‘moderate edge’ is just a sham. To show people that the party’s main policy – which essentially entails deporting minorities for the good of the nation – is just an amazing marketing pitch for the British version of the Ku Klux Klan.

Firstly, one might hope that some realism would rain down upon the 22 per cent in Britain who would seriously consider voting for the BNP and who think the party are moderate. One might pray that these people would have an epiphany of sorts and see that the BNP are actually hard-right racists, whose leader gives talks to the KKK. Some try to defend the BNP by saying they would clean up politics, not being in it (as many others are) for the money. That’s true – the BNP are in politics to stop what they call a ‘bloodless genocide’: the practice of black and white people having mixed-race children.

However the greatest problem is that the BNP’s cover of “national protection” and the protection of “family interests” are not as jovial and easily dismissed as we sometimes make them out to be. There is nothing moderate about saying that the nationality of a person’s grandfather should determine ones right to step on the soil of that country. Nor is it just to say that no matter how hard an Afghani immigrant or an asylum seeker from Darfur may work, they may never leave that land to escape persecution, murder or simply to seek a better quality of life.

Nationalism has been used for so long as a cause for murders which were – and still are – completely unjustifiable, that it has now become a byword for ‘hate with reason’. No one ever seems to stop and point out that the reason behind nationalism is arbitrary geography.

The old saying, “you can’t polish things that aren’t so nice”, is true: a shiny veneer fools nobody, all it does is give people the ability to pretend a blunt stone shiny diamond when it’s not. In England this means that the middle and lower economic classes can now say they’re not racist, but merely nationalist.

Of course, politicians need votes to save their jobs and so the option of simply labelling a fifth of the entire electorate as racist, ensures banalities and political correctness ensue. If human rights groups were to launch a campaign stating ‘BNP = A Shower of Racists’, their support would probably halve – not because people would be shocked by the declaration, but merely because they could no longer plead ignorance.

In Ireland we are lucky, we seem to have escaped the international tendency to gulp down crap to justify nonsense. Flagrant racism and bigoted words are leaving our country but have skipped happily onto fresher political pastures across the Irish Sea. The underlying message has changed, mutating into an uglier, fiercer beast.

Nonetheless the cover remains the same, and has been worn so thin by extremist right-wing groups that not only must we be able to see through it, but also be able to admonish it for its groundless hate. Then nationalism might actually be a force for good, for strengthening a country as a whole, and not shipping off the hard workers who want to be part of it.

In reality though, we can never prevent politicians from spewing populist nonsense. The nice thing about the older generations of crazies was that they at least tended to be honest about their views, and hung out in dingy bars away from our elevated viewpoint of society. They’re learning now, though, growing up and coming out of their shells, using technology (Holocaust deniers with a Facebook page!) and slogans to make their message more palatable to closet haters.

It is our job to be vigilant. Our job is making it as obvious as possible can that groups like the BNP cannot pretend to be reasonable. Our job is to stop ignorance from inflaming our senses and harming the vulnerable.

The curiosity of why Ireland swung so dramatically to the Yes side of the Lisbon referendum is growing. Was it fear? Was it hope for something fresh? Was it an overall sensation that the acid freaks were right, and we’re all one person after all, and Yes just sounded more positive? It is irrelevant now, and a more important question rears its head. It’s not why, but rather how we came to vote Yes.

How did we come to this decision this time? How did we arrive at the contrary, angry, rebellious shout we roared the last time? All of us have a particular strong opinion about something. Jobs, war and health are all hopes and fears that make us vote – but how do we arrive at these hopes fears and ultimately vital decisions?

Photo: Colin Scally

A man held a poster on O’Connell Street two weeks ago. It proclaimed, “Vote No to Lisbon because of amputated sons”. I asked why he had chosen a ridiculous statement, on what he saw as the militarisation of Europe. He said, “it rhymes with the line before it.” We both laughed; I wasn’t laughing with him.

The average person on the street doesn’t watch many Prime Time debates and, in contrast to the regular student, doesn’t have access to debates between high-level politicians and protesters on their doorstep. Those non-students, they don’t have time to actually find information. They have jobs, family life and other commitment to attend to. They have limited time to deliberate on issues; they’ve got a life to be getting on with – but nonetheless they must decide, one way or the other.

And so they walk out of their houses and see the posters – ‘Yes for peace’ versus ‘No for peace’ – and decide which one rhymed better, or was more eye-catching. It was a decision between a giraffe who thinks “they’ve got some neck”, and the four women who seem to find the act of replacing the word ‘sex’ in Sex and the City with ‘Yes’ and ‘in’ wickedly funny. (You probably had to be there.)

The main parties’ Yes campaign took flak from many sides for their banalities. Their posters just seemed to give a half-positive shrug – “Yes for jobs” – and some of the posters were ridiculous (“Give yourself a treaty”). They could have just put a smiley face, with “big boy high-five for Yes!” written below, and it would be of equal worth. Sadly, however, these banalities were also the best posters of the campaign, because they were the more honest. They didn’t try to reduce an important treaty, governing the daily lives of half a billion people, to three words. Instead, they just pointed out the generally positive effect they felt it would have.

People, of course, complain and compare these displays to the vibrancy of other posters. Maybe they could jazz them up like the others; maybe they could reduce it to some New World Order scare, or say that only ugly people vote No (‘Yes in the City’?), or pursue the popular ‘you’re an idiot if you disagree’ tactic. All are very good options if you feel like making referendum white noise.

We, as students and as the future of this country, have a position to fight against the degradation of debates to blurbs and soundbites, and to stop treating public debate as being a winner-take-all fight to the death where everyone is desperate to score points, however cheaply. But would we do it, or would we be too afraid? Would we refrain from standing out, because the first party to stand on principle will be probably see themselves as the party to stand alone outside Leinster House?

This doesn’t have to be the case. There doesn’t need to be the party to take the proverbial bullet. We could resist the banalities and the hyperbole. What about a future where the posters aren’t the debate, but merely the guide to where to find the debate: perhaps a simple ‘Vote Yes/No, visit X to find out why’.

The internet is an incredible tool to foster debate, give it the space to mature, and ultimately allow discussion actually be functional. If a critical mass of parties and groups used it to its full effect in election and referendum campaigns, the few who would retain the prostitution of reactionary images and slogans would – rightfully – seem like the crazy few to push out into the cold. We could stop using bullet points and use actual points. But of course, the internet is also home to several million of those crazies, and discussions do tend to veer off course rather alarmingly. L1sbon FTW.

It might appear slightly optimistic, but frankly a full, open and boring debate is far better than the alternative, where we make decisions on the issue of the day by whipping them out and measuring. At the very least, it would be a less arbitrary method of governance than “it rhymed with the other line.”