It may seem like a long time ago now, in these times of constant talk about Brian Cowen and Anglo Irish Bank, but it was in fact only barely two weeks ago when Fianna Fáil first flew a kite to discuss the potential abolition of the Seanad and the most recent blaze of ideology about political reform was sparked off.

Much of the talk at the time was focused around whether Irish democracy, or government oversight, would be generally improved by the abolition of what many see as an ineffective chamber of parliament, or whether political transparency was better fostered by tinkering with the Oireachtas in some way as to ensure greater honesty in our elected officials.

But already, just a mere fortnight later, talk about such political reform has been swiftly brushed off the table – and since it has been knocked off the front pages, the general discussion about political transparency and openness (qualities which are almost universally agreed to be good things, right?) has, unfortunately, overlooked a bigger and altogether more touch-and-go issue affecting the scrutiny that our public officials are subjected to.

On January 7, the publishers of the Irish Daily Star Sunday announced that they were ceasing all operations at the newspaper, with immediate effect. On January 13, one of the country’s better-known local newspapers, The Kingdom, announced that it would also be shutting down; its own last edition is published on the same day as this issue of The University Observer.

If asked to close your eyes and to recall any major feats of groundbreaking journalism, it’s almost guaranteed – and certainly forgiveable – that few people would cite an example for either paper. Perhaps an observer might suggest that the Watergate scandal, revealed through the probing of the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, was the last great example of journalism that revealed wholesale corruption. More recent examples, closer to home, could include Sam Smyth’s Irish Independent revelation that Michael Lowry had allowed Ben Dunne to pay for an extension to his house, valued at IR£395,000.

Others, again, may think of Tom Lyons of The Sunday Times, who was the first to reveal that Anglo Irish Bank had lent millions to ten major investors, so that they could in turn buy shares in the bank and keep its stock market value artificially high – hiding what would ultimately become the most expensive government mistake in Irish history. You could, perhaps, cite the Sunday Independent’s Shane Ross and Nick Webb who first uncovered the remarkable expenses claims of senior staff at FÁS, like Rody Molloy.

Or – and again, perhaps forgiveably – you may not have realised that each one of the above scandals was identified, and publicised, by journalists: average citizens from the media corps.

While neither the Star Sunday nor The Kingdom would rank in the potential chart of the papers that have blazed the trail in terms of major scoops, to merely write off their functions – and their closures, both amid unsustainable losses and rising debts – as being dead weight is an unfair and dangerous proposition, for a single reason: despite all of their losses and their reputations, journalists and newspapers perform a whistleblowing and overseeing function that is rarely practiced elsewhere in society.

The closure of local papers is, to a reasonable degree, foreseeable – more and more local newspapers are stopping their presses, falling victim to the slowdown in advertising spending, demographics (the population is slowly converging towards cities, where ‘local press’ is much less significant), and the obvious hindrance of the fact that younger generations have little love for the inherent formula (council meeting reports, local press releases, parish notices, local hurling reports) of their content.

But the closure of local newspapers is merely an outward symptom of an industry that, at large, has far greater ills. It’s not just local papers that are struggling to stay afloat amid falling revenues and the continued wane of advertising spending – national and international papers are equally, precariously, perched on the brink of the financial abyss.

The Irish Times, for example, made operating losses of €4.6m in 2009 – an €11m turnaround from the previous year. The Irish Independent’s parent company, Independent News & Media, recently sold off its main UK title for £1 (the same price as a single copy of that paper) after Denis O’Brien estimated the paper was losing as much as €80,000 every day. The Guardian, which has been to the forefront of the news in the last six months as a partner in WikiLeaks’ three major operations and is seen as one of the more tech-savvy and innovative publications, ran up an operating loss of £54m in 2009-10 – and has, famously, only ever been subsidised by AutoTrader and other more resilient publications owned by its publishers.

What all of this points to is a major malaise in news journalism: while there will always be an appetite for news, and a demand that our leaders and those who spend public money be held to account, it’s not necessarily safe to assume that those news organs will always be around. All of the examples of groundbreaking journalism I mentioned above are, gradually, going to fall victim to the reality that newspapers need their writers to produce content every day – and that fewer and fewer journalists will be blessed with the resources to follow the tenuous leads they come across that may eventually blow the lid on public corruption.

As I was finishing this piece, news was breaking that Ivor Callely had won his High Court appeal against the Seanad committee that recommended his suspension over his travel expenses. Ivor the Terrible’s mileage expenses were uncovered by the Sunday Independent’s John Drennan, and his mobile phone expenses were revealed by the Irish Mail on Sunday’s Luke Byrne. I’m not advocating that newspapers be taken into some kind of public ownership – to do so would fatally compromise a paper’s editorial independence – but we must guarantee, if we’re reforming public society, to either give the press the resources it needs to do its job, or be prepared to find out whether ignorance of public wrong-doing is, indeed, bliss.

Gavan Reilly is a former Deputy Editor (Volume XVI, 2009-2010) of The University Observer and a staff writer at TheJournal.ie.

Hello, Freshers (and everyone else). You’ve probably already heard that college is going to be amazing a few hundred times now, but it’s true. For the majority of you, for better or worse, alcohol is likely to play a significant part of your UCD experience.

This can be a damn expensive habit. You may well already be sick of various societies offering you the Best Fresher’s Night Out Of Your Life This Week™, but overdoing it can leave your head pretty sore, and your wallet pretty empty.

Sure, it’s all well and good going a bit wild after you get your latest grant instalment – what else would you be using the government’s money for? Bailing out some bank or other? – but realistically at some point you’re going to find yourself a little short on cash and you’ll have to skimp on a couple of meals. Which is, most distinctly, un-fun.

This is why it’s worth investigating the alternatives to your traditional beers. And the alternatives, surprisingly enough, aren’t all that diabolical.

It might not have crossed your mind, but it’s worth considering investing in a home-brewing kit. There are a few reasons why: it’s cheap, not at all complicated, a bit fun, and (best of all) because it’s all naturally manufactured, you don’t get hangovers.

Let me repeat. You don’t. Get. Hangovers.

The price of home-brewing kits might not make the first batch of drinks a whole lot cheaper than your average stack of pints – this writer’s preferred kit of choice, the quite popular and nicely-packaged iBrew, costs about €80 for the first forty pints, working out at about €4 per pint. That said, once you own the kit – as in, the actual hardware – it’s cheap enough to buy the ingredients for the drinks again afterwards, so at the very least it’s an experiment that’ll pay for itself.

Of course, there will always be a few things to be wary of when you’re trying to knock together your own beer: there’s every chance, if you don’t pay careful attention, that you’ll end up concocting massive vats of barely-potable putrid goo that you’d rather use to clean a farmer’s yard than put inside your not-quite-yet-ravaged-by-too-many-Pot-Noodles body. And there is, also, the outside shot that your beer simply won’t taste very nice.

Both of these problems can be easily taken care of, however, if you just pay close attention to the instructions. To be complementary (and totally fair) to iBrew, the procedure is almost entirely foolproof as long as you are consistent with what you’re being asked to do.

Firstly, the iBrew kit doesn’t require you to dedicate your bathtub or kitchen sink to your project (apologies to those of you seeking the genuine Homer Simpson experience). Rather, the container that the whole package comes in is the vat, which you’ll ultimately be allowing your brew to stew and ferment in. And, thankfully, that’s made an entirely safe procedure by iBrew’s lovely (and probably legally required) decision to include some steriliser in the kit, so that what could easily turn grubby is left all spick, span and fit to brew some goo.

And goo is exactly what your beer (or ale, or indeed stout, depending on which kit you opt for) will start out as.

The whole procedure works as follows: once you have your tub cleaned out and sterilised, you’ll dilute the concentrated… well, beer goo, add some yeast – also supplied – and leave to stew for a fortnight. Then you just put the slop (sorry to use such unglamorous terminology, but it really is little more than a watery, aromatic slop by this point) into two 10-pint bottles, leave in the fridge to chill while it finishes fermenting, and a week later your brew is ready to tap.

They say that vegetables taste better if you’ve grown them in your own patch rather than buying them in a regular old supermarket because they come infused with the satisfaction of having cultivated them by your own hand. There’s a similar feeling when you first taste your own beer: it isn’t, truth be told, going to be as clear or as naturally drinkable as your average bottled beer. But a few gulps in there is a nice flavour: not overwhelming, but not in the least bit stomach-turning either. Pure beery goodness, made by your very own hands.

And the best part? Well, if you’ve ever tried German beers brewed under the country’s ancient purity laws, decreeing that only four natural ingredients (barley, hops, yeast and water) can be used in brewing, you’ll know that after a night on them, you’ll feel particularly fresh.

Aside from the dehydration element, a hangover originates from the agents used to extend the shelf-life of your drink. A night on your own brew, though, and you’ll be right as rain the following morning – ready to spend the extra cash you’ve saved yourself by making your own.

iBrew kits can be ordered online from www.iBrew.co.uk.

Gavan Reilly, Killian Woods, Paul Fennessy, Richard Chambers and editor-in-waiting Bridget Fitzsimons discuss the climax of the Premier League season and José Mourinho’s inevitable move to Madrid; we preview Leinster’s upcoming glorious weekend – but tougher times on the horizon; we name our Premier League teams of the year and choose our World Cup tips; and Killian offers his Disgusting Team of the Season.

The Observer Sports Show is produced and presented by Gavan Reilly.

Click here to listen to the show, or click here to subscribe to the UO Sports Podcast in iTunes. Leave your comments in the field below, or send them to our Twitter!

The traditional city centre route into the Belfield campus is to be amalgamated into Dublin Bus’s flagship 46a southside service as part of its ongoing Network Direct project, intending at rationalising the citywide bus service.

The cut has been revealed as part of Phase One of the project, encompassing massive bus reforms in the Blanchardstown, Lucan and Stillorgan suburbs. The changes are projected to take effect in mid-July.

The 39a route, which currently ends at Hawkins St in the city centre, will be extended and will incorporate the 10′s route, travelling along Baggot St Upper and Waterloo Road before adjoining the dual carriageway before Donnybrook and terminating at the current 10 terminus beside the Engineering Car Park.

Northbound, the 46a route will extend into the Phoenix Park to incorporate the route currently taken by the 10, terminating at the North Circular Road.

In other reforms to the southside area, the 145 route – which currently terminates at Mountjoy Square – will now extend to Heuston Station, offering a direct bus between campus and the country’s largest train station for the first time. The 47, meanwhile, will continue beyond the Donnybrook Garage on its northbound route and will terminate at Merrion Square, to accommodate substantial curtailment of the 63 and 84 routes which now terminate at Kilternan and Cherrywood respectively.

To allow for the rationalisation of routes, the reforms plan to guarantee a regular service on key routes at all times of the day. Dublin Bus’s reforms project that the 46a will run every eight minutes at all times of the day, at both peak and off-peak times.

The newly reformed 145 route between Kilmacanogue and Heuston Station will run every ten minutes.

Dublin Bus area manager Gareth Quinn has assured UCD students that the campus will “still be well served with a high frequency service to town”.

A full PDF of the reformed routes can be downloaded here.

Gavan Reilly, Killian Woods and Paul Fennessy discuss FA Cup developments, Tottenham’s crazy week and the ongoing race for fourth, and the Heineken Cup quarter-finals – while Bridget Fitzsimons and Catriona Laverty share their anticipation of a Fantasy Girls day out.

The Observer Sports Show is produced and presented by Gavan Reilly.

Click here to listen to the show, or click here to subscribe to the UO Sports Podcast in iTunes. Leave your comments in the field below, or send them to our Twitter!

Rest assured that this ultimate edition of WebWatch won’t be nearly as distracting as… oh, I don’t know, a list of interesting facts about everything Nintendo have done, ever (http://short.ie/uo121). Did you know, for example, that Nintendo began life in 1889 as a playing card company, and had been around for 89 years before they tried to make a video game? Or that ‘Nintendo’ means ‘Leave luck to Heaven’ in Japanese? …Oh, you did? Well, then, let’s move on.

Here’s something that might interest you for all of five seconds – in a very literal sense. Perfectly tailored to keep you amused for quick nuggets of time, 5 Second Films (http://short.ie/uo122) offers a collection of (shock!) five-second films – almost all of which can induce socially suicidal guffaws as you take a quick study break from the library. Just keep hitting that ‘random’ button – and keep laughing, really, really, really loud – until you feel like studying again, or until Librocop kicks you out.

If that’s not really your thing and it’s the summer wanderlust that’s getting you down, the interwebs can help you there too – bringing you around the world in a flash. And we’re not just talking about virtual trips on Google Earth here – simply trot along to

http://short.ie/uo123 and enjoy an interactive 360’ tour of Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower. There’s also a very handy collection at 360cities (http://short.ie/uo124) to amuse you until you can make your way elsewhere!

Which leaves just enough time for a funny video about 8-bit video game characters taking over the world (http://short.ie/uo125), a handy guide to identifying That Guy from That Film (http://short.ie/uo126), and – to round off your break – a website that knows exactly who you’re thinking of (http://short.ie/uo127).

Thanks for reading WebWatch throughout the year – and make damn sure you enjoy your summer.

Ryan’s year has indeed been a bumpy one. Though the second semester brought better fortunes for him – assisted by the shift of criticism from himself to his colleague, Education VP Donnacha Ó Súilleabháin – the first term brought more criticism than any individual sabbatical officer had been subjected to for years. Ryan acknowledges that his year began bumpily, and debits this to his self-professed different approach to campaigning.

Instead of the traditional week-long campaigns, Ryan “initially wanted to have continuous campaigns: I tried to figure out how to do it. It just didn’t work for me. I think the first few campaigns suffered as a result… I had so much planned – so many ideas and things I wanted to do. I was being over-eager and over-ambitious. I said I’d go hell for leather at this. I tried it all and it didn’t work.”

Unsurprisingly, Ryan cites the backlash against him a result as the low point of his year – but curiously, also sees the criticism as the high point too. “It’s when you’re at your lowest that you find out who your friends are. When everyone starts rallying around you and tell you, ‘no, come on, you can do this, we believe in you’ it’s both a high and low point.”

It is unfortunately telling that Ryan doesn’t cite any particular campaigning victory as the climax of his year; major achievements like recruiting a record number of class reps or the successful resistance to third-level fees have, realistically, had little to do with his input, being largely built on the work of SU President Gary Redmond. The flipside of this, though, is that Ryan cannot take much blame for some of the year’s failures, such as the introduction of charges in the Student Health Service – again, because the dominant style of Redmond’s hands-on leadership has sidelined him.

Once he reverted to the weekly campaign model Ryan’s year was solid, but unremarkable. He may have gotten unlucky with the reception to his plan for year-long campaigns rather than concentrated weekly ones, but the fact that the surviving campaign weeks had only a limited impact means that overall verdict of Ryan’s year must be that the Engineering student – in both his approach to the job and his decision to seek it in the first place – bit off more than he could chew.

Thankfully for his own sake, Ryan sees his tenure as a positive experience. “It brought me to the reality that life is a lot harsher than you think it is, but I’ve learnt a lot and I’ve matured a bit. I’ve had great craic. If I was in the same position I’d definitely run again. Will I run again? No.”

Nobody ever likes being woken up by a phone call – but when you’re picking the people who you’d least like to hear you sounding groggy and underslept, influential businesspeople are probably somewhere at the top of the list. Therefore, it’s a strange and bloody frightening feeling being woken up on the stroke of 9am by a phone call from someone from Dragons’ Den.

Thankfully, when Gavin Duffy calls – literally at the same second the clock radio starts to blare the 9am news – he’s merely arranging the details for an interview later that day, and isn’t expecting me to be able to interview him from bed, without as much as pen to take notes. As it transpires, when I get to chat to him again later that day (after, I hasten to add, a lot of coffee), I begin to get the sense that admitting my utter unprofessionalism might not have been as suicidal as I’d feared – because despite the preconceptions one might have about a mega-successful business and media magnate like Duffy, the Drogheda man is an extremely approachable and affable person.

Duffy is familiar to most of us as one of the five tough-talking venture capitalists from RTÉ One’s Thursday night show Dragons’ Den, but what most people our age might not cop is that Duffy began life – and still holds a burning passion – as a breakfast DJ on a local radio station in Dundalk. More true to the usual entrepreneurial stereotype is the fact that Duffy got into the world of business quite early, taking the DJing job at the tender age of 17.

“I remember finishing a breakfast show one morning in the summer of 1977 and driving back up to Drogheda, and helping in the family pub and going down to change a keg in the basement,” Duffy reminisces. “We had a radio on down there, and I heard the radio who had just taken over from me – and here I was listening from over 20 miles away in the basement. That just made me go, ‘Wow, this is some medium. How does it actually work?’” It was this curiosity – coupled with a genuine passion for journalism and community radio (“I would prefer to be involved with a Newstalk rather than a Spin in today’s context”, he suggests) – that led him to campaign for a licensed local radio station for the northeast, and ultimately to set up Ireland’s first commercial local station, LMFM.

“I don’t know whether that was a good career move or not,” Duffy surprisingly concedes, though, “because I really liked talking to a wall – I loved radio and the intimacy of the medium and all that… In the mid 80s I started working on Morning Ireland and to my great surprise, I think it was in 1987, RTÉ asked me to present their first television business programme called Marketplace… They’d been very good to me, but I still had this hankering that if I was to get real legal local radio, I had this ambition about doing it. Critically the station [LMFM] was, as local radios go, quite successful and began to do very well. It was well received and critically acclaimed.” So well, in fact, that UTV took the station off his hands in 2004 for €11m.

Nowadays the day job for Duffy is his Dorland media consultancy firm – again, a business that proved more lucrative than he had expected. “One of the things that worked out well for me was that we went around to a lot of the larger companies in Ireland from about 1999 onward, saying to them, ‘You’ve got a big brand, consider your reputation and risk management… If something ever untoward happens, you have our expertise 24/7’,” he reveals. “It was a type of insurance nearly that the large corporates were taking out with us. We probably oversold it – because since 2008 all of our clients have all, simultaneously, had huge problems because of the economic meltdown… It has paid me very handsomely and continues to over the years. I suppose I should be very lucky to say I’m in a recession-proof business, if we look at the media end of it.”

It was also through his work with Dorland that he became first involved in the seed investments that have seen him gain more prominence in the intervening years – as often, he would take a more hands-on management role in companies seeking his advice on media relations. “One of the things that started to happen from the dotcom boom is that I would, once or twice a week, have these dotcom hopefuls saying, ‘Will you help us make our presentation because we’re going to a bank for finance.’ After a while I said, ‘I think you need more than that,’ and I would get involved with some of them. Instead of charging a fee, I would take a very small slice – anything from 2.5 to 5 per cent.

“That’s why when RTE and Shinawil [the producers of the Irish Dragons’ Den] started asking around Enterprise Ireland as to who might be a Dragon or not, my name was the one name that came up most frequently.”

It’s through his work in the Den that he’s become most widely known: as perhaps the least outwardly vocal of the Dragons, Gavin’s selective nuggets of wisdom tend to pack bigger punches than those of his colleagues. It’s also, he reveals, offered some useful get-out clauses at awkward social situations. “There’s a fantastic bonus for someone doing Dragons’ Den – for someone like me who’s been dragged up in pubs… we were trained from an early age to be nice to people, and it sounds awful but I’ve been nice to people all my life.

“Now, as a result of Dragons’ Den, I have a licence to be rude, and that becomes very effective! It happens to all of us. When I’m stuck at a Chamber of Commerce thing or a drinks party – we all get stuck in the corner with an incredible bore – what I do now is say, ‘Excuse me, I’m not interested, I’m out,’ and I just walk away. And I can hear the bore turning to their next victim, laughing, ‘That Gavin Duffy’s a great guy! Did you hear what he just said?’ It’s fantastic! It was worth doing the programme for that alone.”

Not, of course, that this is the sole benefit – aside from being given a chance to make significant money, the Dragons’ Den experience also seems to be great fun. “My best friend in the Den is undoubtedly Sean Gallagher – it’s not just that we share a dressing room … the other three think they’re D4 sophisticates, and it rubs me up the wrong way sometimes! We’re the two culchies and they’re the city kids. Niall [O’Farrell] is incredibly funny in the Den,” he adds. “Niall is just great fun, he’s just great company! He’s always got a yarn, always got a story. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter.”

I quickly ask Duffy what he thinks might get Ireland’s economy moving again, and – perhaps unsurprisingly – a media-based explanation is not far away. Ireland’s political system, he believes, needs total reform. “The Church in Ireland have lost all credibility, the judiciary is just moving too slow. The fourth estate, the media, has taken over, and I don’t think that’s a good thing. It’s not that we have poor leaders, it’s just that we have people who don’t want to be led by their strategies. I’d argue for a national government, and the media doesn’t call for that because it’d spoil their fun… We should have five years of national government with the three main parties, rotating Taoiseach every twenty months.”

Duffy’s time at present, however, is being occupied by slightly more humanitarian matters, as a judge for the Vodafone Foundation’s ‘World of Difference’ programme. An unusually charitable programme, the competition offers four young people the chance to work for any charity they want – while Vodafone pay them a wage of €40,000 for the year. Crucially, though, entrants have to compile a pitch for what charity they’d like to work for, and how their work would benefit their causes and their communities.

“For a large corporation to be spending money in this sort of way is something I’m impressed with,” Duffy reveals. “It really does make a difference – instead of giving the money to an organisation, they’re saying, ‘Listen, if you have something that you really think will make a difference and if we have to pay the person would deliver that, what difference would it make?’”

And given his experience in seeing pitches in the Den, what makes a good pitch? “From a judging point of view we’re looking for dynamic people who are driven and passionate about what they want to do in the community. The standard of people who come in – and how difficult it is to select the top four – makes it a very challenging job when you’re sitting there as a judge. Somebody coming in with an idea that really is scalable, that could make a big difference – that’s what always impresses me and that’s what I would give the nod to.

“There’s no pressure whatsoever on us to pick one type of project over another one,” the Dragon concludes. “There’s no corporate considerations of things like that. I like the independence of this, the integrity of it. That impresses me.”

The Vodafone Foundation’s ‘World of Difference’ programme offers four people the chance to work for a charity of their choice, with Vodafone footing the bill. More details of the programme can be found at http://www.vodafone.ie/worldofdifference or at the programme’s Facebook page.

It might seem strange but in 1933 a conference of American states, held in Uruguay, resulted in the Montevideo Convention, which broadly outlines the criteria you need to meet if you want to become an independent nation. Chief amongst these is something known as the ‘declarative theory of statehood’ – the idea that “the political existence of the state is independent of recognition by the other states.” So, basically, you don’t need to be accepted by your international neighbours to still be a country (o hai, Israel).

This basically means that there’s almost nothing stopping anyone with a clearly-defined piece of land to announce to the world that they’re defecting from their country and starting up a new one. And hey – we’ve got an office, right?

The convention lists a few significant requirements a country should fulfil. Along with a defined territory you need a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other countries. otwo thought long and hard about these: The University Observer has a permanent (-ish) population – we work long enough hours in this place, and at production weekends we don’t leave; we do have a government of sorts, because there’s an editorial chain of command and ultimately the Editor has the final say in what the Observer or otwo does; and as for capacity to enter into relations… well if the Editor, on behalf of the Observer, can fill out a legal form and send that form to any state body, isn’t that a relationship with the state?

So – on Tuesday 6^th April, a date that will forever live in international history – we typed up a list of our section editors and replaced their titles with legal-sounding ones (‘Editor’ becomes ‘President’, ‘otwo Editor’ becomes ‘Minister for Arts & Culture’ and so on). We taped this to the office door alongside a hastily drafted declaration of independence, informing the world of the Republic of Observia that existed behind it. And lo, Observia was born. We had our government, our territory, our population and our capacity… didn’t we?

It was the last bit that was a grey area, so we decided that it’d be only fair – given the rich Observian culture of international harmony and diplomacy (!) – to let the powers of the world know of our presence. We set up a website (observia.org – we tried to get a .ob address but to no avail) and sent an email from it to the President of Ireland, the Taoiseach and the Minister for Defence. We copied in, for the sake of posterity, the Secretary-General and Security Council of the United Nations. Oh, and we emailed the manager of the Student Centre too – only fair, considering he was now responsible for the electricity supply of an entire country.

While we awaited the response of the international community to our presence, we convened the cabinet and enacted the first constitution of Observia – adopting the standard international approach of proscribing as little as possible, so as not to compromise our ability to legislate for whatever matters we needed. I mean, there’s no point giving a constitutional guarantee of neutrality if there’s a risk that the Students’ Union could declare war, is there?

We also took the chance to make some decisions about Observian culture and pastimes. The national colours (rigidly enforced by the President, based on her Fantasy Premier League team’s strip) are pink and orange; the national animal – in honour of our anonymous sports writer – is the Badger; the national anthem is a mutated form of Rihanna’s ‘Disturbia’; the mass oversupply of daffodils last week earned it the status of national flower. For a currency, we looked to the news section… Have you ever noticed that the headlines of Observer news stories sometimes have a mysterious ☐ in them? Our printing presses in Britain apparently can’t handle the € symbol in headlines – so, being of Observian culture, we declare the Box the official currency (naturally, it’s pegged to the Euro – one Observian Box is worth one euro. We should have made it more).

But still, something felt like a sham. We had a constitution and government but we didn’t really feel like we were getting anywhere. The UN, the Taoiseach and the President had all failed to respond; the manager of the Student Centre crossed the border the next day and never even mentioned it. But then, magically, an email appeared in the Observian inbox.

“I would like to acknowledge your email and inform you that I have forwarded it to Minister Killeens office for attention,” it read curtly, signed by a rep from the Press & Information Office at the Department of Defence. The Irish Government had been in touch – and, crucially, they hadn’t shot us down.

We scarpered back to the Montevideo Convention – and found Article 7: “The recognition of a state may be express or tacit. The latter results from any act which implies the intention of recognizing the new state.” The Department had corresponded with the Observian government, and hadn’t immediately rejected our claim to independence – thereby tacitly acknowledging the Republic of Observia, the world’s youngest republic.

The Observian website is observia.org. If you’d like to be President of Observia, see page 14 of the main section.

It’s a bumper show this week with six in the studio, as Killian Woods, Richard Chambers and Paul Fennessy join Gavan Reilly to talk about UCD’s two successive 0-0 draws in the Airtricity League and the fortunes of the American Football Club – as well as Manchester United’s horror week in the Premier League and Champions Leagues, Tiger Woods’ return at the US Masters and the weekend’s Heineken Cup action and the Aintree Grand National. Bridget Fitzsimons and Catriona Laverty also drop by to keep us updated on their fortunes in the topsy-turvy world of Fantasy Premier League. All this plus Fenno’s Preddos, Killian’s Disgusting Team of the Week and more!

The Observer Sports Show is produced and presented by Gavan Reilly.

Click here to listen to the show, or click here to subscribe to the UO Sports Podcast in iTunes. Leave your comments in the field below, or send them to our Twitter!