After a run of disappointing results, Ireland’s footballers last night scored a memorable victory, beating Portugal 2-0 in a World Cup Qualifying match. I attribute the result to the new Head Coach, pictured below…
And here is a photo of Ireland’s two-goal hero, Troy Parrot, in action.
Yesterday I watched the last round of matches in this years Six Nations rugby Championship so, as I did last year, I thought I would do a quick summary of the games and the competition as a whole.
In the first game yesterday, thanks largely to their own errors, Ireland struggled to beat a spirited Italian side in Rome 17-22. That put them briefly top of the table, but with fewer bonus points and a worse points difference than either England or France so needed both those teams to lose in order to win the Championship. Hope of that happening vanished quickly when England scored a try about 2 minutes into their game against Wales in Cardiff, quickly followed by another. England thereafter ran riot and won 68-14 taking them to the top. England did play well, but Wales were very poor. To be honest, I found the game a bit painful to watch. If it had been boxing the referee would have stopped the fight. Memories of the great Welsh teams of the past are very distant nowadays. It’s hard to see where they go from here, with their second successive Wooden Spoon.
Then it was time for the finale, France versus Scotland. I did think that France would win easily but Scotland gave it a good go, and were unlucky not to take a lead into half-time. They wilted in the second half, however, and France duly picked up a bonus point win and the Championship. They are worthy winners, and all credit to them.
(The atmosphere at the Stade de France last night was so raucous that I had difficulty hearing the commentators over the crowd noise. I find commentators rarely add much to the experience, so this isn’t a complaint. In fact, I think it would be good if TV broadcasts allowed the viewer to turn off the commentary but keep the sounds from the stadium.)
The only game France lost was against England on a rainy day at Twickenham on 8th February, a game I watched. France should really have won that game but made a ludicrous number of mistakes and lost by a single point at the death. But for that Les Bleus would have had a Grand Slam. Fair play to England for hanging on and showing great resilience. After an unconvincing start as the competition went on they got better and better, though they needed a slice of luck to beat Scotland 16-15 as Finn Russell missed a conversion that would have won the game.
Up until last week the only team able to do a Grand Slam was Ireland, but they were outplayed in Dublin by France who won 42-27. Sports journalists have a habit of seeing everything as either a triumph or a disaster, and the Irish media portrayed that as the latter. The way I see it is that Ireland’s rugby team reached a high-water mark with their Grand Slam two years ago since when a number of important players have retired. It’s been a time for reconstruction and rebuilding. This is the way of things. I remember Ireland beating France comfortably last season, but France came back strongly this year. At least Ireland collected another Triple Crown, beating England, Wales and Scotland.
After last night’s game I was reflecting on why I enjoy the Six Nations so much. I think it’s mainly because there are relatively few games so each one takes on a significance, either in the context of the Championship or because it represents a longstanding rivalry (e.g. the Calcutta Cup). The point is that there is real jeopardy attached to many of the games. Contrast this with the United Rugby Championship. The games featuring the Irish teams in this competition (Leinster, Munster, Connacht and Ulster) are broadcast free-to-air on television here and I watch quite a few of them. There are 16 teams in this competition, divided into four pools of four: each side plays the 15 others once, and an additional game against the other three in their pool, meaning 18 games per team. After 18 rounds, all that happens is that the bottom eight in the league table are eliminated and the top eight go into the knockout stage. Eighteen games is a long slog when all it does is eliminate half the teams, and it means that there’s much less at stake in individual matches. Still, now the Six Nations is over I’ll be watching the URC for the rest of the season, starting next weekend.
The big news in Irish physics this week was the announcement that Ireland’s application to join the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) has been accepted in principle, and the country is expected to become an associate member in 2026. The formal process to join began in late 2023, as described here. Maynooth University responded to the news in positive fashion here, including the statement that
This important decision represents a transformative step for Irish science, research, and innovation, unlocking unparalleled opportunities for students, researchers, and industry.
I think this is a very good move for Irish physics, and indeed for Ireland generally. I will, however, repeat a worry that I have expressed previously. There is an important point about CERN membership, however, which I hope is not sidelined. The case for joining CERN made at political levels is largely about the return in terms of the potential in contracts to technology companies based in Ireland from instrumentation and other infrastructure investments. This was also the case for Ireland’s membership of the European Southern Observatory, which Ireland joined almost 7 years ago. The same thing is true for involvement in the European Space Agency, which Ireland joined in 1975. These benefits are of course real and valuable and it is entirely right that arguments should involve them.
Looking at CERN membership from a purely scientific point of view, however, the return to Ireland will be negligible unless there is a funding to support scientific exploitation of the facility. That would include funding for academic staff time, and for postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers to build up an active community as well as, e.g., computing facilities. This need not be expensive even relative to the modest cost of associate membership (approximately €1.9M). I would estimate a figure of around half that would be needed to support CERN-based science.
The problem is that research funding for fundamental science (such as particle physics) in Ireland has been so limited as to be virtually non-existent by a matter of policy at Science Foundation Ireland, which basically only funded applied research. Even if it were decided to target funding for CERN exploitation, unless there is extra funding that would just lead to the jam being spread even more thinly elsewhere.
As I have mentioned before, Ireland’s membership of ESO provides a cautionary tale. The Irish astronomical community was very happy about the decision to join ESO, but that decision was not accompanied by significant funding to exploit the telescopes. Few astronomers have therefore been able to benefit from ESO membership. While there are other benefits of course, the return to science has been extremely limited. The phrase “to spoil a ship for a ha’porth of tar” springs to mind.
Although Ireland joined ESA almost fifty years ago, the same issue applies there. ESA member countries pay into a mandatory science programme which includes, for example, Euclid. However, did not put any resources on the table to allow full participation in the Euclid Consortium. There is Irish involvement in other ESA projects (such as JWST) but this is somewhat piecemeal. There is no funding programme in Ireland dedicated to the scientific exploitation of ESA projects.
Under current arrangements the best bet in Ireland for funding for ESA, ESO or CERN exploitation is via the European Research Council, but to get a grant from that one has to compete with much better developed communities in those areas.
The recent merger of Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council to form a single entity called Research Ireland perhaps provides an opportunity to correct this shortfall. If I had any say in the new structure I would set up a pot of money specifically for the purposes I’ve described above. Funding applications would have to be competitive, of course, and I would argue for a panel with significant international representation to make the decisions. But for this to work the overall level of public sector research funding will have to increase dramatically from its current level, well below the OECD average. Ireland is currently running a huge Government surplus which is projected to continue growing until at least 2026. Only a small fraction of that surplus would be needed to build viable research communities not only in fundamental science but also across a much wider range of disciplines. Failure to invest now would be a wasted opportunity. There is currently no evidence of the required uplift in research spending despite the better-than-healthy state of Government finances.
The dust is now settling on the 2024 General Election which took place on Friday. Counting didn’t start anywhere until the following morning, so in the absence of any actual results the Saturday newspapers were full of articles by Phil Space, most of them based on an exit poll that turned out not to be very accurate. It soon become clear what was going to happen. The Single Transferable Vote system does mean that counting takes a while – one constituency (Cavan-Monaghan) is yet to declare as I write this – but it is much fairer than the system used in the UK and the process is fascinating to follow. Since moving to Ireland 7 years ago, I think my two favourite spectator sports are hurling and election counts, though the former happens at a considerably faster pace than the latter!
I’ll begin with my own constituency, Kildare North, which returned 5 TDs. The chosen five are James Lawless (FF), Réada Cronin (SF), Aidan Farrelly (SD), Naoise Ó Cearúil (FF) and Joe Neville (FG). The big surprise was that Fine Gael grandee Bernard Durkan lost his seat to a younger colleague, the strategy of fielding three candidates backfired on him. At one stage it even looked like all three might be eliminated, which would have been very amusing, but it was not to be.
A surprise at least to me, though a lesser one than the defeat of Bernard Durkan, is that Aidan Farrelly won for the Social Democrats. Catherine Murphy (SD) was top of the poll last time but has now retired. There was no guarantee that Aidan Farrrelly would hold onto Catherine Murphy’s personal following, especially since a former Social Democrat turned Independent stood against him. In the end, however, Farrelly was elected quite comfortably, although with a smaller share of the vote than Catherine Murphy had achieved.
Of the two FF candidates elected, James Lawless and Naoise Ó Cearúil, the fomer is more familiar; the latter was elected to the County Council this summer and will be a new arrival in the Dáil. The Kildare North constituency has one extra TD this time because of population growth, and it went to FF who ended up with the most TDs nationally.
The successful Sinn Féin candidate was the incumbent Réada Cronin.
The wooden spoon for Kildare North went to Sean Gill of the Centre Party of Ireland, an ironic name for what is far-right splinter group of FG previously known as Renua. He received a majestic 67 votes and was eliminated on the first round. In fact, far-right candidates did very poorly not only in Kildare North but nationally. That’s a relief.
One of the fascinating things about the coverage of the election has been to see how people use their preferences. Voting is a much more nuanced thing here that it has ever been allowed to be in the UK by the electoral system there. Some of the transfers are very hard to fathom. I noticed in Kildare North, for example, that some voters put the left-wing People Before Profit first then Fine Gael second, skipping over the whole spectrum in between. I don’t understand that choice, but then I don’t have to. Folk are perfectly entitled to use their vote whichever way they wish. That’s how it works. It’s called democracy.
The big three parties look set to finish on FF 48, SF 39 and FG 38. This means that FG+FF add up to 86, which is two short of a majority. The overall outcome of the election will therefore be the Same Old Same Old government, a coalition of the two right wings of the Property Party, possibly with a smaller party to make up the numbers and to be contemptuously discarded at the next election. That fate befell the Green Party, part of the outgoing coalition, which lost 11 of its 12 TDs this time round. Labour and the Social Democrats are both on 11 TDs. Will one of them walk into the trap, or will some Independents be enough?
Incidentally, the only prediction I made in my earlier post about this election, turned out to be incorrect. I was confident that there would be more Independent TDs than last time. In fact there are fewer (16 versus 20). Though the predominantly rural, right-wing Independent Ireland won 4 seats, it is a party so its TDs are not Independent, if you see what I mean.
Sinn Féin once again failed to break the deadlock of FFG government. They have done reasonably well in terms of seats, but their share of the vote fell by about 5% since the 2020 Election but in between then and now had risen to over 30%. only to fall back recently. I suspect the party leaders will be privately relieved at where they ended up, given that a few weeks ago things looked likely to be much worse for them.
Whatever the complexion of the final coalition, it seems clear to me that we’re in for five more years of housing crisis, crumbling infrastructure, under-investment in education and public services. I don’t know what it will take for a change of government to take place. Perhaps the next (inevitable) financial crash? Or perhaps not even that. Ireland is very set in its ways, politically speaking.
It has been remarked that this election has bucked two global trends. One is the rise of the far-right, whose failure is something I am very happy about. The other is anti-incumbent feeling. I’m much more ambivalent about that because in my opinion change is long overdue. Apparently the electorate were unconvinced that change of government would really make things better here.
P.S. The turnout – just under 60% – was the lowest it has been in a General Election in Ireland since 1923. I find it saddening that 40% of those eligible did not even bother to vote.
The arrival of my polling card yesterday indicates that the general election in Ireland on Friday 29th November is approaching rapidly, so I thought I’d give a rundown of the 16 candidates who will appear on the ballot paper for my constituency, Kildare North.
Kildare North will return 5 TDs (Teachta Dála, or Deputies), one more than last time because of the population growth in the area. The current TDs are Réada Cronin (SF; Sinn Féin), Bernard Durkan (FG; Fine Gael), James Lawless (FF; Fianna Fáil) and Catherine Murphy (SD; Social Democrats). The latter is retiring so will not be standing at this election. The current government is a coalition of FG, FF and Green Party TDs.
The Single Transferable Vote system is used, meaning that voters have a single ballot paper on which they rank the candidates in order of preference. The candidate with the lowest number of first-preference votes is eliminated and their second preference votes redistributed. Candidates are thus progressively eliminated until the requisite number of TDs is selected.
There are three FG candidates: Bernard Durkan, Joe Neville and Evie Sammon). They are based in Maynooth, Leixlip and Celbridge respectively so are presumably hoping that local voting will work out in their favour. The idea presumably is that Bernard Durkan would be first choice in Maynooth, etc. However, I’ve already had canvassers arguing that I should put Joe Neville first. I won’t be voting for any of the candidates anyway, but I would be very amused if their decision to put three candidates forward backfired. Incidentally, Bernard Durkan is 79 and has been a TD since 1982. The leaflet I got from him promised “New Energy” for Kildare North. Yeah, right…
There are two FF candidates, James Lawless and Naoise Ó Cearúil; the latter was elected to the County Council this summer. I find FF indistinguishable from FG. Together or separately these two parties have governed the Republic since its creation and a change is long overdue.
The two Sinn Féin candidates are the incumbent Réada Cronin and Caroline Hogan. I haven’t seen any posters for Réada Cronin up in Maynooth, so I assume the campaign team is saving their resources for elsewhere. Maynooth is not traditionally an SF stronghold.
With Catherine Murphy not standing, the Social Democrats ran a process to select a replacement candidate, which was won by Aidan Farrelly (who actually works at Maynooth University) who is the official SD candidate. That doesn’t end the story, however. Former SD member Bill Clear is standing as an Independent because he didn’t get selected. Adding to the fact that Catherine Murphy had a considerable personal following, this looks like a bit of a mess for the Social Democrats whose vote will probaboly be reduced and split. It may be in order to capitalize on this that SF added a candidate; they only fielded one last time round.
Now we’re into the (probable) also-rans. Angela Feeney is standing for Labour. She is an active member of the Council, representing Maynooth, but it’s not clear whether she has reach over the rest of the constituency. Vincent Martin represents the Greens who haven’t previously been strong here. The Green Party in Ireland is nowhere near as left-wing as corresponding parties in the UK and elsewere. It often seems like the bicycle division of Fine Gael. Leah Whelan is standing for People Before Profit – Solidarity, the only really left-wing party standing in Kildare North.
Then we have we have a number of generally disagreeable (to me) fringe party candidates: Una O’Connor is standing for Aontú, a reactionary splinter group of people previously in Sinn Féin and Sean Gill for the Centre Party of Ireland, an ironic name for what is far-right splinter group of FG previously known as Renua. Gerry Waters is standing from the Irish Freedom Party. He was struck off the medical register for refusing to administer vaccines and has unsupportable far-right opinions on other issues. Last and by all means least is Avril Corcoran who is candidate for The Irish People, a far-right nationalist party which is part of the National Alliance of like-minded bigots.
It’s probably obvious which 11 candidates I’m not going to be voting for, but I’ll leave you to guess in what order I will rank the other 5!
P.S. LinkedIn didn’t like this post:
On Friday 8th November Taoiseach Simon Harris (left) inspired Ireland’s rugby team to a very disappointing home defeat by New Zealand. Earlier on that day he had visited the President to request a dissolution of the 33rd Dáil and to call a General Election on November 29th 2024.
The Saturday newspapers were full of nonsense about how the “General Election campaign starts now” when in fact I’ve had canvassers knocking at my door for at least a fortnight already. Two of them were for Fine GaeI – far scarier than trick-or-treat! I made it abundantly clear that I wouldn’t be voting for their party and hoped that they wouldn’t bother me again.
Fine Gael’s opening gambit was to announce that if elected they would reduce VAT on the hospitality sector to 11%. There was a budget just a few weeks ago in which they could have announced such a reduction had they really wanted it to happen. If re-elected no doubt they will find an excuse for not doing it. If you believe what they say I have a 340k bike shed to sell you.
Talking about the budget, Ireland’s government is in a very different position from the UK, with a large fiscal surplus thanks to buoyant tax receipts. This year presented a great opportunity to use that cash for much-needed investment in public housing, transport, education, the health service, etc. Instead the Government decided to tinker here and there with allowances and bung some cash to middle-income families in order to buy votes. Simon Harris has the air of a man who would sell his Grandmother if he could buy votes with the proceeds. The FG approach may well work but, if it does, we’re in for many years more of decaying public services, homelessness and high rents. As the Landlord Party in all but name, this will suit Fine Gael very well.
My constituency is Kildare North which in 2020 elected four TDs: 1 Social Democrat, 1 Fianna Fáil, 1 Fine Gael, and 1 Sinn Féin. This time, owing to population growth in the area, the seat will return five TDs. Fine Gael is standing three. I won’t say anything about Fianna Fáil. To all intents and purposes they are indistinguishable from Fine Gael and I won’t be voting for either of them. For me “more of the same” is not an option. I hope it goes without saying that I won’t be voting for any neofascists who get onto the ballot paper either.
Catherine Murphy (SD) is not standing and since she had a strong personal following the SDs will struggle to keep that seat. Angela Feeney, who is very active on the Local Council, is standing for Labour and Réada Cronin for Sinn Féin will be trying to hold onto her seat. Nominations of candidates continue for another week, so I don’t know the final list of candidates. I’ll wait until then before deciding on my order of preferences.
Not that long ago Sinn Féin were riding high in the polls, but a series of missteps have left them trailing Fine Gael. They also did poorly in the local and European elections earlier this year, seeming to have lost supporters of the more extreme nationalist type to overtly right-wing candidates.
The only prediction I am willing to make at this stage is that, owing to disaffection with the mainstream political parties, the number of independent TDs is likely to increase considerably from the 20 last time. This will make the task of forming a government even more complicated than before.
Storm season has arrived in Ireland!
Storm Ashley has been battering the West of the country today. It’s not been as bad here in the sheltered environs of Maynooth, though we have had gusts up to 80 km/h which has left my garden in disarray with leaves and twigs all over the place.
Along with all academic staff at Maynooth University I received an email this afternoon from the Vice-President for Research and Innovation, which contained the following request:
Well, I certainly won’t be providing any such lists at any time for this or any similar purpose, let alone by next Wednesday! I will be boycotting the QS World University Rankings and I urge any of my “peers” who are contacted about it to do likewise.
I assume that request this is a panicky reaction to the fact that Maynooth is so low in the current current QS league tables and falling in most others. This decline is a direct result of policies implemented by the Management Team at Maynooth, pushing up a student-staff ratio that is already the highest in Ireland, and starving core activities of resources while squandering millions on management salaries and perks – latest example of which is €500,000 on a luxury taxi service for “priority staff members”; you can guess who that means. ..
I would prefer that the people in charge of Maynooth University made some attempt to improve teaching and research – you know, the things that a university is suppose to do – rather than try to game these ridiculous league tables. Such an approach, however, seems to be out of the question. Maynooth’s race to the bottom is bound to continue unless and until attitudes change at the top.
Today’s the day that over 60,000 school students across Ireland are receiving their Leaving Certificate Results. As always there will be joy for some, and disappointment for others. The headline news relating to these results is that a majority (68%) of grades have been scaled up to that the distribution matches last year’s outcomes. This has meant an uplift of marks by about 7.5% on average, with the biggest changes happening at the lower levels of grade.
This artificial boost is a consequence of the generous adjustments made during the pandemic and apparent wish by the Education Minister, Norma Foley, to ensure that this year’s students are treated “fairly” compared to last year’s. Of course this argument could be made for continuing to inflate grades next year too, and the year after that. Perhaps the Minister’s plan seems to be to keep the grades high until after the next General Election, after which it will be someone else’s job to treat students “unfairly”. Anyway, you might say that marks have been scaled to maintain a Norma Distribution…
One can’t blame the students, of course, but one of the effects of this scaling is that students will be coming into third-level education with grades that imply a greater level of achievement than they actually have reached. This is a particular problem with a subject like physics where we really need students to be comfortable with certain aspects of mathematics before they start their course. It has been clear that even students with very good grades at Higher level have considerable gaps in their knowledge. This looks set to continue, and we will just have to deal with it. This issue was compounded for a while because Leaving Certificate grades were produced so late that first-year students had to start university a week late, giving less time for the remedial teaching that many of them needed. At least this year we won’t have that problem, so can plan some activities early on in the new Semester.
Anyway, out of interest – probably mine rather than yours – I delved into the statistics of Leaving Certificate results going back six years for Mathematics (at Higher A and Ordinary B) level, Physics and Applied Mathematics which I fished out of the general numbers given here.
Here are the results in a table, with the columns denoting the grade (1=high) and the numbers are percentages:
You can seen that the percentage of students getting H1 in Mathematics has increased a bit to 12.6% after falling considerably from 18.1% in 2022 to 11.2% last year (2023); note the huge increase in H1 from 2020 to 2021 (8.6% to 15.1%). Another thing worth noting is that both Physics and Applied Mathematics have declined significantly in popularity since 2019 from 7210.
Now that the results are out there will be a busy time until next Wednesday (28th) when the CAO first round offers go out. That is when those students wanting to go to university find out if they made the grades and university departments find out how many new students (if any) they will have to teach in September.
P.S. When I was a little kid we used to call a “Certificate” a “Stiff Ticket”. I just thought you would like to know that.
On 1st August 2024, i.e. tomorrow, a new funding organization comes into existence in Ireland, formed by the merger of SFI with the Irish Research Council. The new outfit is called Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland and many of us working in Irish academia were optimistic that it might improve the funding environment in Ireland, especially with regard to basic research.
Taighde Éireann has not got off to a very promising start. In particular, the long-running saga of who would be Chief Executive Officer of the new organization does not inspire confidence. Professor Philip Nolan, former Director-General of Science Foundation Ireland was originally intended to take the helm, but then he was dismissed from his position at SFI which made the prospect of him taking over the new organization seem less likely. Indeed, more recently, it was announced that a new temporary CEO would be appointed “pending the recruitment of a new CEO on a permanent basis”.
Starting with a caretaker manager is far from ideal, although it probably just means that the interim CEO will just look after transferring activity from IRC and SFI to the new organization without actually changing much. I just hope that in the long run a person is appointed who actually understands research rather than a generic management type. Otherwise the only change that will actually happen will be purely administrative rather than the systemic overhaul of attitudes and culture that Ireland really needs. As an outsider, one way of reading the controversy of the CEO the current SFI establishment resisting any possibility of change.
From my own perspective, the fundamental problem is that research funding for fundamental science in Ireland is so limited as to be virtually non-existent by a matter of policy at Science Foundation Ireland, which basically only funds applied research. This is a short-sighted and damaging policy that is causing, among other things, a significant exodus of talented young researchers to opportunities elsewhere (especially in the EU).
I know there will be many competing calls for changes in practice for the new Council but I thought I would add a few suggestions that will probably be ignored but which I’ll make anyway.
That’s just five off the top of my head. I’m sure others will have suggestions. If so, please feel free to make suggestions through the comments box below.
In the Dark 