Three, actually four, observations on Lisbon

1. It suffered a horrific earthquake in 1755, during Voltaire's lifetime - a poster depicting said earthquake lives on to this day in one of the language labs in UL.


2. It is the capital city of one of the darker horses of Euro 2008, who are looking very dark at the moment, if darkness equates to looking incredibly impressive indeed after tonight's performance. Less can be said about Football365's sub-editor for the opening paragraph of their report on the game.

3. The Lisbon Treaty campaign, if you were to believe some of the more hysterical analyses of it, has been a mixture of either misinformation from the No campaigners, or bullying/guilt-tripping from the Yes campaigners, and plenty of patronising from all concerned - so which ever offends you less, being bullied or lied to, vote with them. See, for instance, some of the comments responding to David McWilliams' rather excellent commentary on the makeup of the Yes and No camps in today's Irish Independent.

4. On the Lisbon Treaty Referendum Count Centre in Limerick: this will be the University of Limerick Sports Arena. In other words the arena where I was due to play indoor soccer this evening, which was to my first game back after a prolonged absence - I believe March was the last time I kicked a luminous yellow ball in anger. Why should hundreds of (possibly apolitical) sportspeople be put out because of a treaty that doesn't really worry all that many of them? Surely there are other disused buildings in Limerick that could have been chosen - how about the former Microtherm factory building in Bruff Co Limerick, whose ex-employees featured in a recent RTE documentary, Where's My Job Gone? Or would that be sending out the wrong signals?

Do as we say, not as we do

This morning's UK Independent ran a front page story about a secret deal to keep Iraq under US control indefinitely.

Rewind to February 2003. I believe President Bush said one of the reasons for the invasion of Iraq in the first place was to foster democracy there.

Interesting then that the Independent's Patrick Cockburn wrote this morning that:

"The US is adamantly against the new security agreement being put to a referendum in Iraq, suspecting that it would be voted down."

Even a teenager wouldn't expect to be treated by their parents with these levels of hypocrisy. No wonder it is predicted that the deal, the terms of which include 50 US military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors, will lead to yet more explosive conflict.

Image: US Marines in Iraq, Wikimedia Commons

Economic Aches

Last Saturday night I was told by a friend me that The Economist told him that Ronald Reagan once told whoever would listen that inflation is “as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit-man.” In these gloomy economic times, with FÁS predicting losses of 55,000 construction sector jobs by the end of 2009, when the credit crunch seems to be to property portfolio-holders and young house-buyers what “Post 9/11” was to civil liberties fans and Guantanamo Bay detainees, it is worth spending some time mulling over some of the grimmer scenarios for the Irish economy.

The construction boom, upon which much of Ireland's recent economic growth was based on, according to some commentators, appears to be over. The country is dotted with housing estates that appear to be left unfinished as their builders go bust. Anecdotally, I know of one auctioneering firm whose staff size has fallen to a third of what it was last year while their monthly sales income has decreased by a factor of nine.

One point I took from May 24^th's lead story in The Economist is that while inflation per se may not be all that high, employees' perceptions of inflation can become higher and this in turn leads to higher wage demands. As there is no sign of us seeing any decrease in the number of inflation related headline stories between now and the national pay talks, it is a near-certainty that public and semi-state sector employees will push for wage increases. They may even be granted the rises, with the help of collective industrial action. Joe Private Sector Employee will see what his public sector counterpart was doing and will naturally follow suit.

And how will the multinational employer of JPSE react when himself and his colleagues begin to strike? Will they negotiate? Maybe. Will they accede to the JPSEs' demands? Doubtful. You can bet your bottom devalued dollar that JPSE's job will be outsourced offshore to a land with lower wages and less collective bargaining power. Even though according to the European Restructuring Monitor only 8% of EU jobs lost to restructuring between 2003 and 2006 have involved offshoring, this figure is likely to rise, at least in Ireland's case.

'Inflation' photo by Joshua Davis

Futbol Mondial's FIFA 2008 Fanatics

Futbol Mondial is a great programme at the best of times, with the offering from the Trans World International stable normally bringing us such delights as the Asian Champions League, how an Ecuadorian footballer copes with life at Wigan Athletic and Tomas Brolin – life after football. However, I was left feeling a little disturbed by the last item they ran on tonight's show. After running a perfectly pointless, if perfectly enjoyable and fairly nostalgic story about a Romanian all star select playing against the World in a charity match organised by Gheorge Hagi and Gica Popescu in Bucharest recently, they went and spoiled it all by bringing us a report on, wait for it, the FIFA Interactive World Cup held in Berlin at the end of May. The competition featured 32 young men (they were all young men) each of whom possessed a pair of eyes normally only seen on ordinary people at the end of a very long week of caffeine-fuelled exam cramming. Their skin complexions paled in comparison.

Some of the player profiles left me genuinely bowled over. A certain Mr Smit from the Netherlands, the reigning champion, claimed to spend 70 hours a week practicing. From the cut of him I'd say this was a gross underestimate.

Anthony Baffoe, the second Ghanaian to play in the Bundesliga according to Wikipedia (after Ibrahim Sunday, if you needed to know) and the patron of the competition, was heard justifying to the interviewer his own brood’s obsession with football video games as opposed to the real-life version of the 11-a-side game. ‘My kids, they play them all the time, and you know, they learn the names of 600 real life players, which is great.’ So there you have it – spending hours and hours developing arthritis of the thumbs and playing a game of Russian Roulette with an epileptic seizure as the prize is preferable to reading the German equivalent of Shoot! and gleaning their useless soccer trivia that way.

The narrator noted that for some reason Barcelona v Barcelona matches proved to be very popular with the competitors. A Spaniard won the blasted competition in the end – the young Real Madrid supporter opting to be, surprise surprise, Barcelona. An omen for things to come in Euro 2008, asked the voiceover guy to no-one in particular. Actually no, the antics of these FIFA 08 fanatics have absolutely no bearing on the outcome of this summer’s tournament. Gott sei Dank!