Some 2.8 million of us, two thirds of the Irish population, are younger than 44 years of age. Our politicians, civil servants, bankers, business men and women, decision makers and media commentators are predominantly over 40. As Prof Ray Kinsella said on these pages last week: “We have screwed up – that’s the truth of it.” My generation of 20 and 30-somethings do not identify with the tired voices that have failed us and endowed us with a future choked with their mistakes: mistakes fuelled by mediocrity and downright incompetence without consequences; mistakes that are homeless, absent of acknowledgment or apology.

I may be wrong, but I think it may well have been the generation of 20 and 30-somethings which predominantly voted for the present and last governments. But the past is past. If the younger generation of voters does not in fact relate to the current politics and political practitioners, what is to be done?

Perhaps radical new policies should be discussed. In the words of Paul Sweeney (again the Irish Times, May 7) We cannot go back to cosy Irish capitalism after this recession

And now Village is talking about a new departure.

Well, this website, alternativeparty.org, has been dropping hints for years, but it’s nice to see the need has entered the zeitgeist, and people are actually saying it out loud.

I’m going to muse about a mythical radical new party and give it some policies. Alternative Party of Ireland, or API, with an url of www.alternativeparty.ie

Note: it isn’t a simple thing to form a political party for national elections. Scroll down the discussion Anyone interested in putting together a ‘political party’??? at face.boards.ie to get the details.

It could be called anything, so long as the party itself is radical in the sense that its members and voters think outside the box. Indeed, it could be a current party for all I care.

The first thing it should do is think big. Voters are tired of small parties who only stand in a few constituencies. What’s the point? Even if several TDs are elected, they will only ever be the rump of either of the conservative parties. API should have at least two candidates in every constituency, even three seaters. It’s the pre-requisite to being taken seriously.

It would have to be done on a shoestring, of course, but that’s where technology comes in, as Elaine Bynre realizes. Okay, here’s a skeleton outline, which can of course be improved on.

Purchase the domain alternativeparty.ie. Make sure you do it with my excellent host, Letshost.ie, as you can have 999 sub-domains and MySql databases for the price of one account, ie for less than €100. There are 43 constituencies, so we probably won’t require all 99!
So, for example, http://galway-west.alternativeparty.ie, http://clare.alternativeparty.ie, http://kerry-north.alternativeparty.ie etc.

We’ll use a reliable, democratic and opensource software like WordPress (which runs this site).

I don’t know about other providers, but O2 offers 250 free webtexts per month. Texting via the web isn’t everyone’s preferred method, but it’s easy to type and 250 is a literally powerful amount of texts, if you have ten volunteers in each constituency texting everyone they and their friends and family know about the alternative party website and its consituency subdomains. If you ask those who are interested to text their friends who might be interested, suddenly its viral. As a new way forward is very much in the zeitgeist, perhaps this is an optimum time to intrigue people about such a party.

Each constituency discusses its own problems on its own website and arrives at solutions. These solutions are fed to the main site. www.alternativeparty.ie, and become the bedrock of national policy.

Okay, so that’s the bones of structure, to be fleshed out by those who are interested.

Where will the candidates come from? My guess is that many will come from community groups. Affiliations with groups like The Irish Senior Citizens’ Parliament might prove fruitful.

And what about policies? Several will be suggested in the next post.

Trash compacted by the ReCyclone can be used to create energy or compost material—organic waste becomes diesel fuel, and plastic becomes oil. The machine can grind up any piece of waste ranging from 20 microns to 12 inches.

For some perspective, the ReCyclone can get more gold out of electronic devices than from a gold mine (one metric ton of circuit boards contains between 80 and 1,500 grams of gold, which is 40 to 800 times the concentration of gold available in gold ore mined in the United States) and 1 kilogram of plastic recycled in the machine can yield 95 percent of 1 liter of diesel.

Powermaster Recylone

(via CleanTechnica)

Al Gore’s speech
apologies, I’ve had to remove the actual embedded video as it crashed IE browsers

We Can Solve It

Greener Plastics. Science Videos, Science News

[via Digg]

Denmark is now regarded as the world leader in technological innovation and application, with its Nordic neighbours Sweden, Finland and Norway claiming second, fourth and 10th place respectively, according to a BBC report.

Denmark, in particular, has benefited from the very effective government e-leadership, reflected in early liberalisation of the telecommunications sector, a first-rate regulatory environment and large availability of e-government services,” said Irene Mia, senior economist at World Economic Forum.

European countries to make the top 20 included Switzerland in fifth place, the Netherlands, one of the most improved in sixth, the UK (nine), Germany (16), Austria (17) and Estonia (20).

Ireland just misses the top twenty at no 21, surprisingly ahead of France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Spain and Italy. The latter comes in at a lowly 39th. Of course one should note the phrase ‘Networked Readiness’. So what does it take to get into the top 20? Obviously more of what made Denmark the leader. Ireland is a small country, easy to turn around with the right policies, so it’s a matter of political will and skill, really.

NETWORKED READINESS INDEX RANKINGS 2006 (2005)
1: Denmark (3)
2: Sweden (8)
3: Singapore (2)
4: Finland (5)
5: Switzerland (9)
6: Netherlands (12)
7: US (1)
8: Iceland (4)
9: UK (10)
10: Norway (13)
Source: World Economic Forum (PDF file)

EU concern over Irish telecoms competition

Almost 278,000 people are directly employed in construction. That’s around 13% of the Irish workforce.

It would seem obvious that it’s crucial to redress the balance fast – but how?

One answer should be to think radically and adopt new technologies faster than any other country, thereby anticipating the worst effects of the inevitable disruptive technologies. The latter almost certainly will include Robo-Builders, the very notion of which should bring on a cold sweat across the collective groin of any Irish government.

Another disturbing sign is that China is about to put on sale its own computers running with its own processor and Linux – a triple-whammy threat to three of our mainstay foreign companies: Intel, Dell and Microsoft. It won’t happen for a few years, but it will happen.

So what to do? It’s easy enough to state the problem but of course the solution isn’t easy or we’d all be at it over cocktails.

But as I often say, people who have a problem for every solution, whilst loathe to offer a solution themselves, annoy the hell out of me; so, hoist on my own petard, I will have to come up with an x point plan of my own. Stand by for the bus to utopia over the next few posts.