I’ve previously written at length about Mary Harney and my distaste for what she’s doing to the health service in Ireland so this image posted to Blogorrah made me smile.
There’s a general election on May 24th but I thought Harney would be retiring after her disgraceful stint as Minister for Health. It came as a shock that she’s actually standing in the election!
To see more of Mary Harney be sure to check out the cartoons on Langerland!
Due to my ongoing problems with An Post, the postal service in Ireland, I wasn’t overly worried when this month’s copy of National Geographic didn’t materialise on time. It rarely does.
However, it’s getting on a bit, it’s the 17th of the month so I rang their Dutch offices(the only number I had for them) and found out that a shipment of magazines destined for Germany and Belgium went astray. Susan, the very nice woman on the other end of the phone verified my account details and told me that a few customers in Ireland were affected too. She promised that a copy of the missing magazine would be sent out to me from their American office immediately and I should expect it within 2 weeks.
So, if you’re missing this month’s copy of NGM, visit ngmservice.com where you can type in your customer number and find out where it’s gone.
I’ve had cause to get in touch with my local TD, Noel O’Flynn, recently over an urgent matter and he has been very responsive and helpful. Some will say that it’s an election year and our elected officials will be extra careful to keep their constituents happy but even in past correspondence he responded promptly. I’m not normally a Fianna Fail voter but this year that may change.
So, will you vote for the person or the party? Do party policies matter more than the active local politician who represents you?
We spent over 2 hours this morning at Cork University Maternity Hospital (CUMH). Little had changed since last week. Appointments were still impossible to make so Jacinta was told to come in early and wait.
It was crowded last week, but if anything, it was worse today. Most seats were taken but it’s a funny thing about some people – even when there are seats to sit on they’ll continue to stand. Even heavily pregnant mothers. I can’t figure it out. Martyrs?
This last week has seen Ireland sweltering under a blistering warm sun and conditions in the hospital were as stuffy as before. I stood near a radiator in the corridor and was shocked to find it was lukewarm. Expectant mothers looked on in disbelief when I mentioned this!
You’ll meet all sorts in the hospital. All races and creeds are represented in those hallways and unfortunately Irish racism is alive and kicking. A man at the end of the corridor was heard to say, “I should learn a foreign language and get an interpreter. We’d be seen sooner.” Shortly afterwards, his partner commented on the pronouciation of a foreign doctor saying that it was hard to understand him.
Good news however, I’ll be a dad within the next 7 to 8 days (hopefully). Due date is tomorrow but if nothing happens, Jacinta will be induced by the end of next week.
In related matters, Justin provides a transcript and commentary on Green Party candidate Patricia McKenna’s assertion on national radio that there’s a link between MMR and autism. That link has been discredited and I’m following this closely, but all it takes is one comment from the parent of an autistic child to make me doubt my convictions. Conor has more to say on the matter too.
He also reported a few weeks back that children in a Cork creche were found to have Tuberculosis (TB). Munster, the southern region of Ireland, does not have a programme in place to vacinate babies and children, but after the recent outbreaks, the HSE will introduce it later in the year. The vaccine is called BCG and has been administered in all other parts of the country. The Wikipedia page on Tuberculosis has a lot more information on the disease.
More and more bloggers I read are becoming parents. Maybe I’ve become more aware of the announcements, or maybe it’s simply that they are at that stage in life when they’re starting or expanding families. Remember when you and all your friends were celebrating your 21st birthdays?
The Minister for Health, Mary Harney, has a lot to answer for. Nurses, midwives, consultants and other staff in the newly opened Cork University Maternity Hospital (CUMH) are stretched to the limit coping with the pressure of expectant mothers and babies from the original three maternity hospitals in the city.
We spent over two hours in a stuffy, crowded and very warm waiting area to be seen by a midwife and a consultant this morning. It was in stark contrast to the empty hallways and calm of the hospital just two weeks ago when we were given a tour of the facilities and offered a glimpse of a gleaming high-tech maternity environment. Pregnant women, partners and children waited in the sweltering heat while staff were run off their feet. The waiting area was unfortunately too small, there weren’t enough seats, and pregnant women had to make do by leaning against the walls of the corridors while waiting to be seen.
Despite the pressure, staff were as nice as always. Midwives were considerate, helpful and professional, but when asked about how things were going I heard that 2 had resigned and 4 had taken sick leave. As well as being short staffed to begin with, the remaining staff are even worse off now. Some workers are pulling 11 hour days.
Did I forget to mention that this 75 million Euro hospital doesn’t have air conditioning? Can you imagine the heat and mood in a small area where the only air comes from 2 slightly ajar windows and from internal corridors? It wasn’t nice. At least the two expensive flat screen LCD screens on the walls kept us occupied with day time TV courtesy of TV3. Oh yeah, that’s what we need.
Thanks to Mary Harney’s bullying tactics last week the hospital opened a week late on Saturday last. She had threatened to find a different use for the building if midwives didn’t accept her terms and move to the new hospital. Midwives and consultants protested that staffing levels weren’t high enough and I bore witness to that shortage this morning. Even the computer system there is broken and not expected to be working until this evening. No appointments could be made so women had to come on a first-come-first-served basis to the morning clinic. One woman we met there had been there since 8.30am. We arrived at 11am. Apparently it was even worse on Monday.
Teething problems with a new hospital? Perhaps, but if Mary Harney wanted the hospital opened a week previously shouldn’t those problems have been sorted out then?
Truly, healthcare is a vocation. I couldn’t do it. The midwives and staff deserve all the support they can get.
Do you work from home? Do you wish you could share the cost of an office space with like minded individuals?
Coworking.ie was launched a few days ago by Jason Roe and whose goal is to, “promote coworking in ireland, to provide a community space for coworkers to team up and to serve as a guide to people who are looking to go out on their own.” I love the notion of a “community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents”.
It’s a great idea and I for one will be subscribed to the blog and keeping an eye on developments. I’m not the only one: James and Justin have both expressed an interest in the venture.
This wiki page has more details on what coworking is with a long list of posts on the subject and links to coworking initiatives all over the world!
Damien alerted me to the fact that the new Ireland.com blogs are using WordPress, and so with much excitement I hit the site and browsed around. A quick look at the source showed that they are in fact using WordPress MU which is rather neat.
Ireland.com is the website of The Irish Times, a major daily newspaper here. It’ll be great to see journalists blogging there, but only if they are allowed free reign. If they pull it off, they’ll bring a lot more attention to the site.
So far, only two blogs are operating. On the Record is a music blog written by Jim Carroll, and Price Watch by Conor Pope. Conor’s first post is Window or aisle? €15 please, a short post exploring new charges by Aer Lingus. I don’t see a Trackback link there but hopefully they’ll allow trackbacks and pingbacks sooner rather than later.
Welcome to the ireland.com blog page. We have two blogs, one written by music journalist Jim Carroll, using his weekly column On The Record as its cornerstone. This blog will shed light on the machinations of the music industry at home and abroad. From today, the consumer-focused PriceWatch section will also be carried in blog form on the site. Written by Conor Pope, the blog will be updated throughout the week and will allow users to post details of rip-offs, ask questions and perhaps even highlight bargains they have spotted.
Update on Sep 8, 2009 They’re not using WordPress MU any more unfortunately. Looks like a Windows based system, with ugly urls. The links to the blogs above are broken as a result. Disappointing.
William Shatner was interviewed by the Sunday Times for it’s In Gear section and in typical fashion it’s mostly about cars, but don’t let that put you off if you’re not a motorhead. He talks about his marriages, his future flight into space in a Virgin Galactic Shuttle (not looking forward to it), horse riding, and his hopes for good health which must play on the mind of an active 76 year old.
To lift the mood I ask what dreams Shatner still wants to fulfil. “Not to get sick,” he says. “I’m so healthy and I feel so strong and I jump up on a horse and I drive fast cars. And I’m thinking this has got to end soon, and I don’t want it to end. That’s my biggest dream.”
While on the subject of high achieving 35 year old septuagenarians, I want to congratulate my mother-in-law, Philomena Burns for winning “The James Stack Memorial Perpetual Trophy” and a gold medal in this year’s Feis Maitiu poetry and recital competition in Cork. She is of course delighted and we’re very proud of her! I hope to update this post with a photo of her and her trophy and medal next week.
How are you supposed to do business in Ireland when tax forms don’t come on time? Here’s a snippet from a form P30 I got from Revenue this morning.
A form that should be filled out before February 14th arrived on March 30th. A form that warns that there may be penalties for late payment. Sheesh. Oh, and it arrived opened. Not the first time that happened either.
This morning I finally paid my motor tax. Instead of getting the nice simple online registration form and pin number I got a “final reminder” sometime in February warning that the police would be called if the tax wasn’t paid within ten days. I didn’t and they weren’t. I called the garage instead who sent me a form to get another vehicle registration form, which I already have. I have two of them now, one must go back.
We know for a fact that mail has been lost. A letter that Jacinta was expecting last year vanished without a trace. Maybe it’s in some sorting office somewhere stuck behind a bin.
An Post need to get their act together and stop losing mail and delivering late.
Edit: oh, and next time you buy a second hand car you’ll have to pay the motor tax for the time the car was in the garage. You’re not supposed to, but it’s happened to me on my last two cars. I’ve had to pay for the month previous to purchasing the car because the tax just happened to run out before I bought it. The garage is supposed to register the car as off the road but that obviously doesn’t work.
Edit: It’s April 4th. I just received a tax assasement from Revenue dated January 10th. It had no address on the form, but someone had hand written the address on a slip of paper which was stapled to that form. We got an awful shock until we realised the issue date because we’ve sent Revenue big fat cheques since January. gulp!
I spotted this on a large advertising hoarding on the Western Road in Cork this afternoon and snapped it to remind myself to look it up. It’s right by UCC and in the perfect spot to attract the attention of webs savvy students. URLs on hoardings are like honey to a bee with me. I will snap off a few shots of the sign as a reminder and visit later. When I did visit thisisliving.ie I was presented with the following page.
I have to ask, if I’m visiting thisisliving.ie what country do you think I’m in?
After selecting Ireland and hitting “Enter” I was brought into a nice animation of a resort or hotel which built up and zoomed away again, and then repeated with another 2 locations before being brought to a hotel reception. I signed in and clicked around for about 5 minutes before getting bored of all the loading. It reminded me of the days spent loading C64 games from datasette. At least then I had the cool Ocean or Thalamus loading music to entertain me..
The copyright notice at the bottom of page identifies “Sony Computer” and a quick search took me to this post which has the following tv ad for the Playstation 3. Apparently this advertising campaign has been running all over Europe since January. I’m sure I would have come across a games console somewhere if I had persisted!
Game footage in the above trailer does look pretty. Anyone bought a PS3 yet? Someone told me they’re going for about €600 or so. That correct? You could buy a reasonably specced “home PC” for that much! Supposedly Ireland has a less than healthy obsession with everything Playstation so I’m sure they’re selling like hotcakes!