Posts from — August 2008

“NGOs that are really good and efficient should survive and grow, and those which really don’t add value and can’t be competitive should wind up.
‘‘You’re wasting money that could be applied to the poorest people in the world in a much more efficient way. Unless you can do it efficiently, I don’t think you should be in this business.

These words came back to me this morning, as I sat in a hospital corridor at 10.15, waiting to see the doctor for my 9.15 appointment. Privatisation, or at least, bringing the tenets of the private sector to bear on Ireland’s hospitals, looked like a very sensible argument this morning. Efficient, ruthless, performance-based management rather than a multi-layered, union-bound, hamstrung bureaucracy.  Denis O’Brien wrote well about it a few days back.

IN any case, the quote ain’t from Denis O’Brien, or Michael O’Leary, or any of their ilk. It’s from Cormac Lynch of Camara, an Irish charity that reconditions PCs and sends them, with instructors and instructions, to a variety of African countries, at a price that’s cheaper than the fabled $100 laptop.  The article’s below the fold, or just click below.

Charity in a PC World (August 3, 2008)

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Errol Morris is hitting the headlines at the moment for his film Standard Operating Procedure, an eye-opening snapshot of the life inside Abu Ghraib, famous for those pictures. Morris’s film features in-depth footage from interviews with the prosecuted grunts who carried out what are now the best-know acts of prisoner abuse in history, give or take.

He paired up with Philip Gourevitch, who committed the substance of the film to paper for his book of the same name. Gourevitch has a skill for cataloguing atrocities, having cut his teeth on the genre with his book about the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the chilling ‘We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With our Families’.

Gourevitch’s journalistic credentials are lofty, high-brow and unimpeachable. And he’s a nice guy in person, too. I met him to chat about his book a while back – the result is below. Oh, and the headline? Stolen from the Irish Times, so don’t go calling me tasteless.

America’s Blame (June 22, 2008)

A doctor friend of mine, a matter-of-fact, nuts-and-bolts surgical type used to bemoan the modules of psychology he had to endure in med school. Psych-holiday, he called it, as he tuned out and put his feet up. This is not medicine, it’s quackery.

It’s a convenient memory to link these two bits from the SBP, one on 50 ways to holiday in Ireland, and the other on eminent psychiatrist Ivor Browne (Yeah, I know he’s a psychiatrist and not a psychologist).

The only other link is the therapy you’d need if you can’t get out of Ireland for a 12-month period. Arrrgh.

They’re long, so I’ll post a link and not the entire articles.

The Drugs Don’t Work (May 4, 2008 )

50 Ways to Holiday at home ( May 4, 2008 )

What follows is the first article of mine that appeared after I got back from Australia. What was meant to be a light Q&A with rower Gearoid Towey ended up a hard news piece on the front page.

Gearoid wasn’t all that amused, as the splash was a bit unexpected, and had the potential to put him in the crosshairs of his bosses in the various echelons of Ireland’s sporting administration.

Click below to read the story in the TCM Archives, or simply turn below the fold.

“Irish Rower supports boycott of Opening Ceremony” (April 13, 2008.)

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Yeah, probably.

I’m gonna stick up some of my most recent articles here in the next few days, from the Sunday Business Post and Afloat.

It’s about time I got back online.

See you all very soon.