Pre-Snip plus other news and views from the last few days

The An Bord Snip Report will be the most important document delivered to Government in the last, and next, 20 years. We don’t know all that much about its contents as of yet. It was received by Lenihan’s office last Wednesday but leaks don’t seem to have been all that forthcoming. Over the last few days the broadsheets led with silly season stories and/or vague journalistic-shotgun-blast style guesses at the contents and/or publication date. Concrete was lacking, though you can hradly blame them for that, the Gov’t have been using the report as a carrot for nearly two weeks now.

On Saturday a number of the papers had a report saying Cowen wanted to “publish the report [in the near future]” (as opposed to post-Lisbon, as was rumoured earlier last week). In their piece The Irish Times had an interesting quote from David Begg, who was already out looking to undermine the report’s contents by claiming members of the Snip committee (can we call them Snipers?) “never actually believed in it” – ‘it’ being the public service. On that topic, The Sunday Business Post said public sector jobs will be targeted – shock horror – so did everyone else, but the SBP had the best article on it. Another Union big’ed got also fired a few shots across Government bows, ICTU chief Jack O’Connor said the nation could expect “a sustained and relentless industrial campaign conducted workplace by workplace” if there were further “assaults” on worker’s pay. Too right, 4.9% pay increases for everyone, I say… it’s going to be gloves off once the report is made public. The electricians’ was nothing.

Also, The Trib said the Snipers would target the office of the ombudsman for children. Oh won’t somebody think of the children…

Today’s Irish Times says Cowen will meet each of his ministers individually to examine their performance in relation to the programme for government. It also states a discussion will take place at cabinet about the details of the An Bord Snip report tomorrow. We’re looking at a Thursday/Friday leak so, probably… the same article says the review for the programme for government is now unlikely to take place until September.

One note: The rumour/Government-hint is that the Snipers will say 20,000 public service jobs will have to go in the next three years. That’s nothing, it’s about the same numbers that leave due to natural wastage over that same period… it wouldn’t be a cut, it’d basically be a recruitment freeze with an enticing early retirement scheme. If true, watch how it’s spun…

Elsewhere on the political landscape over the last few days…

The Sindo had a piece by John Drennen quoting unnamed sources, supposedly a TD and minister, saying that Fianna Fáil now is so divided that “we have five-wings to the party… [but] we have factions, no real leaders”. Hmm, what do yez make of that? Waffle? Where’s McDaid?

Yesterday The Times had an article on a report from the Ombudsman about the extraordinary cost of photocopying in local authority offices – up to €5 for an A4 page. All very well and good but I cant help thinking it’d be great if someone like the ombudsman published a report on the cost of making an initial FOI request, or the weaknesses of the SIPO legislation, or the lack of transparency in TDs expenses, or something that actually mattered in a wider context…

The Data Retention Bill was published yesterday too. In my opinion it’s more bullshit legislation following up on the criminal justice and blasphemy bills from last week. Two journalists contacted me over the course of the day asking if they would now be better off using Facebook messages or Twitter DMs as opposed to emails when contacting sources on stories that may be looked at by Gardaí or Revenue – without a warrant – in the next two years. I couldn’t give them a confident answer to be honest, anyone reading with more expertise, chime in below. The legislation allows the authorities to access information about who you have emailed, received emails from, telephoned, texted, and received texts from over the course of the previous two years. Strictly speaking it doesn’t allow them to access the content of the emails or texts but one respected journalist told me earlier today that ISPs are already unofficially co-operating with Gardaí in that area and it’s only a matter of time before the legislation takes the next step, she’s looking at moving over to Facebook messaging.

The lads from Digital Rights Ireland were on The Last Word with Matt Cooper yesterday debating with FF TD Niall Collins about the data retention bill. Rather brilliantly, they called him out on his bullshit and rather unsurprisingly, seem to have found he was all talk.

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I’m drumming up a juicy post about an official Government report – hope the press officer will get back to me with official statement later.