Questions and Answers - Heckle Here

Auditor #9 wrote:

QnA is getting axed .... !??


nooooooooooooooooo

That's exactly what I said. Hopefully they replace it. Was Today Tonight before that? Or was that before Primetime ?

johnfás wrote:

Well no... they should have sold it to a cash rich developer (so he didn't need a loan which we now guarantee) who would have struggled to get planning permission for the site and would still be holding it now without a chance of developing it. Then UCD could buy it now for a fraction of what RTE sold it for .

Even better! I like your thinking johnfás!

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

Auditor #9 wrote:

QnA is getting axed .... !??


nooooooooooooooooo

That's exactly what I said. Hopefully they replace it. Was Today Tonight before that? Or was that before Primetime ?

Ah, 7 days, those were the days when journalists went to jail. I don't know why we stopped that, best place for them.

Primetime, on the killings in the North.

What was said by whom?

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

Auditor #9 wrote:

QnA is getting axed .... !??


nooooooooooooooooo

That's exactly what I said. Hopefully they replace it. Was Today Tonight before that? Or was that before Primetime ?

It was one of the few organs of democracy in this country - a place where the public could engage directly or by proxy with their elected representatives. It was a place where information could come out and you could see your public reps reaction to it. I wonder why they are axing it - John Bowman looked fine and healthy. Maybe the information was unhealthy, or maybe it would be digested unhealthily ..

John has been contracted to do a History of Irish TV or some such.

johnfás wrote:

Here's the problem Papal Knight, you could book a Minister on 10 different flights (to keep his options open) and you would still be cheaper than running the Government jet for every junket to London.

There are 44 flights per day from Dublin to London on 5 airlines serving the 4 main London airports (excluding Luton). You could book a Minister on 10 of these flights for 200 quid, or you could send him on the jet for about 4 grand.

John, you still don't get it.

How can I make it any simpler?

The issue isn't the flight. The issue is that you cannot be sure that (i) a flight s/he is booked on will take off on time, (ii) that as a normal passenger jet it will not be delayed, (iii) that when up in the air it was not be diverted, (iv) that it will land where planned, when planned.

You cannot run a government on the basis that you have to be in Brussels at 12.15 for a meeting that will decide whether water charges will be imposed on schools in Ireland or whether schools will be exempted if you cannot guarantee, with the sole exemptions of technical failure or weather, that you will be there. If you on a Ryanair flight, or an Aer Lingus flight, or any public flight, you cannot guarantee you will be there because you have no absolute guarantee that the airline will delay the flight's take off, landing, or where it lands. If you come back to Ireland and have to say to schools "sorry guys, but you are all going to have to pay for your water but . . . um . . I couldn't get to the meeting in Brussels to get you guys excluded from the charges because on the flight over Aer Lingus had to redirect the flight to a different city/push it back in the queue for landing and . . . well tough titty Ireland, you now have to pay water charges. Blame those fuckers in Aer Lingus" you would be lynched.

It sounds as if you have no idea, John, the crucial importance of the meetings, the fact that they cannot be missed in many cases, that hundreds of millions of euro may rest on you being there. THAT is why a government jet is vital. Only with your own jet can you, bar weather or technical events that are outside everyone's control, control when you take off, and where and when you land. A minister could have to be at the cabinet table to get the heads of a bill he is introducing at 11am, leave that meeting at 12.30 and be in Brussels by 2.30 for a Council meeting, and then have to be back in Dáil Éireann to speak on the Bill at 6.30pm. (In saying that I am thinking about a specific case I know about where those were the rough times a particular minister had to be in different places on a real day about a decade ago.) You cannot do that relying on scheduled flight.

The point is that not every journey is tightly time specific. When there is not a specific reason for using the jet it should not be used. But in the majority of cases its use is needed. The problem is that this government is notorious for using it when they did not have to. In about one-third of the times the current government uses it there are alternatives. In the remaining two-thirds there is no alternative.

The fact that you think these trips "junkets" shows how little you really know about government. A friend of mine was a government advisor and had to go on a lot of these "junkets". He hated every minute of them. He hated having to be out at Baldonnel at some ungodly hour in the morning. He hated flying around in the rather cramped jet where if there was any medium sized delegation it was cramped and uncomfortable. He hated the 'divebomb' at the end where the air corp fly from very high very suddenly down to landing level. And he hated them coming home having hated every minute of the trip only to be told by people that he had been on a "junket". He got so fed up of it he begged to be allowed go by ordinary plane. One day he was allowed to. He left Ireland in theory in a flight two hours before his minister, but sure enough the flight was redirected to hundreds of miles from where he was going, and to his minister's fury he missed the meeting. He was told that any more he had to go by the jet. And he hated every goddamn minute of it. Every time he'd get an email saying 'council meeting, X date. Make sure to be in Baldonnell by 7am' he would groan and end up taking a prozac. (Seriously!) When a couple of years after leaving government he was invited to go back he declined, specifically because of the travel and the "goddamned jet". He was asked recently if he would return and do a stint again in a job in government which involved a lot of foreign travel by government jet and said bluntly 'No. Never ever ever."

Fergus Finlay in his account of his career in government in a book a couple of years ago tells similar stories about the nightmare of travelling by government jet. He too had the same irritation with it.

BTW one of the main reasons Dermot Ahern begged to be moved from Foreign Affairs by Cowen was because he was so totally fed up of all the travel. He got fed up spending much of his life living out of a suitcase, and finding that much of the contact with his family was via the telephone. By the end he was thoroughly fed up with it.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

Auditor #9 wrote:

QnA is getting axed .... !??


nooooooooooooooooo

That's exactly what I said. Hopefully they replace it. Was Today Tonight before that? Or was that before Primetime ?

7 Days begat the Politics Programme begat Today Tonight begat Prime Time and Farrell which then merged back into Prime Time.

RTE has a bizarre tendency to axe a successful programme and then start from scratch trying to create a replacement when they already had one with an established audience. For example, they have had numerous clothes shows, each of which was axed just as it they had a show that had established itself. It is classic RTÉ. So while the BBC has had Panorame for 50 years, and ITV had World in Action for decades, RTE chopped and changed over and over. Similarly ITV has had Emmerdale and Coronation Street for ages, the latter nearly 50 years now, and the BBC has had EastEnders continually since the 1980s, RTE launched Tolka Row, then inexplicably axed it, then had the Riordans (which Emmerdale was modelled on. ITV travelled to Ireland to study The Riordans as a template) which crazily was axed, to be replaced by Bracken, which was replaced by Glenroe, which eventually was axed.

Q&A is flawed and needs fixing. But axing it is plain crazy. When you have a recognisable product why in the hell should you axe it? All they will do, true to form, will re-invent the same show under a different name, experiment with it, find the new experiments won't work and end up back where they started with another Q&A under a different name. It is so typically RTÉ. (And you'd think they would have copped on that with the economy in the shits now, this is the ideal time for Q&A because we are going to have years of rather heated political rows.)

I am not one of those people who spend their time bitching about RTÉ. But their endless pointless axing of shows to replace them with a carbon copy is irritating. So we have Landmark axed to be replaced by . . . Landmark II (aka 'Ear to the Ground'), Head 2 Toe replaced by another clothes show, umpteen political shows, endless soap opera rebirths, Tuesday File becoming Prime Time Investigates, Keating on Sunday becoming Farrell, Crimeline becoming Crimecall etc etc. Sometimes I just want to scream at RTE - 'for the love of God, will yiz stop axing and relaunching the same stuff and leave well enough alone. If it works, keep it. If it doesn't, scrap it. But stop axing a perfectly good show to replace it by its twin. It is a pain in the bum.'

Quote :

(And you'd think they would have copped on that with the economy in the shits now, this is the ideal time for Q&A because we are going to have years of rather heated political rows.)

maybe that's why?

Excellent post PK. Don't be surprised if that post shows up somewhere else.

Auditor #9 wrote:

Quote :

(And you'd think they would have copped on that with the economy in the shits now, this is the ideal time for Q&A because we are going to have years of rather heated political rows.)

maybe that's why?

Posted that question on the other place. Biggest political crisis since the civil war - axe the main political debate programe. You know it makes sense. The only place we got to see the whites of their eyes.

The last programme I saw was an invited audience only. Government in hiding from the people? Coalition politics would = 3 in a row from the same Cabinet too.

I've emailed RTE to give out.

You don't get it either PK because clearly you are absorbed in your own rhetoric rather than reading what is being said, if it is routine travel book the Minister on 10 flights, if he misses one, put him on another. If it is important travel, take the jet. There are hundreds of people every day who travel between Dublin and London on scheduled flights, many of whom have meetings which are just as important for the Irish economy in a private sense. I once sat on the front row flight of a Ryanair flight to Gatwick talking to the man below. You may not recognise him but he just happens to be the Managing Director of Microsoft Ireland and I am sure his meetings are just as vital to Ireland's "Inc" as the majority of those meetings which our Ministers attend. By all means, take the jet to an international summit, but a Minister does not have to travel on it for every single meeting.



At least you seem to have finally got the message half way through your post which was largely just repitition of your previous post. My point was that where the use of the jet is unnecessary it should not be used. This is something, in your excitement, that you clearly failed to pick up upon. Again, nobody is saying that we should scrap the jets, but are you yourself admit they are overused. Thus, we're actually in agreement so stop feeling that you need to demonstrate your ability for verbal diahheria just to let us know you can construct rhetorical sentences.

Papal_knight Two wrote:

The problem with the current government
is that like so much else they use it as a perk of office, travelling
to places when commercial aircraft are available, and there are no time
pressures. There simply was no need for O'Dea and Coughlan to use it to
travel to meet Dell. They could have done the journey on a commercial
flight. (Indeed, considering how disastrous Coughlan's performance at
the meeting was - oh my God was it bad! She caused high offence to the
Americans! - it might have been better if they never went at all.)
Similarly using helicopters except for major important journeys is a
waste.

The above is your ratio, and nobody disagrees with you. Have you ever heard the phrase that you have two ears and only one mouth? Perhaps you should pick up on that.

Good points johnfas.
I sat next to John Bruton once on a Ryanair flight and immediately behind Michael O'Leary on another occasion (he collected the tickets at the boarding gate to get us on faster). The government jet has broken down a good few times, has it not?

John Bowman on Morning Ireland soon

goodbye John

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