Another Flaky Fianna Fáiler

Senator Mary White has a deeply silly letter(sub needed) in today's Irish Times. Silly waffle about how Shannon Airport is FF's contribution to Ireland, etc, etc:

Seán Lemass, considered the establishment of Aer Lingus to be his proudest achievement, and recognised Shannon airport as "a development which would prevent us from being cut off from the rest of the world".

Etc, etc. More about connectivity, etc, etc but, crucially there's a more than a hint of disloyalty to the government. The very same government she supports in the Seanad:

The reluctance of the Government to intervene... raises the question of the purpose of the 25 per cent stake it holds...[in Aer Lingus]. If this shareholding was not intended to influence the strategic development of the company in support of the Government's vision for the country, what purpose was envisaged for it?

Now I kind of agree with her, from an opposite point of view. But is this evidence of a lack of loyalty to the government she supports? I think it is.

RIP Tony Wilson

Tony Wilson was buried today. He was the co-founder of Factory Records and the Hacienda; and general man-about-Manchester. In its 1980s prime Factory released some pretty amazing music from Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays.

24 Hour Party People - what you could very roughly descirbe as a biopic - was released back in 2002. It's long been one of my faves and Steve Coogan's portrayal of Wilson captures him as both deeply silly yet oddly effective at organising a chaotic bunch of people into making very good music.

Check this clip where Joy Division record She's Lost Control while Tony minces round in the background. Well worth a look.

Bad Journalists Part 1

Is Tom McGurk Ireland's worst journalist? Quite possibly. Now RTE doesn't let people on to complain about the toilet facilities in (hypothetically) the parish hall in Swinford, Co Mayo. But someone up there in Montrose thinks that it's okay for Tom to waffle on air about how he won't be able to get his pre-match pints with his rugby chums in Jury's anymore, even though it's just as parochial. But he's often worse in print. This week in the Sunday Business Post Tom's noticed about fifteen years after everyone else that:

The Premier League is all about money and the clubs are little more than huge brands...Football is now quite simply a vast global merchandising industry, still stretched across what were the bones of the old professional game in England....[T]he English Premier League...is now less a domestic league than a world one.

And just in case you think Tom's being excessively anglocentric he notes that:

It has also overhauled the Spanish, Italian and German leagues in financial terms and, because of its enormous wage levels, attracts the very best players in the world. It’s no wonder that, as a consequence, the England national team is in the doldrums. Rather than attempt to produce homegrown players, the English clubs are now more likely to sign foreign talent.

Well by that logic shouldn't the French, German and Italian national teams be in the doldrums too? Now soccer isn't really my thing but I seem to remember those three making semi-finals of the World Cup last summer and one of them winning it.

Then he just gets is plain wrong:

Since the inception of the Premier League the big four [Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United and Chelsea] have won all the major silverware

Now Liverpool have never won a Premier League title. And Blackburn have won one in 1995. So that makes you wrong Tom. Not just wrong in your opinions. But in facts that would take a minute to check.

Then he gets it wrong again:

The Premier League, of course, is effectively owned by Rupert Murdoch in all but name,

Well not quite. Sky used to have the rights to broadcast all Premiership games. Not any more as Setanta have quite a few. So that makes Tom wrong. Plain wrong. And then he mentions that the Premiership is 'the biggest viewed sporting event in the world'. Nope Not the World Cup, the Superbowl, or even the Olympics.

But then it gets curiouser. Tom writes that:

What further complicates the coverage of the game is the fact that not only does Murdoch effectively ‘‘own’’ it, he also owns the principal television and newspaper outlets covering it.

What, essentially, we have here is some sort of cartel effect, with the vast financial resources in the game keeping everybody happy, and with the scale of Murdoch’s press ownership preventing journalistic scrutiny.

Now in fact the Premiership is owned by the twenty clubs which comprise it. Previously I thought that Tom thought that owning BSkyB meant that Murdoch effectively owned the Premier League. Now he says that that 'Murdoch effectively ‘‘own[s]’’ it {the Premiership]' but controls all the media coverage as well. So how precisely does Murdoch effectively own the Premiership? Puzzled? Me too. And if Murdoch 'owns' the Premiership that makes it a monopoly, not a fucking cartel.

Even more bizarrely Tom obviously thinks he's the first to notice the commercialization of soccer. He congratulates himself on a job well done:

Few are prepared to break cover and say it, but the truth that dare not speak its name is that, increasingly, the emperor may have no clothes. Today’s English Premier League is less and less about sport, and more and more about marketing.

Despite all the mistakes and confusion there does lurk in the article a truth that dare not speak its name, that someone is a pretty bad journalist.

Drug Outbreak or Just More Bad Stats?

Those of you out there who've touched on the humanities at some point of their academic career will probably heard the term discourse. It's a slightly nebulous academic term which roughly means that every area of discussion or debate has a set of unwritten rules governing what can and cannot be said. And while the rules may appear obvious they generally reflect the dominant ideological paradigm. In doing so 'they limit the terms of acceptable speech' (as Judith butler says)so that the very terms of the debate frame its outcome. The implication of all this is that academics are the only ones wise enough to see through all of this, which annoys me a bit. But it's a useful concept nonetheless.

Which takes us to the discourse of how drug crime is generally reported in Ireland*. Here's a very few assumptions which underpin every article you'll read on the topic - assumptions that are far from self-evident on closer examination:

• Garda estimates of street value are always correct
• The fight against drugs is not being lost. Nor is it being won.
• Some drugs are worse than others
  

Take for example Conor Lally's article of 30th December 2006 "Illegal Drugs Trade Worth 1 Billion Here" (subscriptions unfortunately needed) which extrapolates from drug seizures that the drug trade now amounts to 1m a year. As the value of a black market is never easy to estimate the method used here is that drug seizures amount to 10% of the total trade. So just take the 'street value', multiply by ten and there you are. Easy? Well not really. The 10% assumption is impossible to verify (in either being too small or too large) and it is severely unreliable to extrapolate a total trade from it. It's the kind of assumption a professional economist would get laughed out of town for if presenting a business case for building, say, a bridge.Yet when the Gardai estimate the drug trade in Ireland this seems quite legitimate and never questioned in the Irish media. Perhaps the Gardai had a great year last year and seized 30% of all drugs imported. Maybe they had a bad year and seized 5%. But we wouldn't know this, we can't ever know this the media still publishes these dicey figures as fact and never questions the assumptions.

The article cites a senior Garda source (why unnamed?) saying "while the increase in drugs seizures indicated a growing drugs trade here, it was also evidence of the success of the National Drugs Unit here." This may be true. But some might argue that a "growing drugs trade" indicates that the National Drugs Unit is not being very successful. You could also argue that "increases in drug seizures" are the sign of the National Drugs Unit being very successful and the drug trade actually decreasing. Who can tell? I honestly don't know, but the article doesn't even offer an opinion or seek out an expert who might know.

The placing of a value of €420m on the value of cannabis sold in Ireland is completely unreasonable. The most up-to-date research suggests that in the last year 5.0% of Irish 15-64 year olds have used cannabis, but only 2.6% have done so in the previous month. This demographic consists of approximately 3 million people. This implies that there are 150,000 users of cannabis in any given year. But this would mean that the €2800 worth of cannabis is consumed per user per year - and half of those users haven't even touched the stuff in the last month! My understanding of such matters is that it takes quite a bit of smoking to get through €55 of the stuff in a week, never mind the cost of tobacco. I'll politely assume that Conor Lally's ignorance of drug values is greater than this girl's, but as a journalist who writes about the area it really shouldn't be.

Further down the article mentions that only €3m of heroin was seized last year and using our magical multiple we get to an annual trade of €30m. But most recent statistics put the number of opiate-users in the country at 15,000. If we again assume that half are heroin users (which is one of the assumptions of the article which seems plausible) the figures suggest that an average heroin habit can be run for about the same price as 40 cigarettes a day! Am I the only one who notices anomalies like this?

The article also cites a source claiming that Ireland is in the early stages of a cocaine epidemic. While I don't want to resort to quoting a dictionary, an epidemic is a widespread outbreak of a serious disease where many people are at risk of infection. No one is at risk of taking cocaine if they don't want feel like it. Throughout the article there is no refutation of either Garda or NACD figures. It's pretty obvious that these are people with an ongoing professional interest in ensuring that reported drug crime is reasonably high.Quoting them without question is lazy.

There are two very interesting stories about drugs in Ireland that to my knowledge no journalist has every pursued. One is that Garda sources regularly overstate the value of drug seizures by at least 50% and anyone who even knows someone who has bought drugs on can do the math and figure this out. The other is that there are an estimated 15,000 opiate addicts in Ireland and 60% of drug-related deaths every year are heroin-related. Heroin is clearly the worst drug out there in terms of impact on users and those around them.Yet heroin-related prosecutions represent a mere 11% of the total while cannabis prosecutions (usually simple possession) account for about 55%, and have been growing. Why are Garda resources so skewed in this direction? No journalist ever asks.


*Manifesto alert. Hibernium believes in the citizen's right to imbibe any recreational drug she likes in full cognicanse of its dangers. However we don't think this is necessarily wise and certainly think that she should be financially incentivized into healthier types of fun.

Bad Statistcs in the Irish Times

Sean Flynn has a front-page piece in the Irish Times entitled Number of firsts at DCU doubles in less than decade which has a very interesting point about grade inflation and then proceeds to make some very silly conclusions from the statistics on offer.

The accompanying table shows universities have a higher proportion of students getting honours degrees and concludes that "When figures for both firsts and 2:1 honours degrees are combined, UCC and Trinity emerge as the universities where students appear to have the best prospects". This is plain wrong. Yes, these two universities have the highest proportion of students getting good degrees. Yet these statistics say nothing about the ability of candidates on entry or the distribution of grades in the courses the universities have to offer. Arts and social science subjects are generally harder to fail yet harder to excel in while the distribution for science and engineering subjects is flatter with both more firsts and more thirds. Hinting to potential entrants that they'll do better at one institution over another (as the piece insinuates) is simply misleading.

Also Flynn notes that UCD fails to return a full set of results to the HEA yet concludes that: "13 per cent gained a first and 26 per cent a upper second-class honours (2:1) degree." even though the percentages in the accompanying table fail to sum to 100%. Help anyone?

In reality the quality of degrees is unlikely to vary very much from university to university in Ireland. Why? It's a small country so there's only one place to study some subjects. How can you judge UCD's veterinary graduates and Trinity's pharmacy graduates, even against each other? You can't as they're the only places in the Republic to study the subjects. Identical salary scales, equal capitation and little university autonomy ensures that the 'product' on offer in Irish universities is going to vary very little. Policy has always been focussed on ensuring breadth of subjects and wide access and sometimes quality at undergraduate level has suffered as a result.

I'd like to see a serious study (a bit like this one) of university gradings controlling for ability of entrants, drop-out rates and the type of course mix on offer. Until that's done there's very few conclusions (and certainly no front-page ones) to be drawn.

Collusion in the Newspaper Market?

The price of the three national daily broadsheets went up last week to €1.70 - a decision of such startling simultaneity and similarity which you're unlikely to read about in, well, any of the three national daily broadsheets. And while here at Hibernium we don't have access to a handy record of how these things are timed I do seem to recall price changes working quite like this in the past. One newspaper changes its cover price and the others follow within the week. This isn't unusual - La Stampa, La Repubblica and il Corriere della Sera (all quite complementary newspapers) retail at the same level in Italy last time we checked.

Add to this the fact that the newspapers engage in a kind of resale price maintenance, the practise where encouraged to charge the same price as their competitors, and you might wonder if some kind of anti-competitive behaviour is under way. A cartel? Not quite. The three papers are close but nowhere near perfect substitutes and the greater the degree of substitutability the less the scope for cartel-like behaviour. Oil cartel OPEC works (reasonably) well because crude oil is pretty much the same wherever. Newspapers vary in both scope and quality. Cartels are also explicitly illegal and it would be very surprising if the management of the various newspapers rang each other up and coordinated price changes. This is particularly the case when it's quite clear that they don't need to. Theoretical models have been developed to support the notion of firms changing prices in reaction to other firms' pricing signals with not a word of explicit communication.

In the Irish newspaper market a tacit agreement exists whereby a price increase from one newspaper is quickly followed by an increase from the two others. The resale price maintenance ensures that the increase is passed on swiftly and uniformly. Interestingly this is an area where we're somewhat surprised that retailers are so happy to acquiesce. Both the mark-up and own-price elasticity of each newspaper is likely to vary from retailer to retailer. So the loss in sales from a price increase may be compensated by the increase in revenue for a large retailer but not a small one, or even vice versa. So why the I suspect that newspaper retail is an area so profitable as to make such considerations unimportant.

But why are the newspapers so keen to not compete on price? Well they know that customers are fond of their own paper and that cross-price elasticities are low. In other words quite a significant change reduction in price would be needed in order to attract a significant chunk of competitors. And I suspect the revenue attracted from new readers at a much lower price would not nearly be enough to compensate the loss of giving the paper to existing readers for less. And no price competition doesn't mean no competition. Given an equal price you can judge the Irish Examiner's sports coverage to be better than the Irish Independent's and not have your purchase decision confused by price considerations.

So it's clear that the papers have quite happily convinced themselves that price competition isn't in their own collective or individual best interests. And it's hard to argue that the consumer doesn't suffer from prices being higher than what they could be. Independent News and Media in particular seems peculiarly profitable given the questionable quality of much of its Irish stable. So what could the Competition Authority do about this? Very little. First it would have to establish that Irish consumers suffer as a result of abnormally high prices and then they would have to establish that explicitly illegal collusion is taking place (for the record we don't believe that it is). So don't expect to see prosecutions or even one of their very well-meaning reports any time soon. But do expect to be paying €2 for your daily paper (whatever your fancy) by the end of the decade.

Curiosity: The Irish Times now retails £1 in London making it a significantly cheaper product than the product at home. Add to that the fact that the London edition doesn't advertise UK-based businesses and it's clear that it's a significantly lower revenue-rasiser than the Irish edition. Reasons? Well, the London edition is a complementary, rather than integral product. Once the fixed costs of Dublin-based office and staffing are covered by Irish sales the marginal cost of marketing and distribution abroad are very low given today's printing and distribution possibilities. Add to that the fact that it's competing in a lower-price newspaper market and there's no fear of chunks of ITs being picked up in London and whisked for a cut-price sale in Dublin and the lower pricing regime looks quite normal.

Welcome

Welcome readers

Hibernium is here. It's a been a while since I got tired with a the quality of what is regarded as coverage of politics and policy in Ireland a soon after that I decided that sometimes I could do just a little better. So here we are. From the comfort of this girl's bedroom comes a forum for comment and analysis of the news of the day to long-term trends in Ireland, and sometimes even the world beyond. Things I like include stuff like demographics, constitutions and antitrust economics. Expect to see things in this vein. Stuff that bores me includes science, technology and golf. Also expect to see a bit of press criticism. The Irish media never truly criticises or contextualises itself so expect to see an attempt here.

In the spirit of such things I'll be clear. I am not a political partisan, indeed in Ireland this would be quite hard given the homogenietiy of the political class. I am a liberal in both the social and economic spheres although I certainly intend to surprise you. I won't be coming at any topic with any vested interest. I don't know anyone of importance and nobody pays me so expect to see analysis and criticism both at and from all angles.

However Hibernium is comment and analysis constrained by internet resources and the virtue of being a barely part-time activity. So I might get things wrong the odd time, but do feel free to correct me: hibernien at gmail. dot com. And if you're good enough I'll even post what you have to say.

Happy reading, Hibernien