The first round points can be accessed at http://gavreilly.com/cao2010.

Disclaimer: This comes with no guarantees of accuracy, etc etc. Just saved and re-uploaded the document from the CAO’s website.

AIB is offering to pay employees’ golf club fees and leisure club memberships worth millions of euro every year despite being crippled with debt and facing massive job losses and a likely state takeover.

The crisis-ridden bank confirmed the generous staff perks scheme on the same day it raised interest rates for hard-pressed mortgage holders by half a percent – and just days after it announced record losses of €2 billion for the first half of the year. The interest rate hike will affect approximately 50,000 customers who hold standard variable mortgages. [more]

The piece goes on to say that the scheme is offered to each of the bank’s 12,500 employees in Ireland, as well as the 2,500 it employs in Britain. Up to €2,500, it says, is offered to each employee.

Meanwhile, the bank increased its variable mortgage interest rate from 2.75% to 3.25% yesterday, which will (it is reported) hit about 50,000 mortgage holders with a monthly repayments increase of about €27.

So this morning, after seeing the Examiner‘s lead, I decided to crunch some figures.

In the results it filed in March, for the year ending 31 December 2009, AIB said it had a residential mortgage book valued at about €27.1bn. In layman’s terms, that means that homeowners in Ireland collectively hold mortgages, from AIB, to the tune of €27,100,000,000.

How much of this €27.1bn is lent at a variable rate? Well, that depends on who you ask. This morning’s Irish Times estimates that about 30% of the bank’s mortgages are lent at a variable rate (thanks to Aaron Quigley for alerting me), while Karl Deeter from Irish Mortgage Brokers suggested to me that the variable portfolio amounts to about 20% of the total.

This is where it gets interesting. Yesterday’s Irish Times posited that the 0.5% increase in the interest rate would result in the monthly repayment increasing by €26.96 for every €100,000 outstanding on a borrower’s mortgage.

[Update, 2pm: I've crunched more numbers using slightly more mathematical formulae than those in the comments or, presumably, those used by The Irish Times. Using the c = (r / (1 − (1 + r) ^− N))P formula the monthly repayment works out at €26.96 for every €100,000 outstanding on a 30-year mortgage. The post previously stated an increase of €26.82.]

So, if 30% of AIB’s mortgages are lent at a variable rate (€8.13bn), then AIB stands to make an extra €2,191.848 a month from the increased interest rate – that’s €26.17 million a year. If as Karl suggests the rate is closer to 20% (€5.42bn), it will make €1,461,232 extra per month, or €17.44 a year.

Now let’s go back to the gym membership scheme. Though it’s unlikely, let’s suggest – as well most employees might want to – that every single employee claims their €2,500, there’s a chance that AIB is faced with 15,000 bills for €2,500 every year. That’s €37,500,000 a year for AIB employees to go to the gym or the golf club.

So, if 20% of AIB’s mortgages are at a variable rate, then the amount by which AIB is hitting mortgage holders – the vast majority of whom, we can guess, are in negative equity – doesn’t even cover half of its bill for sending its employees to the gym or golf club.

Let me repeat that. AIB is increasing its mortgage interest rates, when potentially more than double the amount it will make is being offered to send its employees to the gym every year.

It will take at the very least 17.10 months, and at most 25.66 months, for the increased mortgage rates to cover AIB’s annual cost for the scheme.

This is the bank that got a €3.5bn recapitalisation bailout from the taxpayer last year, will probably need another one to the same amount this year (according to JP Morgan, anyway) and which has been able to offload billions in loans to NAMA that it otherwise would probably never be able to get back.

First, some background. Seanad Éireann, as I wrote in a piece for The University Observer in October,

is an imperfect institution. It is little more than a political car park for those postponing the inevitable decline into retirement; a breeding ground for a political party’s new hopes, trying to blood their new meat in the life of Leinster House before the savagery of the Dáil floor; and a consolation prize for those who came close-ish to winning a seat in the lower house in the previous election.

Its work is limited; its relative power to put a stop to legislation is nil; its members largely wish they were elsewhere. It’s a morose place where the good go to die and the young come to roar, all just to get a few minutes’ token coverage on Oireachtas Report three times a week for their trouble.

And, despite the chamber’s activity, this is a perception I think the Seanad has probably not done a whole lot to counter.

However, it does not need to be so, and the members of the House know it. In March 2009 The Late Late Show hosted a discussion (sadly no longer available which featured several members of the upper house arguing the merits of reforming the upper house to becoming an entity that the public had knowledge of, respect for, and trust in.

The Seanad, of course, has had its fair share of enemies in the past. In 1936, as Donie Cassidy saw fit to remind us on Wednesday morning, de Valera – frustrated with a Seanad full of independents and its hampering his legislative agenda – abolished the chamber completely, only to reconstitute it the following year. In the past, former PD leader Michael McDowell has been an outspoken critic of the House and demanded its scrapping – only to turn around a few months ago and say he felt it neither “wise nor beneficial” to scrap it, and to call for its reform last week.

That, of course, leaves Enda Kenny, who seems not to have noticed that should he conspire to lose the next election (an entirely plausible hypothesis) that the manner in which local councillors elect the majority of its members will guarantee an anti-FF majority irrespective of the Taoiseach’s nominees. Except a volte-face soon.

The Seanad and students: natural bedfellows

That volte-face, of course, will have been made all the easier to bare by the Seanad doing its best, as Suzy put it, to earn its keep this week. When I was involved in student politics, way back when, I ran for Chair of UCDSU Council because I loved two things: procedure and its application, and a decent debate. More than anything, though, I used to love the annual trip to USI Congress, and all because of Kissinger’s immortal words:

Student politics are the most vicious kind of politics that exist, because the stakes are so low.

While Kissinger’s edict is often interpreted in a cynical way, I choose to interpret it in a more well-meaning manner. Student politics are so vicious because the practical imnplications of their debates are not of a student’s concern. Thus, a USI debate on whether the morning-after pill should be available over the counter (to name one example that comes to mind) became an intense moral dissection of how such an act would play on society, and the slippery slides it may lead the country to.

The difficulty, of course, with being inside the circle of student politics is that it’s too easy to forget thaat such arguments will not lead to an immediate legislative shift. USI passing a motion calling for the pill to be over-the-counter does not mean that young girls can walk into a chemist the following day. But that real life implication is divorced from the debate: it’s all about the moral, the wrong and the right.

(The USI debate I mention, by the way, ended in a tie. Which, I thought, was a perfectly appropriate and meaningful result.)

I like to think of the Seanad as being in a similar conundrum, though naturally with the stakes raised. But watching Rónán Mullen and the Fianna Fáil dissidents argue the right of a civil servant to decline registering a civil partnership – because a truly liberal society, they argued with a degree of merit, shouldn’t force people to act against their will – rang a lot of the same bells.

The Seanad is, in de Valera’s original vision, that kind of chamber able to apply the Dáil’s hypotheses to the real world and critically analyse their merits in a way which the Dáil itself – handcuffed by the professionalism of the politicians who sit in it – cannot.

Sadly, this role is one that a further ingratiation with the Dáil itself – and, by the same virtue, the political ‘establishment’ – only serves to lose. Where those with commercial expertise should be easily electable to the Industrial Panel of the Seanad, they usually can’t – not, at least, unless they’re a member of a political party with a significant presence on local councils.

But this week’s debate – which debated, in a genuine sense, the merits and demerits of the legislation before it in a way the Dáil could never have managed – showed that the Seanad still has the capability to act in the way The Long Fellow would have wished for. Once the culture of free rein and conscience had been established by one FF senator deciding to jump ship, it made it all the easier for two more to join him. And suddenly, the usual rubber-stamping the Seanad gives to the Dáil’s work became that little bit more hard to come by, and the Seanad thus acted closer to the way it’s actually meant to. And when it works… by God, it works.

Ireland doesn’t work

The major problem with Ireland as a democracy is that the legislative branch simply doesn’t function in the way a legislative branch is supposed to. In other nations, a local MP is elected with only a minor responsibility to serve their constituents and a far greater focus on their legislative agenda. The Oireachtas, in short, isn’t meant to be a forum of local reps, it’s meant to be a body of lawmakers. And sadly, it’s largely anything but. We continually elect the likes of Jackie Healy-Rae to our parliament; people with every interest on making sure their name is emotionally attached to the latest main road linking two towns, and no interest in being the one putting their name to the legislation that actually builds it.

The Seanad, though, is our getaway clause. The Seanad is the area in which our legislators are not bound by culture to hold constituency clinics or to fight for the interests of the people from their locale who share their political hue. The Seanad is our chance to elect legislators who just want to legislate. People like David Norris, Joe O’Toole or Shane Ross. Lawmakers. Not public representatives, just parliamentarians, who want to be in the legislature because they want to legislate.

So let’s make it work

So, with that in mind, here’s a couple of quick ideas to get the Seanad going.

First of all, let’s give the Seanad a far shorter recess than the Dáil – and let the public know about it. Today’s news agenda was entirely sculped by the fact that the Dáil will be in recess for twelve weeks. Nobody seemed to remark for a moment that the Seanad will be sitting again next Tuesday, quietly getting on with things while everyone assumes they’re on holiday.

Further to this, given the fact that the Dáil isn’t sitting until late September, use the extra time wisely and get the Seanad sits to work through its backlog of undiscussed motions. Thursday’s Seanad order paper – listing all the motions and bills on the body’s agenda to be discussed – ran to 16 pages. While the Dáil is on pause, introducing new bills only adds extra work – but there’s a lot of motions, many of them apolitical, sitting on the agenda waiting to be discussed. The Seanad is our prime national debating forum. Let’s let it debate and play to its strengths.

Let’s also remove its image as a halfway house between the creche and the deathbed by holding Seanad elections directly alongside Dáil elections. Most people have contempt for the Seanad because it’s populated by people on their way into, on their way out of, or in between stints in the Dáil. By putting the elections at the same time, the Seanad ballot papers will be populated only by people who want to be on them. A house of parliament shouldn’t be somewhere people see as a silver medal. The Seanad, and Ireland, deserves better than being a consolation prize.

Let’s introduce the graduate reform programme we approved in a referendum 31 years ago this month (!!). Currently Trinity graduates get 3 senators all to themselves; graduates from UCC, NUI Galway, NUI Maynooth and UCC share another three between them. Those who graduated from two Irish universities get no representation, nor do any from the ITs. Let’s pass an act getting the institutions to hand over their graduate records, and task the NUI with maintaining a roll (they already do it for four big colleges, so why not?). Then merge the two three-seaters into one six-seater graduate panel, et voila – instant improvement in public profile.

Of course, all of that comes as a stepping stone before an actual Seanad reform. With people from every side of the House being in favour of making the Seanad more relevant, why not capitalise on that appetite – and the inevitable few months’ downtime between an election and the Seanad convening properly – to formulate universally acceptable ideas on what should change, and have them ready for approval as soon as things get going.

Let’s further divide the Seanad from the Dáil by having it not acknowledge party memberships. By all means, have a Government-sponsored minority (let’s perhaps allow the Taoiseach their discretion to keep their 11 nominees) to allow some coordination of the legislative agenda between the Houses, but having a stable of independents would require every piece of legislation to command a cross-industrial consensus. And if that means that legislation is restricted to the practical things we can all agree on, then that’s no bad thing.

And hopefully, all of the above will help give the Seanad its own identity. If it’s to survive and thrive, it’s going to need the public to believe in it. So plug its work and existence separately to that of the Dáil. That’s going to mean giving it its own significant presence on the imminent MerrionStreet.ie. (Currently the YouTube channel is almost entirely made up of Dáil speeches.)

The future

The Seanad is a house of parliament of one of the countries most envied by the world. It deserves better than being a stepping stone or retirement home. It should be modelled to play to the strengths of those who want to be in it.

Perhaps someday, someday, it might what it deserves. Until it does, we merely get what we deserve for putting up with it being second best.

I wasn’t able to find one anywhere online so emailed the clerk of the Dáil’s office looking to see if they could help; I got an email back this morning from Gina Long in the Clerk’s office (thanks, Gina) with a copy of the seating plan, and a list of who sits in which seat.

Given the amount of people who were keen to get a hold of  a copy of this when I went looking around on Twitter last week I’m throwing up the copy here for public reference. The chart and accompanying lists can be referenced when looking at the electronic voting display on Dáil broadcasts.

The seating plan was supplied in .dwg format so I’m uploading a .jpg copy here for the sake of easy access; the list of seats comes in two formats, one sorted by seat number and the other sorted by each TD’s surname in alphabetical order.

• Official seating plan of Dáil Éireann as used for electronic voting (JPG image)
• List of Dáil seats and who sits in them, sorted alphanumerically by seat number (PDF format)
• List of Dáil seats and who sits in them, sorted alphabetically by TD’s surname (PDF format)

Two thoughts struck me as I wandered around both:

- Isn’t there something sad about the fact that, although having a famous artist’s collections distributed around the world means more people have greater access to them, you can’t go to any one place to see an entire artist’s collection? I was meant to be in Amsterdam earlier this week (cheers, Eyjafjallajokull). It would make sense that I would be able to take in the entire collection of Piet Mondrian – an artist whose works have always been particularly striking to me – while in his hometown, or at least his home country. Yet, I saw some of his stuff in MoMA, New York, and more of it in IMMA last week.

Isn’t it sad that there aren’t individual go-to places for this kind of stuff? To me it’s a shame that there’s nowhere where you can see every non-privately owned Warhol / da Vinci / Monet/ Mondrian / whoever.

- Being a geek, and as something of a corollary to the first thought, it strucke me as a shame that that whatever about the merits of having all an artist’s work in one place (because, fair enough, people are allowed to have private collections in one place or another) – why isn’t more of an effort made to harness the internet in allowing people enjoy art from a distance? Why should I have to go to IMMA or the Ulster Museum or MoMA to enjoy a piece of art on tour? Why can’t the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation reproduce graphics of every piece of work the guy painted?

And, more pressingly, why don’t more people create more art for the internet? It seems to me that nobody creates artistic exhibitions made directly for the screen (other than in video form, but I mean in the more traditional sense of exhibition – static artwork and words, etc).

Here’s an idea: make an exhibition that instead of being limited to one place at any one time, exists everywhere for everyone to see. Set up a website, ask people to hit F11 and click the ‘Enter’ link, and use the screen to create and showcase art.

It’s something I’ve been pondering, and something I might revisit. Watch this space.

(And yes, I haven’t blogged in ages. Suffice it to say I’ve been sleeping up.)

So. What’s next?

One of the big things on the list – well, not that I considered it a major point, but ‘big’ in the sense that it was 90 minutes long and substantially larger than I’d anticipated – was Steve Jobs’ iPad keynote address.

This brought me nicely to a post on MediaGuardian’s PDA blog featuring five videos on how different magazine or newspaper publishers might use the touch-screen platform that the iPad will offer.

There’s a few varying approaches but these two are my favourites, showing exactly how phenomenal the power of a versatile large, touch-screen interface when combined with the fluidity of omnipresent online connectivity.

The second of these videos – from Sports Illustrated – is a particularly brilliant example of the multimedia experience. The stream of tweets as we watch events like the Six Nations is proof of how we watch TV with our laptops on full pelt. The first one – from Wired – is exactly how media-rich the magazine experience can be made and augmented in a Minority Report-style world of rich data.

Notably, however, there’s no such innovative approach being exhibited by any newspaper – the closest there is is the New York Times playing with tweaked website designs so that its cluttery webpage columns fit slightly neater on a netbook-sized screen.

There’s two reasons for this – one, because no newspaper can afford to devote the requisite resources to probing the practicalities of adapting their content to the platform, and two, because there’s very little with the medium that you can really do.

News is news – by its very nature it’s factual and definitive; there’s only so many ways of stating a certain fact, especially in the current world where a single two-sentence press release with only one nugget of information serves as the substantive for a news story. Spending huge money developing a touchscreen platform doesn’t make sense when, if you put your content behind a paywall (and we’ve all seen how brilliantly that’s worked before!…), users will simply wander along to another free alternative – in particular the BBC, which is never ever going to go behind a paywall – to get the same nugget of information.

News is information and information is free. People will pay for magazine content because with magazines you buy an experience: as the Wired rep in the first video says, you pick up a magazine because you believe in the quality of the edit.

When the iPad hits the streets and matures – probably in about a year’s time when the second-generation model comes along or where mainstream magazines have adopted a wholescale dual-platform model – we’ll see just how sustainable the newspaper business might possibly be. Personally I wouldn’t be wild about holding my breath.

Most of us, when asked to close our eyes and imagine a UCD student with an eating disorder, would probably conjure up a similar image. We would probably envisage a thin young woman, wearing an oversized hoodie to cover her undernourished frame, standing outside the James Joyce Library, perhaps having a cigarette for lunch in an attempt to kick her appetite.

Far fewer of us would imagine the same scenario being played out by a young man, conscious of his weight and hoping that a hit of nicotine will be enough to get him through lunch. Fewer again would picture a muscular young man in Crunch Fitness, grunting in pain as the muscles in his arm tear from one too many bench-presses, or whose legs are buckling after a mile too far on the treadmill.

Yet this is the reality of eating disorders today – and countless male students are being affected by body image problems in more worryingly everyday ways.

Last week was National Eating Disorder Awareness week – a week dedicated to raising the public profile of the scourge of eating disorders among the general public. While public perception of such problems has been traditionally focussed on the problems experienced by young women, this year’s campaign took a less predictable focus: highlighting the rising prevalence of eating disorders among men of all ages, as embodied in behaviour that many of us might not perceive as anything other than totally ordinary.

“One of our biggest awareness campaigns last year was on challenging the stereotypes about eating disorders, because you do get this perception that it happens to 14-year-old girls and that’s it,” says Ruth Ní Eidhin of Bodywhys, the Eating Disorders Association of Ireland. “One of the big things we talked about was that, ‘no, this happens to people of any age, and it definitely does happen for men.’ We’re seeing an increase these days in the number of men who are being affected.”

Whether the current rise in the number of male patients being diagnosed with eating disorders can be attributed to a genuine increase in the number exhibiting negative body image problems, or simply because more men are now taking the first step to recovery by acknowledging that they may have a problem is unclear. Either way, Ní Eidhin believes that the burgeoning societal obsession with male health has nurtured this culture, and suggests that men of all ages – but particularly young adults – are struggling to accept this new regime. This has been given all the more prominence with the recent news that Men’s Health magazine has overtaken the less health-oriented FHM as the biggest-selling men’s magazine on these islands.

“There’s a lot more pressure on men in terms of physical appearance in the last five or ten years,” Ní Eidhin believes. “Women have been raised in a world where we’re expected to be judged on our appearance, and we’re expected to be told how we’re supposed to look or dress, or whatever, whereas for men that wasn’t as prevalent for a long time.

“Now, if you look at these Men’s Health magazines, there’s always a similar image on the cover of a guy that has this incredibly toned upper body. And that’s something that we are hearing a lot about… there is that consciousness of, ‘men are supposed to look a certain way’, and I’m not sure that existed about ten years ago.”

This emergent culture is a logical and natural progression from the stereotypical roles of each gender in modern society, where men are portrayed as the more physically capable species, expected to take care of the heavy lifting, while women are still idealised as being less physically capable, but countering this by being, in a glamorised Hollywood world at least, ‘prettier’ and more delicate.

It’s precisely this fixation with satisfying the athletic stereotype that leads so many men, Ní Eidhin reports, to their own unique form of coping: over-exercise. “It’s important to say that in the case of something like anorexia, with men it tends to be experienced a bit more differently, so rather than restricting your diet, you’re over-exercising, which is taking exercise to a compulsive level.

“If you think about the number of guys in their 20s who have to go to the gym every day… it’s at that point where they can’t miss their gym session, or they can’t miss that time in the weights room because they feel there’s a certain amount of muscle they need.”

This health-obsessed culture, of course, is not the only embodiment of male eating disorders: there is also the more high-profile stereotypical behaviour of purging food, and simply refusing to eat when their body demand nourishment. As detailed in the last Observer, pro-anorexia (or ‘pro-Ana’) websites are shockingly plentiful – but while many follow the stereotype and cater largely to females alone, the number of sites catering specifically for men trying to betray their bodies’ needs is also on the rise.

One such site – a networking site where users can leave photos of themselves for others as ‘thinspiration’ – offers some “helpful tips and tricks” for its members. “Browsing through model agency’s websites, and finding adequit [sic] thinspiration pictures,” it recommends, “can distract you from eating and feels satisfying… Wear a red/purple bracelet on the arm you always eat with. Everytime you want to grab something, the bracelet will remember you.” The most striking thing about such sites is that, though they foster a community spirit where struggling users can feel inspired by their fellow members, the aim is far from healthy: users assist each other in resisting the urge to eat, and encourage – in spite of acknowledging their medical diagnoses and the best intentions of their parents and friends – continued weight loss to the point of emaciation.

But worse than the continued support (photos of thinner men are rewarded with comments like “nice ribs”) offered is the resource of perverse motivational material, ranging from inspirational movies and songs to emotive texts such as ‘the Ana Creed’ (sample sentence: “I believe in bathroom scales as an indicator of my daily successes and failures”) and quotes promoting the values of self-control – a virtue that indulgent eating disorder victims consider to be idyllic, and one they perceive themselves as being ambassadors in spreading.

Ní Eidhin is frank in admitting that the unique problems of male bodily image disorders – and the perception that such problems are female-only and that it’s considered somewhat effeminate to come forward with such problems – mean that tackling the problem is a regrettably difficult task, especially when it seems that more and more men are falling victim to such disorders: it is estimated that ten per cent of anorexia and bulimia victims are male, though this suggestion is constantly being revised upward. This is especially worrying given the Department of Health’s recent revelation that some 200,000 people in Ireland – one in twenty people – harbour some kind of negative body image problem, and the fact that there are only three public beds in the entire country allocated to treating patients with eating disorders.

Thankfully, Ní Eidhin says that the admission of high-profile figures, such as rugby pundit George Hook and former British deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, as being victims of eating disorders have encouraged others of their gender and age to seek help for their disorders.

“It has to be said, the [media] reaction to [Prescott’s public announcement] was appalling. But, at the same time, our equivalent organisation in the UK – the number of calls they got from men in their fifties, sixties and seventies in the weeks that followed that was amazing. So there is that impact where if you see a man say, ‘Wait, this does happen to men and it’s not just young men, it’s men of any age’, it has such a huge impact.”

Unfortunately for the moment – especially given the particular keep-fit culture pervasive among young men of college-going age – there are no similarly high-profile role models for male UCD students who might suffer from a body image disorder to look up to. This is something Ní Eidhin reports that Bodywhys are trying to address, explaining a new ‘Be Body Positive’ initiative where the organisation are hoping to recruit young people who themselves are coping with eating disorders to present a positive message to their peers.

“If [young men] see someone from their own sport, from their own club, from their own team saying, ‘Wait a minute guys, this is what’s really going on behind this – mental health issues are a reality for men in this country. Let’s talk about this,’ I think it really does make a difference. You have those role models that are willing to talk about it, and not saying, ‘This is a really big step for me to talk about this.’” Ireland needs to develop a culture where it’s not considered ‘brave’, she adds, for someone to admit an eating disorder. “It has to just be ‘what you do’. It’s not brave to talk about having a broken arm.”

Sadly, though, it would appear that there are legions more young men suffering in silence. “From the men we would talk to on the helpline, there’s always that sense of, ‘I’ve suffered for so long, I’ve been completely isolated from this, and I don’t want people to know this is going on for me because it’ll be seen a sign of weakness,’” Ní Eidhin concludes. “There’s layer upon layer of barriers to people getting support, which is a real pity.”

Bodywhys offer support and guidance services to those with eating disorders, as well as their families and friends. www.bodywhys.ie

The UCD Student Health Service can assist students who believe they may have a mental health problem. Call (01) 716 3133.