Category: ireland | 愛爾蘭| 아일랜드 | アイルランド

Céad míle fáilte – welcome to the Ireland category of this blog. This is where I share anything that relates to the Republic of Ireland, business issues relating to Ireland, the Irish people, or Irish culture.

Given that I am Irish, a number of these posts are more personal in nature and based on observation when taking time out to see the family. If I am honest about it, there is less of these posts than there should be. Life gets in the way and I don’t get to the home country as much as I would like.

Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Aer Lingus launched a new advert that I thought was particularly notable that might appear in branding as well as Ireland. It is a small market of seven million or so and doesn’t have that many distinct brands.

Or if there was a new white paper from UCD (University College Dublin), that might appear in ideas and Ireland. If there is Irish related subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.

  • Roots

    I spent a good deal of time thinking about roots and what they mean to me, with a change in my wider family situation. I spent a lot of my time growing up on the family farm owned by an Uncle. I knew the neighbours, knew the dogs and was familiar with many farm chores. The farm has gone up for sale a couple of months ago. My cousin who inherited the farm can’t run it part time and make it work.

    The Island

    As long as my Mum had known it the farm had been called The Island. There was never a reason given for the name, but one can guess from aerial photo below. Apart from a depression where the farm buildings are, the rest of the land slopes down and away from the farm.

    The land never flooded. My great grandfather died as a relatively young man so my grandfather and his mother farmed the land. Before, during and after Ireland’s bid for independence.

    My grandfather married late on life and had four children. My Mum, who wouldn’t inherit the farm because she was a girl. My eldest uncle inherited the farm and eventually left it to one of my cousins as he didn’t have children of his own.

    Given the changing regulations in Ireland, in order for my cousin to operate the farm, they had had to put in logged hours on the farm under supervision of my Uncle in lieu of studying at an agricultural college.

    The Island
    The Island from the air.

    The farm changed over that time. Originally the farm house was in the depression where there are now farm buildings. Only a small store room remains from that time. During British rule, houses were put in the most unproductive parts of the land, so the original house was dank and damp. The farmers didn’t own their land but instead paid rent to British landlords. The roots of the independence meeting was much about land ownership and owning one’s own future as it was about the irish identity, culture and language.

    Externally the old farmhouse looked like a chocolate box thatched farm cottage, but the reality it was different. When my Mum was a child the current house was built, some of the furniture including cupboards, dressers and chairs were moved from the old house. Everything has been covered with an annual coat of ‘oil paint’ – a gloss household paint.

    Irish gothic

    I can remember when the farm started to get grants from the EEC (also known as the Common Market), my grandmother decided to get rid of the old wooden chairs and buy new ones with vinyl covered foam seats.

    Around this time, the rural areas of Ireland began to see bungalows and cars proliferate. The main reason was agricultural grants making farming less of a hand-to-mouth existence and the publication of an architectural plan catalogue by Jack Fitzsimmons called Bungalow Bliss. This allowed multi-generational living on the family farm and commuting to work in the town. The homes were modern, light, airy and despised by Ireland’s intelligentsia.

    The Island

    I am just old enough to remember electricity going into the farm house. While Ireland was economically backward; the farm was notably late in having electricity installed. In fact, pylons had gone across the land for years earlier and electricity had first been put in to power the milking parlour. When I was in my teens an extension was built with a hot water tank, radiators, a bathroom and flushing toilets.

    The old house was replaced with a hay shed and a couple of outhouses. An animal crush was built by my Dad who is handy with building and steelwork, including custom-lengthened gates. The crush was to help with treatment of the animals. There’s not much else you can do if you want to vaccinate or give medicine to cattle that weighed as much as a small car (at the time). When we’d go back as a family, gates needed maintaining including remedial repairs and repainting. My Dad and I (ok I was very young and more of a hindrance) built a concrete flowerbed in the front of the house.

    Front of the house
    The front garden and front of the house.

    When I lived there it was expected that I would start contributing labour by the time I was primary school age. Harvesting peas, carrots, parsnips, potatoes and rhubarb from the front garden. Sweeping inside the house, outside the house and fetching turf from the shed where it was stored to keep the solid fuel cooker (range) going.

    Then I moved up helping herd in cattle or sheep, cleaning up after animals. Collecting bales of hay or moving them around for feeding. Feeding the farm dogs and chickens before finally collecting eggs. Helping to put up electric fences or ‘foot turf’ arranging it in a way to help it dry out prior to being stored as fuel. These were things my parents had done as children too. The Island felt atemporal linking past, present and future in the moment, the roots were clear. We never felt poor, there was always food on the table, a warm house in winter that was free from damp.

    Sunset

    We didn’t even get bored. Doing manual labour on a farm tires you out, there was the weekly newspapers to read, and the countryside itself (particularly with a child’s imagination). Up to my teens there was sufficiently little light pollution that I could see the delicate band of the Milky Way and major stars. Because of this, I am comfortable with a good amount of rustic living if needs be.

    If tractors were needed for making the hay or the silage, my Uncle would hire a contractor to take care of it. My cousin was the first person to introduce a tractor on the farm for the everyday chores such as putting out winter feed or cleaning up the yard and spreading manure.

    Land

    The land and the area around it had Maddens living there since at least the 15th century and likely earlier in one form or another. Madden is an anglicised spelling of Ó Madáin, meaning descendant of Madán. Over time, the family name spread around the world due to members of large families having to find their way in the world and economic emigration. Of my generation, we’re in the UK, Canada, Germany, the US and Ireland at the moment. Previously we’d been in China, Hong Kong and across the Middle East. In my family, we were the first generation to get a university education. But all of us have The Island in common.

    Keeping people on the land, has been as much a political endeavour as it is a commercial one now. Yet despite government grants, small holdings like The Island struggle to keep going. Even if they are operated as a part-time farm. The countryside has been depopulated separating families from their roots, at the same time as a housing crisis sweeps the country.

    Roots

    Roots bind and also tie. Pre-internet letters and phone calls bridged the gap with those at home. My Mum and Dad still call home on a special phone tariff. I am connected to one of my cousins by WhatsApp and older family relatives and neighbours via Facebook.

    Trying to go to school with an askew tie or scuffed shoes would bring an admonishment about disgracing the family name. And sure enough gossip did get home as I grew up both in Ireland and in an Irish neighbourhood with people who were schoolmates of my Mum. All of which reinforced the ties. More recently, they have mostly been awakened and reaffirmed going to funerals of family friends and relatives.

    Roots have also been lucrative for Ireland. The country is an expensive tourist destination, yet managed to attract descendants from Australia, New Zealand, mainland Britain and the US to visit home. Often centuries after their ancestors had got on the boat.

    Before decline in Irish immigration to the US, it was a market for made-in-Ireland products including Arklow Pottery, Carrigaline Pottery, Waterford Crystal and the Kilkenny Design Workshop. While the revenue was grateful, there is also largely a sense of otherness that the natives feel to their wider diaspora, which adds an underlying tension to those roots.

    Up until they retired, my Mum would not go to our local GP or dentist, but instead suffer until she went home to Ireland and sought out to the local family doctor and a dentist that she’d gone to school with.

    It’s not only Ireland that has this pull. Overseas Chinese flock to their ancestral home despite centuries of living in Singapore and elsewhere. Hong Kong Chinese supported the mainland due to complex family ties, even through the great leap forward and the cultural revolution.

    Self

    American academic Amy Cutler’s study on the sense of connectedness to roots had a number of results. Roots affected sense of self in Americans and an increased likelihood of negative life outcomes was found to correlated with the disconnected. Her work has been based on survey and interview research conducted from writing her doctoral thesis. She since kept up the line of research while holding a teaching position to find out more about these correlations.

    Elias and Brown found some link between the connectedness to roots and mental wellbeing, but they also admit that understanding that linkage is nascent at best. Ambeskovic et al has work that suggests understanding one’s roots might help better understand challenges to mental wellbeing – based on animal experiments. Their work went back four generations.

    Further information

    Looking back to look forward | Irish in Britain

    The “ideal self” stands alone: A phenomenological psychological descriptive analysis of Anglo Saxon American self-concept formation in relation to ancestral connectedness | Amy Cutler and Anglo Saxon American Self-Concept Formation in Relation To Ancestral Connectedness | Ame Cutler

    At Home in the Ancestral Landscape by Solène Prince and Katherine Burlingame

    The role of intergenerational family stories in mental health and wellbeing – Alexa Elias and  Adam D. Brown 

    Ancestral Stress Alters Lifetime Mental Health Trajectories and Cortical Neuromorphology via Epigenetic Regulation by Mirela Ambeskovic, Olena Babenko, Yaroslav Ilnytskyy, Igor Kovalchuk, Bryan Kolb & Gerlinde A. S. Metz

  • The ultimate driving machine + more things

    The ultimate driving machine

    Interesting interview with author Steve Saxty on how BMW as a modern car brand came into being as the ultimate driving machine and a discussion on what eventually became the 1-series. The brand value of it being the ultimate driving machine actually came from a review by US magazine Road & Track in the early 1970s.

    This seems to have parlayed itself into an internal insight at the company and was then manifested in advertising by the 1980s. I remember seeing an interview with an ad exec at the UK agency claiming that it was an insight they had come up with. The truth can be a pesky thing.

    BMW 730i (1989)
    The phrase itself worked really well from the small lightweight sporty saloons that Road and Track loved to the large executive models of the 7-series. Whatever your criteria was, BMW positioned itself as the ultimate driving machine.

    More BMW-related content here.

    Bob Hoffman’s rage against the machine

    AWXII - Day 1

    Bob Hoffman is a long-time ad man and long-time commentator who points out the foibles of technology-driven marketing. His book 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising is a good read for anyone jumping on a plane. Hoffman has recently given away two books in electronic format Inside the black box focuses on the online advertising industrial complex, MKTG STINX takes a broader brush to things.

    BBC coverage of GAA All-Ireland hurling final

    For a long time BBC Northern Ireland have covered the key GAA matches. But this was the first time that the main BBC network carried the GAA All Ireland hurling final. 3pm I sat down in front the television to watch the BBC with volume down and my Mac playing the RTE Radio 1 commentary through its speakers. This is the same way as I have listened to the game all my life and I wasn’t going to change now. But it was refreshing that I didn’t have to trek out to a pub or fiddle with a VPN to secure video of the game. Cork vs. Clare gave hurling neophytes a great introduction with the winning score done during the last play of extra time.

    Thamesmead time’s up

    I have a soft spot for brutalism as an architecture style. I put this down to the clinic I was taken to as a small child which was part of a bigger civic centre including a library. It had massive concrete features and overhangs. It was quiet inside, great to climb and play on outside and the overhangs kept the hottest sun away from the massive round windows.

    Brutalism felt comforting and futuristic, which was probably why Stanley Kubrick shot key parts of A Clockwork Orange in Thamesmead. But the Peabody Trust are well on their way to demolishing Thamesmead’s iconic buildings.

  • March 2024 newsletter – no. 8

    March 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my March 2024 newsletter which marks my 8th issue.

    Strategic outcomes

    I am glad that I have moved to the eighth issue. In between St Patrick’s day happening in March, and the number 8 being lucky according to the Chinese in a good place – I figure its a good omen for this issue. 8 symbolises prosperity, joy and infinity. In Chinese pricing strategy 8 holds a similar role to 9 in western markets, so $58, $88 and $688 are frequent pricing points.

    Love on St. Patricks

    St Patrick’s day is particularly lucky for one Chinese city above all others: Yiwu in Zhejiang province is often called Christmas town. In reality it’s a city selling ‘small commodities’ better known to you and I as tat. The Christmas town epitaph came from it being the centre for the global Christmas decorations trade. It’s also where most of the St Patricks Day decorations are made including the leprechaun hats popularised around the world by Irish pubs.

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here

    Things I’ve written.

    • Razors for strategists – how we can apply the principle of philosophical razors to aid faster solutions for client work, while also bearing in mind their limitations.
    • Vicki Dutton – Singapore’s forgotten fashion icon.
    • Brand clichés – a bit of honesty from the trenches.
    • CMOs – their demise and evolution considered.
    • AI two-step – corporate leaders reluctant to admit AI-related job losses.

    Books that I have read.

    • A Hacker’s Mind by by veteran technologist Bruce Schneier provides a guide to the different way people have found loopholes to ‘hack’ systems. Schneier is trying to write a social movement book,, but while it’s interesting enough to read on a plan, it will be harder for it to get people moving as he intends.
    • I picked up this book from Scheltema book store just off Dam Square in Amsterdam during a work trip, with a bit of time-off bolted on the end. Browsing the English language book section of foreign book stores often gives recommendations that you wouldn’t otherwise look at. Tales from the Cafe: Before the Coffee Gets Cold is book two of a four-book series by Japanese author Toshikazu Kawaguchi is difficult to characterise in terms of genre. It’s a time travel novel with distinct rules that keep its universe coherent. It’s a book that is suitable for children, but not aimed at children- in this respect its more like the childhood books that I read growing up than are popular now as the ‘young adult’ genre. It’s about love lost, but not a romance novel – the love covered is a mix of loneliness of a widower, an orphaned child and a past romance. There is something delightful about the book, especially as it captures the minutae of everyday Japanese life.
    • Historian Dan Jones portrayal of medieval wars in his Essex Dogs series is very well written and accessible. It’s an ideal holiday read, if you can handle the grim subject matter. The Wolves of Winter is a richer story with greater intrigue in the plot line.
    • Back in the early 1990s chaos theory was very much in the public zeitgeist in a rather similar way to the internet from the late 1990s to early 2000s and artificial intelligence now. I have noticed mentions of chaos theory has started to pop up again as an idea in email newsletters. Fluke Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters resurrects chaos theory as an analogy and hypothesis for everything from global politics to emotion-driven behaviours. The author Dr Brian Klaas is a social scentist by training and has taken a few leaves out of the Malcolm Gladwell school of writing with stories to pull in the audience. I would liked to see a bit more evidence-based findings in the book. But it is a good read.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    TheOrangeblowfish, a Shanghai design-led agency did an amazing retail / out of home activation for Arc’teryx museum on what looks like a 3D OOH execution a la Ocean Outdoor’s Deepscreen sites in the UK.

    Oliver’s white paper on How Brands Can Build Customer Trust looks at how brands can communicate about sustainability in their marketing. It’s a nice first step as a discussion document. There are a few areas I would like them to explore further:

    The gains earned by behavioural science are argued about, with practitioners relying on models that are often seen as overly complex and stacking of marginal gains. It has footholds in trying to drive meaningful changes in health, where small gains on paper mean a big change in lives saved, or made better. This LSE discussion on how it can be used to make democracy work better was interesting, especially given how many elections will be taking place in 2024.

    Finally this paper on the polarisation of popular culture is likely to affect the way marketers think about product choice, media and culture over time. Media buying itself becomes a political act, beyond advertising on overtly political media channels and indicates a widening of the lived experience gap in society. We could see this already in the UK with Brexiter favoured brands.

    Things I have watched. 

    The Knockdown – A Chinese drama where a Chinese Communist Party team goes to investigate a business and runs into widespread corruption. The corruption is centred around a fishmonger who gets tired of thugs and the grind of graft – he then reinvents himself as a gangster within the system. While it’s not Breaking Bad or The Sopranos, it is a good insight into how the Chinese government wants to see itself.

    Flic Story – Alain Delon plays a detective pursuing a dangerous criminal in post-war France. This is based on the true story of criminal Emile Buisson who terrorised France. I did wonder whether the roof top chase scenes influenced Jackie Chan’s classic Hong Kong film Police Story in terms of plot and tension rather than his acrobatic skills?

    Season 1 of Mr Inbetween had been recommended to me for years, people would rave on about it in the same way you hear about Breaking Bad or The Wire. A friend eventually sent me there copy on Blu-Ray. It has elements of Man Bites Dog about it – which makes sense when you find out it was originally adapted from Scott Ryan’s The Magician – a short fly-on-the-wall rockumentary film about a Melbourne underworld enforcer and occasional killer. Unlike Man Bites Dog – the violence is used sparingly in between the tedium of everyday life and office politics. Helen Mirren had apparently recommended it widely at the time. I am looking forward to season 2 which reputedly takes a darker turn.

    Useful tools.

    Sensia AI

    Sensia AI is an interesting set of tools for consumer brands to easily monitor satisfaction and potential problems with their products and that of their competitors quickly, with ease and efficiently. Sensia analyses diverse data, from online reviews to e-commerce; offering useful insights. I was looking at it for consideration with regards an FMCG project that didn’t come off in the end. If you are interested. Check out some sample reports here, and if it looks of interest – contact Iris Chung.

    Passport Online

    Travel this year? Passport ready

    I am an Irish citizen. The Irish government’s process to renew my passport and passport card via an online service was really easy. The service is called Passport Online and I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.

    Untranslatable

    Not necessarily something that you would use day-to-day; but definitely of interest during digging into market research transcripts or transliteration of campaigns across different markets and languages. Untranslatable is a dictionary of idioms and expressions. The creators are native speakers, so you get the different cultural nuances.

    New ways of using Miro

    If you work in brand or connections planning or have thought customer experiences you’ve probably heard of Milanote, Miro or Mural. They also came to the fore with COVID-19 as virtual workshops became much more of a thing. Recently, I have been experiencing new user cases for these platforms. To present:

    • Creative briefs.
    • Sharing creative with clients.
    • A quick folder that holds key documents and shows the links between them.

    Zettelkasten

    Trying to build that vast mental model to then wrap into a narrative for clients. Vicky Zhao revisits the analogue technique of Zettelkasten. Your mileage may vary. It does remind me of the way I use social bookmarking as a data bank and mind maps as a creative process in writing. I can also recommend Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis for similar organisation ideas.

    The sales pitch.

    Now taking bookings for strategic engagements from April, or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my March 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and watch out for any April fools tricks being attempted on you.

    Don’t forget to get in touch, share and subscribe!

    Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues. 

  • Loneliness

    This post on loneliness came about from an insight journey I took for a prospective project aimed at generation Z. Don’t get me started on defining an audience by generation, or I will go off-topic and not be back for a while while I rant about how life stages are a superior lens. But we digress. So the approach I took was looking at the problems and challenges faced by the target cohort. From reading academic papers, I came across things like anxiety, climate anxiety and loneliness. Loneliness stuck out as interesting, as it was something that small community moments could be fostered around and a brand would help in an authentic low key way without being parasitic.

    What is loneliness?

    First of all it makes sense to define what loneliness actually is?

    loneliness, distressing experience that occurs when a person’s social relationships are perceived by that person to be less in quantity, and especially in quality, than desired. The experience of loneliness is highly subjective; an individual can be alone without feeling lonely and can feel lonely even when with other people. Psychologists generally consider loneliness to be a stable trait, meaning that individuals have different set-points for feeling loneliness, and they fluctuate around these set-points depending on the circumstances in their lives.

    Encyclopedia Britannica Online
    We are all connected, but do we feel lonely

    The UK government commissioned a report in 2019 by Simetrica Jacobs that quantified the economic cost of loneliness for businesses in terms of ill health and lost work productivity as £9,900 per year, per person. Commentary in The Lancet associated loneliness with a 26 percent increase in premature mortality.

    Loneliness hits youth harder

    In my initial research I found that we had high levels of loneliness and young adults experienced this in a more acute way.

    83% of generation-z survey respondents said that they experience loneliness, compared to 68% of the UK population as a whole. I found this fascinating as if you look at the TGI data around the UK overall group cohesion score, you tend to get much smaller variances from the mean.

    Nor is loneliness just a UK phenomenon. Studies have indicated that it is prevalent from multiple countries with different levels of cultural commonalities: from the US, Israel, Japan and the Philippines.

    This seems to go hand-in-hand with other conditions such as anxiety and depression. There are plenty of other causes for anxiety and depression: but loneliness certainly feeds into their severity. This can be seen by the increasing incidence of mental health on US student campuses over the years according to research by The Health Minds Network.

    Some experts hypothesise that the normalisation and embedding of therapy in modern culture and the popular lexicon may well be exasperating the loneliness problem, rather than helping.

    The idea of being alone, but not feeling lonely has become a rich vein of content inspiration for influencers.

    Loneliness is a longitudinal trend

    COVID-19 isolation brought ideas of loneliness to the forefront, but it has been a rising issue for a long time.

    loneliness
    Going back over a century of data from 1919 – 2019, we can see that mentions of loneliness had a peak during the great depression. It then dropped through the second world war and started to pick up again. There was a rapid increase from the late 1960s through to the mid-1980s and then an notable increase from the mid-2000s through to 2019 – which is the latest year that we currently have data for.

    There seems to be a correlation between mentions of loneliness and times of economic hardship. One also has to remember that during the second world war, publications were widely censored. Printing paper was in limited supply due to the war effort.

    The BBC conducted conducted research with the Wellcome Foundation in 2018 with 55,000 respondents. At the time it was the largest survey that had been conducted on the subject. The research found that a higher number of younger survey respondents felt lonely and that having online-only friends correlated with higher degrees of lonely feelings.

    At the time, the BBC came up with a few hypotheses about the possible high incidence of loneliness among 16 – 24 year olds:

    They have less experience of regulating their emotions, so everything is felt more intensely

    This might be only the first or second time they’ve felt lonely in their lives and they haven’t had the chance to learn that loneliness often passes

    16-24 is an age when identity is changing. Young people are working out how they relate to others and where they stand in society. That process is naturally isolating to some extent, so feeling lonely during this time may be quite normal

    BBC Anatomy of Loneliness

    The view that this might be a phase was supported by qualitative responses of older respondents who said that young adulthood was the time when they had felt loneliest. Loneliness might be something that we can’t blame completely on social media.

    Social capital

    Public policy academic Robert D Puttnam warned about the decline in social capital across American society back in 2000 with his book Bowling Alone. Social capital is the reward from communal activity and sharing. Shrinking social capital impacts both civic and personal health according Puttnam.

    Based on survey data outlining American social activities over the decades, Puttnam outlined how the population had become more disconnected from family, friends, neighbours, and social structures. This makes sense given the pivot that western society went through during the 1960s and 1970s towards existentialism, or even go further back as far as the post war period where Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care realigned parenting around the child as an individual. For various factors including long work days, both men and women working, increasing personal distractions meant that there was less participation with local organisations like:

    • The PTA (parent teacher association involved with a school).
    • Church (going to services, community bonding and related social work activities).
    • Clubs.
    • Political party related grassroots activities.
    • Organised sports such as bowling leagues.

    In the revised edition of Bowling Alone, Puttnam explored the omnipresent fabric of social media and the internet which represented an opportunity for new types of social connections, as well as the threat of even higher levels of alienation and isolation.

    Loneliness solutions

    The World Health Organisation (WHO) considers social isolation / loneliness as one of the key social determinators of health. Over this decade, they have been focusing on loneliness in aging populations. Society has already been evolving various point solutions to help combat loneliness with varying degrees of success. There have been some attempts to use healthcare’s tool de jour -behavioural economics.

    Mukbang

    Mukbang (or meokbang) is a type of online streaming programming that started in Korea. It crossed the cultural barrier to western audiences where it lost its meaning as it became a platform for eating feats or stunts. In its original form, it addressed the loneliness felt by many Korean single-person households.

    Korean lunch

    Korean cooking is designed to be shared. You have lots of side dishes, the best known of which is kimchi.

    Mukbang streamers ate and interacted with people watching their stream, giving the impression of a virtual dinner table. The watchers may be only eating an instant ramen, a convenience store meal, take-out pizza or a Cafe de Paris baguette. But they had a parasocial experience more akin to when they lived with family members.

    Elder care

    WHO is most focused on the impact that loneliness has on the elderly in society. Governments and the health sector have looked to address this in a systematic way. In Hong Kong, there is a disco to bring elderly together and visits from therapy dogs are two of the ways local government have looked to stave off the worst effects of isolation.

    IMG_0781
    PARO by Shoko Muraguchi

    Japan pioneered the use of robotics with the PARO therapeutic robot. It looks like a baby seal and provides a similar experience to a therapy lap dog. Sony’s Aibo has been adapted for a similar role.

    Inclusivity

    In Ireland, the Roman Catholic church has been weakened as the organisation at the centre of social fabric due modern Ireland gradually becoming more secular.

    Clips from the Late Late Show hosted by Gay Byrne from the 1962 to 1999 showing how Irish society changed. Byrne was both a chronicle of change and a catalyst for it because of the discussions his show facilitated.

    This was then exasperated by a series of scandals coming to light.

    8I8A7144.jpg

    The GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) is Ireland’s largest sporting organisation and is made up of local amateur clubs playing indigenous Irish sports including camogie, hurling, Gaelic football, handball and rounders. The local GAA (Gaelic Athletics Association) clubs have gone some way to pick up the slack with the GAA Social Initative.

    The GAA Social Initiative continues to grow in its capacity to enrich the lives of all older members of our communities while specifically reaching out to isolated older men across the 32 counties.

    From its genesis in the observations of then President Mary McAleese of a dearth of older men at events she attended across the island of Ireland, it has grown from a small pilot project involving GAA clubs across four counties to one of the Association’s flagship community outreach projects.

    GAA Online

    More information

    More than two thirds of adults in the UK experience loneliness | Eden Project Communities

    The West’s Struggle for Mental Health | WSJ Online

    Generation Z in Japan: Raised in Anxiety | Emerald Insight

    The Healthy Minds Network School Mental Health Research Symposium

    Loneliness at epidemic levels in America – PMC

    Esther Perel Thinks All This Amateur Therapy-Speak Is Just Making Us Lonelier | Vanity Fair

    Americans Are A Lonely Lot, And Young People Bear The Heaviest Burden | Rhitu Chatterjee

    New York State Buys Robots for Lonely Elders | Futurism

    The AI Girlfriend Seducing China’s Lonely Men

    As Hong Kong’s elderly face loneliness epidemic, carers hope dogs and disco will keep post-Covid isolation at bay – Hong Kong Free Press HKFP

    No More Loneliness: The rise of livestreaming in East Asia – YouTube

    An investigation into the relationship between climate change anxiety and mental health among Gen Z Filipinos | SpringerLink

    How Amazon, Apple, and Facebook Made America Lonelier Than Ever

    Why loneliness fuels populism | Financial Times

    PARO therapeutic robot

    Assistive social robots in elderly care: a review. Joost Broekens, Marcel Heerink, and Henk Rosendal (PDF)

    Man who married a fictional character, he’d like you to hear him out | The New York Times

    Man Who Married Hatsune Miku Hologram Says the Relationship Has Gone Cold | CBR

    The Anatomy of Loneliness research | BBC

    Firewater | No mercy, no malice – exploration of changing consumption habits, risk profiles and declining mental health in a safer environment

  • Walmart store of the future + more stuff

    Walmart store of the future

    Walmart has built over 100 Walmart store of the future designs. Some of the elements seek emulate the best bits of Target with seasonal low priced items close to the door and a more experiential approach to merchandising.

    Walmart
    Mike Mozart

    Some of the other changes in the Walmart store of the future include QRcodes on signage and a Walmart smartphone app for self-checkout show a blending of real world and digital, or as we like to call it here, the web of no web.

    CIA director William Burns

    CIA William Burns gave this wide ranging talk in February 2023. It seems apropos to share it here. Burns was involved in the Middle East before and through much of GWoT (global war on terror). Burns commentary on the Middle East at the time is very much worthwhile about thinking about now. Burns’ book The Back Channel was frank about his failings as well as successes when it was published back in 2021.

    Burns handled the Ukraine conflict particularly well in the early stages. His comments on Israel and Palestine look particularly prophetic now, even though western intelligence agencies were shocked by what happened on October 7, 2023.

     I’m sorry to be so uplifting today about the international landscape, and I also have to say that, you know, in the conversations I had with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, you know, I think it left me quite concerned about the prospects for even greater fragility and even greater violence between Israelis and Palestinians as well. You know, I was, as Barbara mentioned, a senior U.S. Diplomat 20 years ago during the Second Intifada, and I’m concerned, as are my colleagues in the intelligence community, the lot of what we’re seeing today has a very unhappy resemblance to some of those realities that we saw then too.

    William J Burns

    Operation Shady RAT

    How an experimental honey pot simulating computerised industrial systems reveal the long term hacking programme done by APT 1 for the Chinese government. The RAT in question was a ‘remote access trojan’ piece of malware.

    Irish radio broadcasting

    RTÉ, the Irish public broadcaster started broadcasting radio programmes in 1926. At the time it was called 2RN, it became by Radio Athlone, which was eventually called Radio Éireann in 1938. The ‘T’ came in after to the first television broadcasts in 1961.

    RTÉ was central to my identity as an Irishman spending a good deal of my childhood in Britain – my culture, language and literature came through the speakers. The programmes now conveyed online offer my parents an information lifeline to everything happening at home since the long wave and medium wave radio services were shut down. This documentary from 2001 reflects one the first 75 years of Irish radio broadcasting.

    Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott: The Canceling of the American Mind

    Talk at the Churchill Club of California about their book The Cancelling of the American Mind. It is interesting hear Rikki Schlott reference The Coddling of The American Mind, which Lukianoff co-wrote with Jonathan Haidt. In Cancelling the authors look to document some of the failings in how cancel culture works on campus and in the workplace. It is much more of a partisan work than Coddling, mainly because it driven by Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The comparison to the red scare of the 1950s are interesting.