How to Pass a Law

Ok, I'm an amateur when it comes to passing legislation, but here's my interpretation of how you go about things.

In the US:

1. Have an idea, preferably one that can be synopsized to a single sentence. This sentence will usually be vague and aspirational so as not to tie you down to any specific proposals. Something like "Make America safer for Americans" if you're Republican or "Make Poverty History" if you're Bob Geldof, or "Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others" if you're somewhere in between.
1a. Get some photos of the President and other high ranking politicians in compromising positions. This will be very useful later.
2. Win an election. Easy enough if you have the right friends.
3. Make up some draft proposals. Get flamed by the opposition. Get flamed by the public. Get your office, home, car, child's school, mother etc. blockaded by angry protesters. Expect farcical and fanatical opposition.

4. Negotiate with the opposition to try to find a solution more amenable to the masses. As long as the bill still conforms to your initial vague aspirational statement, then you can't be accused of running away from your ideals. Just remember that a large amount of the opposition are convinced that you are either an elitist, baby-killing communist or a knuckle-dragging, inbred racist, so you're not going to get everyone on your side no matter how much you give in.
5. Try to pass the bill in the House. Use of the materials obtained in step 1a can be useful here.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 until you get it passed.
7. Try to get it passed in the Senate. Again, use of the materials obtained in step 1a can be useful here.
8. Repeat steps 3-7 until you get it passed in the Senate.
(In general, these phases are the most annoying and you may have to cede authorship/sponsorship of the bill and sacrifice all chance of doing anything else in your political career.)
9. Get the President to sign it. This is easy of the election you won in step 2 was the presidential election. Otherwise, step 1a comes in handy again.

In Ireland

1. Get enough seats to be needed in a coalition.
2. Have an idea. Commission a consultant to write a report about it.
3. Wait for a scandal to happen.
4. Comment that action on this scandal is imminent. Commission a report on the report in view of the specific scandal.
5. Introduced the bill to the Dáil in the last two days before a break to limit debate. Force the bill through the Dáil and Senate in record time through your use of the whip.

Dermot Ahern version


1. Put together some version of your religious beliefs that look vaguely like legislation.
2. Use your influence to push it through.

The Grand Slump

Am I the only one left feeling unfulfilled after this Six Nations?

After the drama of last year's championship, it was inevitable that this year would not live up to the same level of excitement. However, tension was almost completely devoid from this year's proceedings. Mistake after mistake after mistake robbed me of any enjoyment of the game as it slowed to a halt. The effects of whatever new rules that were brought in seem to have reduced the game to a kicking dominated affair. Defences are so good that running the ball is dangerous, as the Wales-France match showed. Two intercept tries from France, who were happy to play for territory all tournament. The result? Grand Slam for them. The England-Scotland encounter was about the most dreadful rugby match that had ever been inflicted on the world.

There were flashes of brilliance, and yes, there were moments of tension. Today's match in Dublin had both of them. I however benefit from having Sky Sports and I watch the Super 14 matches occasionally whenever I have the time. The gulf in pace, runnig, excitement is ridiculous. In the 39 games played so far in the season, each game is averaging 53.5 points. In the Six Nations this number is 39.6. Essentially, that's an average of 2 more tries per game. And that's not even "international standard" rugby.

Since the game went professional, the skills needed for a good defence (essentially fitness, strength, teamwork) have all benefited, and the natural flair needed for attacking rugby has remained static. Some of the ELVs that were experimented with last year I think would actually have been good to encourage a more running attacking game. Keeping the back line 5m back from the scrum gave people more space to run; making quick throws easier encourages counter attack play and discourages kicking for position; free kicks rather than penalties means less kicking for touch and for goal and more attacking play. The whole point was to increase the emphasis on attacking play to force coaches and teams to think and train more in that way.

I'm not saying that there's no place for the grinding tension of close control near your opponents' line, but can't something be done to at least make a RANGE of tactics effective?

P.S. I know that the photo is not from this year's Six Nations, but it's cool.

Forgive Me My Sins

My blog has been neglected of late. I could blame many things, but it's mostly because I got a little lazy. I hereby beg forgiveness from the internet gods and shall hope that no punishment shall be inflicted.

Speaking of punishment and forgiveness...

While I was away last week (the ISDA festival was flipping unreal), a story broke about Cardinal Brady. The basic version is that he was in a meeting where victims of Fr. Brenden Smyth's sexual abuse were forced to swear an oath of silence about their allegations. Unsurprisingly, this led to a tide of calls for Cardinal Brady's resignation.

Morally, there was fault. He knew about the monster that was Fr. Smyth and all he did was pass the buck to his superior's and not say anything in the intervening twenty years before Fr. Smyth saw justice. Twenty more years of abusing innocent children could have been prevented. Surely, resigning is the only correct course?

Personally, I don't think so.

The then Fr. Brady was in no position of power. He did the best he could within the structures. Can we blame him for not speaking out? Not really. The culture at the time was one of denial and cover-up. Fr. Brady was not the only one to know. Practically everyone knew on some level what was going on. I lay the blame at the higher levels of hierarchy at the time and not at the lowest level. Realistically, everyone who could replace him was probably complicit on a similar level. He could do a lot more trying to work from the inside.

The key question is whether his ability to lead the Church has been compromised. In reality, I don't think so. Given the small role he played in the past, given the potential good he can do from where he is now, given the ability of the man; I can only see him doing good from here. I don't want to sound insensitive, but I do not think that the victims of Brenden Smyth are served by his resignation. Fr. Smyth was the perpetrator. The hierarchy at the time were the ones complicit.  Not Cardinal Brady.

These calls for his resignation come from a desire for vengeance against the institution rather than from some viewpoint of justice.

Debating, Sexual Discrimination & Numbers

There's been a lot of chat recently about how women are under-represented and under or over performing at IVs, Worlds etc. depending on what result you want from it. So I've decided to do what any good number cruncher would do in this scenario; I'm going to put some numbers on it.

For this I'm using the tabs from the recent National Law Debates in Galway and from the Cork IV in December. This is as they are the two most recent tabs I have and I am confident that I was able to identify female names from male names (I wouldn't be so confident with a Worlds or Euros tabs). I also used the total speaks for the competition, not the individual speaks. I could make up some valid reason, but it's 99% because I'm lazy and it's easier to work with.

IV	Male Mean	Male Standard Deviation	Female Mean	Female Standard Deviation
Cork	362.2577	28.45621	361.3617	25.18145
Galway	372.2174	21.89606	370.8286	23.90482

What does this teach us? Apart from the fact that judges at Galway were more generous, it clearly shows that there is no meaningful difference between an average male or female speaker. The boxplot of the cumulative results from both IVs also shows this in a nice visual way. It also shows that the 25% and 75% quartiles lie essentially at the same point, showing that the distributions are essentially the same. A t-test gives the probability of there being no difference in the actual means as 0.772; for there to be a statistically significant difference, that number would have to be less than 0.05.

So one thing is abundantly clear from this; there is no discernible bias towards male speakers from judges.  One thing that has to be remembered here though, is that these were all mostly Irish judges. My own admittedly stereotyped view of the world would suggest that a bias is more likely to exist in not-so-liberal countries and thus would be more prevalent at Worlds (this is the angle I'm selling to try to get a research grant).

Where a difference does appear is in participation numbers. In both IVs the proportion of male to female speakers is approximately 2:1 (32.7% female in Cork, 33.6% male in Galway). Given the small total sample size, the 95% confidence interval (i.e. the range of possible values) for the true proportion of female debaters is between 27.3% and 39.35%. Clearly this is where there is a problem.

As a white, heterosexual, private-schooled male (and thus not part of any oppressed minority), I'm not going to spend too much time discussing the various options available to the debating community to help solve this problem. Just to say that when it comes to participation, I think the onus is much more on the individual societies to up their game in recruitment, training and retention than on changing the rules of the game. There clearly is nothing wrong with the game itself which handicaps women.

George Lee: Vain or Victim?

A mere nine months ago, George Lee was elected to the Dáil. His election was indicative of the mood at the time; the public had become staunch Fine Gael supporters, mainly due to them being "not Fianna Fáil" as much as anything else. Lee, by his own admission, similarly picked FG as they essentially have no prima face stand-point on economic issues like the rest of the opposition parties do, and so would be maleable to his suggestions. This is not unusual; Garret FitzGerald joined FG for the same reason, and nearly managed to transform the party and move it away from it's traditional roots of being the large farmers party. I don't blame Lee for that choice; it makes sense if you want to have an immediate impact to choose a platform that will let you do that rather than joining some smaller party or runing as an independent.

However, FG seemed to give Lee the cold shoulder, and treat him as a sort of circus act. They'd wheel him out to get the crowd in, and then force him to hand things over to the big boys, Enda and Richard, when things got serious. Sure, he's only a journalist who doesn't know anything about politics right? They didn't treat him like a serious politician but expected him to have the loyalty of a serious politician. Big mistake.

Lee is a damn good economist by any measure, as his pre-RTE career shows. Yet FG, were slow to bring him into the fold and let him help craft policy. Why? There's the sense of seniority about politics in Ireland, that age somehow makes you more qualified, that years spent helping people with medical cards makes you an expert on the economy, that you have to do your time in the back benches before moving up. Kenny was presumably wary of the wrath of the other backbenchers if he promoted young Lee too quickly. That would seem to have cost him a great electoral and governing assest.

The worst thing coming from it though, is that now we have a very high profile example of how closed a shop politics is. We all knew about the nepotism, but to see a major political party essentially give up a very well educated, very well known. very intelligent, trusted voice on the economy tells me that these politicians are out first to look out for their own. This is a huge disincentive to experts from all fields to trying to get involved in politics. When people talk about the detachment of politicians from everyday life; this is what we mean! In any business, not only do you want to best people, you promote them when you find them and you do all you can to keep them.

That all being said, I do think Lee may have been a little premature in going. He should have known that politics here isn't going to change over night. He got a front bench offer when he made the threat, and he should have realised the power his high profile gave him to embarass FG. He could be doing something today to help the country but he was too proud and self-rightous to accept the offer when it was made. Who cares if it was made under duress? Practically every decision in politics is made under duress.

My Problem with Neo-Nazis

Or one of them anyway.

I just can't seem to understand why neo-nazis deny the Holocaust. Assuming that the hate Jew, fags, crips and all who where murdered in the death camps, surely it's more consistent with their mindset to be proud of having wiped six million "undesirables" off the face of the planet.

I could understand Germans wanting to deny the Holocaust. The massive guilt of having to deal with that can lead to a very natural human response of denial, which I'm sure we've all done at some point. As a nation however, the German people seem to be taking it very maturely and more than willing to openly talk about it.

Why would neo-Nazis deny the Holocaust? It doesn't make their cause any more palatable to normal people, it only shows them as being further on the edges of the mainstream discourse than one could have possible imagined. Is it a natural response to them seeing the jewish people get "sympathy" territory and treatment from the international community and they want to snuff out that? If so, then they grossly overestimate how much influence they have, which shows them to be complete buffoons when it comes to political awareness on top of everything else.

It just doesn't make any logical sense!

The Greatest Show on Earth

Superbowl XLIV is a mere three days away. I am literally wetting myself with excitement. 


The Superbowl trail is littered with monumental stories, implausible comebacks and Goliaths being laid low. If New Orleans win on Sunday though, you'd find it hard to get a better story or find a city more in need of that win than any other. Only a few shorts years ago, the city was destroyed and the Saint's stadium the Superdome housed thousands of the homeless despite suffering terrible damage itself. Drew Brees decided to come to New Orleans, not only because nowhere else would have him, but because he genuinely wanted to help a city on it's knees.

Brees has managed to turn the fortunes of the team around, and has led them to a first ever Superbowl appearance. I've seen videos from New Orleans when they beat the Vikings for the NFC Championship; the place went mental. The whole city has been lifted by this. Not only that, but the whole team and Brees in particular have been incredibly active in the city, helping out with whatever charity work they can. Brees has even moved his principle residence to New Orleans, an unusual event for an NFL pro. 


If Brees and the Saints win it, it couldn't happen to better guys and neither could it be more important for a city.


That is the story. Unfortunately, it's Payton Manning and the Colts that stand in their way. As much as I want the Saints to win, I just can't see it happening in reality. The Colts are the complete package, with only a perceived weakness in special teams as their only constant criticism. The Colts defence can do a good enough job on the New Orleans line to make life tricky for Brees, and I can't see the Saints brutish but unsophisticated defence stopping the most intelligent quarter-back in the game from picking up another Superbowl MVP to weigh down his already groaning trophy shelf. 


There's been alot of chat about the possibility of Dwight Freeney not playing. It's a factor, but I don't think there's enough in the Saint's defence to stop the key Colts plays. If the game is to be won or lost by either side, it's when the Colts have it that matters. If the Saints defence can actually get to Manning again and again and make hits without giving away oodles of penalty yards, and if they can shut down the Colts running game, and if their man-coverage secondary can hold up; then they have a chance. 


That's a lot of if's though.