Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
ENDA KENNY GOT 1,000 emails about the cancelled Garth Brooks concerts – some begging him to intervene, others questioning why he should get involved at all.
A freedom of information request by TV3 News has revealed the extent of the correspondence received by the Department of the Taoiseach over the issue.
Last month’s refusal by Dublin City Council to grant a licence for two of the five concerts at Croke Park resulted in the country music star cancelling all five gigs.
At the height of the crisis, which convulsed the nation for weeks, Kenny asked the labour relations expert Kieran Mulvey to arrange a meeting between City Manager Owen Keegan and Lord Mayor Christy Burke in a bid to resolve the matter.
However, no resolution was found and the concerts did not go ahead last month. A generic reply was sent to those who wrote to the Department acknowledging that the issue had not been handled well.
“The cancellation of these concerts is a loss to this country not only in terms of the impact on the goodwill of Garth Brooks fans but also for the economy,” the reply states, adding that the Taiseach cannot intervene in planning matters.
Here’s what some of the emails to the Taoiseach said:
One fan wrote that the country needed to be saved:
“I want to ask you to do something to save this country from a complete shambles. The chance is there and you need to grab it…. We listened to you when you were begging for votes and granted your wish, now it’s time for you to pay us back.”
Another argued:
They added:
“I would call on you as Taoiseach to do everything in your power to make an exception for these concerts.”
Another member of the public wrote:
“I am writing to you in desperation to ask you to intervene in this disaster… you can’t stand idly by and let it fall away…
One fan wrote:
“By changing this law it would bring great happiness to many and the country as a whole…”
However, not everyone agreed that Enda should intervene:
They added:
Why on EARTH is the office of An Taoiseach getting involved? The planning laws were breached by Croke Park, Mr Brooks and Aiken Promotions. End of Story.”
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
I don’t get from the article what the benefits of being a data hosting hub country are? Other than perhaps prestige and increased regulatory role.
Benefits of pharma and software tech multinationals are proven, with large numbers of high paying jobs.
Data centers aren’t big scale employers, additionally they are energy hungry industries that will not help our push to meet energy reduction targets.
The associated data science careers referred to in the article, arent typically located at the data centres, we could strive to excell in these disciplins without the data centres.
As a country we need to be discerning about the type of industry that we court. If it is to be huge banks of servers, we need to insist on zero emission environmentaly friendly facilities.
To be a global data hub we need data centers! Was it 2yrs later Apple finally gave up on planning for a 1billion investment in a data center in Galway a few years ago ? In the mean time a similar project started In Denmark was complete and operational. They are now proposing to build another in Denmark where they propose to provide unwanted heat to the local community.
Is this just a backup plan ?
The real challenge is hiring academics only, the US have a growing pool of criminals to cut deals with, good hackers either go to jail or work for the state. We don’t have criminals at that level here. Couple of good professionals in Cork but I am unsure where we can get the talent to really enforce the team behind these new task forces. We need people who can reverse engineer malware, are constantly updated on backdoors in circulation, along with 0day flaws and dissect packets, that’s before we even look at the problems with hardware from certain regions.
@Padraig Carey: *”enforce the team” = “harden the team”
It’s almost embarrassing to think the best in Irish tech management and government believe the data management companies like Amazon etc are here for anything other than cold weather cheap power and tax breaks
Perfect place for Data Hubs. Not to extreme weather patterns so cosy of electricity is not so high with cooling units and not really a chance of a earthquake or some other natural disaster.
Downside not great for climate change targets and don’t really employ many.
have your say