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Pics: Fine Gael TDs climb Croagh Patrick... one of them runs back down

All the way up, and all the way down…

WHEN ENDA KENNY joked at the Fine Gael think-in last night that those Ministers who didn’t make it up Croagh Patrick in good time today could face a reshuffle, some obviously didn’t see the joke.

There was plenty of movement up the 760 metre tall mountain also know as ‘The Reek’ in the Taoiseach’s home constituency of Mayo today as not only Ministers, but Fine Gael backbenchers and senators were keen to show their athleticism.

In one case, the Dublin South East TD, Eoghan Murphy, was apparently so keen that once he reached the summit, he gave his jacket to another person and ran, yes ran, all the way down Croagh Patrick in order to keep warm.

There were reports that some Fine Gaelers were up as early as 5.30am this morning to scale the mountain. Dublin North deputy Alan Farrell tweeted to say he reached the peak in an hour and 27 minutes.

While the Irish Times’ Harry Magee noted that while some went climbing, others including Transport Minister Leo Varadkar – fresh from his bog snorkelling – cycled from Westport to Achill Island.

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Minister Varadkar travels by bog-snorkel in Monaghan

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    Mute john doe
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    Dec 29th 2020, 12:00 PM

    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.

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    Mute keano
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    Dec 29th 2020, 11:24 AM

    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.

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    Mute CAMILA REMONA
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    Dec 29th 2020, 9:26 AM

    Is this just a backup plan ?

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    Mute Padraig Carey
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    Dec 29th 2020, 2:10 PM

    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.

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    Mute Padraig Carey
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    Dec 29th 2020, 2:12 PM

    @Padraig Carey: *”enforce the team” = “harden the team”

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    Mute ChuckE
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    Dec 29th 2020, 9:45 PM

    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

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    Mute Wayne Walsh
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    Dec 29th 2020, 11:03 PM

    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.

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