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COMMUNICATIONS MINISTER PAT Rabbitte has said social media has a “crucial role” in ensuring that those in authority are held accountable.
The Minister told a conference organised by community radio station Near FM that sites such as Twitter and Facebook are important for reporting on action and inaction, as well as questioning the established order of things.
Rabbitte said it was too early to predict what the expanding world of social media would mean for a small country like Ireland.
He also stressed that the government’s system for evaluating media mergers and acquisitions “is long due an overhaul”.
The Minister for Communications wished those in attendance “better luck” in expressing their opinions than he experienced when he voiced what he described as “timid criticisms of some practises in the media recently”.
Speaking on the performance of Irish media outlets, the Labour minister said that, “given the degree of economic trauma we’ve seen, one would expect the media to play a critical role in explaining the impact of this change.” However he would not be drawn on whether or not he believed the media has fulfilled this role and said it was best left to be debated in the group discussion following his speech.
Pat Rabbitte credited community media with playing a vital role in giving a voice to people whose views aren’t represented on commercial or public service broadcasts.
He cited campaigns for gender equality as an example of this, saying:
My generation in particular will acknowledge the role the media played in Ireland in enabling women to communicate their shared experience with each other and campaign for change.
Around 100 people protested against the controversial property tax outside the conference in Coolock.
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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