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TUESDAY WAS THE first day back at school for the Houses of the Oireachtas. Since then, Senators have stood up and made speeches on their hobby horses. The Government came back with the long-delayed wording for a referendum on children’s rights. The Minister for Health survived a motion of no confidence.
And, buried in all this bustle, the dead hand of the State managed to kill off KildareStreet.com, one of the brightest and best examples of what the Government is always saying it wants to see. Citizens (mostly one citizen) taking public data sets, provided in an open standard, and making something much much better than the State had ever managed.
If you have ever tried to search for anything on the Houses of the Oireachtas website, you can understand why I can confidently say it is the worst thing in the Universe. It is probably worse than that but language must fail beyond a certain level of awfulness.
The search doesn’t work and never did. You can’t link to any particular part of a debate. You can’t look for contributions by a particular Oireachtas member. Basically, you can’t do anything you could possibly imagine you might actually want to use a record of the Oireachtas debates for.
KildareStreet.com works. It does everything the Oireachtas website should always have done. It even does extra things – like let you sign up for email alerts if a particular phrase is mentioned.
And on 17 September, the Houses of the Oireachtas just pulled the plug on the whole glorious thing. They did it without warning (though they were fully aware of KildareStreet.com’s existence and utility) and they did it would caring about the consequences for KildareStreet.com’s over half-a-million users. In doing so, they demonstrated that our State is either guided by petty minded malice or is driven by block-headed ignorance.
Was this malice? Or stupidity?
The magic sauce that made KildareStreet.com possible wasthe provision of the debates record in structured XML format. This is basically an open format common to debate records in the UK, the UK and around the world. It is owned by nobody and is available to all to write code around. It was this common base that allowed KildareStreet.com to reuse lots of the code which runs the TheyWorkForYou.com website in the UK.
As of Monday, the Houses of the Oireachtas has just stopped producing XML. They’ve even stopped producing an RSS feed. From their web addresses, it looks to me that they have moved from the international open standard of XML to… Lotus Notes.
Yes. I know. Lotus Notes. Not just a proprietory format. But a really stupid one. Here’s a hint: The future should never involve the phrase “More Lotus Notes”.
We’re told that we should never ascribe to malice something which can be explained by stupidity. But I do think it is important to recognise the context in which this decision- to kill XML without debate or warning- was taken. Here’s the KildareStreet.com blog. Sample:
The lazy, incompetent fools who get paid substantial amounts of your money for not doing the job they’re paid for, in respect of publishing the Official Transcript of Dáil proceedings, have now actually surprised us.They’re now not bothering to correct their errors at all, which is a new and unpleasant departure from their previous form, where they’d shove any old rubbish up and then quietly airbrush their failings out of existence in the ensuing day or two.
There is a cartoon on the front page showing counting the days since the last time the Dáil Official Record was published without errors. It currently shows 237 days.
It is hardly a step too far to imagine that a bureaucracy would react to criticism from a person who is passionate about the outcome of their work by happily silencing him.
For whatever reason it was taken, we, the public have been harmed by this decision. KildareStreet.com should have been embraced by the Houses of the Oireachtas, prickles and all. It provided a plethora of services in an area where the state had simply failed. Instead, it has been stifled.
In November of 2011, the Irish Open Data week set out the opportunities for both commercial and public-spirited reuse of public data sets. After the Houses of the Oireachtas has killed off, without warning, the biggest and best such project in the country, who would bother to try again?
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Simon McGarr is a solicitor with litigation firm McGarr Solicitors. This article originally appeared on Tuppenceworth.ie.
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Are cancer patients surveyed as to help find the causes of the cancer epidemic, is there work been done on finding out if it’s the food we are eating, is it water we drink, radon areas, microwaves from phones, radio signals, air pollution etc.?
@Macus Mc Mahon: Bear in mind too that according to WHO, booze and fags are class 1 carcinogens.
@Bairéid Rísteard: plenty of non drinkers and non smokers getting cancer too, since that proposal of Bob Mugabee been the goodwill ambassador was suggested by The WHO you couldn’t take anything they say seriously.
@Macus Mc Mahon: Why of course not. Are you suggesting we invest research into cause and prevention of cancer! Ould diet have anything to do with it? Meat, Dairy? IFG-1 hormone increases? Oh don’t be silly. Its all in a persons gene’s nothing to do with diet. The right thing to do is spend time and money on finding new cures for cancer through excellent pharmaceutical intervention and treatment and spend money on raising awareness on cancer.
But then again I could wrong… ;-)
@Macus Mc Mahon: Yes the epidemiology of cancer is pretty well understood, even though there are people who will tell you that you can stop getting it by eating more organic carrots, quinoa or ginkgo biloba (whatever that is) or whatever they’re selling. The problem is a terribly unstable molecule called DNA and it’s first cousins that control cell division and replication and unfortunately there is a proportional error rate. Some of those errors trigger the cells to die, which is OK, others will cause the cells to multiply uncontrollably which is cancer. Evidence for preventing cancer, don’t smoke, exercise more, drink less alcohol. Environmental carcinogens are hodge podge of other tiny risk modifications which really only count as an epidemiological interventions (banning asbestos, limiting organophosphates) rather than increasing your stress by trying to live in a bubble.
@Joe Harbison: I’d argue that eating junk, not exercising drinking, and smoking, is being trapped in a bubble of ignorance.
@Joe Harbison: Oh, and as the man said, Sunscreen
@Macus Mc Mahon: I know and I trusted WHO up until then.
@Bairéid Rísteard: they also added Sunbeds to that category but we still allow them to be used
@Macus Mc Mahon: My mum was diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year. It was during a routine check up when they noticed a change in the skin on her breast. She’s 66, non smoker or drinker, healthy living and regularly exercises. My husband was diagnosed with a form of skin cancer two years ago. He was 36 at the time. The cancer developed due to over exposure to sun coming in on his neck whilst driving a bus (his job). He’s also a non smoker or drinker. Exercises regularly and we eat relatively healthy food. He knows he got it from sun exposure as other colleagues developed it on the same side of their necks,arms and faces. Thankfully both have been given the all clear.
Leo’s 5 million euros spin team can’t bluff the fact Leo left health with 600,000 on waiting lists and GO reward hos failure & still do even though waiting lists is now past 700,000 & counting and parents and elderly have to beg their dignity away on liveline as they can’t afford buy private insurance to skip public yes public hospital waiting list eith private insurance for their vital operations.
@Jay Lane: FG reward his failure
@Jay Lane: it’s more than FG to blame here. This problem is ongoing for years. Coupled with the fact that we have people living longer, people have higher medical needs/demands than they do 20 years ago, standards of health care IS improving (detecting / monitoring/ operating various illnesses etc. The problem is hospitals and wards were closed, new hospitals weren’t built to meet demand, nurses and drs are graduating and emigrating. This all isn’t Leo’s fault. It’s going back to FF , it’s going back years. It isn’t a quick fix. It won’t be fixed by changing of ministers. It needs a radical change – the HSE needs a complete overhaul
Perhaps if our water wasn’t laced with Flouride ( carsonagenic) things would be better!
@Linda Keneally: Fluoride isn’t a known (or suspected) carcinogen.
If you live long enough you will die of something. The older you get the more likely that something will be Cancer. The rise in cancer deaths is a positive sign, because it means we are eliminating all the other causes of death.
@Clancy: Yes, of course we will, but it seems more and more that people expect to live indefinitely. Illness is the revenue stream for the pharma-medical industry, and old age is huge business. But it is clearly unsustainable, it doesn’t take a genius to work that out. Spend some time in an old-folks home, no-one in their right mind would want to end their days there.
I remember a scene from a book by either Camus or Sartre. A prisoner is facing the death sentence and has the opportunity to get off. But he decides that such a day has to come anyway, and will be exactly the same, whether now or later.
Long life is not necessarily a blessing . . .
@Clancy: I think your forgetting there is a cohort of young patients who are dying myself included who don’t see it that black and white and there are many older people who are in rude Health and would like to continue that way as long as possible except cancer interrupted their plans for a long and happy retirement
Figures, figures, figures. Statistics and more statistics. Is there nobody out there
Interested enough to find out once and for all what’s really causing these cancers and
the reasons for the increase in diagnoses?
@Frankly Mydear: I think the reason for the increase in diagnosis is down to a few things, 1) better public screening for breast and bowel cancer 2) better education, as in more information as regards the importance of self-screening, going for regular medical check-ups, what symptoms to look out for & seek medical help for without delay etc. Of course the BIG question is what are the markers for causing cancer in the first place, especially among younger people, how come 2 people of similar age, with similar lifestyles etc will see one of them getting cancer & the other not? This is a subject I have a huge interest in as my family seems to have had more of it’s share of cancer sufferers over the years, some have survived but sadly some haven’t. Whatever about older people who have lived through most of their lives & have experienced the major milestones that should be everybody’s right, it breaks my heart to see young people battling this disease & not always winning the battle either.
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