Here in Mayo we should be grateful, however, as some parts of Ireland have been far wetter, with nearly 4 times the seasonal average falling at Johnstown Castle in July, and 2.5 times the mean at Valencia in August.

Interestingly, the temperature and sunshine figures for Belmullet have been slightly above average, 6% & 7% respectively. The summary, then, is warmer and wetter, which happens to be just what the climate change model is predicting.

Thanks and congratulations are due to Chris Kerndter, the driving force behind establishing MOCC – well done Chris!

The Open Coffee Club concept is to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow. More details about Mayo OCC are at mayo-open-coffee-club.org, including details of future meetings.

A good mix of people were in attendance, from developers and business owners to mentors and people involved in support and incubation of fledgling businesses, all adding up to a solid foundation on which MOCC can grow. The venue, a large hotel in the centre of Castlebar, was spacious and accommodating, although the coffee was a bit on the pricey side.

So, a great start and plenty to look forward to in the future.

According to a report in the Mayo News, councillors disagreed about a proposal to honour the brothers, whose mother is from Charlestown, with a Civic reception. Despite the objections, the Council agreed to invite the brothers to an event in the east Mayo town which, according to one councillor, would be “claiming these sons of emigrants back.”

It is not known if Liam & Noel would be interested in such an event.

Seems a bit presumptuous to me; just because someone is part Irish it is assumed that they would want to be ‘claimed back.’

If a person is elected to our national parliament as an independent candidate, i.e. not affiliated to any particular political party, it seems that they can claim and extra €41k a year on top of the €100k+ salary and expenses (which can, for TDs in more remote constituencies – like Mayo I assume, amount to a further €100k or so). This extra money is supposed to compensate for the fact that they are not backed by a ‘party machine’ and hence incur extra expenses.

So a TD could receive as much as €250k per year – that’s a quarter of a million euros of taxpayers money. Now hold on, I musn’t get side tracked here, the point of this post is not about the ridiculously large salaries these people are paid – even more if you get to be a minister of course – and the absurdly generous pension arrangements. No, this is about that ‘independent’s bonus’.

Let’s just throw in a bit of abbreviated background here, regarding Ms. Flynn. She used to work in a bank. According to a report on RTÉ, the state broadcaster, in the course of her work at the bank she would encourage people to evade tax. That’s evade, not avoid. It’s illegal. Well, she denied it of course and sued RTÉ for libel. She lost. Costs were awarded against her, to the tune of €2.4 million, she was thrown out of Fianna Fáil, her party, and became an independent. She was still an independent when she was re-elected in 2007 and so gets the little bonus. However, in 2008 she was allowed to rejoin the Fianna Fáil party because by then she had settled with RTÉ (by paying half the money she owed) but she continued to claim her independent’s bonus, which she’s entitled to do until the next election, apparently.

She reckons there’s nothing wrong with this and anyway the money is used for the benefit of her constituents.

As you can imagine, this has caused a bit of a stink. With the global financial crisis, the banks losing all our money, the economy in recession, businesses closing down, people losing their jobs and the government building up a debt of biblical proportions, you can see why some people might have a problem with Ms. Flynn claiming a bonus to which, morally at least, she is clearly not entitled. It’s OK though, the Taoiseach (prime minister, leader of the goverment) has had a word with her and she’s decided not to continue claiming the money after all. And she’s very upset at all the horrid things that people have been saying about her in recent days.

For the sake of fairness, I should point out that she is not the only TD accused of this sort of behaviour, so that’s all right then.

When will politicians learn? Will they ever learn? Or do they, if fact, know exactly what they are doing and just hope they can get away with it for long enough to feather the nest with exquisite Hungarian goose down? After all, corruption, fraud and generally dodgy behavior is hardly unknown in the world of politics. Our previous Taoiseach, the great Bertie Ahern, resigned because the questions about where he got his money were becoming a bit difficult to answer. [Interestingly, these questions were posed by a 'Tribunal of Inquiry' set up by the Bert to look into corruption in public life. Talk about 'hoisted by his own petard'.] The late Charles Haughey, another former Taoiseach, was really quite bent. Every country has similar exemplars. It would be very easy to wonder if there are any honest politicians, or is that an oxymoron?

Perhaps the real question is why, oh why, oh why, do we keep voting for these individuals? Maybe it’s because there isn’t any real choice.

Mayo County Council obviously have funding problems, no doubt in part due to the current economic climate and concomitant downturn in revenues from taxation, levies etc.. However, attempting to bridge the gap by taxing consumers who wish to recycle is surely the wrong way to go. Clearly the Council sees these ‘recyclers’ as a soft target.

Supporters of the idea mention the ‘Polluter Pays Principle’ but this is irrelevant – recyclers are not polluters – and the Council may not be contravening any laws or directives, but this misses the point. Waste is a massive environmental problem at a local, regional, national and global level. There is no single solution, but one of the ways of dealing with the problem is recycling. Authorities at every level have a responsibility to encourage as much recycling as possible (the government spends a fortune on adverts promoting the idea of ‘reduce, re-use, recycle’). You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that charging for recycling – even a ‘nominal’ €2 – will discourage rather than encourage.

The likely effect of charging is that less people will use the civic amenity sites – I for one will ensure that I only go when my car is full to the brim with recyclables – and there will be an increase in burning, dumping, abuse of (still free) bottle banks and, quite possibly, placing of mixed refuse and recycling in other people’s bins. Less people visiting the amenity sites (or people visiting less frequently) will mean less than anticipated revenue for the Council, which will undoubtedly lead to a raising of the ‘nominal’ charge to €3 then €5, continuing in a vicious circle.

There is an additional contradiction in what the Council has to say about its latest great idea. On the one hand the Council is obliged to open additional Civic Amenity Sites and on the other they want us to use waste removal contractors for our recycling. Who will end up using (and paying for) all these Civic Amenity Sites?

Recyclable materials are a commodity, a raw material that manufacturers will pay for. The Council should be using the revenue from this to develop further sites. Free access to recycling will maximise this income stream, rather than pushing the profits into the pockets of the private waste collectors.

This move strikes me as another example of short term thinking on the part of the Council and it is the consumer and the environment that will suffer. So no change there then.