The knowledge economy myth

Amhran Nua

Peanut wrote: »

Pushing it as a primary goal for the future development of the country immediately brings to mind images of dancing at the crossroads for many people.

As it stands within the policies it is a minor and ancillary part of the larger picture, being only a single section of one policy document.

eoinbn

#15 wrote: »

OK, care to elaborate?

My point was about algebra.

That mass is measured by kilo's and weight in newtons.

Sponge Bob

Amhran Nua wrote: »

As it stands within the policies it is a minor and ancillary part of the larger picture, being only a single section of one policy document.

Half the population cannot speak english either , they eschew any pretence to literacy and express themselves in txt speak while attempting to open conversation with such inanities as "Stoooory Bud"

This is evidently a mass failure in English teaching standards and is , prima facie, a good reason to abandon the teaching of english in Irish schools and most particularly in urban areas where this illiteracy is at its worst .

Teach them a bit of basic arithmetic in kindergarten instead , eg 10 bag , 20 bag , 30 bag etc . Then stop wasting money on them .

#15

eoinbn wrote: »

That mass is measured by kilo's and weight in newtons.

OK, so are you suggesting that the curriculum content be changed? So that we teach children to measure weight in newtons?

#15

Sponge Bob wrote: »

Half the population cannot speak english either , they eschew any pretence to literacy and express themselves in txt speak while attempting to open conversation with such inanities as "Stoooory Bud"

This is evidently a mass failure in English teaching standards and is , prima facie, a good reason to abandon the teaching of english in Irish schools and most particularly in urban areas where this illiteracy is at its worst .

Teach them a bit of basic arithmetic in kindergarten instead , eg 10 bag , 20 bag , 30 bag etc . Then stop wasting money on them .

Come off it, teachers can't stop children speaking in slang.
Especially if they go home to parents/friends who influence them to speak in such a way.

#15

eoinbn wrote: »

Oh my...

Taken from link.

"estimate, measure and record weight using standard unit (the kilogram) and solve simple problems".

Originally Posted by eoinbn
That mass is measured by kilo's and weight in newtons.

I'm still not sure of what you are getting at?

Was it an attempt to make the curriculum writers look stupid?
Or do you think that children should be taught about the difference between mass and weight at first class level?
Or did you not bother to look anywhere else in the curriculum for the reasoning behind the content?

Here it is:

Mass and weight
In everyday speech the term 'weight' is used to describe mass and weight. However, weight is not the same as mass. The mass of an object is the amount of material or matter it contains; the weight of an object is the amount of force being exerted on it by the pull of gravity. Most children, during the primary years, will not have developed the ability to grasp the distinction between mass and weight. However by the end of the senior classes they could be encouraged to use the term 'mass'.

http://www.curriculumonline.ie/en/Primary_School_Curriculum/Social_Environmental_and_Scientific_Education_SESE_/Science/Science_Curriculum/Fifth_and_sixth_classes/Content/

You might do a bit more research next time before making ''oh my...'' rolleye type comments.

Permabear

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Sponge Bob

donegalfella wrote: »

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As what is best described as grunting skangerism IS the 'living' language in much of the state then it is time to abolish english in the curriculum .

We have taught 'proper' english for 90 years as a state and have failed utterly to deliver an adequate standard. Things are getting worse, irrespective of resources devoted to the subject . For that reason , and following your own logic to its inevitable conclusion , we must abolish the thing in our curriculum .

Furthermore we have taught near universal French at second level for around 40 years now . This has been a disaster. As we have completely failed to inculcate any regard for the French language or indeed any competence in it's speech we must also abolish French as a failed experiment . It has led steadily nowhere for 40 years , baises le , non ??

Permabear

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eoinbn

#15 wrote: »

I'm still not sure of what you are getting at?

Was it an attempt to make the curriculum writers look stupid?
Or do you think that children should be taught about the difference between mass and weight at first class level?
Or did you not bother to look anywhere else in the curriculum for the reasoning behind the content?

Here it is:

Mass and weight
In everyday speech the term 'weight' is used to describe mass and weight. However, weight is not the same as mass. The mass of an object is the amount of material or matter it contains; the weight of an object is the amount of force being exerted on it by the pull of gravity. Most children, during the primary years, will not have developed the ability to grasp the distinction between mass and weight. However by the end of the senior classes they could be encouraged to use the term 'mass'.

http://www.curriculumonline.ie/en/Primary_School_Curriculum/Social_Environmental_and_Scientific_Education_SESE_/Science/Science_Curriculum/Fifth_and_sixth_classes/Content/

You might do a bit more research next time before making ''oh my...'' rolleye type comments.

TBH I was just poking fun. I agree that mass/weight is probably beyond most 7 years old. I do find it somewhat amusing that the curriculum has to explain the different to the reader

I must admit that it does look like a much better curriculum that what I was taught. It introduces alot of concepts 2-3 years before I would of learnt about them in science.

leninbenjamin

there's actually a very strong economic argument for encouraging bilingualism: It's generally found bilingual kids perform better academically, which could be hugely important to us replacing those lost manufacturing jobs with high skilled services and R&D based employment.

now some of you will argue that's why foreign languages should be taught earlier, and Irish has no bearing on this, but the reality is language learning begins at the home and learning a language in school is no substitute for speaking a language on a daily basis. That to me is pretty strong rationale for encouraging Irish as the working language of this country.

fergalr

Niall Keane wrote: »

fergalr interesting points:

Computer Programming isn’t my field, architecture is, and right now the architectural profession is aiming along the same lines at going down the knowledge based economy route, i.e. developing innovative green design solutions and technologies, and also selling our expertise to developing economies.

But is this sustainable? Once you develop a new system straight away others can adopt and improve upon it, all they need to do is understand the driving principles behind the design solution. How do they do that, well they work on the project. (As much as posters here want to believe that schools and colleges create a knowledgeable workforce, they don’t they provide an elementary understanding of a field to their graduates, they enable a person to begin the real education - acquired by practicing in the field working on serious projects alongside the professions / industries heavyweights. I know that most of my old college tutors wouldn’t know where to begin on some of the clinical / technical projects I am involved with. They might know how to produce a pretty house extension, but don’t even know about the existence of specialist requirements for more technically demanding buildings. A guy who designs a kitchen extension is not going to come across negative air pressure requirements and corresponding spatial design considerations for clean areas in labs and hospitals, he is never going to consider designing an independent structure within a structure so a TV studio can be acoustically insulated from all frequencies. Such considerations are in effect outside of their universe. And guys who do know this because they are working in the field have not got the time to be tutoring down at the local university.)

So China got the experts - Arup, Foster etc.. to design their buildings. The projects were grand enough and given the budget to justify exploring innovative solutions, now China has these buildings, they can see how they perform, what works and what should be avoided. In fact we in the west are now visiting these buildings to benchmark and learn from them. We had the brains to conceptualise the design, but the practical knowledge now belongs to China. It is those Chinese junior engineers and architects who worked on the projects, and are now maintaining them who will have a true understanding and be able to improve upon the initial developments. So in 10 years time it won’t be Arup or Foster with the impressive portfolio it will be a company as yet unheard of in Shanghai or somewhere else in China.
I imagine this must occur in computer programming too. Innovative programmes are obviously designed to address some need, or to cater for an inadequate or absent approach. Necessity being the mother of invention. Once such a programme is produced, the cat is out of the bag, maybe people didn’t know before that they needed this programme, but they do now, so you have not only designed an effective programme but also an effective brief. And after you have spent time and money developing the solution, and you now intend to reap the reward, another unrecognisable but better programme is suddenly produced in the east and sold for less (they didn’t have to spend years figuring out what exactly was required from the product, you’ve market tested it for them). I already see this with Computer Aided Design software. Autodesk produces a new version with “fantastic” new features, fixing some of the frustrating bugs of a previous version they have been made aware of through client feedback which costs in itself, and suddenly Intelicad from Eastern Europe brings out the exact same product some weeks later but it costs €350 not €5,000.
What’s the gig? Are you going to keep on inventing? Can we really be hoping for and expecting a nation of Leonardos?

So, if I have this right, you are asking what is to stop people cloning the process/product, after the R&D has been done elsewhere.
A bit like in the (hotly debated) situation where one pharma company incurs a lot of sunk costs developing a new drug, and its competitors develop generic versions.

It's obviously something to think about, when discussing the knowledge economy. I don't have all the answers of course, but there are a few reasons why I think software is a little different than the other fields - not that this isn't still a factor, but just that its much less of a factor.

On thing is that first mover advantage is huge in software. Just being the first company to develop a good new product, and get this to your users, is a huge leg up on the competition. People learn to use your software, and not your competitors'. Yours is what is familiar and easy to them. And in many domains, once users have started to use your software, there is a cost to them switching.

To give some examples here. Lets look at Facebook. Simply, it would be a relatively straightforward task to build an very functionally similar clone of facebook. It would be extremely easy to build one that works for a couple of hundred thousand users. (It would be hard to develop it in such a way as that it scales to tens of millions of users, but you'd still do it with a small team of skilled developers).
But the thing is, if we were to go right now, and launch this competitor to facebook, we wouldn't even get a hundred thousand users.
Even if we copied all facebooks technology and innovation, it wouldn't matter. There's a huge amount of inertia in the user base that is currently in facebook. (I think perhaps people possibly overestimate this inertia - but they point is, it does exist). That's just a fundamentally different situation than if we were to discuss buildings, and technology to develop green buildings. Users, to some extent, are going to stick with what they are currently using. It wouldn't be enough to just clone facebook - we'd have to both clone it, and substantially add more value, to get the users to go through the hassle of switching. (Unless facebook do something stupid and drive their own users away).

You could also look at something like MS Windows. I would argue that Apple has had a better operating system for the last 5 years; but there still huge inertia involved in making the switch. I don't want to get into a debate on the early history of windows, but Microsoft were the first company to bring their product to market in a nice, common, well promoted package, they captured a huge share of the market, and even when Apple produced a better package years later, there was still a lot of inertia there that stopped people switching. If you just cloned MS windows people wouldn't just switch, even though it cost money to buy windows. Just look at how long Openoffice has taken to get traction.


The company/person that first develops the technology/software/computer program doesn't necessarily reap the rewards. But if they are smart enough to take their potentially game changing advances, and to bring them to market in the right package, then the 6 months or so that it takes a competitor to produce a cloned product can give the original producer enough of a headstart that they are very hard to catch.

I think there's enough advantage that accrues in this manner, that frequently you don't particularly need to worry about all your ideas and innovation being stolen by competitors who are just cloning your ideas.
You should probably be more worried about a skilled competitor can will come along and produce a better product, with new innovations you haven't thought of, than a competitor that will just knock off your existing wares.


The other factor which I think is important, and this is touched on by some of the other posters, is that cloning really good, user friendly, software can be really really hard to do. It's just a really hard task to take something like the IPhone and produce a competitor that is sufficiently better to displace it.
If we look at the IPhone; Apple did a lot of things which perhaps seemed a little obvious - putting a web browser and music player on a phone, with a big screen, and a good UI - but they did it *really really well* and they leapfrogged companies like Nokia that had been trying to do something like this for a while. That was nearly 2.5/3 years ago now, and despite frantically trying to clone the device, competitors are only just now managing to make viable competing devices. It remains to be seen whether Apple has developed an insurmountable lead (Android is getting a lot of momentum...) but the point is that despite the IPhone being very much a product of the knowledge economy (and again, I mean the software, the whole package - the hardware is made in China and not so hard to do) it is difficult for a competitor to just produce a clone.



So that's two things that I think set aside good software (or perhaps I should say, the capacity to develop good software) from the building examples you mentioned.
I think if we get to the stage where Ireland had a world class software development capacity (and I think we are a *long* way off, but getting better) then we wouldn't need to worry too much about people just stealing the innovations, and reaping the benefits. Its hard to just clone really good software - and even if it was really easy, large advantages often accrue to the first to market with the right package.

I don't think 'Intellectual Property' is a particularly big component in this picture. Copyright is important for MS to stop people just distributing windows on CDs - but not really at all relevant to google, facebook, many web2.0 companies etc.

But thats just copyright - patents and other IP protection often take years to be granted, and can be hard to enforce - the software industry moves very fast, and I think IP really isn't often that relevant to the business of software.

If someone sues Facebook or Apple now because they have violated a patent (and I would bet, without even looking, that such lawsuits are ongoing) will it really change the face of the phone market, or the social networking market? Patents aren't as relevant as they are sometimes made out to be - personally, I'm not sure whether their existence in the software industry is actually justified, but that's another topic.

fergalr

Amhran Nua wrote: »

The IP aspect is one of the most important ones in any industry, but especially software where the barrier to entry is so low. And you can run web based services just as well from India or China - indeed, even better since you don't have to directly interact with customers.

Amhran Nua wrote: »

The IP aspect is one of the most important ones in any industry, but especially software where the barrier to entry is so low.

What about farming or fishing? You've mentioned the agriculture industry a few times on this thread. How important is the IP aspect in farming?
Both have low barriers to entry. What about accountancy, or retail etc?
Surely IP is only an important aspect of certain industries - its not really all that relevant or core in other ones?

Amhran Nua wrote: »

And you can run web based services just as well from India or China - indeed, even better since you don't have to directly interact with customers.

Are you saying its better to not be able to interact directly with customers?

Surely its particularly hard to develop products for a market that you don't have access to or don't know. Most people view it as an advantage to be able to interact directly with customers, when developing products. It must be hard for chinese and indian developers to try and build web based products for a western market - the same as it is for us to build products for their markets when we don't really know or understand the customers.
Could you explain why you think its an advantage?



Also, I don't really think what you are saying makes sense here. You are talking about people stealing IP and running web based services. Its hard to steal the IP from a website and just clone the website, as you don't typically have access to the running code etc.

I find it really strange that you mention web based services, one area of software that is particularly immune from considerations of people cloning software IP, as an example to highlight the dangers of people cloning IP.
Could you explain your thinking behind this, or is it just supposed to be some sort of nice sounding soundbyte?

soden12

What about teaching our bankers how to count so that they don't get caught up in their own lies ?

Or indeed asking our politicos to grow a spine and not spend all our money on bailing out the banks...

digiology

leninbenjamin wrote: »

there's actually a very strong economic argument for encouraging bilingualism: It's generally found bilingual kids perform better academically, which could be hugely important to us replacing those lost manufacturing jobs with high skilled services and R&D based employment.

now some of you will argue that's why foreign languages should be taught earlier, and Irish has no bearing on this, but the reality is language learning begins at the home and learning a language in school is no substitute for speaking a language on a daily basis. That to me is pretty strong rationale for encouraging Irish as the working language of this country.

But seriously, why Irish of all languages? Imagine the potential of having our kids learning Chinese for example!

nice_guy80

It is a ficticous term used by Fianna Fail and other people high up in companies and the Public Service to justify their salaries

consultants
GPs
Higher grades in Semi states


can't think of other examples
they justify their wages by claiming there'd be a brain drain of expertise and ability if they were paid the wages for the amount of work they actually do

fergalr

nice_guy80 wrote: »

It is a ficticous term used by Fianna Fail and other people high up in companies and the Public Service to justify their salaries

consultants
GPs
Higher grades in Semi states


can't think of other examples
they justify their wages by claiming there'd be a brain drain of expertise and ability if they were paid the wages for the amount of work they actually do

Ah, come on...

Here, if you believe what you just wrote, go fix this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_economy
Wikipedia seems to reckon its got something to do with knowledge, and economics, and doesn't mention FF at all.


Also, in fairness, I don't even think that - even as used as a piece of Irish political spin - that its frequently applied to GPs and consultants. Neither of those groups, nor lawyers (except maybe IP ones) or politicians would fall into the typical use of the term.


Even if you think the phrase 'knowledge economy' is a bad one, or poorly defined, or a piece of marketing-speak, or spin, what its trying to get and describe does definitely exist at some level.

There are high tech tertiary industries, that deal with information creation and processing, the creation of information artefacts, etc.
What the phrase is trying to get at is that as well as Ireland having value because we have X amount of spruce trees each year, Y litres of milk, Z tons of fish, K meat packaging plants, J cheese factories... ...there is also a certain worth to the ability we have to handle and process information, to write clever software, to know how to deploy a phone network - and to the knowledge thats in the heads of Irish people, as they work from day to day.

In this sense, its not a myth, there's plenty of people involved in this sort of work, right now, today, who were hired, and are paid money because of what they know how to do, and because they are good at working with information.

When the phrase is used its because people are starting to realise that in future, it doesn't cut it to know how to just produce milk, and extract EU subsidies. There are bigger and better farming nations than us, they can do it cheaper and better, and our agriculture simply cannot be our whole economy in future. Tourism also won't make the whole economy work... Nor can we compete, long term, on manufacturing labour costs. We can't always be the cheapest place to put factories, unless you want a huge drop in the standard of living. We won't always have the lowest corporation tax rate. And we sure as hell can't just keep on building houses forever - that doesn't seem to have worked out very well. We're a small nation, and we don't have much in the way of heavy industry, nor great natural resources, and our small size makes it hard for us to attempt to develop a critical mass of heavy industry.

So, what are we going to do? Well, personally, one thing I think could work is this whole knowledge economy thing. We could get really good at developing things like software and expertise in the various high tech domains. You don't need huge industrial bases, and giant factories, requiring huge population support, to develop software or process information. You can do it with the scale of population we have. We've done pretty ok at this so far too, considering the small amount of resources we've invested in it.


One way in which the 'knowledge economy' is spin, is that our politicians have continually pretended that we've much more of a knowledge economy than we currently do. A collection of multinational computer companies whose Irish operations involve the equivalent of putting CDs into boxes, and using the cheap corporation tax rates, does not a knowledge economy make. But hopefully we'll get better at this as time goes on.

nice_guy80

are foreign companies going to come in to head hunt our doctors and consultants? as well as people in semi state companies? and decision makers in the public sector?

as that is used as reasoning for paying them higher salaries: to stop any brain drain from Ireland.

its all bollox.

there is nearly always someone who will do a better job, for less

fergalr

nice_guy80 wrote: »

are foreign companies going to come in to head hunt our doctors and consultants? as well as people in semi state companies? and decision makers in the public sector?

I'm not really sure we are talking about the same thing.

I'm not sure I'd really say that GPs and consultants are in the core of the knowledge economy. I guess though that they could be considered an asset to it if they had a lot of critical expertise and knowledge, and even more so if they were working in knowledge industries. But I personally wouldn't have thought of medical professionals as the most obvious knowledge workers; so maybe someone is stretching it a bit there, or being equivocal about things because it suits them.

nice_guy80 wrote: »

as that is used as reasoning for paying them higher salaries: to stop any brain drain from Ireland.

its all bollox.

Whatever you think about the doctors and consultants personally, you probably agree it costs a shedload of economic resources to train them up to the level where they are consultants, right? Even without free university education, but even more so with it.

Smart people with valuable skills tend to be relatively footloose, and if you under pay them, they will simply leave. Then you don't get the benefit of the resources it took to train them, you don't get their economic productivity, you don't get their taxes, and, yes, you don't get the substantial and valuable expertise that's in their heads.

Now, maybe medical professionals in Ireland are still being paid well above the amount of money at which they'd leave. I really have no idea. If thats the case, then I'd be right with you. But the brain drain argument makes sense to me, at least at some level.

Brain drain is a serious issue, especially in Ireland at the moment; we've sunk a lot of costs in educating people to a high standard, and if they all leave because of a recession on the back of a terribly mismanaged boom, then thats very bad for the economy. The problem with brain drain is that its often the most valuable people, who are the ones that can leave, that do leave.

nice_guy80 wrote: »

there is nearly always someone who will do a better job, for less

Well then, give all the public sector workers, regardless of level, 300 euro a week, and tax everyone else at 80%. We'll quickly see for how long there will be someone doing a better job for less.
If that sort of thinking is used to set policy, and taken to its logical limit, then there'll be very little of an Irish economy left in 10 years.


Not that people aren't getting overpaid - sure they are, and they shouldn't be. I'm just saying I don't think the argument in itself is 'bollix'; it is a sensible argument; brain drain is a real threat here at the moment.

nice_guy80

i'm talking about people/sectors who get to negotiate their own salaries.
take for instance the CIE chairman who got special legislation enacted so he could switch from FAS to CIE and keep his salery and perks from the first job

the money consultants and GPs are on is ridiculous
lawyers fees for tribunal work

leninbenjamin

digiology wrote: »

But seriously, why Irish of all languages? Imagine the potential of having our kids learning Chinese for example!

plenty of reasons.

a) it makes more economic sense. We already have the most of infrastructure in place to make Irish the working language of the state

b) tens of thousands of people in this country are fluent in it. Hundreds of thousands have a proficiency close to fluency.

c) Most bilingual regions develop entirely new dialects that are so different from the original, it's inaccessible to the original region. For example, plenty of Iberian Portuguese can't understand a whit of Brazilian Portuguese. The same thing would happen if we started speaking something else, which largely renders the point moot.

d) Another cultural reason; it's our own f*cking language, as spoken by my grandparents, and their grandparents. In many nations, a common language is the only source of a shared identity. We want to strengthen the nation's national identity in the economic world. Not undermine it.

e) Another cultural reason; have you any idea how hard it is to learn a language for which you have no cultural context? European languages are fairly accessible to us as we share similar cultures... but Mandarin? ffs...

and I could go on...

thebman

leninbenjamin wrote: »

plenty of reasons.

a) it makes more economic sense. We already have the most of infrastructure in place to make Irish the working language of the state

That doesn't mean it makes sense economically. How did you arrive at that conclusion?

It just means its cheaper.

It would still leave Irish as being useless from an economic perspective as no other country speaks it and we all speak English currently which most of the world speaks so adding a language barrier unnecessarily to business would have a negative impact economically.

Permabear

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Peanut

English is the international language of business, science, and technology.

We don't need to have a chip on our shoulder over what is, right now, still a potentially great economic benefit.

Forget about the language issue. We are already in a position that others strive for - why should we squader this advantage with some fluffy nationalistic swaggering instead?

asdasd

It's not my language. Census returns tell me that it was not the language of my great-grandparents, either.

Sure, and it wasnt ever the language of some peoples great^n grandparents, particualrly people with English surnames. That may explain a lot of the hostility to it.

asdasd

Meanwhile, "melting pot" countries such as Australia and the USA have been highly economically successful. They have managed to turn their cultural diversities into strengths

Thats probably mixing up correlation with causation.

leninbenjamin

thebman wrote: »

It would still leave Irish as being useless from an economic perspective as no other country speaks it and we all speak English currently which most of the world speaks so adding a language barrier unnecessarily to business would have a negative impact economically.

I've already outlined the benefits of bilingualism.
I've already outlined why learning a more widely spoken language is ust as useless.

Btw, Irish is not useless in the economic world. I remember reading an article before about the Irish language abroad, and more than a few business men and traders said they found it useful to have. I'll try and dig it up.

donegalfella wrote: »

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but you don't have every child in the education system already exposed to Polish now do you?

donegalfella wrote: »

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Somewhere you're lying. A true Donegal person would have Irish speaking roots. I was the most Irish of all counties and that...
>.>
<.<
(btw that was an attempt at humour)

donegalfella wrote: »

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oh for god sake... I think you'll find that's due to the Qur'an.

donegalfella wrote: »

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That was due to Dev's policy of economic isolation. It wasn't a by product, he deliberately set out to do it!

donegalfella wrote: »

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From an economic perspective perhaps. Socially though those countries are about the most unequal in the world and are rife with problems.

edit: btw, we haven't even mentioned the benefits of Gaeilge to tourism to this country. There's a lot of evidence to suggest Gaeilge is a very undertapped lure for Tourism.

Permabear

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fergalr

nice_guy80 wrote: »

i'm talking about people/sectors who get to negotiate their own salaries.
take for instance the CIE chairman who got special legislation enacted so he could switch from FAS to CIE and keep his salery and perks from the first job

Not familiar with that specific case, but certainly the worst of the public purse abuses and dodgy dealings going on over the past few years have been terrible. I agree with you on that point.

However, I don't think you are making a good case that the idea of the knowledge economy is inherently stupid, just because you can point out that taxpayers money was terribly wasted in the past. I think what happened was awful too, and should be sorted out - but looking to the future, we still have to make sure that Irelands producing something of international value, and the knowledge economy is probably a big part of a sensible future plan for Ireland.

nice_guy80 wrote: »

the money consultants and GPs are on is ridiculous
lawyers fees for tribunal work

Consultants get paid a whole lot, yes. Thats not just an Irish problem though, its an international one with how the medical system is setup so that very small numbers of people reach those high ranks, thus keeping the wages there high. We can't just cut consultants wages below the point at which they'll leave the country, unfortunately.

A lot of the legal fees in tribunals seem, to my uneducated eye, like robbery, agreed.

I think if you look at GPs and calculate out the take home pay of the GP (after insurance, practice staff, drug costs, private patients subsidising the public ones (which is de facto what happens) etc) and look at the hourly rate across the career, and considering the amount of training done, you'd be surprised at how low it frequently is. Certainly no better than any other profession.

leninbenjamin

donegalfella wrote: »

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Well, good to see your opinion on the history of the state and the vast majority of it's people. We're not going to agree on anything so. You must have had a very bad experience learning Irish as a kid or something as you're hostility towards it, while understandable, seems excessive and blinkered.