[article] How perfectly apt!

mike65

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0104/1224286701107.html

A HISTORY of the Office of Public Works to be published this year will cost the taxpayer €350,000 more than was originally envisaged.

The OPW agreed a two-year contract in 2002 with a professional historian to write a history of the organisation at a total cost of €76,184.

However, when the full extent of archival work needed became apparent, the OPW agreed a further extension until January 2006 at a further cost of €78,470.

No signed contract went beyond this point. However the project has been continually extended by the OPW and will be finally completed this year.

The final cost is now expected to be in the region of €420,000.

Amtmann

Staggering. As someone who worked as a historian of sixteenth-century Germany, the amount of archival work was indeed staggering.
The cost, however, was not:
Plane ticket to Germany, hire a car for a few weeks, visit archives and take thousands of digital photographs of the manuscripts. Bish bash bosh. Then back to the office, discriminate the relevant sources from the irrelevant ones, have a think, and write.

And my primary sources looked like this:



A far cry from the typed English sources that most research on the, um, OPW would be based.

I fail to see how it could have cost so much.

Dirigent

Let me guess, it's called "PS I Owe You"?

Bards

I reckon it must be his salary since 2002 which works out at about €46,000 per year (2002 - 2011 , 9 years salary)