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Lisbon Treaty Polls

There’s a number of polls ongoing tonight across the Irish Internet. The majority appear to be indicating a No victory.

Not sure how reliable these straw polls might be. Here’s some links (I’ll add more as I find them – Is this very sad?):

Politics.ie – Yes side took an early lead but No closing gap all evening. 10pm – 1% gap, Yes leading.

Tom Raftery – Yes consistently 10% ahead.

Boards.ie – Consistent 7-8% No lead – largest sample.

People’s Republic of Cork – Consistent and significant No lead – small enough sample.

Machine Nation – Small sample – 10% lead for Yes.

UCC put the Yes side well ahead.

Meanwhile Douglas Herbert on France 24 writes an almost triumphalist report in France 24 on the issue headlined ‘Irish Vote: From Tiger to Turkey?’

The Munster Fans have obviously had enough of Europe.

While the Creative People of Ireland are voting No.

John Curran (FF TD) is seeing a very close run thing.

The 5 voters (me being one) on Ire-Land.com (didn’t peruse the forum but it must be for all us angry Irish) are neck and neck.

Paintballers across the Country are confirmed NO.

Obviously the most reliable poll is the Paintballers poll – I’m sure that’ll be confirmed tomorrow evening – 39% No, 33% Yes and the rest undecided or don’t know..

And finally for this evening – Politics.ie posters intimating a Yes victory based on an RTE exit poll leak. And hello and welcome to our Paintballing visitors (do Paintballers sleep?).

12:30am correction – seems that the poster with RTE source for his exit poll on P.ie has changed his source to his Politician father.

Friday 13th – EARLY TALLIES

Friday 10am – Getting a bit obsessive now. Have a lot of work to do today – licence applications, method statements, invoices, proposals and 3 reports. Anyway, P.ie reporting early (first box)tallies favouring No in Tirellan, Galway and Cherry Orchard and 51.6% No in DNW.

RTE, Newstalk and Betfair all indicating a possible NO victory.

Ireland.com should have ongoing tallies throughout the day.

So there you go – As of 3:45 today there’s no doubt that the No side has won. Here’s a screen shot from Ireland.com – demonstrating a distinct Western bias (the very parts of our Country which did least well from the European project..).

Jun 12, 2008 | Categories:Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 4 Comments »

The Common Lizard

Posted by Niall

Pictured above is a common lizard (Lacerata vivipara), Irelands only native reptile – one of a number of individuals spotted in the Ballycurren area of Headford by Nigel recently. The common lizard is seldom spotted but considered to be widespread in Ireland. The distribution and requirements of the species are currently being studied by the Irish wildlife trust. The male lizard can be identified by its brighter colours and black spots while the female is generally grey or greenish with fewer black spots. The little lizard enjoys nothing better than a nice bask in the sun and possibly piña colada’s. Common lizards hibernate during the winter and re-emerge in spring. Live offspring are produced in July and August. The Irish Wildlife Trust is currently carrying out a National Lizard Survey.

Of other lizards in Ireland the slow worm, although superficially like a snake, is actually a legless lizard (unlike snakes, they have eyelids) and is found in parts of the Burren – but is probably a recent introduction. Although there were almost certainly snakes in Ireland before the last glaciation, by the time the last Ice Age ended there was no existing landbridge. Even the shortest distance across the Irish sea is 12 miles between Kintyre and Antrim, barring the way for the post glacial reptiles (so St Patrick’s legend of driving snakes and reptiles out of Ireland doesn’t quite weigh up).

Sightings of the Common Lizard can be notified to the Irish Wildlife Trust by downloading the survey and information sheet online and emailing it to Lizards@iwt.ie

And just noticed that John Smyth has been spotting them too..

Jun 11, 2008 | Categories:About Environment | Tags: , , , | 19 Comments »

WAC 6 Fringe beer

We’ve been invited to present the beer experiment at WAC 6 in July as part of the WAC Fringe at UCD’s Belfield Campus. WAC is shaping up to be a great event. We’ll be giving out free samples of our Fulacht Beer/Hot Rock Ale at the event as well as samples brewed by a student from Sligo IT, who recreated and improved on the process (more on that later). We’re looking forward to hearing people’s opinions of both the process and the beer! So this weekend we have to go off to get juniper, elderflower, bog myrtle and get brewing again in preparation…

Our bog myrtle is sourced on the north shore of Lough Corrib, and we’ll gather about 10 plants for three brews of the ale, our juniper we just buy online and our elderflower will come from Billy’s garden as needed (we discovered that elderflower is very yeast heavy and probably accentuated the flavour of our first brew last year – which was the best of all the brews!). The pickup will also be busy this weekend collecting granite from Connemara.

Here’s the excerpt from the WAC Fringe programme:

Billy Quinn and Declan Moore, Moore Group

Thursday, 3rd July & Friday 4th July

A demonstration of their ‘Great Beer Experiment’, which attempted to demonstrate the feasibilty of using burnt stone mounds (‘fulachta fiadh’ in Ireland) as brewing sites. They will demonstrate and discuss their experiments and research into the enigmatic site that is the fulacht fiadh. These ubiquitous monuments, which are visible in the landscape as small, horseshoe-shaped grass-covered mounds, have been conventionally thought of by archaeologists as ancient cooking spots, saunas or industrial sites.

We’re also looking forward to seeing the experimental bronze forging group, Umha Aois who will be in residence the entire week of WAC with ‘demonstrations of experimental practices aimed at understanding the methods and techniques of forging bronze artefacts developed in the Bronze Age.’ “Umha Aois” (Irish for “Bronze Age”) is an ongoing experimental project organised on a volunteer basis by a committee formed of artists & archaeologists.

Directed by Dr Steve Davis (School of Archaeology, UCD) and Dr Ian Russell (Humanities Institute of Ireland, UCD), assisted by Dr Andrew Cochrane (Cardiff University, Wales), the WAC Fringe will feature ‘a series of demonstrations, events and exhibitions, showcasing cutting edge international archaeological research and artistic practice. These will include demonstrations in experimental archaeology (e.g. flint knapping, hide working, cooking), audiovisual presentations (with the School of Folklore, Irish Traditional Music Archive) and conceptual materials (e.g. photographic exhibitions, artistic materials), and will bring together collaborators from within Ireland, as well as from Europe, N. America, China, Australia and New Zealand.’

The Fringe will include ‘In Transit – The excavation of a transit van by John Schofield (UK) with photographs by Urusula Frederick and Katie Hayne (Australia) which I’ve read about before and sounds interesting…. Also of interest is a demonstration by Sculptor and currach-maker Holger Lönze of making of a traditional oval-shaped River Boyne currach from the Oldcastle area of Co. Meath.

For more see the WAC website.

Jun 06, 2008 | Categories:About Archaeology, About the Beer | Tags: , , , , | Leave A Comment »

Assemblage II

Gathering stuff from the blogworld/internets on Beer, Archaeology, Environment, Aquaponics and anything else that strikes us as interesting, since last month.

We’ll start topically this time with Jim Corr setting out his stall on the Lisbon Treaty on ‘The Last Word’ (via Mulley)…… I still haven’t received my booklet – clearly I’m a victim of the tiptoe totalitarians and the new world order, one-world government, Zionist, Masonic, Illuminati, Anti-Semite, Communist conspiracy.

On beer this time we get a kind mention over at Impy Malting and Oishiioishii reports that Sapporo are brewing a ‘Space Beer’ made from ‘third generation barley grains that… spent five months on the International Space Station in 2006.’ Also just came across this piece in BNET which provides a really good background to the current knowledge on ancient beer around the world. Meanwhile Zythophile has an interesting post on AK Beer, while Pete has published a deleted scene from his fine tome ‘Three Sheets to the Wind’.

And, speaking of the literati, we heard Julian Gough on the radio last night talking about stealing Will Self’s Pig.

Colleen describes ‘memory mapping’ over at Middle Savagery and there’s more archaeology and anthropology reading over at Remote Central who hosts this weeks Four Stone Hearth (some great links there but I found James Q. Jacobs paper on The Cannibalism Paradigm: Assessing Contact Period Ethnohistorical Discourse of particular interest…). And Eachtra point to the Retreive Foundations claim at a recent UN conference that ‘the desecration of indigenous lands and sacred areas continued, namely the Hill of Tara and surrounding areas’ and “so far in Ireland, there was [sic] no dialogue about the rights of indigenous peoples.’ Aren’t we all indigenous? (then again my wife’s family only came here in the 13th century so could they be considered indigenous?).

On environment we read at Gristmill of a new potentially disastrous, aggressive strain of a fungal disease that can decimate wheat crops. Biodiversity (specifically ‘the more different strains of wheat we cultivate across the globe, the less vulnerable we’ll all be when a single damaging fungus strain seeps through’) is one of the suggested answers to this threat.

And Garry Miley has revamped the Planning Dispatch. His discussion regarding Protected structures here and here is well worth reading.

Finally, our new interest in Aquaponics. There’s some great sources over at Joel Malcolms excellent forum via his website Backyard Aquaponics. He’s also started publishing a journal.


May 31, 2008 | Categories:Assemblage | Tags: , , , , , | Leave A Comment »

Aquaponics

Posted by Nigel

Here’s the reason there’s been very little recent activity on the blog – we’ve been working hard on our new side project – our Headford backyard aquaponics system ….

Put simply, aquaponics is the integration of hydroponics and aquaculture, a recirculating method of sustainable food production. The process basically entails pumping nutrient rich effluent from fish tanks which fertilizes hydroponic plant beds, and, in turn, the plants function as a biofilter, removing the ammonia, nitrates, nitrates and phosphates from the water. The cleaned water then recirculates back into the fish tanks.

An aquaponics system is made up of two basic elements – a pond/tank for your fish and water reservoir and a grow bed for the plants.

This summer we’re experimenting with a small ‘backyard’ system, comprising three ponds and three grow beds. Following the photo’s above clockwise from top-left will give an idea of the amount of work involved in just preparing this small system. In the first photo, we’ve cut the top off an IBC (an intermediate bulk carrier – a plastic industrial container) to give us our basic tank and grow bed. We’ve tried to scavenge what we can in order to minimise costs but this was our greatest expense (€200.00 for the three). The next step is insulation to cope with temperature fluctuation. The second photo shows an aborted attempt using Polyurethane foam (yes, we should have tried putting it on before filling the tank with water!), and the next shows the finished tank and grow bed. In the end we used fibre insulation wrapped in black plastic sheeting kept in place with pallet wrap. Our grow beds are gravel filled (and cleaning the gravel proved to be the most intensive element of the set-up work), with simple wavin pipe irrigation systems. Our pumps are the cheapest pond pumps we could find online – about €65 each. In total we estimate we’ve spent about €800 between everything at this stage (add water testing gear, electrical fittings and sundry bits and pieces). We also bought some goldfish to get the whole ecosystem going.

The working model is also depicted above with water flowing from the plant bed drain and the pump in the, as yet, unpopulated fish tank. As you can see we have planted a few plants in one of the grow beds (lettuce and basil) and all is well so far.

We’ll be introducing our main fish stock shortly and we’ll go into more detail over the next few months, and keep readers abreast of progress. Hopefully we’ll be reporting a thriving little facility and be eating lots of trout, perch, lettuce and basil all summer (well – we won’t have fully grown fish that soon). There’s a thriving aquaponics community worldwide and it’s a very exciting field. If nothing else it should be good, clean summer fun. Most of the information we’ve garnered is from Joel Malcolm’s excellent book and forum available at Backyard Aquaponics.

May 29, 2008 | Categories:About the Aquaponics | Tags: , , , | 13 Comments »