Listening to Gerry Ryan on the radio during the big freeze when I was home at xmas mad me realise how out of touch the media are with reality and how they perpetrate their myths on to the Irish people with what I call the Joe Duffy Syndrome. Basically - moaning for no reason. Gerry was saying how in New York they have the streets and pavements cleared in no time. Here's the facts, Manhattan is 13 miles long and three miles wide and is home to 4 million people. Of course they can, the tax revenue is huge with about 80 people living on each 100 feet or so of street. So everyone has to pay for about 2 feet of road clearance. Next up - the law in Manhattan states that every property owner has to clean the pavement in front of their property or face a big fine. In Ireland you were told you could be sued for doing that, helpful. If Gerry had taken a walk out to Queens on the outskirts of the greater New York area he would have had plenty opportunities to slip on the pavement out there where the population is far lower and many stretches are left untreated.

If the media had encouraged people to clean their paths and lets say 50% of the paths were cleaned that would half the chances of elderly people slipping, good reduction. Around my mothers area it was like OAP tetris, many people got hurt. Some quite seriously. Well done RTE. Pass the buck and shift the blame as an operating philosophy.

Will it do anything? Is there the political will to actually formulate new, original plans and then see them through? Will the same civil service that allowed for massive expense accounts actually have the conviction and the desire to make changes to their work culture, or will it be business as usual? Can you expect a systemic change in the way things are done in Ireland when the same faces helm the rudders? Are these events concrete or are they weather shields to allow the crew to weather the storm? Am I adrift in a sea of nautical metaphors?

Hi all and welcome to Ireland''s Diaspora. An idea that grew from a talk given by David McWilliams here in New York awhile ago. He was being very unfashionable and warning about the dreadful consequences of the bursting housing bubble that he foresaw (as did I, I have to admit). He felt Ireland''s strengths are in our education, our ability to thrive in a knowledge economy, our friendliness and the craic. He said we needed to leverage those to our advantage creating networks, connections and goodwill which would lead to the development of greater cultural and economic links between the national and international Irish communities.

This site''s mission is to aid that idea. This site will allow its users to make contacts, create online communities, blog and all the other facilities that are starting to be commonplace in a Web 2.0 online world. So have a good look around, it might be slow at the moment and you might get cut off from the database but that''s nothing that a quick press of the refresh button shouldn't fix. Apologies to those whom English is not their first language for that particularly Irish, double-negative using, sentence structure.

You can edit your profile to add various "widgets" that give you more functionality. As we go forward we''ll be adding more and more based on your feedback.

Please be patient as this is only a beta version and is running on minimal specs, there could be bottlenecks. I'm leaving it up to you, the user, to create your own groups so we can see what is created organically. I'd ask you to initially join one of ;the groups ''individual'', ''non-profit'' or ''business'' so we can get some basic differentiation between our users. Maybe we''ll see spontaneous groups spring up afterwards, bankers, economists, musicians, artists, unemployed... who knows.

Feel free to experiment.

Use it to connect and communicate.

Is mise,
Greg