Media

The Irish researcher is soon to be given a very useful new tool in the form of Irish Newspaper Archives, writes John Holden

I love the Sunday Times Rich List.

Ad breaks have become a thing of the past for some viewers who use a broadband internet connection to watch television shows or listen to the radio on a personal computer. But worried marketers, fearing a world in which they can no longer use TV commercials to deliver their message to homes around the world, are taking matters into their own hands by starting their own internet 'channels'.

When the conflict was at its most intense there was little space for grieving. Or so it seems now looking back on it. Obviously we did grieve. How could we avoid it? But grief has its own rhythm, its own cycle, which has to be honoured. I don't think we did any more than genuflect at these patterns. We certainly never took time out to observe them. We were too busy staying alive. And too angry?

In February 2005, in the midst of the wristband fad, Thierry Henry and Nike announced that they'd be taking on the problem of racism in football by launching the Stand Up Speak Up campaign. They were asking us to buy an interlocking piece of black and white plastic. There was a flush of excitement as wristband collectors scuttled to be part of the first wave of owners. They did a brisk trade coating Nike in an anti-racist glow and raising money for charity. First they cured cancer with Lance Armstrong, now they were tending the ills of racism with Thierry. Good ol' Nike.

This is an old story, perhaps one of the oldest. A man returns to a place that once made him happy. He spent a few isolated weeks of boyhood there. He is not so naïve to believe that the old place will still exist after 30 years. There is a certain thrill to the idea that the place will have changed, an expectation of some damage, or even a thought that imagination will have creeped, benignly, into his memory. Nobody ever really goes back anywhere – inevitably we carry our changed selves with us.

Philanthrophy, according to reports of a conference in Dublin last week, is the next big thing. "Philantrophic Tiger might be next," declared the Irish Times headline over a report of remarks by Kingsley Atkins, president of the Worldwide Ireland Funds. The Tánaiste expressed similar sentiments to the gathering of 250 representatives of Irish charities looking for ways to coax cash from Celtic Tigers.

The Progressive Democrats conference coincided over the weekend of 21-23 April with the IMO conference. Potentially an unhappy coincidence from the perspective of the PD leader, Mary Harney. Would excoriation tumbling from the IMO conference rain on her parade at the PD conference in Limerick?

 The diminution of investigative journalism as a result of reinforced privacy laws would be negligible. It is important to state this clearly in refutation of the conventional journalistic assertion that the strengthening of privacy provisions will result in wrongdoers and criminals acquiring increased immunity from detection.

Channel 4 masks a typical reality TV show as a 'social experiment', while RTÉ brings up the standard with some vintage Beckett