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THE FINE GAEL Ard Fheis gets under way at the RDS in Dublin later today with the party set to hear from Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Health Minister James Reilly tonight.
Kenny will open the conference at 7pm with Reilly, Fine Gael’s deputy leader, due to speak on the topic of universal health insurance at 8pm.
Tomorrow will see a full day of events with dozens of motions to be debated and voted on by the Ard Fheis delegates.
There will be a live televised session from 11am to 1pm where we’ll hear from ministers Michael Noonan, Richard Bruton and Simon Coveney, but the showpiece event will be an address from the Taoiseach at 8.30pm which will also be broadcast live on RTÉ One.
Kenny is already fierce excited if this video is anything go by:
We’ve combed through the Ard Fheis Clár (agenda) so you don’t have to and picked out a few motions we found interesting…
‘Towards Universal Health Insurance’
1. Motion 3 in this section, which will be debated tonight, calls on the government legislate for the banning of cigarette sales in off licences and pubs.
2. Motion 4 calls for additional resources to be allocated to mental health care services and, among other things, to examine whether mandatory annual counselling sessions can be introduced for all secondary school students.
Internal Organisation Motions
3. By far the most interesting motion here is Motion 3 – that the Ard Fheis mandate the Fine Gael Executive Council to set up a working group of politicians and ordinary members to explore contesting elections in Northern Ireland.
Ministers Phil Hogan and Leo Varadkar deep in conversation at a previous Fine Gael Ard Fheis. Pic: Laura Hutton/Photocall Ireland
‘Local Government in the 21st Century’
4. Motion 2 in this sections calls for elected councillors and the people of Dublin to have their say on a directly-elected mayor, something we’ll be hearing more about in the coming weeks .
5. Motion 6 calls on the government to encourage local authorities to examine parking charges with a view to getting more people visiting town centres, and to give priority to residents to park on their streets in their own residential areas.
6. Motion 9 has a ring of Margaret Thatcher’s famous right-to-buy scheme in that it calls on the government to introduce a new ‘social housing tenant purchase scheme’ to empower families to own and invest in their own home.
‘Transparency, Accountability, Justice’
7. Motion 4, put forward by the Trinity branch Young Fine Gael, calls for the legalisation of the use of cannabis for personal consumption, sale and production.
8. Motion 6 calls on the government instigate the process of joining NATO – something potentially at odds with Ireland’s long-stated position of neutrality.
9. In what is sure to prompt some interesting debate, Motion 10 in this sections calls for the Ard Fheis to support the passing of next year’s referendum on same-sex marriage.
10. Motion 13, perhaps with a nod to the recent controversies, calls on the Ard Fheis to ‘set clear limits on the powers’ of the Public Accounts Committee which has, to say the least, been flexing its muscles in recent weeks with its questioning of a garda whistleblower and grilling of Rehab just yesterday.
‘Investing in our Future, Commemorating our Heritage’
11. Motion 9 in this section calls for the Transport Minister Leo Varadkar to review public transport prices to ensure that all full-time students pay student fares and only student fares. You won’t be surprised to hear that this motion comes from the national executive of Young Fine Gael.
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His comments seem out if date..His future thinking!!! would of been visionary ten years ago.
The “futurist” from AOL. His office is next to the chief technology officer’s for Netscape. Who in their right mind would open any technology conference with someone from AOL? My 9 year old can give better predictions than this guy.
@Jackass. Spot on. I thought the author was taking the Pisa.
Was just thinking the same, they’re more likes statements of the present and recent past.
Here’s a prediction:
I predict a backlash against the current model for the cloud, in the future cloud services will be personal, people will retain all their data in the cloud, but in their own personal household server, out of the reach of major corporations.
That’s a very good point Paul. My biggest gripe with ‘the cloud’ is SaaS (Software as a Service). This means instead of buying a program and running it locally on your own computer, your computer becomes no more than a terminal and instead you pay a subscription to use the software and it runs remotely on servers. This effectively gives some corporation control over all your work and you pay them for it!
Storage in ‘the cloud’ is also something to be wary of. I do use cloud storage for things like duplicating my photos to dropbox. If I lost my phone they are already backed up and no need to remember to backup manually. However I wouldn’t use cloud storage as my main storage. What if dropbox went bust and everything was lost? Look at what happened to Geocities – they had a substantial portion of the early web on their servers and then flicked a switch and a chunk of web history was gone. Look at the @ireland.com email contoversy now. No corporation cares about end users, they care about $$$. So to trust them with your work and data is simply crazy.
already possible Paul with the likes of the Western Digital Personal Network Cloud device, its physically in your home but accessible anywhere on the web, but still secure. works well so far
It’s far too easy to loose everything in the cloud through no fault of your own, or at the whim of the service provider.
I’m the same, dropbox is handy for on the fly backup, but you really do need everything at home.
@Simon, I’ll check that out! I’m also thinking of trying to build something like that myself as a bit of a project.
Yeah, dropbox is great for on the fly back-up, but I’d never leave anything there full time. Imagine loosing all your data in a flash, possibly at the whim of your service provider. Not a nice thought.
@Simon, nice one, I’ll check that out. I’m considering building my own system as a little project. Lots to learn!
the comment section on here is weird, I posted, nothing there, I refreshed twice, nothing there. I posted again, both show up!
Long wavy hair on people with large foreheads will also become a thing of the past.
I don’t want to say it’s aliens… But ALIENS!!!
Is that an invisible mobile phone I don’t see in his hand? I bought one of these last year, can’t find it anywhere.
thats the new galaxy samsung invisible.i heard they are an amazing phone but ive never seen one.
I would question the wisdom of anyone from AOL. They have a history of epic fails e.g. paying silly money for Bebo after everyone else knew it was a dying platform. Paying silly money for Winamp and destroying it. Loosing so much market share to Comcast and Verizon that Time Warner were so embarrassed they removed AOL from the company name.
Well, the fact he’s not predicting future trends but instead just repeating the present, is typical of AOL. Except for the last one. If video calls were ever going to be popular then they would be by now. Imagine being on an hour long call and not being able to pick your nose or scratch your arse!
exactly not the best company to look towards for future predictions
Ha ha ! Pick your nos e or scra tch your arse !
Video calling is essential for Ex-pats like myself! I’ve made 5 video calls in the past week, two on my phone.
It’s an excellent way for my 4 year old to keep in touch with his grandparents, and me, with my mates too.
In the future, we’ll all be dead. :-/
Mobile phones will be popular and landlines won’t you say?
How much is this guy paid?
My guess is that he is hanging in there. No where else to go. He would fail his first interview…for being a historian…
He’s predicting video calls by 2015. He could be onto something there. He should get cracking on a new start up, call it, I don’t know, Skype or something. I could see it catching on.
I make most of my phone calls on the toilet so if video calling truely is the future norm then I’ll have no choice but to “cull” my friends network.
He can predict the future?
Wonder if he thinks the mullet is combing back too!
Shing says he has a landline number but it connects to a florist in London as a joke because he doesnât believe in communicating by phone call.
Ha ha , he sounds like a pain in the ass who loves himself , he’s listed online as a digital prophet by day and a “singer songwriter” by nite ……his singing songwriting skills sound as flat and dated as his future predicting skills I’m afraid..
Good to see AOL have a prophet. But a pity they don’t have profits!
I wonder why the usual experts on journal have not commented more. Intellectual disabilityb, I presume given their comments on matters political which send them into the normal rant against the government /anti taxes / anti everything etc etc etc. trolls ,the lot of them .
intellectual disabilityb…
digital prophet,what a job title,when I used to pump petrol I liked the title fuel technician but alas it never took off,I must have been ahead of my time
He looks like a Cult leader….i be wary of them types and the crap they be pushin….
Reading this story I was in disbelief that this kinda crap from an idiot at one of the most spectacularly dysfunctional companies of the tech-era was here, but then I thought it was surely one of the stories reprinted from that rag tabloid ‘Business Insider’, but no… This is actually a journal article?
With a forehead like that he has room for another face.
It’s a pity he cant predict fashion trends.
Sure even Marty McFly had a video phone in the 80s!! Oh wait…..
I still have my ‘Dan Dare’ walkie talkies and they
have never let me down…it’s back for some
more fun on the holodeck now….
Some prophet. Talk about stating the obvious. 2015 woooo thats years away!
I think he ment to say 2011
*meant
Can’t beat surfing on my 24″ benq screen with a half million tabs opens!!! Just because I can :)
Sorry, but desktop sufin remains tops for me!
What you all font understand is that he is a robot
Wow! that is impressive!
Smartphones will never take off.
Sent from my Nokia 6310i
he does look like a Robot
Hold on a second……those are fake arms
Wait, wtf!!! On my phone it showed my comment in reply to someone above as under your post… Now on my laptop it’s normal. Please disregard my comment ‘wrong comment’ post :)
Video calling? It’s been around for years, nobody uses it. One network operator decided not to waste money implementing it. What’s going to change this apathy towards it?
Landline dead? It’s been dead outside businesses for a while now, but he’s wrong I saying we don’t need them, we’ll need the speed & latency that only a fixed line will be adequate enough to provide.
I agree with him on the impending future back lash against social media, are we all supposed to live in the virtual world more than the real world now or does real life not count anymore? The targeted advertising has already started ages ago too, hello? Google have been doing it for years… Since when has stating the obvious become “predicting the future”?
just watched RTE news and “Chairman” shouldn’t it be chairperson Mitchell Baker, from Mozilla!
He had better hurry up because according to some bearded lady the world ends next week :-P
Thanks Dear Leader for the enlightenment. Now, if you could do something about you not wanting look like Kim Jong-il, that’d be great.
Sorry, replied to the wrong comment!!
should of gone to Specsavers !
Wait for it, wait for it, I predict Colgate bring out a better toothpaste this year?
It’s Edward Scissorshands
Hmmm, the smartphone comment is also a bit at odds with the evidence. 35% have a “smartphone” and only 25% of them use the “smartphone” as their primary internet device. And it breaks down even further in that even though Apple only has 24% of the overal “smartphone” market, iOS accounts for 65% of the web traffic.
So I guess he has a point, of the relatively small number of people who have a smartphone, the even smaller number of them who have an iphone tend to acces the internet a few times.
(links)
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2054/smartphone-ownership-demographics-iphone-blackberry-android
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57464763-37/apples-ios-grabs-65-of-mobile-web-traffic/
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