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BRENDAN HOWLIN’S ANNOUNCED his Labour front bench in the wake of his election to the leadership of the much-reduced parliamentary party last month.
Much of the speculation in the run up to today’s announcement (not that there’s been much of it, outside of the corridors of Leinster House) had focused on what role Alan Kelly, the outspoken former environment minister, would be given.
The Tipperary TD, who had responsibility for Irish Water in the last government, had made no secret of his leadership ambitions in advance of Howlin’s elevation to the top job.
As you may recall, his absence from the press conference announcing Howlin’s victory cast a shadow on proceedings, in the wake of the veteran Wexford deputy’s election.
A slightly-odd tweet from Kelly (below) fuelled speculation that he might leave the party altogether – but he later said he was committed to helping rebuild, in the wake of the disastrous general election result.
The jobs
Kelly has been vocal on Irish Water since leaving office – most recently appearing on Morning Ireland to double down on his post-election position that Fianna Fáil’s pledge to scrap Irish Water is likely against EU law.
However in the new-look Labour lineup of spokespeople, talking about water charges will no longer be a priority for Kelly. Instead he’s been given the dual role of spokesperson on both health and ‘Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation’.
Instead Jan O’Sullivan, the former education minister, will shadow the minister responsible for Irish Water, Simon Coveney. O’Sullivan will fulfil the role of spokesperson on ‘Children and Youth Affairs’ in addition to being spokesperson on ‘Housing, Planning and Local Government’.
The party’s reduction in representation means everyone will be doubling or tripling up in their roles. Senators will also be stepping up to the plate more than usual, as the full list of jobs announced this afternoon shows.
Here’s what the rest of the TDs will be doing:
And the Seanad members:
Great business decision and very good pricing by Eir as they look to carve out a sizable market share in the otherwise entirely free of charge online email industry. Hard to see a future where they’re not the dominant player after this business savvy announcement.
@Gordon Comstock:
Obviously want to shutter it I’d say. Won’t be long.
@Gordon Comstock: whilst I am a lover of satire and sarcasm, I believe that you’re off the mark here sir.
They obviously want to shut down the whole thing as it’s a cost with no revenue stream. They’re hoping nobody will pay so they can delete the whole system.
@Dara O’Brien: so why not just shut it down? They’re hardly under some obligation to provide this service so if it is losing money they should just shutter that part of the business. This approach means they’ll still have to provide the service but just to far less people so any fixed costs of providing the service will still be borne in full.
@Gordon Comstock: Wow. I’m glad you’re not my granny’s email service provider. All the pics of her grandchildren and her cat memes are on eircom servers.
Charging her a fee will be a great disincentive and it will achieve what you describe over time without hurting people.
@SouperArlene: Set your granny up a gmail and bulk forward it to the new gmail account.
@Gordon Comstock: they are most like trying to get rid of it but also remain loyal to obligations. I’d imagine loads will jump ship and then an emergency proposal to scrap it within a certain time frame.
@Gordon Comstock: I hate eir that much I’d nearly sign up for an email and pay them just to annoy them.
@Gordon Comstock: The fixed costs will already have been capitalised so to an extent reduced numbers don’t matter until the next time they have to upgrade the hardware. For eir charging is the only option that makes any sense; if they close it down the negative PR is painful, especially given the Joe Duffy demographic they serve. Having said that, they might have been better off offloading the service to a cloud provider and washing their hands of it that way (BT in the UK did that with Yahoo years ago).
Full disclosure; I used to run the eircom.net webmail service as one of a number of Value Added Services when I worked for eircom ten years ago; it was a money pit even back then.
@Brendan Crowe: Gmail on the way out as well apparently.
@SouperArlene: Get your granny a Dropbox account. It’s free and very user-friendly.
@SouperArlene: arlenesgranny@gmail.com is available?
@Brendan Crowe: can you explain that please Brendan I have an Eircom email with stuff on it with this dreadful company
The company is deluded,sign up to google for free,it’s a better platform anyway.
@mrdingaling: except Google reserve the right to read your emails
@mrdingaling: It’s meant to be a bad deal, they want people to refuse so they can delete their account and save on storage costs.
@Connoroconner: never mind the fact that it’s regularly hacked. A five year old with a paper clip could hack it. Eircom/Eir have been trying to get people to give up these emails for years. I guess they got fed up waiting.
@mrdingaling: When you use any Google service YOU are the product.
@Connoroconner: sign up to fastmail instead (they are specialised to email and won’t sell you out). not cheap but you get what you pay for
@Connoroconner: yeah but MI5 and the NSA don’t,they do it anyway.look away I say
@Soeren Kuehling: They’re sound. They actually charge less for a basic but very secure account than eir.
@Colm O’Leary: ha ha . So right
Definitely a clever tactic to encourage users to leave. I imagine that hosting and administrating a small email service isn’t worth the effort and headache.
@Ajax Penumbra: I think you hit the nail on the head there
@Ajax Penumbra: @mail.com they have lots of @ name to choose from
@Ajax Penumbra: I would reckon that many may pay for the privacy alone , & non.work/business related e-mails also . The reason I switched from Yahoo to Google was the spam filters >> Éir though as ISP are beginning to get hungry again & we;ve lost a lot of Rugby >> Keep the Éir ESOP shareholders happy anyways no matter what !!
Have had an eircom email address for over 20 years, bit off a pain in the hole having to change everything to a new mail address, but €5.99 a month, are yea for real ! Who in there right mind would pay that when there’s countless free mail providers out there !
@Jonathon Forbes: may I suggest you get yourself a domain name and just forward emails.
Had a domain name since 1997 and I’ve changed email providers about 5 times since then but I always have the same email address because of it :)
@Barry Somers: the forward aspect may not work with Eircom.net emails if it’s closed down
@Barry Somers: hi Barry can u explain that.ie domain.is that different than just creating a new email account ie gmail.
@Barry Somers: Not much use forwarding email to your domain from an email account that doesn’t actually exist, is it ?
@Tommy Roche: It’s more that you forward email to the email account. So you might have mail@tommyroche.com set to forward to an eircom.net address. As eircom.net is (effectively) closing down, you can change your forwarding settings to gmail or any other provider. If they shut down, you can change again without ever having to change your email address.
Worst email I ever used, endless spam. The spammers seemed to have access to thousands of valid eircom addresses. Haven’t used it for about ten years.
@John Considine: never used it…
Text book example of a bad decision..
@Wreck Tangle: depends on what you want the outcome to be…
lol
@Bitcoin Buddy II:
What fools. Eircom service is brutal at best, now they want to agravate people even more, over a service that’s automated and would have a really minimal cost attached. Fools, doesn’t adequately describe it.
Cowboys Ted.
What genius came up with this..
@munsterman1:
Someone from Gmail ;)
Stupidity at it’s best. Have account since 90s but will be moving. Thanks Eircom. Will cancel my broadband and phone now too.
@gerardfleming: me too
I think we all know that no-one would pay for a new email sign up
As there are others with better capacity, features and are free
They have done a sneaky move here
There are a lot of community emails, little businesses that have been using eircom.net for nearly 20 years. A lot of older people using them as well
Their customers, web sites, printed matter all have their email address
They can change but it is going to take years for them to move over and longer for customers and other folks to change their details
Easy move to make money when they have them in a hold
@Dan: sorry for double posts…did not take at first so posted again
@Dan: people will pay
Mainly businesses and the like who have eircom.net plastered on vans etc
@Dan: It is akin to blackmail or ransom.. They are desperate because they are
haemorrhaging broadband & landline customers left right & centre..
Why not just say they are terminating a loss making part of the business. They’d get some respect for being honest.
Well, that’s the end of eircom.net!!
@Andy Byrne: I think that’s their plan.
I will be contacting Eir to request a copy of where I ever signed and agreed to the possibility of ever being charged a never-before mentioned monthly fee for the free email address I have been using for the last 20 years, which is irreversibly connected to thousands of different websites and online accounts/login/password securities, not to mention thousands of different email contacts & subscriptions who all email me every day, which would be a total nightmare of hassle, difficulty, inconvenience and never-ending problems to change over from. If they cannot provide such a signed agreement from me, (since I never signed one) then I will be suing Eir to the tune of at least €500 for every one of the thousands of problems they will be giving me to have to sort out in my own valuable time, due to no fault or decision of my own.. I hope everyone else with an Eir email address takes the same stance. Fight for your rights and do not accept any of this unjustified nonsense.
@DAVID J CARON: I am overwhelmed at the prospect of having to change all of my email address’s because of this “blackmail”. I cancelled my broadband service with Eir about 6 months ago but I am still receiving bills, even after numerous explanatory phone calls. They seem to be determined to lose whatever customers that they still have. What they are doing now does not fit under the legal description of blackmail or ransom but it is definitely not right.
People will be outraged, but in all honesty there is a VAST array of free and far superior email services to eirom.net.
If you are a business you really should get yourself a domain name as they are as cheap as chips at around £6 a year, it looks more professional and regardless of the email provider you may switch to in the future you can always set the domain to forward emails to that new provider :)
It is still a money grab by Eir though, but they know that too.
@Barry Somers: I have no idea why businesses don’t have their own domain and email address, and I’m baffled when I see vans that actually have a domain name, and then an eircom address.
A simple LOL will suffice
What are the 15 customers that have an eir email address going to do now
And then, when they get rid of all the customers who are too smart to pay for email, they will “suddenly” drop the monthly fee as a kind gesture of customer service. They will have freed up all that storage space.
I think we all know that no-one would pay for a new email sign up
As there are others with better capacity, features and are free
They have done a sneaky move here
There are a lot of community emails, little businesses that have been using eircom for nearly 20 years. A lot of older people using them as well
Their customers, web sites, printed matter all have their email address
They can change but it is going to take years for them to move over and longer for customers and other folks to change their details
Easy move to make money when they have them in a hold
I’m an EIR customer, have my landline, broadband and mobile phone with them, eircom mail since God knows when, my contract is up on March 30th, guess these fools will be loosing another customer.
@Charles Coughlan: make sure you check and see what notice period you need to give them or they will hound you. I had a dreadful time trying to get my 80yr old dads phone and broadband cut off he has had an eircom land-line since they were invented and they kept telling me he was in a contract so I had to pay up 200 eventually to get rid of them.
@Loretta stiletto: Interesting. (My late neighbour had similar trouble with BT, who refused to accept a cancellation except by email. Since their broadband never worked, she had to cancel the direct debit to quit their messing.)
Did he pay a deposit for his landline? They might owe him a refund.
@Fiona Fitzgerald: no deposits in the old days and you paid for your calls not dumped into a package that didn’t suit you. To be honest he used his mobile in latter years handier for him as he had it in his pocket wherever he went. He passed away last April
@Loretta stiletto: I’m sorry for your loss.
@Loretta stiletto: That’s sad .. RIP
Mary O’Rourke wasn’t she a great minister worth every penny of her pension
Let’s have quotas
Between us we should donate 10c each per month and just keep one account open. That’d piss them right off ..
This is amazing
I have an eircom email account havent used it in years when tried to make me ring a premium rate number to reset the password so they might as well get rid.
Haha that’s the end of that service so !!
Is this Waterford whispers ?
Dear Eircom You can take my eircom.net email and shove it where the sun dont shine.
I remember I had a eircom,net and ocenfree.net email address around 20 years ago . Looks like blacknight took over the oceanfree service amongst others https://www.blacknight.com/savemyemail/ .
I see lots of vans with eircom.net email addresses on them , if you are a business you really need to buy own domain they are so cheap now .
Haha that’s the end of that service so
If your looking for a temporary email address to sign up to things without receiving tons of spam check this out it’s handy when signing up for stuff
Introduced after the 31th of March !
That’s April’s Fools Day then ????
I think we all know that no-one would pay for a new email sign up
As there are others with better capacity, features and are free
They have done a sneaky move here
There are a lot of community emails, little businesses that have been using eircom.net for nearly 20 years. A lot of older people using them as well
Their customers, web sites, printed matter all have their email address
They can change but it is going to take years for them to move over and longer for customers and other folks to change their details
Easy move to make money when they have them in a hold
They might as well cut it off, it’s pure useless. Their customer service is pathetic and if you contact them with a problem they just cut you off . They won’t be missed
Is it April the first?
Just in case you didn’t get it the first time !
At least these email account holders are being given the chance to retain their email. For a very long time I had an email address at ireland.com until the tourist board was gifted the domain (by government I think).
I was given 30 days to find an alternative email address with no option to pay to keep it and no means of transferring my existing emails either – the hassle of that cost me for many years with people thinking I was ignoring them or wondering why I hadn’t replied – and no I wasn’t able to create a message or anything to tell people that the email address was changed.
So the charge is a bargain as you can at least sort out your online contacts over a period of time
Haha that’s the end of that service so
Fairly hipster to have an eircom.net email in 2020 , id say its worth it.
wow yahoo
Always good to shake the tree be it business or politics. the person on the street always benefits.
Seems fair…
I guess it’s only a matter of time before we will be charged for mobile date. That will get your face out of your phone.
Haha that’s the end of that service so
@Keith Murray: Quit while you’re ahead?
@Keith Murray: Remind me not to invite you to my funeral.
Am I the only one who hasn’t a CLUE how to manage this … have had an eircom e mail acc for years …
only for few emails like car tax etc !
Have no idea what to do now
Joan
Eir were always a robbing shower of B*****DS. Nothing changes
How would they know what account to charge? I had many eircom.Net addresses but no eircom account.
Eir need to think carefully about this. I have emailed them and told them that my broadband and two phones are going to another provider and in the case of one just as soon as the contract finishes. If everybody affected did this they might think again.
I stopped using my eircom address years ago because it was full of s**m and p**n. it’s probably still there full of that. I don’t know how to cancel it. Better find out.
They’re trying to shut it down.
Penalising anyone still using it.
Think gomo is the same idea move everyone from eir to gomo.
It’s pretty much what they did with meteor moved everyone onto eir.
Maybe a boycott of other eir services might change their minds?
An absolutely dreadful company Eir I still have a landline an email address and broadband with them for years. This is the final straw for me . Thank you for making up my mind for me
Brilliant decision Eir dreadful to deal with
Shame on your company for doing this to a client for over 40 years shame you will lose so many customers not only for email but broadband and phone are you thinking really people will go
Charging people to use an email service is absolutely disgusting. Old or not it’s ridiculous. I’d be surprised if anybody still uses an eircom email. It was shocking 20 years ago. I can’t believe it got much better over time.
EXTORTION…… plain & simple.
I’m not accepting this…. I’m not that foolish…so I’m off to Google!
I have been a eir customer for over 20 years they are my broadband providers and if they think I am going to pay an extra €6 per month for a service I had over the years they are highly mistaken I am in the process of talking to Sky with the intention of leaving eir for good, Greed will be their downfall
Eircom.net emails haven’t been working properly for months now, with no warning whatsoever. I almost lost a huge opportunity due to this negligence and right now have no idea what else I may have missed. I’ve had days of frustration trying to get help. I would gladly pay to get my backdated emails pushed into my inbox. So this ‘offer’ to facilitate ending eircom.net is ridiculous and dishonest. It was always compromised technologically, with compatibility issues with Apple products.
Surely they need my details and permission to take this charge,
have your say