Ean press release on RTE medium wave shutdown
Monday, February 11th, 2008Ean has issued a press release on the shutdown of RTE medium wave services, which will affect those who listen to Radio 1 on MW radio. The move will hit listeners in Britain, Northern France and the Benelux countries.
Here is the text of the release:
On March 24, RTE will cease broadcasting on medium wave, cutting off Radio One to those who listen to it on MW radio. This is a move that will disproportionately affect the most vulnerable among the listening audience.
While RTE points to the fact that there are numerous other options for listeners available, including FM, longwave and non-radio technologies such as the internet, there are wider implications that will affect many sectors:
· Senior citizens – who value medium wave’s reliability and ease of use over FM’s sound quality. It is easier to tune in – the FM dial is cluttered with stations, and tuning in can be a distraction. Medium wave reception is stable and predictable. Those who need to purchase long-wave receivers will incur an additional cost.
· Emigrants – Medium wave reaches Britain, Northern France and the Benelux countries. Those listening to Radio One on MW radio will have to buy new long-wave receivers, which will be a burden on the vulnerable elderly among the emigrants. Additionally, there are some areas where medium wave is a stronger signal than the longwave station, due to interference with the long wave signal.
· Northern Ireland – parts of Northern Ireland rely on medium wave because the FM signal is too weak to reach them. Cutting service contradicts the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement.
· People with limited vision – the FM dial is cluttered with stations. Tuning RTE in on MW is simple.
· People on the move – medium wave stays on the same spot on the dial. FM requires retuning as one travels through the country, which is the type of distraction that has been a proven factor in car accidents.
· RTE has been producing separate programming for medium wave, such as sports programmes and events and the Sunday Mass. Religious services will move to longwave, requiring the purchase of an additional receiver for those who do not have them. This will be a further restriction for those on the move, as pocket-sized long-wave sets are rare on the market.
FM, medium wave, and longwave are complementary services: some people choose medium wave over FM because they live in areas where they do not get good FM reception. Additionally, some programming is not carried on FM, so people will be required to switchover to longwave. For many, a switchover to longwave will require the purchase of a new radio – a burden that will fall disproportionately on the elderly and most vulnerable, who are the most likely to rely on medium wave to begin with. Additionally, those listeners who want to convert their car radios to longwave will have to incur the installation costs.
In addition, new digital technology will soon render our existing longwave receivers obsolete. RTE has installed a longwave DRM transmitter and tested it in August, transmitting digital longwave across the UK and Europe. This is a welcome move, but the switchover to digital radio on longwave will render current longwave radios obsolete. Those who purchase longwave sets now will have to buy another radio when RTE cuts the existing longwave signal and sends out a digital signal in its place.
Ean Director Noreen Bowden says, “This issue is particularly important for our older emigrants, who value RTE’s services as a powerful link with home. At the very least, they should be given assistance with the switchover before services are cut off – although we would like to see the move postponed until RTE begins broadcasting in digital, which will give near-FM quality across all of Ireland, across most of Britain, and into near Europe, using much less power. This will be a boon not just to older emigrants, but to anyone travelling abroad – business people and holiday-makers as well as long-term residents.�
Voting rights article featured on IrishEmigrant.com
Monday, February 11th, 2008IrishEmigrant.com is carrying an article from Ean on its website, on the issue of emigrant voting rights. The article notes that many immigrant groups are now able to vote in their home countries from Ireland, a fact that is reported positively in the Irish media. It contains an overview of the diverse ways in which the over 100 nations that allow emigrant voting have managed the issue, and discusses the effect of the likely move toward Seanad reform on the number of Irish people who will have some say from abroad.
Here is the text of the article.
Expat voting, global style
By Noreen Bowden
There was intense media interest in Ireland this week over the Super Tuesday vote in the US. The excitement was evident in the amount of media coverage afforded those Irish residents who cast their ballots as part of the Democrats Abroad primary election. More than 250 American citizens showed up to vote in Dublin at O’Neill’s pub, as for the first time ever the Democratic party was sending delegates from abroad to the convention. In essence, we were being treated as the “fifty-first state”.
As someone who was delighted to join the pub crowd in casting my ballot on Tuesday, I noted the fact that there was no negative commentary from Irish observers about the fact that we were exercising our rights to an emigrant vote – a topic which has been highly controversial in Ireland. In asking a few of the journalists and students who had come to observe the situation, most of them conceded they hadn’t made the connection between Americans voting from Ireland and the fact that Irish people don’t similarly get to vote once they have left the country. We in Ireland have come to accept it as a matter of course that immigrants here have a say in their home elections – in recent months, it’s not just the Americans who have been voting, but also the Poles and the French. The votes of all three have been widely covered by the Irish media – and I have yet to see any critical coverage or suggestion that these emigrant voters were in any way damaging to their home nations.
Currently, there are around 115 countries and territories – including nearly all developed nations – that have systems in place to allow their emigrants to vote. And the number is growing. Even countries with very high rates of emigration, such as Italy, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico have recently allowed their expats to vote.
Ireland is in a highly unusual situation in our increasingly globalised world, in not allowing the majority of its overseas citizens any say in the political process. Members of the armed forces and the diplomatic services are able to vote in Dail elections, while only NUI and Trinity graduates can vote in the Seanad. There is no law to prevent emigrants from voting; there is simply no law to facilitate it.
Many people within Ireland are at first leery of allowing emigrants to vote, pointing out that, with such a high number of emigrants abroad, Ireland would be overwhelmed. Others point to Ireland’s system of proportional representation, and suggest that elections in close constituencies could be held up waiting for a box of votes to arrive from Boston or Berlin.
Still others, in an odd inversion of the eighteenth century’s American Revolutionary rallying cry for democracy, proclaim, “No representation without taxation” – an argument seriously undermined by the fact that no other nation seems to link expat voting with expat taxation. In fact, the US(which does not explicitly link the two) is the only developed nation that requires its citizens abroad to pay taxes on money earned abroad, and even then the only people affected are those making over $85,000.
Some suggest that Irish people abroad quickly lose touch with the country, and can’t stay informed enough to vote responsibly. This argument will no doubt seem nonsensical to anyone who has been reading the Irish Emigrant for any part of the last twenty-one years. Plus, we don’t require voters within the country to pass a current events test, so how do we know that our voters at home have been brushing up on the issues?
The fact is that there is a wide variety of solutions for the emigrant voting conundrum, and every country has dealt with the issue in a different way. It’s not an all or nothing proposition. While a 2006 study found that 65 countries allowed external voting for all, 26 countries placed restrictions on which of their expats could vote, making the right conditional on the length of time they have been away, their intent to return, or their location. A few countries disqualify citizens from voting after a certain period of time – the UK allows expats to vote only for the first 15 years away, for example.
Some nations restrict voting to only certain types of elections – the most commonly allowed voting is for national and presidential elections. It is less common to allow emigrants to cast their ballots in local and regional elections, or for referendums.
Most nations require that their emigrants vote in the last constituency where they lived, while others vote for specific emigrant representatives. Nine countries, including France, Italy and Portugal, reserve seats in their parliaments for those abroad.
The forms of voting are also diverse – some require voters to do so in person, at either consulates or embassies or by returning home to cast the ballot; others allow voting by mail or fax, a handful by proxy, and some by a combination of the above methods.
It may be time for Ireland to begin examining the diversity of compromises and solutions that other nations have arrived at. Ironically, the fact that emigrant numbers are declining may make the idea of an emigrant vote more possible, as voters at home will be less threatened by a smaller number of emigrants, and as the nature of emigration becomes increasingly more of a temporary phenomenon. These decreased numbers will be one of a number of factors eroding the level of opposition to emigrant voting.
In addition, the prospect of Seanad Reform is in view again, and the most likely outcome appears to be the extension of the right to vote by all third-level graduates, not just Trinity and NUI graduates. Presumably, reformers will continue to allow those third-level graduate Seanad voters to vote whether they are at home or abroad. This will greatly increase the number of emigrants who can vote – but the long-term effect may be even greater. Authorities will have to come up with a national system that will allow them to register voters from abroad, and to decide on how an overseas election will work. In doing so they will be setting up the structures that could pave the way for more widespread emigrant voting in the future.
Noreen Bowden is a New Yorker who lives in Ireland and is the Director of Ean, the Emigrant Advice Network. Do you have an opinion about whether you should be able to vote from abroad? Let Ean know, by writing to Noreen Bowden at info@ean.ie
For more information on Ean, visit www.ean.ie
Published on Irish Emigrant.com, February 2008.
See Ean’s factsheet on emigrant voting rights.
Have an opinion on the matter? Drop a line to Noreen at info@ean.ie, or use the comment feature below.
NY Times speculates on Irish return to city
Monday, February 11th, 2008The Irish may be coming back to the New York neighborhood of Woodlawn, suggests an article in the New York Times. In an article entitled, rather tweely, “Return Trip on the Shamrock Express”, journalist James Angelos suggests that the trend of return migration back to Ireland, driven by the Irish boom and the post-9/11 crackdown on the undocumented, may be reversing. The article cites the recent Irish Voice article that suggested agencies working with Irish immigrants are busier with new arrivals in recent weeks.
The journalist quotes Siobhán Dennehy, executive director of the Emerald Isle Immigration Center of New York, who says she has noticed more new immigrants coming in making inquiries about housing and jobs. She says that many of them would be former New York residents who have returned to the city after a stay back home, finding Ireland’s housing expensive and the job scene slowing.
Not everyone agrees with the notion that the Irish are returning, however: One waitress says that if more Irish are arriving, she hasn’t seen them.
The article concludes with a quote from one new arrival, a visa holder from Northern Ireland who arrived in September. He says he came over when the slowdown in the construction industry hit him. He claimed more emigrants would be coming back to New York “because there is no work left in Ireland�.
That sentiment, of course, seems to be overstating the case. The current unemployment rate in Ireland, while higher than in recent years, still stands at a very low 4.8%. Recent census figures, however, do point to a rise in emigration last year, probably fuelled at least in part by an increase in return migration among Eastern Europeans. In addition, male migration to Ireland has slowed, possibly due to a decrease in the number of jobs available in construction.
Read the whole article on the New York Times site.
RTE move affects emigrants in Britain, beyond
Friday, February 8th, 2008RTE has announced that it will shut down its medium wave service on March 24th. This means that those who listen to RTE Radio 1 on the AM dial will no longer have that option. RTE suggests that listeners can turn to FM or longwave.
RTE says that less than 10% of their listeners listen on medium wave, and suggests that those who do listen “largely based on habit rather than necessity”. Presumably this 10% figure is based on listenership figures for the Republic of Ireland, and does not take into account those who listen in the North and in Britain, where the FM option does not exist.
Ean is concerned about the effect of this move on emigrants, particularly those in Britain, where the most vulnerable elderly are likely to be disproportionately affected. The medium wave signal also reaches Northern France and the Benelux countries, and interference on the long-wave signal means that for some people, Radio 1 comes in better on the AM dial.
RTE has pledged to assist the vulnerable elderly in Ireland who may have been depending on the AM service all their lives with vouchers to reduce the cost. They are not, however, offering similar assistance to the vulnerable among the emigrant communities, who are likely to be disproportionately affected by the move.
Will the loss of Radio 1 on medium wave affect you? Do you have an opinion on this issue? Ean is eager to hear it. Drop a line to Noreen Bowden at noreen@ean.ie, or use the comment feature below.
Undocumented resolution unlikely: Ahern
Thursday, February 7th, 2008The Taoiseach dealt with a number of issues related to emigration, and particularly the undocumented in the US, during question time in the Dail yesterday. He said that a bilateral agreement that would allow Irish and American citizens to travel and work between the two countries was on hold for political reasons. Mr Ahern also noted that most of the existing models for bilateral agreements would not take care of those who were already undocumented.
Speaking about his upcoming visit to Washington, Mr Ahern said:
There is a strong sense in Washington that immigration reform will remain a difficult issue for the foreseeable future. While US political leaders fully acknowledge that the number of undocumented Irish is extremely small in the overall context, there is an understandable reluctance to single out one particular group for preferential treatment, and therein lies the difficulty. I do not believe anyone is against our cause, but when taken in its totality they cannot deal with it. We will, of course, continue our efforts for as long as it takes, and I shall certainly work on it again next month at the meetings that I will have.
See the Dail report under the heading “Ireland-US relations”.
Lecture: The Irish in Britain. London, Feb 21
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
Irish historian Ultan Cowley, an Ean member, will give a talk on “The Irish in British Construction: A Symbiotic Relationship?” The lecture will be held at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith, on 21 February at 7:00 (with refreshments at 6:30).
The talk will focus on how the Irish played such a major role in the British construction industry, will explore their contributions, and discuss what cost those contributions came at.
Ultan Cowley is the author of “The Men Who Built Britain: A History of the Irish Navvy”.
For more information, click on the flyer.
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