The Infrastructure Guy

tl;dr: there are plenty enough farmers, rentiers,
publicans and teachers in the Oireachtas. We need
more scientists! A proper gander at the Seanad elections

We can't all be centre-forward. Someone else has to hoof the ball up-field or make the final cross for Messi to walk-it-in. But the culture we endure privileges the one over the other to a quite absurd degree. CEOs award themselves 20x the wages of the janitor; the surgeon is getting 5x more than the scrub nurse. 

25 years ago, I had a candid talk with Ken Wolfe = then just the fellow in the office next door; rather than Fellow of the Royal Society. He was almost always the smartest person in the room [MultiBloboPrev]. Whereas I was a second-rate [but not fifth rate!] kinda guy. I didn't want to win prizes but I was rather good at setting things up so that others could be their Best Selves. I was, I believed, a good post-doc: given a task I'd plug away at it creatively and with diligence until it was done. Six months later - scutter me pink, lads - Wolfe landed one of the first monster grants from Science Foundation Ireland and, taking me at my own estimation, offered me a seat at the table. Some really smart people [from Spain, France, Canada, USA & Ireland] landed posts as they were advertised under that grant.

One of the New Hires was a rocket scientist theoretical physicist called Kevin Byrne [R] who was ear-marked to be SYS$OP, managing the hardware for us all, as well as pushing the frontiers on his own project. The Boss had an arm-waving vision for a graphical tool for comparing complete genomes: both an archive and a tool for studying the evolution of related organisms. Over the next couple of years, from not knowing how to spell DNA, young Kevin implemented that idea, adding bells and whistles and extra features if they seemed to have utility. Or if The Boss had woken up screaming at 0300hrs with another of his brilliant insights. 

That lab was a wonderful experience. A dozen people from widely different backgrounds [hmmm, maybe a bit whiter than the global average; maybe a bit more spectral], with different tool-kits, all working on separate but related projects making sense of the fresh minted human genome [other genomes were available]. Kevin was present - always ready to pause and listen; suggest a solution; share a fragment of code; ready to say I've no idea . . . but also leave it with me, I'll find out. He could no more blag a bullshit answer than he could refuse to offer a helping hand.

The following May, the whole lab decamped for Cork to present our stuff at the 2002 VIBE meeting. That's when everyone in the molecular evolution / computational biology community in Ireland gets together to compare notes, set up collaborations and eat pizza. A block booking was made for the early morning train to Cork. There was a mild commotion when Kevin bailed out at Port Laoise and went back to Dublin. It turned out that he was moon-lighting for Fianna Fáil developing and maintaining one of the first effective political web-sites. The country was three weeks out from the 2002 General Election, the party web-server had blown a gasket and nobody at FF central office was able to make it go again. With their website fixed, Fianna Fáil went on to comprehensively win the election! And Kevin came down to Cork the following day to make his prez for VIBE.

Some time later I was in the pub with Kevin and asked him "Politics can be a worthy [and often thankless] task; but why [for heaven's sake] Fianna Fáil ?". Kevin was quite open: "When I was at school and then college, I really believed in Europe and all the positive, inclusive, diversity-affirming, opportunity-providing aspirations of the EU". Taking the long view, he asked himself which was the most effective political star to which he could hitch his wagon. FF was the answer, and Kevin signed up to make the tea, knock on doors and create the website. I've been teasing him since as the next Taoiseach but three because I knew him to be pragmatic, honest, loyal and clever. We need all those qualities in our leaders.

At last, Kevin Byrne has made his move! After three decades of crunching numbers in academia, and briefly in in dot.com business, and always always in the engine-room of politics [what do people want? what makes them tick? how best to achieve that?] my friend is running for the Seanad to take & hold one of the three seats allocated to The University of Dublin aka Trinity College, our shared Alma Mater. #1 No better man! Vote early and vote often. My ballot and some poll puffs have arrived at Caislean Blob:

Here come the cavalry

Alternate years, The Boy braves St George's Channel to bring his family home for Christmas. There was a big yellow warning storm at sea over the weekend prior with ferry cancellations and delays but they lucked out and arrived on time late on Monday 23rd Dec. We had fired up the oil-fired central heating for the first time this year on the Solstice. The first floor of the house felt like the tropical rain-forest exhibit at the Botanic Gardens as the rads drove the damp out of the granite walls. I was surprised (and relieved) that the boiler actually fired up because we've been eking out a tank of oil that might be our last before moving to a more sustainable way of heating our home.

Then, at lunchtime on Christmas Day, the boiler [R] went phut and we had to subsist on the residual heat in the walls. It was fortunately super mild - and dry - so it wasn't too much effort to revive freezing wet G.daus when they returned from outdoor adventures. And we always have wood and the Waterford 104 stove to burn it; so one room in the house can keep frost-daemons at bay. Shortly after 0900hrs on Stephen's Day, I called the number on the front of the boiler. The ansafone at O'Byrne Services in Kilkenny shared a mobile number for emergencies and breakdowns. I wished Conor O'Byrne a cautious Happy Christmas and explained the symptoms, adding that nobody was going to die if the boiler wasn't fixed. But he took my Eircode and said he'd try to get out later.

. . . and he did.  And like the best trades-folk, he listened a bit, poked a bit and announced "It's the oil pump". Like the best trades-folk, he had a spare pump in the the Aladdin's Cave of his van and he swapped out the tired old broken for a shiny new replacement . . . which worked. It's like science: you have some data, which you match with experience, to float a hypothesis, which you test. Sometimes, the first, most likely explanation, is wrong and you have to dig deeper through the mind-archive for the answer.

After the fix and the payment, which seemed proper reasonable, and my sincere thanks for Being There for strangers we chewed the fat for a bit. Lamenting that Millennials floated through adolescence on the back of the Celtic Tiger, awash with money, so they never had to get their hands dirty fixing tractors or laying bricks. I lamented that The Institute had lost its place in the scheme of things with its pathetic aspirations in rebranding to a second rate university. In the before times, The Institute had been a first rate regional technical college: training up youngsters to be a Good Pair of Hands who could implement the ideas of desk-bound, live-in-m'head, intellectuals like me.

And its not only scientists who are detached from the Real World. We just had a general election which returned a safe centre-right coalition. But all the political parties were talking large about how many houses they were going to build. Mr O'Byrne asked, with dead-pan rhetoric, "build houses with which blocks-layers, sparkies, chippies, plumbers and central heating installers??" Because he sure-as-heck couldn't find enough Effectives to drive a van loaded with spanners and spares and fulfill the demands of Seán Poblacht for new and upgraded central heating kit. Our 28 y.o. cast iron boiler is a) fundamentally inefficient b) approaching its end-of-life.