Joe McCarthy and Valerie Jennings, regular contributors to the discussion on municipal waste management on this blog, write in the Irish Times. It’s a classic protest, with complaints about the status quo but no serious consideration of the alternatives.
Yesterday’s Sindo had a sensationalist piece on electricity prices. It misrepresents the PSO levy as an ad valorem levy on electricity (it is a connection charge). It confuses a 3% increase in the transmission tariff with a 3% increase in the price of electricity — the former is a small part of the latter. And it omitted that the distribution tariff will fall by 6.5%. See the CER newsletter of August.
Lucey and Larkin offer some thoughts on higher education reform. I either agree (evaluation, performance-related pay, fees) or do not know enough to have an opinion (curriculum*).
UPDATE: The Irish Times (2) has seen the report of the National Strategy Group for Higher Education. Strikes me as less radical than Lucey and Larkin.
* Clarification: I know a few anecdotes about a few courses at a few Irish universities.
The speech by Minister Lenihan is available here.
Patrick Honohan’s Tokyo speech is a wide-ranging essay on different varieties of economic growth and the transition between fundamentals-based growth and unsustainable growth: you can read it here.