David McRedmond lying again? No, this time it's worse.


Eircom 1/3 page ad in the Sunday Times, 16th April

Dear David McRedmond,

eircom's costly Sunday Times ad is poor. Just look at the detail:


For a start, it renages on its promise to show us those people ("HERE THEY ARE"), who don't like facts getting their way. The ad should have at least shown the two main clowns acting in this charade:

What the ad meant to show

And then: You still think to come away with your old bullshit misrepresentation about the availability eircom offers with its DSL broadband?

Of these 85% of lines connected to broadband endable exchanges, according to eircom's own official filing with the Security and Exchange Office in Washington (SEC filing), 23% fail to make DSL available to the user. This reduces DSL availability to 65% of lines. DSL availability to your customers (as opposed to lines) is still lower; it is below the 60% mark in the national average and it is below the 50% mark in large parts of the country.
This means Ireland is not in line with its EU counterparts. You know that from your database, but prefer to try and bullshit your way through.

Let us quote a few sentences from the Irish Times, March 22, 2006, article: "Republic trails broadband access":


The European Commission DSL coverage chart in the Irish Times

The Republic was named as one of Europe's slowest movers on rolling out broadband at the launch of a new EU strategy to boost the uptake of high-speed internet technology. The EU strategy highlights that the Republic has the second-lowest coverage of broadband technology in both urban and rural locations out of 17 states surveyed…
The commission document is critical of the slow uptake of broadband in the Republic, which it describes as lagging behind along with the 10 new member states. Uptake is hindered by the highlighted fact that the Republic has the second-lowest broadband coverage of the 17 states surveyed, rankin it ahead of only Greece."

The November 2005 Forfas Broadband report came to similar conclusions, page 12: "5.1. Broadband Availability
As mentioned in the previous section, national DSL coverage in Ireland based on the population is the second lowest of the EU-15....
However, in Ireland, where the population density is relatively higher [than the well performing Sweden and Finland], rural DSL availability stands at just 38% of the population, making it the second lowest of the EU-15 countries. This is of particular concern considering Ireland has one of the highest rural populations in Europe."

David, when we said in the headline, that your bullshitting is worse than lying, we meant that seriously. From several of your recent media utterances on the matter and this display of your personal PR strategy concept (Note: avoid getting photogaphed with displays/posters etc. in hand), we recognise that you are a selfconfessed bullshitter. This is not a laughing matter, but can have severe negative consequences for your personal future.

David McRedmond, showing off his press information mantra, with Minister Hanafin offering an emergency phone for the dangerously tranced-out eircom media guru.

David, please take serious Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt's warning about the consequences dedicated bullshitters could have to face:

"For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person's normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost.



Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth, than lies are."
("On Bullshit", page 60/61, Harry G. Frankfurt, Princeton University Press 2005)

So, David, how about making a start and breaking with a bad habit? Tell us, or the next journalist who asks you the question, which percentage of eircom telephone customers can avail of eircom DSL.
And once you've admitted that nearly half of the Irish population cannot get DSL broadband, you and your accomplice Philip will automatically stop with your latest favourite piece of bull, namely trying to tell us that the stupid Irish consumer with his of her dislike of computers is to blame for the poor broadband take-up.

Resources:

1. Page 12 of the Forfas broadband report:




2. A few words to the rest of the bullshit "arguments" in the eircom ad:



As a percentage of turnaround that may be. But Eircom's yearly investment is less than the annual depreciation, when we dearly need improvement. This detrimental form of asset stripping is not done in the other EU states.



So eircom is investing merely 200 million annually, less than the depreciation of the assets! How great is that?



If the monthly landline subscription is taken into account, and any DSL customer needs to have one, then the Irish broadband user pays a lot more for his broadband than our European neighbours pay.

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