My eye was caught by this story in today’s Irish Times.

The Government lost a vote in the Seanad [i.e. the second chamber of the Irish parliament] yesterday on the Defamation Bill but managed to salvage the legislation by calling for a walk-through vote which gave enough time for two missing Senators to be found.

The Government defeat came on an amendment to the Bill proposed by Senator Eugene Regan of Fine Gael proposing to delete the provision in the legislation making blasphemy a crime.

In an electronic vote whereby Senators press a button, the Government was defeated by 22 votes to 21 in the 60-member upper house.

However, Fianna Fáil whip Diarmuid Wilson immediately requested a walk-through vote which takes about 10 minutes to complete. In that period two Senators, Geraldine Feeney of Fianna Fáil and Deirdre De Búrca of the Green Party, had time to get to the chamber and the amendment was defeated by 23 votes to 22. The Bill itself was then passed by the same margin.

A Green Party spokesman said Ms De Búrca was initially absent through “a misunderstanding” while showing a trade union delegation from Colombia around Leinster House. Ms Feeney was at the dentist.

What, one wondered, was all that about? Deeper in the paper there was a rather good OpEd piece by Michael Nugent, which explained some of the background.

The Constitution says that blasphemy is an offence that shall be punishable by law. That law currently resides in the 1961 Defamation Act. Because he was repealing this Act, Ahern [Minister for Justice] said he had to pass a new blasphemy law to avoid leaving “a void”.

But this “void” was already there. In 1999, the Supreme Court found that the 1961 law was unenforceable because it did not define blasphemy. In effect, we have never had an enforceable blasphemy law under the 1937 Constitution.

After several retreats, Ahern claimed both that he had to propose this law in order to respect the Constitution, and also that he was amending it to “make it virtually impossible to get a successful prosecution”. How is that respecting the Constitution?

This type of “nod and wink” politics brings our laws, and our legislature, into disrepute. In practice, we cannot be certain how our courts will interpret unnecessary laws, as we discovered after the abortion referendum.

Also, the matter might be taken out of our hands. In 2005, the Greek courts found a book of cartoons to be blasphemous, and issued a European arrest warrant for the Austrian cartoonist who drew them. This can be done if the same crime exists in both jurisdictions.

Instead, we should remove the blasphemy reference from the Constitution by referendum. Many independent bodies have advised this, including the Council of Europe in a report last year co-written by the director general of the Irish Attorney General.

We could do this on October 2nd, the same day as the Lisbon referendum. It could be the first step towards gradually building an ethical and secular Ireland. We should be removing all of the 1930s religious references from the Constitution, not legislating to enforce them.

Hmmm… It’s a long time since I read the said Constitution, so I dug it out. Here’s an extract from the preamble:

In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred,

We, the people of Éire, Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial,…

Article 6 states:

All powers of government, legislative, executive and judicial, derive, under God, from the people, whose right it is to designate the rulers of the State and, in final appeal, to decide all questions of national policy, according to the requirements of the common good.

Article 40 states, in part:

The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter
is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.

Article 41 is even wierder:

1° The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.

2° The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State.

1° In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.

2° The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.

3. 1° The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.

Article 44 states:

The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion.

It’s enough to make one feel sympathetic towards the ‘Reverend’ Ian Paisley. This isn’t the constitution of a modern, pluralist, secular state, but of a priest-ridden, superstitious, misogynistic and backward statelet.

… in 1940 the Blitz began. The Luftwaffe began bombing London and other British cities. By late October, the ‘Battle of Britain’ was over. The Germans were unable to sustain the losses because of RAF fighter opposition. I was reminded of this today as I was passing the Duxford war museum earlier on the M11 and suddenly three WW2 fighters flying in close formation appeared and looped the loop. Magical.

In the mid-1980s I learned everything one needs to know in order to understand large organisations. I was in Aldershot, Britain’s biggest army town, having a pee in the toilet of a large pub patronised mainly by army squaddies. As I stood there relieving myself I noticed a graffito at eye level. “AT THIS MOMENT”, it read, “YOU ARE THE ONLY MAN IN THE BRITISH ARMY WHO KNOWS WHAT HE’S DOING.”

The ‘Peter Principle’ expresses this in slightly less charged language. In the late 1960s the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced the principle that “Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence”.

Now three physicists have found a way of simulating this effect using agent-based simulation methods. “Despite its apparent unreasonableness”, they write, “such a principle would realistically act in any organization where the way of promotion rewards the best members and where the competence at their new level in the hierarchical structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level, usually because the tasks of the levels are very different between each other”. Their simulations show that if the latter two features actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical structure, then not only is the Peter principle ununavoidable, but it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization.

So how to avoid it? The simulations suggest that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are (a) either to promote each time an agent at random or (b) to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence.

Hooray! At last I understand what’s been going on.

Robin Mason, who was one of my best academic colleagues, and one of the nicest mavericks I’ve known, died recently. There’s a nice obit in today’s Guardian.

Born in Winnipeg, Canada, Mason completed her first degree at Toronto University and her master’s at Madison, Wisconsin. She was a free spirit, best exemplified by stories recounted by colleagues. One remembers her swimming across a very chilly Norwegian lake during a break in an international conference programme. Her colleagues sat anxiously on the shore, wrapped in warm jackets, while Mason swam into the distance and, so her colleagues thought, into mortal danger of hypothermia. They were greatly relieved when she emerged again, dripping and smiling.

Much loved by her colleagues, she was known as a maverick who didn’t give much regard to what she saw as unnecessary administration. But she struck the right balance between scholarly activity, practical application, and having fun with new ideas. Her legacy will continue to inform educational technologists in the future.

We’ve been watching a terrific BBC film (in Alan Yentob’s Imagine series) about David Hockney’s return to his Yorkshire roots. It’s an entrancing movie (still on iPlayer here.) It’s complemented by this nice Spectator piece, A Yorkshire genius in love with his iPhone.

Landscape and nature dominate Hockney’s life these days. In mid-May, I arranged to call in with my wife to see him for lunch. The exact timing was decided only after a lengthy conversation by text, the point to be determined being when the hawthorn would come into blossom. As soon as it was out, he would want to be painting it all day, every day. So a definite invitation could only be made after the progress of buds in the local hedgerows was examined. Day after day for several years, in summer heat and freezing winter winds, Hockney has set up a canvas beside some quiet road. The film catches him at work, putting on the paint. At one point a local driver stops to remark to Jean-Pierre — in Yorkshire so broad that the BBC has resorted to subtitles — ‘Tell him when he’s finished we’ve got some decorating needs doing at t’pub.’ Hockney himself is as unmoved as Van Gogh was when heckled by the youth of Arles. He carries on calmly depicting the rolling fields…

Thanks to Gerard for spotting the Spectator piece.