James Galvin

Listening to Newstalk (quoting from my feed reader, because their website is broken):

• Beaumont Hospital was found to have spent three-hundred and eleven-thousand euro on an I.T. system described as totally useless.
• The Irish Blood Transfusion Service lost three quarters of a million euro on another I.T. system when it abandoned its rollout.
• FÁS shells out €1.7million on the Jobs Ireland website.

It is so infuriating to see the public’s money wasted so blatantly like this in Ireland, knowing that there’s nothing we can do about it. I recently covered the black hole of funding known as Irish Roots, but it gets worse and worse.

It is safe to assume that any technology project remotely linked to the government will involve scandalous overpayment. It is due either to gross incompetence or blatant corruption - either way, heads should roll.

The guys on Newstalk mentioned the possibility that the FÁS Jobs Ireland contract may have been sewn up before ever going to public tender. Regardless of whether that is true or not, the trend is sickening. There is no accountability, and with a wink and a nudge, a state-agency doles out millions for nothing. And they get away with it. More often than not, we don’t even hear about it. Even the few instances that do make the news amount to almost nothing.

Pat Phelan has announced Twitterfone. Great design, and a nice handy app for anyone who uses Twitter a lot. A particularly good one for long journeys in the car. Now all I need is a hands free kit, and a text to speech plugin for my phone.

And better late than never: another mobile/web app on the way, courtesy of Paul Walsh. Follow Wubud on Twitter to find out more.