I'm sitting in the back garden listening to birdsong this evening. I can hear at least four birds singing near the river and their music fills the evening as the clouds pass slowly overhead.

How empty the sky would be without their songs. Are they singing to each other? It seems to late for mating - do nesting birds sing to their chicks?

It makes human communications seem so harsh and disconnected. At moments like this I wonder how technology can possibly improve our communications. The problems are not technological. Imagine some futuristic system where our thoughts could be shared directly with others. It could be a nightmare! It would certainly not lead to harmony .

Sitting here, listening to birdsong, I feel a strong urge to communicate in some different way. Technology was supposed to improve human communications but the mass media are filled with misrepresentations of the human condition (This week, I'm thinking of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson)

I certainly don't want to hear the contradictions and distortions that are commonplace on blogs and chatboards. I was looking at Politics.ie earlier this evening and came across a classic example. There was a posting about the Lisbon Treaty. Don't ask me what brought me into that cesspit but it was clear that
the opening post had totally misrepresented the facts and the thread was a series of misguided interventions in which point-scoring was the guiding principle. The blogs about crime and immigration are even worse (please, not Shell to Sea!!!).

Can humanity communicate honestly or is there always an ulterior motive distorting our messages? We can twitter but where is the joy of birdsong?

I'm not being superior - we all have our motives - but listening to birdsong in the evening is a lesson in communication. When you open your mouth, there must be honesty and a desire to be as one.

Ireland's experiences in appointing Commissioners:

Richard Burke gave a revealing interview

John Cooney wrote that:

From my experience inside the Delors Commission, I was shocked to encounter a bureaucratic-paternalist system that was Napoleonic in spurning democratic principles of accountability. Delors' hatchet man was his chef de cabinet, Pascal Lamy, who made even Commissioners tremble. This technocratic regime, which thrived on the centralisation imposed by Lamy, produced the present malaise of inefficiency and corruption that was outed by the Strasbourg Parliament

margaret Thatcher intervented to prevent O'Kennedy getting a job coordinating the EU budget, probably because it would give him influence over the CAP.