KildareStreet news

Why you're not getting email alerts.

The lazy, incompetent fools who get paid substantial amounts of your money for not doing the job they're paid for, in respect of publishing the Official Transcript of Dáil proceedings, have now actually surprised us.

They're now not bothering to correct their errors at all, which is a new and unpleasant departure from their previous form, where they'd shove any old rubbish up and then quietly airbrush their failings out of existence in the ensuing day or two.

What do we mean? Almost every single day the Official Report is full of errors, especially ones where they take tables which are embedded in written answers to questions, remove the table title, and then call it a major debate heading and wreck the day's page index.

See for yourself:

Previously we've either fixed it ourselves (yes - one volunteer is often able to do a better job here than a well-paid company full of people who don't care about your tax money or the quality of their work), or waited until the next day for a fixed version when it's too broken to work with.

However, we're not currently able to fix a lot of this, and the Oireachtas is no longer bothering to correct the errors at all.

Until they do we can't send you your email alerts because (as a famous IT saying goes) Garbage In, Garbage Out. Unlike your national parliament we do our best not to send complete rubbish to thousands of people every day, so the alerts have been suspended all week.

Hopefully someone in Kildare Street will wake up eventually. Until then, please accept our apologies.

Update at 2300: We've managed to manually-correct the past four sitting days, and have sent a bumper batch of email alerts this evening. Additionally, in future our automated systems will simply refuse to accept Written Answers sections from the source material which contain the most-obvious formatting error detailed above. This means that Written Answers will in future take substantially longer to appear at all on days where the printing company responsible for the mistakes can't find their own arses with both hands -- and at the moment that's almost every day.

On the plus side it means that KildareStreet will always be less broken than debates.oireachtas.ie, your "Always Wronger For Longer" government-funded disaster area.

Update, the next day at 2pm: The first two source files above have just been silently corrected.

Update, the next day at 2.30pm: ...and there go the other two. Wouldn't it be nice if we could find a way of making this work without our having to kick you up and down the street in public?

Posted on 18 October 2009 at 18:00:00 | Link to this