For this blog post I decided to use a text analysis tool to compare what politicians say when dealing with Irish sovereignty. I decided to look at all the Dail debates on the treaty as well as a selection of Dail excerpts from leading politicians from November 2010.

The reason I have chosen November is I believe it is a very dark month in our history where calamity and confusion are the order of the day. The Fine Fail led coalition government have led this country to a collapse where our fought Independence has been sold out.

I am first going to analyze the three Dail debates and see what common words are used. I will then compare this to what modern day politicians are saying in relation to the crisis that is currently occurring,

From the Dail debate from

14 December



19 December;



7 January




Looking at the three debates together one can get a picture of what issues are being raised. "Irish People and the Republic are the most common themes being argued in the debates.

Now we turn our attention to the modern era and see how people are commenting on the current economic crisis.

The first account is from a speech made by An Taoiseach Brian Cowen regarding financial stability.




The next item is taken from the a blog post entitled ' Irelands last day of independence'





As is clear when looking at the different examples the majority of the speeches are dominated by 'ireland' republic. people. It is fair comment for the modern day journalist to see this handing over of out fiscal independence to the IMF as a handing over of our total independence.

A Historians tool.

A great line depicting the state of mass media. 'see mass media as reflecting not a world out there, but the practices of those having the power to determine the experience of others'.

Newspapers are a vital tool for the historian. As this article discusses how reliable are they? Bias and commercialization all have a role in the words we read on the page, The argument that what we read is simply the editors view on an issue can be strongly supported but hard facts cannot be disputed.

Using the newspaper as a source can be a gamble but as this article continuos to say is that a broad examination of newspapers in needed to look at a specific event. Thus eliminating the viewpoint of one specific editor and incorporating the ideals of others to formulate a hypothesis of the event being reported.

In order to support the validity of the report it would require a study of other sources on the event such as police reports government reports and stats.

This is a very informative article detailing extremely well the method used when taking newspapers as a source. The problems that are encountered such as what papers to select and what issues to be looked at to method used in collating the data all are easily picked up.

One issue I have in reading the article is that it is a very long winded and tries to back up the arguments immensely. Don't get me wrong it is a very informative piece and very useful but a simple bit of editing and it would work wonders.

I found the article online and here it is for anyone out there wanting to know how to properly use newspapers as a historical source

The Press as a source of socio-historical data.

Photo editing

Right its time to start editing pictures. Im gonna try and use two different tools out of curiosity and just to see which one is user friendly. I opened Sumo paint and worked around with all the various colour changes. I found it very easy to use but I was going in blind and just playing around with the colour of the picture.

The first picture I used was of a photo of the old Bandon Railway station. I took it on a very wet and dark day so the picture is cold( reflecting the feeling that day) I tried to warm the picture up but only the red brick came out and the tarmac remained cold. I then tried to clear the picture but it just did not work out for me.

Here is the original photo

And here is my attempt at warming it up

The Photo editor automatically cut the picture as you see above. I left it as it because I did not want the sky to be seen.

The next photo I took was from a book detailing the history of Patrick Street in Cork. It is of the Fr Mathew stature taken early in the 1900s.

My aim for this photo is to be able to get more clarity from the photo. I also took a picture of the statue as it is today just for the sake of viewing what is still the same from the same angle.

It took a while for the Adobe photoshop trial to download. So as I waited I looked around to see what all the fus was with photoshop. Pretty interesting stuff. I used Final Cut Pro last year for a project we had in college. I editing a 30 second ad and found messing around with the buttons to be great just as long as i saved the previous material. With FCP as with ant editing software it takes time to get to grips with what the software can do. A lot of experimenting is needed

I tried using photoshop but will need more time than I can afford in order to understand what it can do.