conferences and bertie's local

Last Monday our class visited a conference about global warming at the mansion house in Dublin. While waiting for it to start, the big screen above the stage showed us the usual 'greenpeace doctrine' footage of melting glaciers and barren land. And I was starting to fear the worst: an evening of environmental activists with woolly socks who would basically all have the same arguments in similar talks.
Fortunately it wasn't all that bad. Even though the keynote speaker presented the 'facts' and all the other speakers agreed with him, a good number of them had interesting viewpoints and/or original metaphors (we're running up the down-escalator, people!). I can only recall one speech that was extremely far out there. Something with some form of carbon-tax that will result in smaller families and will solve all world problems. Ah well, I guess you have to have one of those anyway.
Unfortunately none of the speakers was willing to say that global warming is not such a big problem and we should focuss on other things instead. I'm sure that would have been a very interesting one for a panel discussion..... The panel of politicans from all the Irish parties agreed with the standpoints of the green party on the issue and I was wondering how far that is from their actual policy.
In the end, there was a some time for questions from the public which resulted in some quite funny bantering between CEOs of the cement and concrete industry telling everyone that their method of construction had a far smaller CO2 output than that of their competition.

On our way back from town, I was pointed at the local of the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern. So now I know that Bertie, as he is known here, drinks his pints in the neighbourhood I live in. Imagine Balkenende going to a pub at all, or even people referring to him as Jan Peter all the time for that matter....