But this year they have had the audacity to tell us to measure ourselves around the middle and for women, if you are over 32 inches, or men over 37 inches, this indicates you are probably harming your health through being chronically overweight.

Some journalists have questioned the one measurement fits all approach sanctioned by the WHO, the World Health Organisation. But is this further proof of our denial. Do we simply hate to be told we are FAT?

When the WHO recently pronounced that mobile phone use is injurious to our health not one journalist questioned it. But because we are in denial about our weight some of the journalists have even questioned the independence of the WHO.

So let’s be clear what the WHO says, and in turn, what safe Food is promoting. They are asking us all to measure around our middle. That is not what we commonly call our waistline. So, measure around your middle at your navel or bellybutton. If a woman measures more than 32inches or a man measures more than 37 inches, that means there is an indication that your belly is protruding because so much fat has already built up around your heart, lungs and intestine that on top of that it is now forcing your tummy to protrude.

Now we can continue to deny it all day and all night long but they are the facts according to the WHO. With that much excess fat around your internal organs you are more likely to suffer coronary disease, diabetes or cancer. One third of all cancers are weight related.

But because of our state of denial we start claiming, “I have heavy bones” or “I retain a lot of water”. When the WHO stated brain tumours can result from excessive use of a mobile phone no one was daft enough to say “but I have heavy bones, my skull has an above average thickness so the electro-magnetic field won’t get through my thick head as much”. However these are the very arguments many of us use to resist accepting the fact that we are overweight.

Unbeknownst to ourselves our nation and our children are getting fatter and fatter. Safe Food has stuck to its guns and told us to measure ourselves as instructed. It is merely an indicator and if you are over the 32 or 37 inches but you believe you are not overweight, the best thing to do is to go to your Doctor and get that verified. If your doctor, who will also take into consideration your age, fitness, height etc, tells you you’re not overweight isn’t that fantastic! Keep up the good work but don’t attack a public health agency when it is merely trying to draw our attention to a serious and costly health issue for our population.

Constitutionally the office of The President is above politics and must not take policy positions. David Norris demonstrated, beyond doubt, that he cannot help himself when it comes to expressing an opinion even if it is going to destroy his ultimate objective. Does anyone actually believe he could go for seven years in the Aras without expressing a single controversial opinion?

Further his campaign demonstrated appallingly poor media judgement. The worst type of president we could have is one who doesn’t have the wit to realise when he or she is in really big trouble and graciously reverse. But not Senator Norris, he should have immediately apologised for his 2002 Magill and 2010 Irish Mail reported comments, stating that he should not have allowed himself say something so ambiguous and so open to misinterpretation. Instead David Norris ploughed on and over the cliff.

He stoutly defended his position by condemning paedophilia but apparently condoning pederasty. So what is the actual definition of the word “pederasty”. Dictionary.com offers three definitions as follows;

1. Sexual relations between two males, especially when one of them is a minor.
2. Homosexual relations between men and boys.
3. And it offers a Medical Definition as – anal intercourse especially with a boy as the passive partner.
This raises the question what is the difference between pederasty and (sexually) “grooming” a boy aged thirteen to sixteen? Clearly Senator Norris’s stance raised more questions than it answered and so his hopes of becoming President effectively ended by his own doing last week on Morning Ireland.

But I’d like to challenge all the criticisms of the pension levy. Our country runs an €18 billion euro deficit a year. That is we take in eighteen billion euro less than we spend running the country. We have to borrow that money and as the international capital markets were not prepared to lend to us at a reasonable interest rate, then we had to access the money from the IMF and ECB.

An absolute imperative for our nation is to reduce that deficit. We either cut back on social welfare, health and education, our three biggest areas of expenditure or we raise taxes. If we raise taxes on income, people’s house hold budget, what they spend to live on, will be hit directly. If we increase VAT we negatively impact on consumer spending.

So the Government is right to find sources of revenue that don’t make our situation worse and won’t be felt directly by people immediately. In this regard targeting pensions was justified.

What is now clear is whatever the Government decides to do to generate revenue it will be met by widespread whinging and gnashing of teeth. Everybody says don’t tax the lower paid. Well then those of us who have accumulated €78 billion euro in pension funds maybe we can afford to pay this tax and if gets people back to work, surely that will be good for all of us in the longer term.

Now it has been reported that the couple weren’t expecting a hearing of the case on Monday the 9th last but rather a listing. So when the case went ahead they must have been taken by surprise. But Sarah and DJ should have made themselves available to the media immediately. Instead they kept their heads down hoping it would all blow over. What happens then is a media free for all.

If you have been regularly in the media and using it to promote yourself or your business you can’t then go to ground, so to speak, on a bad news day.
It will sound like I am promoting my fellow columnist here in the paper when I say look at how Ivan Yeats handled his problems just back in January.

Actually Ivan’s problems were far wider ranging in that many people were losing their jobs. Now in both cases it was the same bank AIB that was playing hard ball but Ivan faced the music with great dignity, integrity, honesty and empathy for his colleagues.

The amount of support and concern for Ivan and his wife Deirdre was absolutely amazing and well deserved.  Very different to the coverage for Sarah and DJ, described as a couple who “enjoyed the high life” which was not deserved. It would be hard to come across a harder working couple than both DJ and Sarah.

I hope they will both pull through this awful mess. In many a game DJ was well down at half time but the fighter in him would come back and get a win. I know he and Sarah will apply the same determination in overcoming this crisis and I sincerely wish them every success.

I am very privileged to be meeting both Queen Elizabeth and President Obama at functions I will attend in the next few days. The Queen’s itinerary has been published but the final details of President Obama’s visit is a ferociously well guarded secret.

In a professional capacity I am working the members of Moneygall community. Normally this too should have stayed secret until Ollie Hayes the publican in Moneygall told RTE’s John Murray on his radio show last Friday morning. Now everyone knows, thanks Ollie.

Anyway what is my role? For Henry Healy, a relative of Barak Obama who lives in Moneygall, for John Donovan, who owns the ancestral home and for Canon Stephen Neil, the genealogist who established the link between County Offaly and the US President, next Monday is monumentous. These three men will each be interviewed over a thousand times by the world’s media between, say, Saturday and Wednesday next.

I don’t think people have any idea how big an international story this is. My team and I will be on the ground in Moneygall to help them cope with the media tsunami that is about to hit them. It is important that the spokespersons in Moneygall do themselves, their village and Ireland justice. It will be a fantastic few days for Ireland having the two most widely recognised heads of state in the world meeting the warm and friendly people of Ireland and pictures of it all beamed around the world on TV.

As a result of my involvement I have been invited to attend an “intimate function” with the US President but if I told you the details of that here now his secret service would have to shoot me so I will tell you all about it in my next bog update!

Ever the gentleman, Sean was giving his close friends a heads up. Since then I have been amazed at the number of people who said to me he would make a great candidate. I don’t mean to sound surprised but when you know someone so well, after all, we have shared a dressing room on the Dragons’ Den set for three years, it is more difficult to think of him as possibly, “His Excellency, Sean Gallagher, Uachtaran na hEireann”.

However, at a time when employment prospects are dismal, it would be fantastic to have a person in the Aras who understood the importance of people creating a job for themselves rather hoping to be offered one. Separate from our current economic woes, the days of lifelong employment in a firm, ending at age 65 with a pension and a gold watch, are over. Those entering the job market today have to possess a knowledge, skill, service or product they can sell to companies. That’s how many people will earn their living in the future. We have entered the age of the sub contractor and perhaps the only prospect of earning decent, dependable money will be to become self-employed. This is a seismic change in our job structures and requires someone who fully understands and appreciates the challenges facing the self employed and the small and medium sized business operator. For that alone Sean is worthy of serious consideration.

The fact that he also has championed so many, what I will call, disability causes, would also be a benefit to the entire voluntary sector that does such Trojan work throughout Ireland. When people see Sean on the TV they see him as a relaxed, jovial, warm man but they don’t realise the daily struggle Sean has with his greatly impaired vision. Something he has suffered from childhood. In the Den I have to constantly tell Sean what is on the large display board in front of us on the easel. Of course this is always edited out of the programme. He can’t see big letters on a board from fifteen feet. A combination of his ever worsening impaired vision and the bright studio lights leave him blinded. But Sean never complains. He is one of the most positive, uplifting people I have ever met.

He faces a difficult challenge to win an Independent nomination for the Presidency but Sean has a long track record of overcoming challenges. With his energy and self belief he has every chance of succeeding.

Jessie J was hardly known outside of her bedroom just fifteen weeks ago. So, apart from music industry insiders, no one knew about her at Christmas and before this Easter has arrived she is an international phenomenon. She is top of the charts and is being tipped by respected music critics, on both sides of the Atlantic, as the next global music sensation.

So what’s different about Jessie J? First she wasn’t manufactured on some show like The X Factor. She is a real star and they are born not made by some TV company.

Her talent has been nurtured on the West End Stage where she was a child performer. Many of the really big megastars, like Michael Jackson, have all clocked up a lot of stage miles before they go solo. Jessie J has served her time and thus brings an exceptional presence to her live performances, in this regard, on a par with Robbie Williams

She is a prolific songwriter, so prolific that when she writes a hit that doesn’t suit her gospel, which I will come back to later, she gives that hit to other stars such as Mylie Cyrus, or Alicia Keys. Yes, as a teenager Jessie J just happened to write platinum selling hits for the big stars.

She claims she has a catalogue of six hundred songs ready to be released to the world. Oh and by the way she is the best singer on the planet according to Justin Timberlake one of her many, many fans in the music industry. If you need any convincing about her amazing voice, check out her acoustic performances on You Tube. I direct you particularly to the BRMB recording of Price Tag.

But Jessie J isn’t just a singer, she is on a mission. She has a gospel and she is proselytising. She doesn’t drink, smoke or do drugs and she preaches purity. Listen to the lyrics of her current number one Price Tag. The message from Jessie J is we all got carried away in the boom, obsessed with money and bling. She sings it was a bad time “when the sale came first and the truth came second”.

If you watch the music video of Price Tag, you realise she is against materialism, against big fancy cars, against girls in music videos displaying themselves as mere sex objects and so on.

Following economic crashes, societies not only adjust but they overturn the past. “Jessie J-ism” could become the new Victorianism of the 21^st Century.

To see where this young woman is coming from watch the iconic music video of the global economic boom, I got a Feeling from the Black Eyed Peas. That’s the one that goes “tonight’s goin’ to be a good, good night”. The song was written just before the Lehman Bros crash that has lead to the banking meltdown in the developed world. It is a most superb anthem to excess. Its message is fill up your cup, let it over flow, if you go out tonight – get smashed.  All the scenes in the video feature girl on girl, lesbian action to make it risqué and excessive.

Again check out You Tube and see for yourself that in the last sixty seconds of this video ten girls, not one guy, fall down on the floor or on the street or in the gutter because they are drunk or have overdosed. The message from this music video to young women is you can’t have a good time if you have enough brain cells to recall it the next day.

Jessie J challenges all this. Do it Like a Dude, her first hit, she has explained is partly about how girls make such great efforts to look pretty but still the boys go around with their trousers down around their butts and in hoodies. Maybe the girls should behave badly like the boys or act like dudes. Who You Are, the title track from her first album says to women not be crushed by the air brushed models of the magazines but be yourself because you are special.

It would be a mistake to dismiss her as just a mere singer-songwriter from Essex. Despite all the hype about social networking music is still the soundtrack and staple diet of youth. Songwriters can’t change the world but they do have immeasurable influence. John Lennon’s Imagine hasn’t delivered world peace but from the moment we heard it, the world had changed.

One thing is very clear. Under 25s listen to music radio and their parents, the over 45s, listen to talk radio. The under 25s have already moved on from our economic crash but the over 45s are still looking for someone to blame and venting their anger on radio talk shows. The kids have already got over it. The older generation, their parents can’t get out from underneath it.

Since the economic downturn the music soundtrack has been changing and with that, perhaps, the moral compass of the world’s youth. The male American rappers, partying by the pool with all the sexy girls and showing off their pimped cars and possessions, are fading fast and the purity girls have taken over. Adele, followed by Ellie Goulding and now the campaigner, Jessie J. Coincidentally the last three Brit Award Critics Winners.

Pop music is the ultimate fashion and is ever changing and mega trends come and go. The soft porn era of music videos all started on a Sunday afternoon on the late Vincent Hanley’s MTUSA with Madonna writhing around on that boat in Venice singing “Like a Virgin” and the era officially died in 2011 when Jessie J’s Price Tag lyric posed the question regarding all these soft porn type music videos “Am I the only one getting tired?”

It is far too early to say if Jessie J will have any significant, lasting impact on global youth culture but she is a very different role model than anything we have seen before. So the stage is set at Oxygen for the ultimate music culture battle between, in the red corner, the Lords of Excess, the brilliant Black Eyed Peas, representing the boom and the past and in the blue corner, the challenger, Miss Purity, the awesome, Jessie J representing hope and a new future but not as we know it Jessie.

However I ask the question are we Dragons not looking a bit too smug this year? Here we are in the middle of the mother of all recessions and if someone is prepared to set up a business in these challenging times should they not be lauded rather than be lambasted as happens sometimes in the Den. I can’t excuse it, but even though I am integral part of it, I question the programme’s tone this year.

The producers are obviously feeling the pressure of the primetime slot and only want to feature the brilliant or the barmy. Anything in between is edited down or out. So you only get situations where the Dragons are battling with one another over a very good idea or you get the opposite, us Dragons, giving the false appearance we are queuing up to put the final nail in the coffin of someone’s dream. There is no middle ground because 21st century television demands jeopardy, you must always either win big or lose big.

Of course the producers are constrained by a strict format dictated by the programme owners, Sony Television, who stipulate how it is to be shot. In fairness who could argue with them, their show is now a success in 22 countries, so they know what works and what doesn’t but Ireland is in an unusual place at this time.  More than ever start up businesses need to be encouraged and that is still must be the primary objective of Dragons’ Den.

It is alright, perhaps, for the BBC Dragons to be arrogant. That’s the UK but Ireland is still a community, one large family. I fear we, Irish Dragons, may be falling into that trap of appearing arrogant. The opening sequence has each of us with our arms folded, staring down the camera lens. This is the classic, formatted, Dragons’ Den look but for Ireland I would have preferred to see the Dragons with their sleeves rolled up working with some of their previous investments.

Also because it is series three we have all become very comfortable both in the Den and with one another. So if someone comes in and they have forgotten their figures, an all too frequent occurrence, because we five all know one another so well now, we are more likely to look and smile at one another but this can be misinterpreted as perhaps laughing and the promoter struggling in front of us. I know this is never, ever the case but it can appear like that.

These are not excuses it is just setting a record straight. For a fact I know both Sean Gallagher and Bobby Kerr do countless talks for free in Universities, colleges and schools and with Enterprise Boards the length and breadth of the country doing their bit to promote enterprise. Niall O’Farrell, has in my view, in this series made at least two investments because he was taken by the determination and drive of the promoters even if the rest of us saw no hope of a financial return in those two businesses. Norah Casey, who I am only still getting to know, but I can vouch I have witnessed her being very generous in one business dealing.

Another consequence of a primetime slot is the show gets constant promotion. But producers will always pick the sensational lines for a promo’. So when Bobby Kerr asks, “ why do I smell a rat here?” that can be edited to, “I smell a rat here” and worse is repeated in numerous promo’s, out of context, which I believe is not fair to Brian Lesley, the promoter, who was proposing modest charge to people who needed their debts managed.

Then we willsee someone working with technology to assist disabled & elderly people in their home.

We see such a wide range of ideas – and certainly this week brings a real ‘left of centre’ idea – which presents itself as a frightening and even possibly intimidating security solution.

Also an inventor paid the Dragons’ Den a visit – claiming he can stop your pipes from freezing in winter.

Did they succeed in securing investments from the Dragons ? – all will be revealed on Sunday night – RTE1 9.35pm ! See you then.