The first time I went on holiday abroad it was like cutting myself off from world events for two weeks. Occasionally I'd meet someone who'd spent a fortune phoning home for a couple of minutes and who was happy to share the news that somebody famous had died and that it was chucking it down with rain back home. But, generally speaking, Ireland could've floated off into the Atlantic and I wouldn't have known much about it.

Obviously, now that nearly everyone has phones that can accept e-mails, surf the Net and can keep us in constant contact with anyone in the universe, it's a little more difficult to be completely out of touch. The situation is made more difficult by the all-pervading influence of Sky News.

But it's not impossible and nobody says that the phone has to be switched on all the time or that you have to go into a bar that's showing the news in English, or that you can't simply walk by the display of day-old Financial Times without grabbing hold of one to skim the headlines, no matter how difficult that might be.

So when you've stayed as out of touch as possible, even when it's only for a fortnight, you imagine all sorts of exciting things must have happened in your absence. But when I arrived back in Dublin, it was straight into the exact same stuff as before I left. Which proves that two weeks might be a short time in politics or even in business, but the long-term trends remains.

Six o'clock in the evening wasn't a great time to launch into the city's traffic, but it only served to confirm that transport chaos is one of our more pressing problems. And sitting in a taxi waiting to join the melee gave plenty of time to listen to yet another reporter spitting with rage on behalf of the Eircom shareholders at the performance of the share price; the bonuses paid to the executives; and the share option package that will be voted on at the annual meeting in September.

There wasn't anything she could say about the share price performance that hadn't been said already, and she spoke of the fall in price more in sorrow than in anger. But she was incensed about the bonuses, although the fact they were primarily related to work done in getting the company ready for flotation meant that these should be paid regardless of how the company has performed since. (Nice money all the same!)

The share option package is the more important one. Given that the performance of the shares has been so awful, it seems extraordinary that none of this is now being taken into account when allocating the options that will end up being priced at market levels - so that if the share price goes up, the executives will reap the benefits. But the shareholders will simply be sitting on smaller losses, which hardly seems an equitable arrangement, particularly as some shareholders probably currently hold more shares than the executives.

Option packages are supposed to offer incentives to management. Shareholders baulk at the idea of huge pay cheques to senior management, and so options packages are generally designed to reward executives when the value of the company increases, which should benefit both shareholders and management. Interestingly, though, many companies don't blame their executives when share prices fall, preferring instead to cite "market forces" and a downturn in the industry or the markets. They don't, however, cite "market forces" when prices soar, as so many do during the bull runs. Then it's a question of brilliant management and there's a stampede to turn options into cash before the market retreats.

The bottom line is that senior executives in a whole raft of industries (and certainly not just telecoms) rate themselves far too highly. They want to be paid the "going rate" for the job - the same as their counterparts in other industries or similarly rated companies, no matter what the differences between those industries or companies are. (Pretty much the same as a same-grade civil servant in one department gets the same salary as another, even though the level of responsibility might be wildly different.) They say that it would be difficult to replace their levels of expertise and that it would cost the company more to do so than it would to pay to keep them. And they're happy to perpetuate the myth that nobody could do things better.

Institutional fund managers don't want to get involved because they don't believe that their role means they should have anything to do with the overall management of the companies in which they invest. They rarely vote against management proposals and the weight of their holdings makes it almost impossible for the votes of smaller shareholders to make any difference.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the final round of the auction for mobile phone licences ended with a total amount raised of just over €50.5 billion, which must please finance minister, Mr Eichel, immensely. And I thought the amount raised in the UK (about €37.5 billion) was scary! This means that the telecom companies will have to issue yet more debt to pay for the licences, and already there's talk of downgrading corporate paper in this sector.

Which will, in turn, increase the cost of borrowing for the companies themselves. I have a horrible feeling that there will be far too many offerings for the market to absorb over the next few months, so there'll have to be a hell of a lot of mobile chatting going on for these guys to make money. I'm still a telecoms sector fan simply because of the market potential, but I'm beginning to think the heat will drive me out of the kitchen yet!

Actually it's quite interesting to realise that you're now more likely to be woken from your siesta on the beach by the sound of someone's mobile belting out the William Tell Overture than by a ghetto blaster. In looking at the telecom sector it's sometimes hard to realise how far it's come in such a short period of time. But rebranding companies, snazzy ads and snappy mission statements aren't enough. Results are what count in the end.