05.30.05
Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 4:51 pm by
If Brits are Irish I need a holiday
When I had to order heating oil last week I knew the time had come to get out of Ireland. I screeched at my husband and soon he had the family booked on a charter to Majorca. Mollified, I began the bureaucratic and logistical battle to get the baby’s passport sorted.
First he was held aloft in a booth for a startled photo. I rang the Department of Social and Family Affairs for his PPS number. We found a garda to witness our mutual consent. I queued for the birth certificate, wrote the cheque, sent the application off, sat back and waited. Then the phone rang. On a Saturday. A very nice lady from the Passport Office said she was terribly sorry but my son had not established his entitlement to Irish citizenship.
I was perplexed. Of course he was Irish, he was born here. Wasn’t that enough? Not any more. Since January 1 the citizenship referendum we approved last June has taken effect. It means that people born in Ireland aren’t automatically Irish anymore. Now you have to establish that you’re Irish through your parents.
“But I thought that was only for foreigners,” I told the lady. “That’s what everyone thought,” she agreed. “No one realised it would affect Irish babies too.”
“Just the black ones,” I grimly offered.
So I was required to send in my own birth certificate to establish that I was Irish and therefore my son was Irish too.
Once I got over the astonishment, I re-examined the application form, concerned that my efficient administration system had broken down. I need not have worried. While the law has changed dramatically, the forms have not. Nowhere on the very detailed application does it acknowledge the shift in Irish citizenship. A call to the Department of Foreign Affairs elicited the response that the new forms are at the printers and not due for a few months. Sounds like a poor service. In the meantime, the passport people have to spend weekends asking people to prove that their new children are Irish.
I shared my surprise with friends at a barbecue. As the rain came down, we huddled inside in front of a fire. An English couple living in Dublin for nearly 15 years sent off a passport application for their child, knowing there would be an issue, but at a loss as to how to resolve it given the absence of any reference on the form to the new law. They presumed they would need to provide proof of residency.
Duly, they received the phone call from the passport office. But it turns out their son is entitled to Irish citizenship . . . because they are British. Apparently, if one parent is British – irrespective of whether they are from Norwich or Northern Ireland – the child is entitled to Irish citizenship. If a parent is from any other EU country, the residency requirements kicks in.
We were amazed. Amid the xenophobic justification for last year’s referendum there had been a lot of hysteria about
closing the floodgates to the Nigerians, Romanians and Mrs Chen. No one said anything about opening floodgates to the British.
The text of the article inserted into the constitution says that “a person born in the island of Ireland, which includes its islands and seas, who does not have, at the time of the birth of that person, at least one parent who is an Irish citizen or entitled to be an Irish citizen, is not entitled to Irish citizenship or nationality, unless provided for by law”.
You’ll note it doesn’t say anything about the children of our nearest neighbours getting citizenship. Apparently those five words at the end “unless provided for by law” are the key. In December the law, being the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 2004, was enacted and that gave entitlement to Irish citizenship to a person born on the island of Ireland to parents at least one of whom is a British citizen. Given the wording of the referendum, the law could have granted citizenship to a child who had at least one parent from Mars and we couldn’t have done anything about it.
For a country determined to restrict Irish citizenship to ourselves and our oppressed nationalist brethren on the Falls Road, it is a surprising consequence of the referendum. The argument in favour of a Yes vote was that, theoretically, millions of asylum seekers could land on our shores, bear children, and collect passports. The population of the UK is now 60m, but hark!
Where are the howls of outrage that they will start beating down the doors of Holles St in the middle of the night demanding that their baby’s first breath be an Irish one? No one wants to be caught on a hijacked plane with either an American or British passport – ample incentive for fearful Brits to nip over on a Ryanair flight and have a baby here.
Yet again, it seems, we amended the constitution without a clue what the consequences would be. The 1983 anti-abortion wording gave a constitutional right to an abortion, and two subsequent referendums later it still stands. The 1998 Good Friday agreement provided a constitutional right to citizenship to anyone born in the 32 counties, which the 2004 referendum was supposed to nullify. It is conceivable that we will find ourselves going to the polls again to redefine our citizenship.
Maybe it’ll be third time lucky.
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05.27.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:08 pm by
I usually avoid the morning current affairs radio programmes as they annoy me too much. I risked irritating myself today and turned on Morning Ireland. Cathal McCoille was interviewing Frank Fahey TD who was calling for the Minister for Health to do something to speed up the establishment of a Breast Check unit in his constituency of Galway. There is no breast cancer screening unit in the West of Ireland and they reckon 40-50 women die each year as a result of late detection.
Except that Frank Fahey is FF TD and is a junionr Minister!! He was pulling the old Fianna Fail stunt of acting like an opposition and calling on his own government to do something. Did the interviewer point this out or tackle him on the subject? Noooooooooo. Pathetic. That will teach me.
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05.25.05
Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 10:46 am by
You know, I was slightly worried about my post yesterday in which I offered the opinion that speed must have been an issue in the crash. I was afraid that I was rushing to judgement prior to the investigation being completed. However Pat Kenny in a really excellent programme this morning lays the blame very much at the door of Meath Co. Council who were doing road works on the stretch of road. I had listened to his programme back in February in which the father of a girl killed in Mayo blamed the temporary road surface for her death. The DBM surface is only suitable for speed limits of 30 m/p/h or 50km/p/h. He campaigned for speed limit reductions where this surface is in place. Of course, nothing was done and it looks like it was DBM on the road in Meath. Ivor Callely, who has always been a truly useless public representative is the unfortunate minister in charge and Pat really went for him. In fact it was the first proper political interview I’ve heard on RTE in years. When Callely tried the usual lines of how he ‘responded positively’ to the campaign, Pat demanded to know why he simply hadn’t sent a memo to all county councils insisting that speed limits be reduced when DBM is down. Callely blathered on about meetings he had with insurance companies???? He was so crap.
Then to top it all off Pat read a letter from a mother describing her campaign to get seat belts on school buses. Except she had written the letter in April 2001 and she was from Ashbourne in Co. Meath….. They got her on the line and she read out the one liners she got back from various ministers at the time acknowledging receipt of her letters but of course doing absolutely nothing about it.
A lot of people are going to be running for cover.
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Posted in Irish Politics at 10:45 am by
Thanks to PO’Neill for sending this link. Whilst my rages against the Eastern entries to the Eurovision are really only skin deep, it appears the Dutch are taking matters far more seriously.
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05.24.05
Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 9:22 pm by
Apropos, as Pat Kenny says, Lenihan and racism, thanks to PK himself for bringing the following to my attention. In the week that Conor made his unfortunate remark my favourite Minister, McDowell, made a speech which was far far worse in content and even worse again because it had been prepared. RTE news report here. He talked about ritual sacrifice, and seventh sons of seventh sons and took the piss out of the asylum seekers. Here’s one quote (from a defence council as well as Minister for Justice!) “I would like to interview these people at the airport, but the UN insists that I go through due procedure.”
In other words, the Minister for Justice, in very loose language gave credence to every ignorant prejudice that exists about black people in Ireland. He claimed to know what asylum seekers tell immigration even tho, as Fergus Finlay pointed out on the PK programme, that he admitted a few weeks ago that he doesn’t read the immigration files and sneered at Joan Burton when she suggested that he should.
I have no doubt that some stories are invented to get through immigration but as Fergus went on to point out – a) they have no other way of getting into Ireland because we have no proper immigration application system that they could use and b) didn’t every Irish person in the States for the last 40 years have a cock and bull story for immigration there and no one here saw anything wrong with it.
However the really scary thing is that he made his speech the same day as Conor made his remark and I can find no report of the speech in the paper of record, the IT. It did feature on RTE and in the Indo. Very shoddy of the Times I think. In any event where were the howls of protest from the meeja about this speech. Where was Joe Duffy? Such a pile of hypocrits.
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Posted in Feminism at 9:05 pm by
The bus crash in which five teenage girls lost their lives is truly appalling. Whatever caused the accident it is clear that speed must have been a factor given that the bus swung around completely before overturning and flinging the five through the back window. I thought Mary Hanafin’s performance, tho’ I don’t like using that term, was very touching. She (being Minister for Children) cancelled a trip to Brussels and went straight to the hospitals and when interviewed by RTE she was clearly quite upset. She also appealed for calm, which was most appropriate, because by the time the SINDO etc are finished with this, they will have whipped the rest of the school into full scale hysteria.
However, I can’t help feeling sorry for the mothers of other teenagers who die in car crashes every single weekend and are practically ignored. I’ve long held the belief that there is a political willingness* to accept a certain level of death on our roads. Every year about 450 people are killed (and twice that number left alive with spinal and head injuries) and we know how to stop the crashes – police presence on the road to prevent speeding and drunk driving. But the cops are not given the resources and the carnage goes on. The victims of this crash will get loads of attention and the pyschologists are being wheeled in already. The focus will remain on school buses and how to make them safer. But where is the political will to do something about the everyday massacre on our roads?
*wasn’t there a term for a similar policy in NI? As long as the deaths stayed under a certain level, the British and Irish governments had no motivation to do anything. It took the bombing of the mainland to get the Brits into action?
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Posted in Feminism at 12:51 pm by
Be fat, die young: it’s policy now
On learning that I was breastfeeding, the doctor urged me to take omega-3 fish oil capsules. “Raise the baby’s IQ by four points!” he declared, brandishing a copy of the British Medical Journal.
Four points didn’t seem like a lot, but he was insistent: “You must do everything you can to make your children successful – it will make your old age much easier.” Within the hour I was at the health food shop clutching capsules.
I’m already making exhaustive efforts to raise advanced children. I police television, blend organic sweet potatoes at night and dangle psychedelic black and white cards on the buggy. The pressure is immense.
So it was a great relief when the National Taskforce on Obesity informed me last week that 300,000 children in Ireland are obese, joining those who, according to other government reports, are borderline illiterate, delinquent and permanently smashed on alcopops. Why should I worry about my children raising the bar if all the others are lowering it so much?
It’s a question of Darwinism, really. Natural selection will weed out the weak and the fat, and any kid who is thin and can stay sober most of the time is assured to be top of the pile. I can dump the capsules and the freezer-full of ice-cube trays of lentil and pear purees, and still count on my son the barrister/doctor/entrepreneur taking me on holidays when I’m 70.
I can’t be alone in my cocoon of schadenfreude. The government is probably quite pleased about the list of ailments that afflict the fat and hasten their demise. The Department of Finance must be relieved. They claim that treating obese people will cost €500m a year. Even if this figure is correct, and I suspect they just made it up, it is still in the best interests of the economy that people die sooner rather than later.
Old people, you see, are costing us a fortune. Between bus passes, medical cards and nursing homes, not to mention those pesky “bed-blockers”, they are nothing but a drain on the exchequer and the fewer we have the better. Last week’s hysteria over obesity simply replaced a pension panic. An Bord Pinsean, the silly pseudo-Irish name for the Pensions Board, is trying to scare us into saving up for old age so the government doesn’t have to.
Smoking helped for a time; smokers were most patriotic in their efforts to reduce the burden on the exchequer. Not only were they paying onerous taxes on their habit, but their early deaths relieved pressure on services for the elderly. There must have been a right panic in the finance department when the smoking ban was introduced. But it now appears as though sufficient numbers in the population are self-destructive enough to eat themselves into an early grave.
An astute caller to Liveline last week exposed the government’s true agenda. Underneath The Irish Times’s front-page article on the obesity crisis was a quarter-page ad detailing a recipe for roast leg of lamb with honey-orange glaze and port and mint dressing. Included among the ingredients was a suggestion to serve the said lamb with boulangere potatoes, which are made with generous quantities of butter and regatto cheese. My mother’s stupendous Sunday roasts are achieved by sticking the lamb in the oven with a bit of Frytex and serving it up with boiled potatoes and carrots. This recipe added about 40m calories to a potentially healthy meal.
Was this lethal concoction part of a promotion for an over-exuberant television chef? Had the ad been placed by a publisher selling yet another tempting cookery book? No. Underneath an article in which we were begged to eat less, the government placed an ad urging us to eat more. It was part of a multimedia campaign by another superfluous agency, An Bord Bia, promoting Irish lamb.
The ad was funded by the National Development Plan. Now, I thought the NDP was about building roads, but a lesser known use of our taxes is to build the revenues of newspapers by advertising food. It costs €7,500 to place an ad on the front page of The Irish Times and other parts of the €250,000 campaign are being aired on national radio. The minister for kebabs, Conor Lenihan, persistently tries to persuade us that we can’t afford to raise our overseas aid budget in an effort to feed the hungry. Yet there are ample funds available to persuade our portly population of their patriotic duty to eat more.
This duplicitous approach to the obesity epidemic was further apparent as schools became the latest target in the blame storm. A consensus emerged that the stoutness of students was owing to the curtailment of physical exercise in schools, coupled with the availability of fizzy drinks from vending machines.
The link between the daily traffic jams outside schools and the bored, fat teenagers in the people carriers seemed to escape the members of the obesity taskforce. Vending machines require money so that their evil contents can be extracted and I suspect that the students don’t have to mug anybody for their refreshments.
But then, the Irish have become expert at flinging money around. Now consultants will be employed at high cost to tell us how to solve the fatness problem. I say hold onto the dosh and follow the advice of Dolly Parton: “Honey, if you want to lose weight, take your head out of the slop bucket.”
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05.23.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:03 pm by
Whatever else is said, it was one of the best night’s entertainment I’ve seen on telly in ages. The acts were soo bad and outrageous that it gave us all a great laugh and full marks to Marty Whelan. I know everyone else watches Terry Wogan but in 3 channel land we had no choice and didn’t lament it. He was hilarious.
The theme was dancing girls and drums. Most of the acts had lots and lots of drums on stage and in the interval Ukraine put on an act that consisted of even more drums. The dancing girls were fabulous. Some had dancing boys but the shortness of the girls’ skirts was amazing. However, the best dancing girls in my view were from Sweden and they wore skintight cat suits. They accompanied a rock ‘n’ roll number called Las Vegas (if you hold on tight/you’ll be a star in the neon lights/everything will be alright/in Las Vegas TONIGHT! (fab lyrics).
Other great lyrics were Uk (touch my fire/you are my desire/you can take me higher or the winning entrant Greece (your my only one/my no.1 lover/you are my sacred passion and I have no other/you are my lover/undercover etc.
The Moldovan act was quite popular. They were a hard rock outfit but rather mysteriously there was a granny in national costume sitting on a rocking chair holding a large drum. For the last chorus she got up and started banging the drum! Or the Ukranian entry. During the revolution a particular hard rock song became the anthem so they turfed out their proper entry and put this in. The lead singer was a big baldy tough guy and his backing dancers were two guys who looked like slaves and they were in handcuffs. I anticipated the finale two verses in advance and yes!!! They ripped off their chains!!! Symbolism overkill.
So, the conclusion. I know I slagged off the semi-final and raged that Donna & Joe didn’t get through. I know there is ridiculous block voting. (Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway all gave each other big points). BUT
a) even if the music was crap from the Baltic/Slavic states, all of the entrants were top acts in their own countries. They all had albums. Pros all the way.
b)The Malta entry was really good and even tho’ it might have won in olden days it still came second which shows that you are not completely at the mercy of politics.
Therefore we have to persuade RTE that we can improve our performance but getting amateurs through the Your’re a star programme has got to end. We have to go back to the jury system and get in the pros. Personally I think we should PAY Westlife to enter. Also I just found out that the UK, Germany, France and Spain NEVER have to qualify because they pay so much into the Eurovision organisation so I think we should stump up more and avoid the semi-final.
Child crying…back later.
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05.19.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:17 pm by
Stop the press! Forget about Conor! I have just witnessed the most astonishing travesty of justice. The qualifying round of the Eurovision song contest just took place in Kiev. Forced by last year’s disaster to go through this process, we had to share a stage with what I can only describe as a bunch of dated, tuneless, talentless FREAKS from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Now, I’m not saying that Donna and Joe are paragons of style and glamour. However, they could sing a lively song in tune, with attractive riverdancers jigging away in the background wearing handkerchiefs.Trust me that was more than enough to come top of the group. But we didn’t get through! 10 acts out of 25 and we didn’t make it! This is the Norwegian entry. They got through! Hellloooooooo. As mentioned in the last post, this is what comes from allowing the public vote on anything. We always did fine when there were juries. Enough is enough. We have to stop entering if all the slavs with their crap taste are going to keep voting for each other. Of course, if we had a jury to pick the Irish act for the last few years we wouldn’t be in this mess in first place.
Finally, I noticed that Switzerland got through with an all female rock band in tight white clothes and straight hair. Jade, the no.2 act in Ireland’s final, were mirror images. I knew we should have sent them….
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Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 8:45 pm by
Well, he livened up the blogosphere if nothing else. I take a slight knock in Richard Delevan’s blog and he also has a convenient list of links to other sites. His observations did serve to remind me of how being ‘inside’ conditions one’s reactions. I actually know Conor quite well and we worked together for a couple of years persuading county councils to give planning permissions for mobile phone masts and persuading county councillors not to complain – we were very successful. He was also solely responsible for getting the Digifone deal with the Gardai to put antennas on their masts – a development which had a material impact on Digifone’s performance.
He is more like his father than people think. Brian Sr. had a huge intellect. He was incredibly well read and far more sophisticated then he ever let on to be. For some reason, and I have no idea why, he played the buffoon as Haughey’s sidekick all those years. When Haughey completely shafted him in 1992 by sacking him as Minister for Defence during the Presidential Election, neither he nor any of the Lenihans would criticise Haughey and still won’t to this day.
Conor is also well read and once or twice I’ve seen him let his guard down and actually seriously discuss a topic. In fact I saw it happen once on Q&A when he got into a conversation with an audience member. He made a casual reference to The Affluent Society but the audience member assumed he was calling Ireland an affluent society and had clearly never heard of JKG. Conor started to explain himself but within seconds abandoned it, choosing not to start teaching the audience and even tho’ the guy was hostile he changed tack onto something else more on the level. I thought it was revealing. Can you imagine McDowell or McCreevy allowing a humble member of the public to remain in ignorance? They would have been shot down immediately.
He is tho’ completely wired and seems content to fulfill the role as class messer whilst big bro’ Brian retains the dignity of the law professor that he is. The real mystery is why Bertie snubs Brian who should really be a senior Minister and clearly favours Conor.
Finally, my reaction is also indicative of how accustomed we are to the non-resignations of FF ministers and TDs. If Liam Lawlor was allowed out of Mountjoy to come up to the Dail and vote, then I can hardly be blamed for dismissing any calls for Conor’s resignation. Of course why anyone votes FF at all is beyond me but given that they do, we have the standards we are prepared to tolerate.
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