05.05.08

Guns

Posted in Feminism at 11:02 am by Sarah

WHEN my husband is away overnight, I turn on the burglar alarm and lock all the internal doors. When my friend’s husband is away, he leaves a loaded shotgun under her bed. I worry that my tactic would delay an exit in case of fire, but she risks being shot by the weapon designed to protect her.
There are 217,000 legally held guns in the state, 165,000 of which are shotguns. Each one is more likely to be turned on his owner than to protect him from an external threat. Yet despite the litany of tragedy that accompanies the possession of a firearm, people insist on believing a gun offers them protection.
Even the gardai, who should know better, are getting in on the act and last week demanded that more officers be armed. How much evidence is required before we accept the obvious? Guns are dangerous – principally to their owners.
We’ll probably never know exactly what went on or why in the Flood household in Wexfordlast weekend, but the shotgun that was used to kill Lorraine and Diarmuid was legally owned by a third party. It had been lent to them several years previously, perhaps for protection. The owner is undoubtedly devastated at the use to which the weapon was put. In August 2006, Charlie Wrench was accidentally shot with his own gun by his girlfriend during a row at their home. On Christmas Day in 2005, Alan Blakely in Co. Cavan killed his sister in a dreadful accident when he was picking up his gun to go shooting after Christmas dinner. Just two of the many gun-related deaths of recent years. It may appear that gangland assassinations are the norm but when someone is shot and killed in Ireland, the killer is most likely a member of the victim’s family using their own gun. Whether its suicide, murder-suicide or an accident, keeping a gun in the house is lethal.
So why do people do it? Are drug-crazed burglars being chased successfully from houses by gun-toting residents each night? No. When burglars visit an occupied house, the usual scenario is that everyone continues to sleep soundly upstairs and wakes up to discover that their laptops, iPods and cars have disappeared.
The fact that my friend and I take extra precautions only when home alone is ludicrous. Exactly how do we presume our husbands will protect us if events take a violent turn? Will hers calmly fire a shot over the assailants’ heads and watch them flee? Will mine descend the staircase with a golf club in hand and overpower them? Not likely. Home owners bearing weapons are usually disarmed and have their hurley, blackthorn or stiletto used against them. If thieving brigands show up at my front door, I’ll do what I’m told and beg for mercy. That’s assuming they show up. Despite crime paranoia, most of us are quite safe in our beds.
There is a casual acceptance that farmers need guns. I don’t see why. This is the not Wild West and farmers don’t need to patrol their flocks at night protecting them from predators. Farmers are entitled to shoot dogs chasing their sheep, but I’ve never heard of one who witnessed this happen and had time to retrieve a shotgun, load it, and kill the animal. There’s little point in executing a rabbit. Many people won’t eat them, as they carry disease, and at the rate they breed taking out the odd Bugs Bunny makes no difference.
Some people enjoy hunting as a hobby, but accidents are an inevitable consequence. Last week, John Kelly was out hunting near his home in Waterford when he spotted an SUV parked in a lonely spot. He approached the vehicle, heard a bang and realised he’d been shot in the stomach. An investigation found that Kelly had not, as initially thought, been shot when he happened upon criminals, but instead may have accidentally shot himself. In any case, he is lucky to be alive.
The argument in favour of arming gardai made at the Garda Representative Association (GRA) conference last week lacked rationale. John Healy of the GRA questioned whether the garda could continue to “enjoy the luxury” of having unarmed members. Other gardai claimed that because criminals increasingly use guns, officers should have them too. Apart from units such as the Special Branch and the Emergency Response Unit, didn’t our police force come through the Troubles without being armed? So why now?
Vicky Conway, a lecturer in law at the University of Limerick, has pointed out that only 12 gardai have been killed by armed criminals since 1942, the last one being Jerry McCabe in 1996. Half of those killed – including McCabe – were armed. As another garda, Aonghus Moloney, pointed out last week, arming officers “will not make us bullet proof”.
Criminals dealing in drugs have access to more guns now, but armed gardai are more likely to become their targets. If a garda has a gun, then the criminal may decide he has to eliminate him quickly. I suspect this may be why Jerry McCabe was killed. If the garda is unarmed, the criminal is more likely to threaten him and escape. An unarmed policeman may be less effective, but he lives to guard another day, and that’s more important.
Apart from placing gardai at greater risk, arming our police also places the public in more peril. A garda is only supposed to discharge his weapon when faced with lethal force. As we discovered in Abbeylara, when John Carthy was killed by highly trained officers, mistakes can happen. It’s too difficult to define in a tense, split-second situation when force is genuinely lethal.
The National Rifle Association in America likes to claim that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people”. But people kill people with guns, either deliberately or accidentally, all the time. The NRA invokes the second amendment of the US constitution which they claim enshrines the right of the people to “bear arms”. That claim is disputed, but in this country we aren’t burdened with any such constitutional restraint. No-one, other than authorized members of the armed forces, has a right to own a gun. The term “legally held gun” is of no comfort to a family burying their dead. Unfortunately, it’s a phrase we will have to get used to hearing in ever more tragic contexts.

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04.03.08

Bebo Tribute pages

Posted in Feminism at 3:48 pm by Sarah

(Sunday’s column – forgot to post earlier)

There are some things we don’t know about suicide, and some that we know beyond all doubt. One is that suicide is contagious. Research has conclusively shown that it can cluster, especially in the case of people aged under 24. Copycats account for 6% of all suicides. It’s not a big number, but each one is preventable. When a suicide happens in a small community, Gardai, priests and other leaders brace themselves and hope that it will be a one-off. Emotional funeral masses and highly charged eulogies for the dead can have the effect of romanticizing the dead and their manner of dying. It puts ideas into the heads of already distressed teenagers.

But masses are transitory and people talk themselves out of the immediate hysteria at wakes. Grief is a process and gradually, the dangerous phase and the risk to distressed adolescents fades.

Media reports of the suicide, especially written media don’t pass so quickly. Newspapers can be re-read and absorbed. Because these reports can influence the vulnerable and hurt the families, the Irish Association of Suicidology has issued guidelines to the media for the reporting of suicide.

They request that reports shouldn’t be put on the front page and photographs used very carefully. There should be no reference to the method used or any suggestion that there was a single cause for the suicide : such as poor exam results. Language is important too. For instance, terms like “successful” suicide or “unsuccessful attempts” shouldn’t be used. They also ask that phrases like “commit suicide” which carry the connotations of crime be avoided. I’m trying to keep the guidelines in mind when writing : though its strange how these phrases are so instinctive. Above all, the experts ask that suicide is not portrayed as some last heroic act. Glorifying suicide is deadly.

The aim is to keep factual and fictional accounts of suicide in the media low key and avoid adding to the emotional fever of a tragedy. I should stress that the experts aren’t asking for discussion about suicide to be suppressed. On the contrary they believe that suicide awareness is vital to its prevention. All they ask is that public reporting is contained in order to reduce imitation.

Sometimes journalists will weigh up two competing pressures : to report the story and to do so responsibly. It can be a fine line, but you have to be hardline about this : I don’t need to know certain aspects of a “newsworthy” suicide story but vulnerable people do need to be protected.

Nevertheless it was through news reports, both on RTE television and in all newspapers that I learned of one disturbing factor in imitation suicides.

Just over a month ago, two boys died by suicide in Westport. In reporting the second death, RTE television news mentioned that before killing himself, the boy left a message on the Bebo page of the first boy. The page had turned into a shrine and many friends had left messages to the dead boy.

My immediate thought was that those Bebo pages are a bad idea. They do everything that the suicide experts say contributes to copycat suicides. The dead person is not only romanticised but sensationalised. Over and again, their peers can re-read the tributes and emotional messages, which are addressed directly to the dead person as if they were alive. Day after day teenagers with a high threshold of vulnerability are being exposed to a seriously imbalanced view of suicide.

I also wondered if RTE was wise to even mention Bebo in the story. It’s bad enough that the page existed but why advertise it on the main evening news report? Unless a Bebo page has been marked “private” anyone can look at it.

Then last week, the same thing happened. A second suicide in the West and again we are told by RTE, but also through every newspaper report I read that Racheal Madden, who killed herself last week, had set up a Bebo tribute page to her brother Philip. He had killed himself 10 weeks previously.

There are two issues here. One is why journalists feel obliged to mention the Bebo pages in their reports and the second is why Bebo allows the pages to remain public.

The whole purpose of the guidelines is to keep suicide reports low key. Helping us visualise the heartbroken friend or sibling heroically writing emotional messages to the dead falls far outside the spirit of the recommendations. Advertising the existence of the tribute sites to other teenagers, 25% of whom have suicidal thoughts at some point, is unwise. It also implicitly suggests a single cause : grief : for the copycat death. This suggestion is also in breach of the expert advice. No one is asking for censorship here, but I don’t see the “news value” in one boy leaving a message on another boy’s Bebo page, both of whom killed themselves. It creates the precise aura of heroic action that should be avoided.

In previous days one might have left flowers at a grave with a card containing the same message. But the writing would have faded or the card kept by the family. Now its public and there for too many other at-risk adolescents to read. The emotional message on a social networking site isn’t a safe channel to express grief – its consequences go far beyond that.

When people learn of the existence of the page, its too easy to check it out, even if you never knew the people who have died. I checked some similar pages last week, just to get a feel for what’s on them. They have love poems and monologues to the dead and can only have the consequence of inflaming, rather than calming, distressed teenagers.

The only positive aspect I could see was that the pages also include links to an official Samaritans page on Bebo. The Samaritans have been working with Bebo to try and create a safe environment online. It’s good but I don’t think its good enough. Bebo will remove a page at the request of a deceased’s next of kin or from the police. They should go further and have an automatic policy of removing tribute pages to suicide victims. Families are in no fit state to make decisions like this after a suicide. Waiting on them to intervene is a neat side-step by Bebo. If copycat suicides are to be prevented a conservative approach is unacceptable. The pages are dangerous and I have no idea why Bebo allow them to stay up, even though I’ve asked them about it twice in the last month.

If people with suicidal thoughts are surfing the internet, the sites they need to see are ones like www.spunout.ie, an excellent health website for teenagers, or others like www.aware.ie or www.samaritans.org. Bebo needs to step up and take down the tribute pages and responsible journalists should stop advertising their existence.

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03.29.08

What’s good for the goose…

Posted in Feminism at 8:59 pm by Sarah

Well, well, well, how interesting.

From the IT today.

Story 1

” A DONEGAL woman who travelled to New York for the St Patrick’s holiday was detained and deported when US authorities discovered she had worked there for four years without a valid visa.

“It was bad treatment. I didn’t know what was going on – they weren’t telling you anything . . . You’re treated like a criminal. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”

Deary me. Treated LIKE a criminal. Overnight in a holding cell and back on BA. Not like these Brazillians chaps who came to Dublin for the weekend and were treated AS criminals – flung into Mountjoy for TWO days! But the Brazillians aren’t a a bit happy about it. Good for them.

Story 2

“A DIPLOMATIC row has broken out between Ireland and Brazil over the detention in Mountjoy Prison of three students who were trying to enter the Republic, The Irish Times has learned.

The Irish Times understands they have since been returned to Portugal.”

My only question is why Ms Greene’s experience is even news. She, by her own admission, stayed and worked illegally in the US and attempted, despite clear rules, to regain entry within 10 years. She’s kept overnight and put on the next flight home. The Brazillians, perfectly legally attempt entry and are kept in jail for two days! That’s a story. Ms Greene has no cause for complaint.

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03.24.08

Spring lamb

Posted in Feminism, Sunday Times Columns at 6:05 pm by Sarah

In one generation an obsession has arisen over spring lamb – supposedly a “traditional” Easter dish. Traditional for I don’t know..20 years? In these parts we look down our noses at Spring lambs. If the lambs are big enough to kill for Easter then they were born in deepest Winter and have been reared on what we call “sheep nuts” or as one consumer of “organic lamb” told me, turnips and “mountain grasses”. Further, lambs born in Winter have to be brought indoors for at least some time and are therefore more susceptible to infection. So they either die or need antibiotics.
Our lambing season really only started in the last 2-3 weeks and is in full swing now. They are born and reared outdoors and eat grass. My mother who is an expert in meat swears that these lambs are far superior to the ’spring” version that has not eaten grass – or certainly grass from the fine plains of midlands Ireland.
But here’s the other thing. From our house I can see our new lambs trotting round the fields, tails wagging as they feed from their mothers and in a little while trailing around after them grazing. Disease is extremely rare and they’ll be rounded up straight from the field and sent to the factory. Its the way most lambs in these parts are reared. But these perfectly and naturally bred animals are not labelled organic. I asked the folks why. They said they had checked it out and the regulations for “organic” are hopeless. The one they singled out was that there were severe restrictions on fertilizer management of the grass. Now, we’re in REPS (rural environmental protection scheme) and so are under regulation about these things already.
As far as I’m concerned these lambs, which end up as normal Irish lamb in your average butchers are a lot more “natural” and “organic” than lambs bred in winter, indoors and fed anything other than their natural diet (grass). They’ll hit the shops in June. They’ll cost half of your heavily marketed Spring Lamb. So consumers – forget this over priced organic thing. Your common or garden, or rather field, Irish lamb is quite acceptable.

So, what do the Carey’s, strange little cult that we are, eat on Easter Sunday? And with GREAT relish?

Turkey and Ham! Yummy. Why only have it at Christmas? Especially when you cook it PROPERLY like Betty does. None of this roasting it the day before nonsense. And none of this roasting it dry. Straight out of the oven, dripping in juice. Loads of veg, gravy and spuds. How we cheer when its presented.

Though in Monty Pythonesque mode Betty did claim that the Spring treat in Cavan in her childhood was…..

The Spring Cabbage

Sick of turnips all winter, her father would head to the fields and return triumphantly with the first cabbage.

I never acquired a taste for cabbage. Good thing I wasn’t reared in Cavan in war time.

Aw..twin lambs right outside the window now. So cute. And so delicious in a few months

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03.03.08

Celebrate Bad Mother’s Day

Posted in Feminism at 12:59 pm by Sarah

IT was the car seat that did it. When the revolution comes, car-seat designers will be first up against the wall. One son was in his, but the second was refusing to co-operate. Tired, cranky and out of patience, I grab him, shove him in the seat, and shout as I struggle with the wretched straps.
We all cry. I get into the driver’s seat, compose myself, and announce: “I love you both but you drive me crazy.” The crazy bit is delivered in a comically exaggerated voice and, for added effect, I tear at my hair. We collapse into giggles, tears are dried, and we proceed down the road singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
By the time we hit the creche, six choruses of Glory, Glory, Hallelujah have transformed us. As they march off without a backward glance I exhale and enjoy a surge of relief. Someone else is minding my children.
“If it wasn’t for the creche, I’d go mad,” I once declared to my mother and aunt. “We had no creche and didn’t go mad,” replied the aunt. “Maybe we did,” my mother reflected ruefully. There is a moment in which nothing is said but everything is acknowledged. The world has changed, but motherhood hasn’t. It can bring you to your knees, physically and emotionally. The reward for this torture is that once a year you get a stupid Mother’s Day card, overpriced flowers and a carvery lunch in the local hotel. Take your Mother’s Day rubbish and give me therapy instead. “My children,” wrote the poet Adrienne Rich, “cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience.”
Psychologists call it maternal ambivalence. Rich describes it as the “murderous alternation between bitter resentment, raw-edged nerves and blissful gratification”. Anyone who has cared for small children will understand that. Sometimes I relish in my unique capacity to care for them; at others I pray to be delivered from the pressure of their dependency. These conflicting feelings would drive anyone to distraction.
The shame some women feel when swamped with these negative emotions causes post-natal depression. Here’s the good news: not only is it common to resent your children for making you feel completely useless, but it’s fine. If you bury that negativity, the kids are doomed. They need to see that at some point they can hurt you and that you can make up later. So when you lose it, you’re not a bad mother, you’re human.
The mystery is why an image of the idealised mother persists. Over 40 years after the second wave of feminism, the Good Mother still haunts us. She is always loving and willingly self-sacrificing. She hands her children to creches full of remorse and only when forced to by the evils of a capitalist society. Without this financial necessity she would be at home reciting nursery rhymes and nurturing what Freud called “His Majesty, The Baby”, just like our mammies did. But our mothers had no choice; we do. Our choice is to pay other women to help us clean our houses and mind our children. Nowhere do I see mothers admitting that they are happy to drive off to the office where they can go to the toilet in peace. She’d be a Bad Mother wouldn’t she? The Good Mother hates to leave her children and gets plenty of media coverage. The “lucky” ones get to stay at home. Why isn’t it acceptable that mothers choose to work outside the home because they enjoy it? Right beside the newspaper pictures of the Guilt-ridden Good Mother are stories about the Creche From Hell. Many Irish creches are supposedly prisons in which your children suffer neglect and oppression, and run the risk of serious injury. A child injured in a creche makes the news. But hospitals are full of children who come to grief at home. Domestic accidents are treated as commonplace, but slips and trips in creches are scandals.
HSE creche inspections make great headlines, and Pavlovian politicians demand that something be done about the appalling conditions that our poor mites endure. The Guilt-ridden Good Mothers sound increasingly shrill each time they explain that it’s the high mortgage that compels them to work outside the home.
Think about it: when is the last time you read something positive about a creche? It’s all complaints about the cost, the quality of care, the failure to regulate them. Scare stories of evil nannies and neglectful au pairs add to this negative portrayal of childcare. Children left to the care of professionals are to be pitied. No wonder working mothers feel guilty. But here’s something else you won’t read too often: psychologists know that a child is far better off in a good creche than at home with a depressed mother. I’m delighted with our creche. Far from being a second-class replacement for our care, it’s a great support. It is clear from the confident manner in which the staff guide and manage their charges that they have been well trained. We’re not policing the staff; we often learn from them. I don’t have a webcam so I can spy on them during the day. Instead I ask the carers for advice and tips. One friend regularly hires the creche girls for extra babysitting. Creche and home are seamless.
I’ve dropped in at odd times to find the children all sitting at the table, politely eating and cheerfully obeying instructions. They love their little friends and do all kinds of art projects that I could never organise. The owner often remarks that shy and unruly children excel in her care. She despairs of the HSE inspection system and the conflicting rules from different authorities in different counties. Even the best creches can be portrayed as dens of disaster by a bureaucrat with a clipboard.
So why did I bother having children then? Well, while having children is deeply fulfilling, my mothering skills aren’t up to the job seven days a week. Once my boys hit the age of two, I had to outsource some of their care. We’ve organised our lives so that everything is done on a part-time basis, and that works for everyone concerned. A good life is one with choices. Given that so many other parents do the same thing, why does the assumption persist that we do so under compulsion? It takes a village, as the saying goes, and creches are the new village.
So don’t celebrate Mother’s Day – celebrate the fact that some days you don’t have to be a mother. They’re good days too.

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02.29.08

Celia

Posted in Feminism at 8:21 am by Sarah

Click to listen to yesterday’s Drivetime show and an interview with Cathy O’Halloran about a conference at which Celia Larkin was giving a speech about branding. (FF to about 20mins on this link..they’ll put the specific segments up later in the day when you can go straight to the piece).

I am so impressed with Celia. The meeja showed up at her gig and she turned the tables on them, asking them questions from the podium and then left the hotel refusing to answer their questions. Alright, so she was given a “loan” to buy a house which she only paid back when the Tribunal found about it. We know not the source of the money nor the tax implications, but for sheer poise, she delivered a masterclass at that conference.

But tell me this, from where has the convention emerged that she is constantly being referred to as the Taoiseach’s “Life Partner”? Clearly she is not his life partner. She was his partner for….I dunno, 10 years? What’s wrong with “former partner”.

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02.17.08

No dog licence for gay couples

Posted in Domestic/Relationships, Feminism at 12:43 pm by Sarah

A friend was filling out the application form at her local gym when she noticed that generous discounts were being offered to “couples”. She’s a thrifty type, and resolutely single, and bristled at the better deal available to her smug married friends.
A few days later she was back at the gym with one of her single girlfriends, whose name was entered on the form under the section marked “partner”. The girls defiantly handed over the joint application with a cheque, almost hoping that their implied status as lesbian lovers might be challenged.
Instead the application was received with such grace that they briefly regretted their fraud. That thought was shortlived as they focused on the unfairness of the financial benefits bestowed upon couples. Why should they have to pay more because they are single? Is singledom so deviant that penalties have to be imposed to persuade them out of spinsterhood?
They spread the word and now anarchy reigns. The place is over-run with discounted couples and the management must be wondering why theirs is the gym du jour for lipstick lesbians. The benefit for “normal” couples has disappeared, since any two people can claim the cheaper membership once they organise a joint direct debit. The deal is a joke, and the gym might as well abolish it.

We are not all individuals, whatever the crowd in Monty Python’s Life of Brian may say (in unison). We start out as members of families, which we eventually leave to form new families. Throughout all societies, this process has two aspects. First, people have an irrepressible desire to stand up in front of their friends and family and formally declare their commitment to each other. No-one really has to get married these days, yet it is as popular as ever.

Marriage rates are almost similar to those of the 1950s. The only reason many people need a divorce is so they can remarry – the supposed triumph of hope over experience.
The second feature of marriage is that by extraordinary consensus across all societies, people want their union formally recognised by civil authorities. Marriage confers significant protection on the parties, be it automatic ownership of the family home, inheritance rights and custody of children. Most countries recognise that a formally recognised family unit is a stabilising force in society.

In free and liberal societies – call them permissive if you wish people still like getting married. One third of births today are outside marriage and I’ve been at several weddings where the couple’s children were in attendance. The order of events might be reversed, but the institution is still attractive even when not strictly necessary.
Despite the solidity of that institution, conservatives fret that marriage is under attack. From whom, and where, I can never quite gather. Those who feel that marriage needs defending lost the war on divorce but have found a new battle-ground – same-sex marriage.
There is general agreement that same-sex couples face considerable injustice. Though a homosexual couple can live together for 40 years, they face unfair financial hardship when one partner dies, since they are legally strangers without inheritance rights. That’s just one scenario which has convinced most compassionate people that something has to be done to make life easier for same-sex couples. The tax system aside, same-sex couples want to marry for the same reasons as straight ones – to have their deeply committed relationship formally recognised.
Irish law acknowledges equality for homosexuals as individuals. We’ve set up an Equality Authority to enforce equal rights and an Equality Tribunal to which homosexuals can complain if they suffer discrimination. While the state wants homosexuals to be equal as individuals, for some reason it is hostile to equality once those individuals become a couple. It’s simply not a tenable position and changes are afoot.
But what changes, exactly? There are really only two reasons to deny gay people marriage. The first is the “ick factor” – the inability of those who consider themselves “normal” to get their heads around two men or two women walking down an aisle. Ick.
The second is the fear of annoying highly articulate and organised conservatives. Brian Lenihan, the justice minister, has predicted that a referendum on gay marriage would be divisive. Because we don’t actually need a referendum, his warning seemed a subtle threat to homosexuals not to stir up the right wingers.
To save us a row, and because we feel a bit icky about which is the bride and which the groom, gay couples are being offered a “civil partnership”. It wouldn’t be a marriage as such, more a mechanism by which cohabiting, same-sex couples could register their relationship and then avail of tax benefits. Senator David Norris, who so bravely fought for the decriminalisation of homosexuality, has called the proposal nothing more than a dog licence for gays.
The government obviously feels that the dog licence route will be less trouble than allowing same-sex couples a proper marriage. Perhaps they hope it will keep the gays quiet without upsetting the conservatives too much.
The logic of this position escapes me. If civil partnership is made available to same-sex couples, it’s an inevitability that other kinds of couples will have to be allowed register their partnerships too. That means that straight couples could become civil partners, even though they also have the option of getting married.
In the UK a case has emerged in which a cohabiting brother and sister wish to become civil partners in order to alleviate the burden of inheritance tax. My spinster friend and her gym partner could also chose to become civil partners, if the management suddenly get stroppy. The benefits conferred upon properly married couples would, like the gym discount, become meaningless as all forms of partnership would be recognised.
So conservatives shouldn’t agree to a half-baked civil partnership concession. Those who wish to defend the institution of marriage should instead argue that gay couples be entitled to nothing less than full marriage equality. Spain, which has a Catholic heritage as strong as ours, recently introduced gay marriage for these reasons. Marriage should be all or nothing. Since something must be done for same-sex couples then it has to be all – a proper marriage – not the dog licence.
Norris is joining a new campaign, MarriagEquality, which launches tomorrow. I’m looking forward to watching opponents explain why homosexuals are entitled to equality before the law in everything except marriage. Watch them try not to say “Ick”.

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02.14.08

St. Denis

Posted in Feminism at 9:10 am by Sarah

We should send him Valentine Cards. What a guy. Why let money stand in the way of Ireland getting the best? Truly hath no man greater love for his country than to pay for a first class soccer manager.*

*we’ll leave the tax bit out of it for now.

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02.11.08

Developers in small towns

Posted in Domestic/Relationships, Feminism at 2:35 pm by Sarah

“Developers are being banned from tacking Dublin-style housing estates onto small rural villages unless they first provide extra schools and facilities for proper public transport.”

A Gormley initiative.

I wonder has he discussed this yet with Hanafin? I know of a developer who offered to build a school for free in a town, and the Departments of Environment and Education wouldn’t even DISCUSS it.

In Enfield meanwhile Meath Co. Council has offered to fund a refurbishment of Irish Rail’s car park to allow for extra parking spaces. Irish Rail won’t let them. It’s parking war as so many people want to us the bus and train. Perhaps Gormley would have a word with Dempsey?

My point? It’s a good headline and the right thing to do, but Ministers could help right now without headline grabbing bans.

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02.05.08

Furriners keep out

Posted in Domestic/Relationships, Feminism at 9:20 pm by Sarah

Fintan O’Toole highlights the bizarre rules on marriage between, or to, furriners laid out in the new Immigration Bill…

“The Minister can refuse permission outright on a number of grounds, including the vague catch-all that the marriage “would not be in the interests of public security, public policy or public order”. Essentially, a politician will have the personal power to decide whether an Irish citizen can marry a foreigner, or whether two foreigners can marry each other…

What’s happening here is an extreme example of the way normally sensible people lose the run of themselves when it comes to immigration. If, in any other area, the Government took to itself such sweeping powers to interfere in personal and family life, people would be up in arms. One would expect the churches, for example, to be rather upset about the notion that Brian Lenihan should take the place of God in the sacrament of marriage. But when it comes to legislating for migration, the first impulse is to punish, to control, to suspect.”

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