Archive for the ‘Ireland’ Category
Reply to Ruth Dudley-Edwards
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/ruth-dudley-edwards/ruth-dudley-edwards-gazabound-vessel-really-a-ship-of-fools-2806080.html
Godwin’s Law. That’s what it’s called – the tendency for internet debates to degenerate into arguments where one side labels the other a Nazi. And so we have a contribution to the Israel/Palestine issue akin to an angrily typed hatemail at the fag end of one of these online brawls –Ruth Dudley Edwards saying that the people on the Irish Ship to Gaza supporting Palestinian rights are antisemites, like the Nazi-loving Irish of her youth. Read the rest of this entry »
Crisis racism and ‘cultural circumcision’
Like everyone else, I was appalled by the revelations of Prime Time Investigates on Monday 30 May about the impact of the cuts on disabled people and their carers. So appalled that I felt unable to watch the whole programme. I was distressed by the stories of the parents of a Downs’ Syndrome boy going hungry because the mother’s carer’s allowance was cut by €16 a week; of the woman who had to wait more than a year for an MRI scan leading to her back deteriorating beyond the possibility of operation; and of the mother who had to carry her adolescent son upstairs for a bath – the son’s scoliosis beyond operative repair because the waiting list was simply too long. Read the rest of this entry »
First reflections on Irish elections, February 2011
OK, I didn’t vote for the first time in my life. Not because I was confused, nor because there was no one to vote for (after all there was the Left Alliance, and particularly the Socialist Party), nor even because I didn’t feel strongly enough about getting Fianna Fail out. But because I realized, finally, that the system does not work. That laws are not made by the Dail but by cabinet and that the enforcement of the party whip does not allow members to vote independently. And that many of the laws on the books are anti-equality anyway.
But this does not mean that I have nothing to say, even if some of my friends say that not voting does not give me the right to comment (since when is voting compulsory? Not voting is also a political act). Read the rest of this entry »
The hidden lives of migrant women workers
I saw Alan Grossman and Aine O’Brien’s film ‘Promise and unrest’, the story of mother and daughter Noemi and Gracelle from the Philippines, and was reminded, yet again, of the hidden lives of thousands of migrant women care workers in post-Tiger Ireland.
Noemi came to Ireland when her daughter Gracelle was seven months to work as a care worker for an elderly person in Dublin. She is one of many domestic and care workers who have become a feature of Ireland once independent and enterprising Irish women returned to the workplace in their thousands, requiring enterprising and independent migrant women to take their place – the assumption being that this is ‘women’s work’. Read the rest of this entry »
Asylum seekers are not ‘things’
In July 2010 the government of the Republic of Ireland began a review of its policies of dispersal and direct provision for asylum seekers. This may sound positive particularly in light of the criticism by the Free Legal Advice Centre (FLAC) in 2003, that the direct provision scheme is ‘gravely detrimental of the human rights of a group of people legally present in the country and to whom the government has moral and legal obligations under national and international law’, and recommendation that the scheme be ‘abandoned immediately’. Read the rest of this entry »