The Coyote Vest – a formidable double laminated, biteproof waistcoat designed to prevent your precious lambkins from being savaged and/or carried off by ravening coyotes (or other dogs).
Available in three different variants (from $20 [17.85] to $60 [53.60],+ shipping) with options for metal spikes, ‘whiskers’ and a remote controlled electric shocker.
Jay.
Kers.
Gar Dunleavy writes:
Galway [this afternoon] all set for the drink-a-thon on Thursday [Patrick’s Day]….
‘sup?
Joan Freeman, founder of [Suicide and self harm crisis centre] Pieta House at the launch of Darkness into Light 2016, supported by Electric Ireland, on the Sam Beckett bridge, Dublin.
Darkness Into Light running events will take place in over 100 venues in Ireland and across the world on Saturday May 7 at 4.15am [register at link below].
Sasko Lazarov/Rollingnews
Mmm.
Execution
Maeve Fitzgerald writes:
Thought yez might like to know this is happening in The Reg bar in Waterford.
Ryan Tubridy, urging others to go ‘offline’
Ryan Tubridy.
He’s had it up to ‘here’ with the World Wide Web.
A timeline.
August 2011 Closes his twitter account, with 60,000 followers, saying he ‘was spending too much time on it’.
September 2012,Tells listeners to his 2FM show that he had contacted Twitter US headquarters to get four parody accounts shut down.
He states:
’Somebody brought it to my attention that there was a number of them being me. It was only then when it started getting rude and kind of personal that somebody said to me, “You better get those taken down” and I did. I got four of them taken down. I sent off my driver’s licence details and got them taken down. I love humour and I love fun and I love boldness but I won’t tolerate nastiness. That’s where the line gets drawn.’
‘What’s happened more recently with social networking, and particularly Twitter, is that for a long time it was fun and it was like a really nice pleasant party and then the bad guys came along and wrecked it for everyone, hiding behind stupid names,’ he said. ‘There is a whiff of the bedsit off most trolls. It is disappointing. We can’t be beyond criticism but put your name to it. Don’t be a coward.’
”For a long time it was fun. It was like a pleasant party and then the bad guys came along and they wrecked it for everyone hiding behind stupid names” and that people could be “completely moronic” when it came to tweets.”
November 2012 Backing an Irish Sun campaign against cyber bullying, he rails:
“There’s nowhere safe for children now….I worry about it – the whole anti-social network concerns me because there is no policing it. I support any initiative that is to do with trying to crush the virus of bullying. I would be very, very keen to try and highlight what’s happening on the internet. The internet is a lawless place – it’s a dangerous place – there’s no police. I think it’s the nearest thing to the Wild West that we can see in this day and age….”
“the party [Twitter) was over. I left Twitter because it was a time constraint and it was not a great place. It was fun but it was like – I had fun with it for a year and then decided ‘that’s grand’ – it’s a strange place.”
January 2015: On his RTÉ Radio One radio show discussing online trolls who abused the family of a toddler who died from a viral infection, He avers:
“[The words] “online” and “abuse” are starting to go hand-in-hand now and I don’t know what to say to that family. They’ve enough to be dealing with the loss of that little boy than having to go and worry about what’s online. I would urge nearly anyone who ends up in the public eye, for whatever reason, be it for good reasons but particularly for sad or bad reasons, or any reason, not to go online. Don’t read stuff. You don’t have to. It’s just heckling. That’s all it is. It’s heckling. And I wish that this family didn’t even find this stuff. You don’t have to go there if you don’t want to. You can just mourn in your own way without turning on a computer or finding stuff because people will always react and say something horrible. Always. Regardless of how happy or sad your story is.’ He added: ‘I hope that family have the time and the space to mourn the loss of that little boy without having to listen to the white noise of ignorance that can often show itself online.”
December 2015: Interviews the father of a six year old girl who had received criticism online following her appearance on the Late Late Toy show. He fumes:
“That is the way of online, I think … you know, there is this element that will almost be there and you know it . seems to be un-policeable… I’m an adult apparently and I don’t read online because it’s just, it’s too mean spirited and I don’t read it, even if it’s kind I don’t read it…I often say and sometimes it feels like a broken record sometimes it feels like the Wild West out there, there are no laws and there are no rules and there’s no sheriff….So you can have the good guys walking round, like you guys, you know talking about mental health but then you’ve got the he others who are, you know, psychologically challenged, I’d argue and writing this stuff down the bottom of a bottle of wine on a Friday night… I’ll tell you, I walked out of this building on Saturday with bunch of kids in here to sing for, I think it was, Sean O’Rourke, and they chased me down as far as my car singing word for word the My Little Pony song, it’s become a thing… The thing about being offline, you have the democratic choice to be offline and it’s very liberating, so I’d recommend it.”
March 13, 2016: The Sunday Independent records comments made in a recent interview with former RTÉ presenter Diana Bunici for her book, ‘The Pursuit of Awesomeness’, He rages:
“[t]hen online came along and honestly, if you want to depress yourself as a broadcaster, read online. If I could switch off the Internet sometimes I would. Especially for kids and bullying and all the things that are so easy to do for cowards…You used to go to school from 9am until 3pm and then you could switch it off. Now it follows you and the bullies can follow you now, wherever you are, if they want to.”
“I’d rather read a good book than what some guy in a bedsit watching Star Trek thinks about me. I made a decision to go offline a couple of years ago and it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
Ah here.
To be continued (probably).
Rollingnews
From top: Chairperson of Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) Ann Marie Gill, CEO of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Ellen O’Malley-Dunlop, Taoiseach, Enda Kenny and Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald at a DRCC event last year; Dr Julien Mercille
Is Enda Kenny a feminist?
Dr Julien Mercille writes:
Enda Kenny’s speechwriter wrote a piece in yesterday’s Sunday Independent declaring her boss a “feminist intellectual” and that he “went the extra mile to help women and do them justice”.
The article is so poorly written that it offers one more clue as to why Fine Gael did so badly in the election.
The speechwriter, Miriam O’Callaghan (not RTÉ’s Miriam O’Callaghan) “admire[s] his compassion, his insight, his ordinariness, his warmth, his feminism and huge intellect”.
Is Enda Kenny a feminist? And what is a feminist anyway? I’ll define it for this piece simply as someone who is in favour of improving conditions for women as a matter of principle.
Therefore, a feminist can be a man or a woman (that will be obvious to feminists, but it’s still misunderstood in public debate). Conversely, anti-feminists can also be either men or women.
So is Enda Kenny as feminist? Well, no he’s not. It’s easy to see that he hasn’t done much at all to improve conditions for women in this country. Let’s look at a few examples (there are many more, of course).
First, abortion rights are still a scandal Abortion is criminalised even in cases of rape, incest and fatal foetal impairment, as Amnesty International explains . T
he 2013 Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act leaves this restrictive legal framework largely intact. As a result, Ireland is still an outlier—an island of conservatism within a European sea of liberalism.
Second, a number of austerity cuts have affected women negatively. Cuts to the lone parents’ payments implemented by Joan Burton’s department hit women disproportionately.
Another cut that I think represents very well the way in which this government has mistreated women is the overall 21% cut to the Rape Crisis Centres between 2008 and 2014. That’s called a direct attack on women.
In Ireland, 87% of victims of rape or sexual violence are women or girls. If you’re not a feminist yet, that statistic alone should make you one. And what about the perpetrators of those crimes? 98% are men.
But few care: try to find a single story in the media documenting in detail the cuts to the Rape Crisis Centres. The only ones I’m aware of are my own, published on Broadsheet and in the Irish Times. To this day, I have not received a single request for a media appearance or interview to talk about those things.
Third, there are fundamental issues, such as the fact that in Ireland, the gender “pay gap” is 14%. This means that on average, for one hour of work, women in Ireland are paid 14% less than men (the data is based on surveys of employees at companies with 10 or more employees—so it doesn’t include women who don’t work).
Those who think that it’s not too bad should consider that this means that women work on average seven weeks per year “for free” compared to men. And according to the available data, the gender pay gap has been widening over the last few years of austerity.
Moreover, if we look at the “earnings gap” faced by women, it is 35% (this compares the annual earnings of men and women, and so considers the fact that women on average work fewer hours and have a lower employment rate, for example because they interrupt their career to take care of children).
There are many causes for this pay gap. According to the European Commission, they include: “Management and supervisory positions are overwhelmingly held by men”; “men are more often promoted than women, and paid better as a consequence”; “less than 4% of CEOs are women”; “women spend more time than men on important unpaid tasks, such as household work and caring for children or relatives”; “pay discrimination, while illegal, continues to contribute to the gender pay gap”.
To my knowledge, the gender pay gap was not exactly a big issue on the government’s agenda.
A real feminist government would focus on issues like those just mentioned, and on a range of others.
Julien Mercille is a lecturer at University College Dublin. Follow Julien on Twitter: @JulienMercille
Rollingnews
Thia afternoon.
Media await the end of former Anglo CEO David Drumm’s bail hearing at the Central Criminal Court, Parkgate Street, Dublin 8.
Mr Drumm was arrested after arriving home from Boston this morning.
David Drumm case: Relatives willing to put up homes as bail collateral (Irish Times)
Earlier: Meanwhile, In Ballymun
Update:
Yikes.
Vibrant 1916 prints by illustrator Jon Berkeley
Jon writes:
The 1916 Leaders Project was commissioned for the Irish Independent by designer Joe Coyle in late summer 2015. The ten paintings featured as covers for a series of special supplements, edited by Ger Siggins for the Independent, leading up to the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising.
Each painting depicts a key player, surrounded by other people and events of significance in the Easter rebellion, its preparation and its momentous consequences.
The paintings are a uniform size at 360 x 305mm, and will form part of the Irish Independent’s major exhibition in Talbot Street, Dublin, to commemorate the centenary of the rising. And available to buy as prints (at link below).
From top: Joseph Plunkett; Eamonn Ceannt; Countess Markievicz; James Connolly and Thomas Clarke
Thanks Annie West
