Category Archives: Politics

from the Dail to the White House and back via Downing Street and elsewhere.

japanunhateSIRIA3BRASIL3USA3 mckdonalds3
Los Intocables (The Untouchables): artworks by Argentina-based Cuban artist Erik Ravelo, featuring children crucified on the backs of child persecutors (of one stripe or another).

The images are part of the ‘provocative’ Benetton sponsored UNHATE campaign started in 2011.

Above: Japan, Priest, Thailand, Syria, Brazil, USA and McDonalds

(Thanks Stephen Schwartz)

00133537Demonstration outside Marie Stopes Clinic, Belfast 2012

The High Court in London has ruled women from Northern Ireland are not legally entitled to free abortions on the NHS in England.

The case was brought by a 15-year-old girl (claimant A) and her mother who live in Northern Ireland.

After becoming pregnant, she travelled to England with her mother (claimant B) in October 2012.

The court was told her mother had struggled to part-raise funds to pay for her daughter to have a termination privately in England.

Unlike the rest of the UK, abortion is only allowed in very restricted circumstances in Northern Ireland.

More than 1,000 women each year travel from NI to have an abortion in other parts of the UK.

Those who do travel must pay for their transport, accommodation and the cost of the procedure.

Mr Justice King ruled that Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s duty to promote a comprehensive health service in England “is a duty in relation to the physical and mental health of the people of England”, and that duty did not extend “to persons who are ordinarily resident in Northern Ireland”.

In England, Wales and Scotland access to abortion is covered by the 1967 Abortion Act.


High Court in London says NI women not entitled to free NHS abortions in England (BBC News NI)

Previously: Choice Words

Flying In The Face Of God

Meanwhile, In Belfast


File pic: Laura Hutton/Photocall Ireland

BnGbiwvIEAANU2r.jpg largeFOUR days.

Four.

Meanwhile…

“I was told that the interrogations were an evidence-gathering process, and that the police would be making the case that I was a member of the IRA; that I had a senior IRA managerial role in Belfast at the time of Jean McConville’s abduction; and that I was therefore bound to know about her killing.

I challenged my interrogators to produce the new evidential material. They said that this would happen at a later interview but they wanted to take me through my childhood, family history and so on. Over the following four days it became clear that the objective of the interviews was to get to the point where they could charge me with IRA membership and thereby link me to the McConville case. The membership charge was clearly their principal goal. The interrogators made no secret of this. At one point the male detective described their plan as “a stage-managed approach”. It later transpired that it was a phased strategy, with nine different phases.

The first phases dealt with my family history of republican activism. My own early involvement in Sinn Féin as a teenager – when it was a banned organisation. My time in the 1960s in the civil rights movement and various housing action groups in west Belfast, the pogroms of 1969 and the start of the Troubles.

It was asserted that I was guilty of IRA membership through association because of my family background – my friends. They referred to countless pieces of “open source” material that, they said, linked me to the IRA. These were anonymous newspaper articles from 1971 and 1972, photographs of Martin McGuinness and me at republican funerals, and books about the period.

If any of these claimed I was in the IRA, then that was, according to my interrogators, evidence. They consistently cast up my habit of referring to friends as “comrades”. This, they said, was evidence of IRA membership. They claimed I was turned by special branch during interrogations in Belfast’s Palace Barracks in 1972 and that I became an MI5 agent! They also spoke about the peace talks in 1972, and my periods of internment and imprisonment in Long Kesh. This was presented as “bad-character evidence…”

Gerry Adams.

The Jean McConville killing: I’m completely innocent. But what were my accusers’ motives? (Gerry Adams, The Guardian)

ab

‘When Emily Letts got pregnant, she knew she would get an abortion. Then she decided to film it. Letts, 25, is an abortion counsellor at Cherry Hill Women’s Center in New Jersey, which is where she had her abortion. The non-graphic video focuses on her face and shows her breathing and humming through the procedure.

I know there are women who feel great remorse. I have seen the tears. Grieving is an important part of a woman’s process, but what I really wanted to address in my video is guilt.

Our society breeds this guilt. We inhale it from all directions. Even women who come to the clinic completely solid in their decision to have an abortion say they feel guilty for not feeling guilty.

I didn’t feel bad. I do feel a little irresponsible and embarrassed about not using birth control. I was able to learn and move forward. And I am grateful that I can share my story and inspire other women to stop the guilt.’

Why I Filmed My Abortion (Heather Wood Rudulph, Cosmopolitan)

jillian

Jillian Godsil writes:

Please consider sharing my online poster for Europe. I think I am the only European candidate to eschew the ghastly poster blight. If people want to look at my face – they can do so on my online poster. It’s called permission based postering!

Only recycled electrons were used in the making of this video.

Fair play though in fairness.

jilliangodsil.com

Meanwhile…