OK, which one of you did this?
Nat writes:
When you’re the movie critic whose one bad review prevents the new Marvel movie from hitting 100%, you need to be ready for the onslaught of endless hordes of butthurt fanboys.
Today, that’s Ed Power of the Irish Indo….
FIGHT!
Junction of Dolphin’s Barn and South Circular Road
Cian Ginty, of Irish Cycle, writes:
Dublin City Council are proposing new public realm scheme at Dolphin’s Barn without providing for cycling for all ages as promised in the City Development Plan.
The project follows the trend set by public realm upgrades in recent years in Kilmainham and Rialto which have been problematic for cycling, with complaints from residents and people who commute to or via those areas.
The project in Dolphin’s Barn is to cover the main streets of Dolphin’s Barn — South Circular Road going east-west and Dolphin’s Barn north-south (leading to Crumlin Road to the south and Cork Street to the north). It is due to go to public consultation in the near future.
The plan includes raised pedestrian crossings and the removal of a slip turn, but no cycling infrastructure suitable for all ages. Short and narrow sections of cycle lanes would be repainted into the new scheme.
….
Council official David Healy told councillors [at the South Central Area Committee on Wednesday 17 of January] that: “In terms of the cycle lanes, the problem that we have is that we have fairly limited road space and we have not transformed it too much because we’re slightly hamstrung, we can’t make it any wider.
Desktop estimates of the street widths, estimated by IrishCycle.com (see below), shows that cycle paths can fit along side wide footpaths, bus lanes and single traffic lanes in both directions.
….Examples [below] of what can fit in the two smaller widths — these are purely examples to show that — roughly — that cycle paths can fit along side wide footpaths, bus lanes and single traffic lanes in both direction.
Besides a very small area where the width goes down to 20 metres, the notable narrowest section is 22 metres wide.
However the workable width along most of the scheme is at 24 metres or wider — much of the widths are 26-30 metres or more, allowing easily for seating, tables and chairs, greenery, bus stop bypasses etc…
Anyone?
Council claims cycle lanes can’t fit into widest route into Dublin City (Cian Ginty, Irish Cycle)
Thanks Irish Cycle
This afternoon.
Outside Leinster House.
Members of Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland, Anti-Racism Network Ireland and Refugee and Migrant Solidarity Ireland, and their supporters, are holding a demonstration calling for a meaningful right to work for asylum seekers in Ireland.
It comes ahead of an expected announcement from the Supreme Court tomorrow.
MASI writes:
The Supreme Court is due to make a formal announcement [tomorrow] about the unconstitutionality of the ban on asylum seekers’ right to work in this state. This follows on from the court’s decision in May last year that this total ban is unconstitutional.
Since then, the Government has dragged its heels until finally, last week, it pushed a motion through the Oireachtas about opting in to the EU directive on reception conditions for asylum seekers including its very general directive on the right to work which allows individual states to decide on the details themselves.
MASI believes that the government is planning to introduce the most restrictive terms it can get away with, while spinning this as a sign of their great tolerance and charity toward asylum seekers.
Our beliefs are well-founded.
The Government has not given any detail of what the right to work for asylum seekers will actually look like, and now has managed to get a majority across parties to let them get away with adopting the most restrictive possible ‘interim measures’ on back of the promise to opt-in to the EU directive some months down the road, without giving any detail about what shape this will take in reality for asylum seekers who want to work.
These interim measures apply the existing work permits scheme to asylum seekers. This scheme limits the right to work in the state to a handful of highly paid professions, and requires the person applying to earn a starting salary of €30,000 minimum, and to pay €500-€1,000 euro for a work permit.
These are unreachable targets for most people, never mind for people living in direct provision on €21 a week.
If these interim measures are a taste of things to come, very few people seeking protection in Ireland will have the opportunity to earn their own living or support their families.
Two 1998 observations of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa by the Galileo spacecraft stitched together by NASA engineer Kevin Gill. He geeks off thus:
Processed using low resolution color images (IR, Green, Violet) from March 29 1998 overlaying higher resolution unfiltered images taken September 26 1998. Map projected to Mercator, scale is approximately 225.7 meters per pixel, representing a span of about 1,500 kilometers.
Alex Murphy (left) and Chris Walley in The Young Offenders
On The Late Late Show…
Gareth Naughton writes”
Host Ryan Tubridy will be summoning ‘the power of love’ as The Late Late Show welcomes 200 single men and women to one of Irish television’s most talked about nights.
Ryan will also welcome the stars of the new comedy series The Young Offenders. Alex Murphy, Chris Walley, Hilary Rose and PJ Gallagher will be on the couch to chat about taking their widely acclaimed hit movie to the small screen with a brand new six-part series on RTÉ2…
80s pop diva Sinitta will be performing one of her biggest hits.
Our Panel of Love – comedian and broadcaster Doireann Garrihy, country singer Philomena Begley and presenter Eoghan McDermott – will be doling out some sage, and possibly not so sage, advice to the hapless singletons in the audience.
Plus there will be performances by 80s pop legends T’Pau singing China in Your Hand and country star Mike Denver with his version of a much loved classic..
*stares at drinks cabinet*
The Late Late Show Valentine’s Special tomorrow at 9.35pm on RTÉ One
Cork-based Journalist and human rights activist Bairbre Flood (above) has completed an hour-long radio documentary on Islam In Ireland (available to listen above or at link below).
Bairbre writes:
The radio documentary wasn’t broadcast yet I was getting messages that I shouldn’t be even discussing the subject as a white westerner.
Islam is often seen as a racial construct – and both the xenophobes and the social justice warriors buy into the orientalist view of Islam as a racial identity, not an idea (or set of ideas).
It’s very difficult to have a conversation about the doctrine of Islam within these parameters – everyone tiptoeing around the core tenets, either afraid they’ll inflame the bigots or of being labelled ‘Islamophobic’.
But surely we can hold Islam to the same standards we would fundamentalist Christianity for example – or Catholicism, or Scientology? It’s not a criticism of Muslim people themselves to examine the religion of Islam.
Perhaps the most well known mosque in Ireland, the Irish Islamic Cultural Centre (Clonskeagh Mosque) houses the headquarters of the European Council for Fatwa and Research which issued two particularly worrying fatwas – in 2003, a fatwa stating the punishment for apostasy is death, and one in 2004 stating that all gays should be killed.
The Dublin and Cork Islamic Cultural Centres have been given hundreds of thousands of euros from the al Maktoub Foundation in the UAE, and their particular kind of Wahhabi Islam has a political aim, not just a religious or spiritual one (the ‘Vatican of Islam in Ireland’ as one commentator dubbed them).
Ali Selim, who was secretary to the Imam at the Clonskeagh Mosque is an active supporter of sharia law (see his talk, ‘The Concept of Shari’ah, Islamic Law’ from 2013).
The day after the Charlie Hebdo attck in 2015, Selim was on national radio urging people not to link the attacks with Islam and threatening legal action on any Irish journalist or media outlet which printed the cartoon cover of the magazine published in honour of the people who’d just been killed.
Of course, the IICC doesn’t represent all muslims in Ireland (or even all Sunni Muslims) – there’s a large Ahmadiyya mosque in Galway and also a substantial Sufi community in Dublin. There’s over fifty mosques or prayer rooms throughout the country, most of these funded by the congregation themselves.
There’s over fifty different nationalities within the Muslim community and within that huge differences in how strict individuals are, and variations in how they practice their faith.
Some don’t pray at all, but still identify strongly as Muslim – like many people in Ireland who still identify as Catholic, but rarely go to mass andonly nominally believe in its doctrine. But even with all that in mind, there has been very little research into what Irish Muslims believe and how strongly they believe it.
The only opinion poll on Muslim attitudes was carried out for the Irish Independent and RTÉ’s Prime Time in 2006 and it found that more than a third (36%) would prefer Ireland to be ruled under Sharia law and more than half of young Muslims (57%) believe Ireland should become an Islamic State.
Then there’s the kinds of speakers that are being invited over here.
In May, 2017 the Cork Islamic Information Centre with Discover Islam put on a talk, ‘How To Live With Your Neighbour in Western Countries’ by Uthman Lateef who in 2007 told students at Queen Mary University in the UK: “We don’t accept homosexuality. We hate it because Allah hates it”.
In March 2016 this mosque on Shandon Street invited a speaker called Shady Al-Suleiman, who once ended a talk in Birmingham in 2014 with ‘“Give victory to all the Mujahideen all over the world. Oh Allah, prepare us for the jihad” and who 2010 organised a conference which featured a talk via phone by Anwar Al-Awlaki (of Al-Qaeda).
In May 2015, Abdurraheem Green gave a talk ‘The Prophet and his Message’ at this same Cork mosque. Green was cancelled from an event at a Montreal university in 2011 after concerns were raised over statements he made about how men may treat their wives: he said, “The husband is allowed – to prevent her from evil – to provide some type of physical force”.
When I emailed the Cork Dawah Centre about these speakers, this was their response:
‘Let me reassure you, we would not have allowed anyone to speak if we had known of any extremist views that they may have had in the past. When I looked into it in the past, as
you’re not the first to question us, many of the individuals and the organisations as a whole have come out and opposed previously held ideas. Which unsurprisingly hasn’t been widely publicised.Members of the local community including the Gardai and various Lord Mayors have attended these events. Speakers when coming to the centre submit an outline of what they are planning to speak on so that it can be reviewed.
Most of the speakers we have invited in the past have been requested to speak on the importance of manners, not harming others, helping and caring for others in society, etc, as this is considered to be half the faith and the heaviest thing on the last day. This does not fit with the opinions you’ve expressed below. I hope I’ve allayed any fears you may have.’
The kinds of speakers being invited to mosques here and the influence of Wahhabi Islam is only one part of the problem – but at least they are in the public eye and open to scrutiny.
The even deeper problem is the more than forty Irish muslims who’ve gone to fight with ISIS since 2014, some of whom have started returning to Ireland. There’s also over 70 on a watch list, suspected of providing logistical support to terrorist groups in Europe and no anti-radicalisation programme in place here.
Yahya Cholil Staquf, general secretary of the Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia’s biggest Muslim organization, said:
‘Western politicians should stop pretending that extremism and terrorism have nothing to do with Islam. There is a clear relationship between fundamentalism, terrorism, and the basic assumptions of Islamic orthodoxy…The West must stop ascribing any and all discussion of these issues to “Islamophobia.” Or do people want to accuse me — an Islamic scholar — of being an Islamophobe too?’ –
This isn’t to demonise in any way the thousands of Muslims living here – or to diminish the very real effect anti-Muslim bias can have on their lives, but at the same time we can start holding Islam to the same standards as we’ve done in recent years here in Ireland with Catholicism, and strive for a similar insistence on the primacy of secular values.
It’s also important for us to provide a safe environment for Muslims to critique their religion (unlike in many parts of the world where it can mean dishonour, arrest, beatings and even death).
Ireland has an opportunity to be a safe house for Muslims to publish their ideas – for ex-Muslims to feel free to tell their experiences – and for moderate, liberal Muslims to find support and solidarity here.
Of this painstakingly measured, pleasing-to-watch physics whatchamacallit, DoodleChaos sez:
I’ve synchronized the song “Fade” by Alan Walker to the physics of a Line Rider track drawing everything by hand. It only took about 3 months of work! I’ve listened to the song thousands of times while making this and I still love it.
From top: Nigel Farage arrives at Trinity College, Dublin ahead of last weekend’s Irexit conference; Dan Boyle
If ever a picture spoke a thousand words it was that photo of crombie wearing Nigel Farage, with his Wolf from the Three Little Pigs swagger, on his way to the recent Irexit meeting.
The demographics of those who attended there were as telling. Overwhelmingly male in its composition, the men in question seemed made up of a weird coalition of an embittered older cohort, nestling with an angry and disappointed group of younger men.
The unifying theme was a common desire to shake collective fists at a society that had let them down. A society, that all too slowly, has been leaving behind its domination by a male, monochrome, homogenous group, the residue of whom now see themselves as society’s new victims.
The liberal in me thinks we should listen more to these tormented souls; seek to understand the landscape they inhabit. The social realist in me feels that the more time we give to placate the hate filled and the small minded, the more they are likely to believe that their views have validity.
The illiberal me is winning this internal argument. I have spent most of my adult life wishing such people, and their distorted views, away. They have lingered, and have re-established themselves, through misappropriating the language of freedom and tolerance. They seek freedom for others to be less free than them. They seek tolerance to be intolerant of others.
They seek to explain way their inadequacies through the blaming of others. Those of different skin tones; of different cultural backgrounds; of different religious or political beliefs; of different gender.
They fear difference wishing only to celebrate sameness. Only the tools of their celebration are hate and anger.
They find a solace with being among their own kind. Being in a collective emboldens their belief they are among ‘right thinking’ people. They are transferred, instantly, into a rotisserie of racists, a harem of homophobes, a melange of misogynists. At their most dangerous they become a falange of fascists.
As with most bigots what they often most hate about others, is especially what they hate about themselves – a perverse form of self loathing.
I no longer have the patience to be nice to those who believe niceness to be a weakness. I don’t want to hold any truck with anyone who seeks to divide and compartmentalise.
I live in a community within a city, part of a region, part of a nation, part of a wider World. A planet. All of which is, and should be shared.
Ignorance needs to be challenged, confronted and faced down. We should never condone its existence or that of hate. We should never give succour to any discredited version of a mythical past, or plans for a hateful future.
With all due respect to the late Spike Milligan, this Goon Show has run for too long. If the Goons participating in this version insist on following the likes of Nigel Farage, then he and they should prepare for some walking backwards (for Christmas) across the Irish Sea.
Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle
Top pic: Reuters
Meanwhile…
Dan Boyle’s ‘Making Up The Numbers – Smaller Parties and Independents in Irish Politics‘ published by the History Press is available at all good bookstores now.
