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From top: Rainbow vigil, Barnardo’s Square, Dublin on Monday night; Anne Marie McNally

Can you preach intolerance of an entire demographic of people and then be truly sorry when they have been removed from the face of the earth?

Anne Marie McNally writes:

It was a terrorist attack. It was a hate crime. It was neither. It was the Federal Government’s fault. It was the club bouncers’ fault.

All actual opinions expressed, by media commentators of various shades, in the wake of the unspeakable tragedy in Orlando over the weekend which saw 49 people murdered, many others injured and the entire global LGBTQ community – and most other right-minded humans – devastated.

An intense narrative developed in the wake of the shooting and the revelation that the shooter had been of Afghan descent and had previous links to radicalised Islam groups. Clearly that meant it was a terror attack apparently.

The fact that the man’s own father claimed his son had been aggrieved by the sight of two men kissing and had previously displayed strong homophobic tendencies before murdering LGBTQ people in an LGBTQ space didn’t appear to matter to those who were determined to paint this as another example of jihadi terrorism perpetrated by those whose religion perhaps differs from yours.

It has since transpired that the man himself appears to have struggled with his sexuality delving in and out of the LGBTQ scene, perhaps struggling with a persuasion to something he had avowed to hate – yet another insidious consequence of the brutality of religious doctrine regarding sexuality.

The religion and terror radicalisation question is an issue for another day (though hopefully not another tragedy) but the issue for today is the seeming reluctance of so many in the public space to categorise the Orlando massacre as a hate crime because to do so would be to acknowledge the role that their beliefs may have played in such an event.

On Sunday, Twitter and other Social Media streams filled with lovely graphics and messages calling on us to #PrayforOrlando….but pray to whom?

The god who tells us that those in the LGBTQ community are misguided at best and sordid at worst?

Or would you rather I combined my prayers for the victims with incantations begging whatever God you believe in to absolve those victims of their apparent sins (that being their sexual persuasion) so that they may enter the kingdom of heaven or whatever other holy afterlife you believe in?

You see I’m confused. You can’t preach about intolerance, unacceptance and in many cases outright hatred of an entire demographic of people and then expect me to somehow believe you are truly sorry when you hear they have been removed from the face of the earth.

You either want me to disown these people, as they are, or you don’t.

And don’t give me some crap about you wanting to embrace them and make them see the light and the ‘error of their ways’ for loving who they love and living their life based on their own desires because that is almost more abhorrent than simply disowning them.

The horrific righteousness of that perspective is impossible for me to swallow and much more so as people have been brutally slaughtered because of their sexual preferences and a man, with easy access to a murder weapon, whose religion had thought him to hate himself for his own sexuality and to hate others who lived comfortably with their sexuality.

That hate, preached to him throughout his life, is what left 50 people dead on the floor of a nightclub where they had gone to enjoy life love and friendship.

If you have sat back and quietly allowed that hate, intolerance or unacceptance to go unchallenged in any religion that you are a member of then you are actively supporting an organisation that has facilitated the massacre we witnessed on Sunday.

I’m all for people finding solace in faith and I’m all for people believing in what they choose to believe in, but I’m not OK with what you choose to believe in being a catalyst for my friends, family and loved ones to be demeaned, degraded, disrespected and ultimately discarded.

We have to accept the correlation between the two and to not do so is not just ignorant it is dangerous.

Anne Marie McNally is a founding member of the Social Democrats. Follow Anne Marie on Twitter: @amomcnally

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A report by Paul Sweeney, of TASC, in December

Paul Sweeney writes:

The leak in [yesterday’s] Irish Times that the Taoiseach has written to Mr Juncker, President of the EU Commisson, on the need for greater investment in Ireland is welcome, but appears somewhat disingeneous.

His letter appears to quote the report published by TASC last December which ponted out that Ireland’s level of investment was at its lowest level ever and was the lowest in the Union.

Mr Kenny said investment in infrastructure in Ireland was at its “lowest level for many years, and also represents the lowest level of any member state at present” – the two points emphasised by TASC.

That Mr Kenny has now recognised this is welcome, but it was his government which set out the investment plan last autumn which proposed to cut investment even lower than the lowest level ever, from 1.8% of GDP in 2013 to 1.7% in 2016.

…So has Mr Kenny finally woken up to the need for greater direct public investment? For example, is he seeking permission from Europe to directly invest some of the banks’ proceeds in Ireland, instead of making the error of using them to accellerate repayment of the national debt?

It seems not. He appears to be looking for new ways of avoiding direct public investment and to increase private investment in public infrastructure. It seems he wants leeway to have more Public Private Partnerships, even though they cost more in the long run and take much longer to execute, than direct public funding.

“Mr Kenny said he felt sufficiently concerned about how Eurostat was classifying public-private partnerships – widely used to fund infrastructural projects – that he felt the need to ‘raise the matter at the highest political level’”, according to the Irish Times.

But he also said, “We are also acutely conscious of the constraints and obligations of the fiscal rules, and the need to broaden sources of investment as widely as possible within those constraints and obligations.”

Clearly using some of the bank proceeds for investment is not even being discussed. The flavour still is “broader sources of finance.”

Taoiseach appears to seek Increased Public Investment, as does OECD (TASC)

Kenny concerned by hazard posed from EU investment rules (Irish Times, June 13, 2016)

H/T: Rory Hearne

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https://vimeo.com/169187915

The already trippy 2001: A Space Odyssey interpreted as a Picasso painting by Bhautik Joshi, using Google’s pareidolic neural network Deep Dream.

He’s also done Vincent Van Gogh’s Blade Runner and this nightmarish Donald Trumpery

colossal

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Terry Dignan’s car insurance has risen from €470 to €886 in just four years. Let me advise Mr Dignan that this is not despite his being 13 years with the same insurer, but because of it.

From first-hand experience of writing premium calculation software for the motor and home insurance industry, I can assure him and all your readers that there’s an in-built “inertia penalty” for such customers.

As a general rule of thumb, if at renewal time a private motorist is obtaining fewer than five quotes – including at least one via a broker – then he or she is almost certainly throwing away money.

Coincidentally, I too have been driving for 25 years with no claims. The difference is that I’ve never used the same underwriter for more than three years in a row.

Mr Dignan is, of course, still right that the Government should take a close look at the industry.

R Scanlan,
Leopardstown,
Dublin 18.

FIGHT!

The cost of motor insurance (The Irish Times letters page)

Previously: ‘There Is A Cartel Of Insurance Underwriters’

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Previously: Not Going Away

Pic: Oireachtas.ie

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