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From top: RTÉ2’s Facebook Election Special at the Facebook headquarters in Dublin last night; Cat O Broin and Shane Gillen; Vanessa O’Sullivan; and Eamon Ryan, leader of the Green Party

Last night, RTÉ 2 broadcast an Facebook Election Special from the headquarters of Facebook in Dublin, presented by Keelin Shanley.

There were seven politicians in attendance – Fine Gael’s Minister for Health Leo Varadkar, Sinn Féin TD Mary Lou McDonald, Green Party leader Eamon Ryan, Labour Minister of State Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, Fianna Fáil TD Timmy Dooley, Independent Senator Averil Power and People Before Profit’s Adrienne Wallace.

The topics discussed were prompted by questions from members of the audience and the questions, in the main, related to mental health, education, and abortion.

In relation to mental health, Cat O Broin spoke about her late brother Caoilte O Broin. Readers may wish to note that Cat was scheduled to appear on the Late Late Show last Friday but her appearance was postponed until March 11.

On the subject of abortion, Vanessa O’Sullivan told how she had to seek an abortion abroad after she was raped and refused access to the morning after pill.

And during the discussion on education, Eamon Ryan, of the Green Party, raised the issue of corporation tax in Ireland – and Facebook.

Mental health

Cat O Broin: “It’s a very long story but I suppose it starts years and years ago but, mostly, about probably 14/15 months ago. My dad died and one my brothers, who was very, very ill for a long time became a lot worse. He was already self medicating for his mental illness with alcohol but it became an awful lot stronger after my dad passed away from his grief response. He became very, very violent.”

“He was screaming at all hours of the night. I’ve a little brother, he’s only 13 now, all of us were attacked by my brother who was unwell. We were living in fear of our lives, our home, everything was going wrong.”

“We had huge difficulty finding help for him, within our health services here. We were told because he was drinking, he couldn’t receive the proper care for mental health services but addiction services wouldn’t look after him because he was so mentally unwell. So he was hospitalised, I’ve lost count how many times.”

“In a two-week period emergency services were at our home eight times. He tried to commit suicide five or six times, it came to a point that we weren’t allowed to meet with his doctors or anything, because of doctor/patient confidentiality.”

“I wrote an article for Joe.ie going public with this, to try and find help because we could get help no other way. We did finally manage to get a meeting with his doctors but nothing really came of it and on January 2, he was pulled from the River Liffey.”

“Since we became public with our story, our brother Caoilte was missing for several days and we had a social media campaign to try and find him and, obviously, a lot of people got to know us through that.

“And the stories I’ve been hearing since then, every day there’s a new person contacting me, saying ‘we’re going through the same thing’, ‘this happened to us before’, ‘please help me’ and I can’t help people. But I know there are people in this country who can – ministers who are looking for reelection who can help us, to not be the problem that it is.”

“Right now, in Ireland, dual diagnosis is a problem, mostly depending on where you live. In Donegal mental illness and addiction are treated together and they’re such an entangled problem that I think that needs to be the case all over the country – they need to be treated one and the same. I think it’s 85% of people who have an addiction also have mental health problems so you can’t separate them out.”

“There also needs to be far more contact with families. My brother was discharged to us, every single time he left hospital, we had no way to care, we didn’t know how to care for him. I didn’t even know until after his death a lot of his diagnoses, I still don’t know everything that went on.

“But we were picking him up off the floor, calling ambulances, this that and the other. Constantly. When we had no training. We didn’t know what to do for him and, obviously, we couldn’t save him in the end. But we believe, you know, it could have been avoided.”

Abortion

Vanessa O’Sullivan: “Where I’m coming from, well I’ve been a Choice activist since I was 16 but about four years ago now nearly, I was raped by a friend. I was denied the morning after pill because of the conscientious objection clause that’s in the legislation with the pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceuticals have the ability, if it goes against their conscience, to give emergency contraception to women which is outrageous in the 21st century.”

“And one of the issues I take with the Labour proposal and I’ve brought it up with Aodhan O Riordan before is that it looks at this conscientious objection clause for, if the 8th amendment is removed, to give the option for doctors to refuse to actually serve their patients. They put their own personal view before their patients.”

“…What happened with me was, and there’s no guarantee the morning after pill would have worked, but what happened to me, as a result of the rape, I ended up pregnant, I had to leave my own country, which I pay taxes in, for my healthcare. I was denied my healthcare, I was denied my choices. I was made to feel like a criminal.”

“The issue with the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act is that it criminalises women up to 14 years imprisonment if they’re seen to go against the morals of the Government of the time. So, if I had had the, if I had bought the abortion pill online which is on the World Health Organisation’s list of basic, basic and essential medicines, I could have been jailed for up to 14 years. If my rapist had been prosecuted, he could have been imprisoned for up to 7 years. So that’s the disparity.”

“So, as has been said before, women have abortions in this country so let’s trust the people of this country to  actually have a say on the referendum or on the 8th amendment. It is no use to us having a nicely nice conversation about it and kicking it on further down the road. Women’s lives are at stake, women’s healths are at stake,  and I think now is the time to deal with instead of constantly, constantly kicking it down the road.”

“We need to deal with it now.”

Education

Eamon Ryan: “Where do we get half a billion is the question. The Financial Transaction Tax, I’d be all for that but I’m not sure we can get it in the next year or two. And I meet a lot of companies like Facebook and Google and others, and they say the same thing, we need better graduates, we’re not getting high enough quality out of our colleges. Well I think one of the ways we could raise the money is getting the money from corporations like Facebook and Google and all the other large corporations here.”

“There’s a one trillion gap in unpaid tax due to the tax avoidance measures across Europe…I’m not picking against any company, I’ve a lot of time for Facebook and Google but Google just put 27.5 billion in the last two years through Holland and off to the Cayman Islands or Bermuda somewhere and didn’t pay proper tax on it.”

“Facebook in the UK aren’t paying any proper, real tax and we need to start having fair, proper rules, transparent and simple rules so that if we say it’s 12.5% or if we say, on the intellectual property rights, we’re saying it’s 6.5%. But we all know the way it works is that there’ll be some complication, money hidden going this way and the other that it doesn’t actually turn out to be the 6.5%.

“So I would say to the companies here, if I could and I don’t mean to be rude about it,  is that’s one of the ways we could raise the money and we should put it into education cause these companies would benefit from graduates coming from high quality colleges.”

Meanwhile…

Watch the debate in full here

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What you may need to know:

1. Good grief. Green screen much?

2. Mortal Bek (Brenton Thwaites) allies with god Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) to defeat Set (Gerard Butler), the god of darkness. As you do.

3. Nothing says quality like Gerard Butler.

4. If you thought the Oscars were #SoWhite, it’s nothing compared to ancient Egypt.

5. Gods of Egypt has already come under fire for its whitewashed cast. It looks like it may have bigger problems than a lack of diversity.

6. Broadsheet prognosis: God almighty.

Release Date: April 8

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“The real inequality is not religious in nature…’

From the Pastoral statement on the Catholic Bishops of Ireland on the upcoming General Election – distributed at mass across Ireland yesterday.

Read the full statement here

Meanwhile…

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A leaflet from the Christians Concerned For Dun Laoghaire.

Previously: School Places For Some, Miniature Tricolours For Others

‘Divestment Of School Patronage Is Slow’

Thanks Alan Kinsella

poll

Today’s Irish Times/Ipsos poll

More polls than you can shake a stick at.

What do they all mean?

Shane Heneghan writes:

You wait a few days for a poll and then four of them come along all at once on a weekend. Dramatically enough, a B&A poll was leaked early showing Labour at 4%. The party’s analysis that this poll is “an outlier” probably rings true – no poll has yet seen them near that low. But this soon to polling it may prove to be a bit of self fulfilling prophecy and drag Labour down after  a sclerotic campaign.

There seems to be a steady climb for Fianna Fail who are now comfortable in the mid 20s. This coupled with the inability of the current coalition to reach a majority would make an ara-sure-it’s-grand-coalition between the two civil war parties considerably more likely as it would be more possible for Fianna Fail to make a deal with the blueshirts as equal(ish) partners.

All polls seem to point to a high vote for smaller parties and groups, if this is replicated on polling day will be important not because they may win more seats (though they might) but because of what happens to their votes when they are eliminated.

Given the very high level of support for small parties that don’t really stand a chance in a lot of constituencies they are standing in, data on where 2nd preferences might go is needed more than ever. For example, would Social Democrat voters (3-4% nationally) be inclined to transfer to the Greens (4%) thus perhaps putting them into contention in some unlikely areas? Or vice-versa.

Two out of four polls out this weekend show Fine Gael on 30%. Across the four of them we see the two coalition parties on an average of 35%. Sinn Fein seem to have peaked in the mid to high teens. Which may be disappointing for them. They have struggled with transfers in the past and the PRSTV system is very hard on a ‘Marmite’ party like theirs.

Of more interest at this stage is the emergence of various constituency level polls including, but not limited to, the series conducted by TG4 that’s concentrating on Gaeltacht areas.

Their poll in Kerry shows the Healy-Ray brothers as uncrowned kings of the kingdom on a combined total of 37%. It has particularly alarming results for Sinn Fein’s Martin Ferris, one of the parties big household names of the past few decades, on a mere 8% and just barely in contention for a seat.

The Shinners will be relieved to see they are on track for two seats in Donegal. Similarly, a poll in Mayo shows Fine Gael in the running for an astonishing three out of four seats.

The weekend’s Irish Times poll shows a huge change in support amongst farmers. At the start of the campaign Fianna Fail had a strong lead now Fine Gael has a commanding 47% of their support and this may figure in rural constituencies.

Another astounding figure from the same poll shows 41% of voters in greater Dublin will not vote for any of the main four parties.

The main take away from these results is that there are wild deviations from national polls at local level. The old maxim that this is really forty very separate local elections rather than a general election may be ringing true.

Irish elections have a habit of sorting themselves out in the last seven days or so. Bertie pulled it out of the fire in 2007 and Dick Spring sprang (see what I did there) to 19% in 1992.

Shane Heneghan is a Galway-based psephologist.

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This morning.

Dublin [Location unspecified].

Thanks Ken Sweeney

Meanwhile…

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River Liffey at Dublin city last night.

Thanks Andrew Holohan

 

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Clontarf, Co. Dublin yesterday.

Thanks Conor D

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Keelin Shanley, Terry Prone and Stephen Collins on RTÉ One’s Campaign Daily yesterday

Asked yesterday if he regretted making a comment about ‘whingers’ in his Mayo constituency, Taoiseach Enda Kenny fulminated:

“No I don’t. Some of them wouldn’t know sunshine if they saw it.”

Chairman of The Communications Clinic Terry Prone and Stephen Collins, political editor of The Irish Times, shared their impartial thoughts on this with RTÉ’s Keelin Shanley on RTÉ One’s Campaign Daily yesterday.

Readers may wish to note that the close links between Ms Prone’s Communications Clinic and Fine Gael were never mentioned during the item. G’wan the RTÉ.

Keelin Shanley: “Is that a good idea? To go to your own constituency and say that you’re champion whingers? Not all of ye, but some of ye?”

Terry Prone: “Well, I think that there’s a certain truth in what he says in a general, geographic sense…”

Shanley: “But do you need that truth at this point?”

Prone: “Joe Duffy could not survive on a daily basis, were it not for the fact that the Irish public are the most magnificent whingers. I think that it indicates something that is profound in this campaign that I think it was believed, at a strategic level, in Government, from both parties, that yes, the recovery had happened and any places that it hadn’t happened, it was purely geographic. There’s a lot of individual people who have not been reached by it, who are complaining very loudly and they need to be sensitively addressed in the coming week.”

Shanley: “And do you think that was sensitively addressing them, Stephen?”

Stephen Collins: “Well, the whingers, I think we are a nation of whingers, it’s been, going back to James Joyce, we’ve always, I think even recognised in ourselves that we like to whinge. Some people, of course, have legitimate reasons to whinge, some people don’t. But they whinge nonetheless. As Terry says, where would Joe Duffy’s programme be without the whingers of Ireland. But it’s probably not a great idea to say it but I’m not sure…”

Shanley: “If you were teetering and you got called a whinged, I don’t know that it would work for me.”

Collins: “I think that people who are, the real hardcore whingers are not going to vote Fine Gael anyway. I think that’s the bottom line. I think a lot of people who would be supporting Fine Gael would be the kind of people who would identify with what Enda Kenny is saying there. So I think his own constituency, I mean not talking about Mayo, but his national constituency wouldn’t be that worried about that…”

Watch back in full here

Previously: Another Fine Mess

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https://vimeo.com/154878586

Artist Damien Hirst’s new restaurant Pharmacy2, opening tomorrow at the Newport Gallery in London’s Vauxhall.

The original Pharmacy restaurant, founded in Notting Hill in 1998 by Hirst and PR guru Matthew Ford, closed in 2003.

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