Tag Archives: Sean O’Rourke

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Petrified Irish Times ‘Pol Corr’ Harry McGee

And say it anyway.

“It looks like the next Dáil will be settled by Independents. I don’t think the number will be quite the 52 that has been projected but I think they will almost have a seat in every constituency. And then people would have to think through the consequences of that. Like just what Shane Ross and others have been saying in the past week, they’ve been saying that they would dispense with the whip system which is a political popular thing to say.

But it means that, I mean, the reason for the whip system isn’t, they’re not just doing it for the health or the discipline of the party. They’re doing it because they have to ensure that when they’re making very tough decisions, when they’re doling out the tough medicine for everybody, that there has to be some discipline and they have to make sure that everybody is on board and if they were to throw the whip system open, as some Independents are doing, it would mean that you’d have a system where taxes would inevitably be cut and spending would be increased and you get the kind of most populist policies being projected and then, in relation to legislation, you’d have TDs subject to intense lobbying both from vested interests and also from their constituencies and you have situations that would conceivably lead to stagnation and paralysis.

There’s not really been any instance in Europe of a country in which and independent administration has been successful. The only place indeed it has worked is in very small instances. You’d have to go to Tahiti islands and other places to see that. So people would have to think through the consequences of what their vote will mean and if the figures that were projected this morning come to pass, I think it will lead to inherent instability and a general election being called in short order. We’ll have a 1981/1982 situation… when there were three elections held in the course of just a year and a half.”

Ah here.

Following the Ispos poll results in the Irish Times this morning, on Today with Seán O’Rourke, the newspaper’s political correspondent Harry McGee warns voters to “think through the consequences”.

Listen back in full here.

Earlier: Ispos Factos

Pic via YouTube

 

Update:

A no show.

*puts trident away*

Peter

[Peter O’Loughlin, of the newly-formed National Independent Party (NIP)]

Look around the eyes.

“I got a couple of emails from a couple of UKIP representatives yesterday. They saw what we were doing and they sent across, saying, kind of, you know ‘fair play to ye, lads’. You know? That’s kind of nice so, it’s nice to get a bit of ‘fair play’.”
“…what’s happening in Europe now, and battlelines are being drawn, it’s quite clear if you do follow politics on the European continent, and especially within the European Parliament and looking at the Euro elections, it is really dividing into, I suppose, to look, to use the buzzword ‘Europhile’ and ‘Eurosceptic’ camps, there’s no doubt about that.
“It’s very clear, we’re  ‘Eurosceptic’, as far as that word covers what we believe in – we’re in that camp. So I mean we have no intention of sitting on the sidelines. No intention at all, we can’t sit back while this kind of fight is going on. Because we do believe that the European Union is, what it’s evolved into is not good for our country at all.”

Peter O’Loughlin to Seán O’Rourke on RTÉ this morning.

Previously: The NIPs Are Here

National Independent Party (Facebook)

National Independent Party – steering committee

maryWe may never know.

President Mary McAleese’s remarks that the Catholic Church is in denial about homosexuality, because many of its priests are gay, were analysed with exquisite detail by Patsy McGarry, of the Irish Times – and author of McAleese biography First Citizen – and a bewildered Seán O’Rourke on his Today show on RTÉ R1 this morning.

Bless the innocence.

Sean O’Rourke:“She’s also telling the paper, or did tell them that a very large number of Catholic priests are gay.”

Patsy McGarry: “Well, this is not new. I mean, in 1997, in March of 1997 she wrote an article for The Tablet, which is the Catholic monthly published in the UK, in which she made the very same point. This was before it was even mooted that she might be a candidate for the Presidency at all, all that happened later on that year…She was talking really about Ireland but, also generally speaking, about the phenomenon, as she knows, that then, of the very high proportion of priests who are gay.”

O’Rourke: “How does she know?”

McGarry: “Well, I mean she’s an acute observer of people, I expect. I never asked her actually why, how she knew..”

O’Rourke: “But I’m just wondering is this based on empirical evidence or her own observations. I mean when she says ‘it isn’t so much an elephant in the room but a herd of elephants’.”

McGarry: “Well there are books, and have been books in the United States, particularly one in 2000 which estimates that half the priests in that country were gay, produced by a former priest himself Daniel [unintelligible]. There have been other such books as well. I mean it’s an understood phenomenon where the church is concerned. One book estimated that a third of bishops in the world, Catholic bishops are gay.”

O’Rourke: “And of course there was that controversy of course last year and there was a report presented to the former pope about allegations of a gay lobby within the Vatican itself.”

McGarry: “That’s true and…in fact there’s a story in the paper today about a Swiss guard who talks about his experiences in the Vatican when he was a Swiss guard there, about being approached by various people, up to and including, a cardinal, for sexual purposes.”

O’Rourke: “So it’s not the only issue, that Mary McAleese has been outspoken and going contrary to the church’s teaching. I mean, I think it’s a long time ago, even before she became president that she tangled with them on the whole question of women priests.”

McGarry: “Yes, it’s true but to go back to the original theme, Sean, she has a strong record when it comes to gay people. I mean when she was in Trinity College, as a professor of law, back in the mid-1970s, she and David Norris set up the campaign for homosexual law reform. And when I wrote her biography in 2008, I talked to her about how she became interested in this issue. And she said when she was a young student in the Seventies, she met a young man in California, when she was on a student job, who was a gay man who was not on the gay scene, didn’t want to be on the gay scene but he lived a very, very lonely life and she was very moved by his experience and it excited her interest in the situation of gay people. And, as president, she also addressed this issue in the context of youth suicide, particularly where young men were concerned.”

Listen here

Earlier: You Could Always Leave?

Pic: Passionists.org

jake

Romany journalist Jake Bowers spoke to Seán O’Rourke this morning on RTÉ Radio One to talk about Gardaí having taken two blonde-haired Roma children away from their respective families on suspicion that they were not the children of their parents. Both children were later returned.

The interview started off with O’Rourke asking Bowers what he thought of the events over the last week.

Jake Bowers: “It hasn’t been a great week for Ireland’s international reputation when it comes to the nuances of the integration of migrant communities or it’s treatment, actually, of that Romany or the Irish Traveller community. I mean it’s been spectacular kind of what’s happened here. You’ve seen a butterfly beat its wings in Greece and it’s turned into a storm of bureaucratic incompetence in Ireland where you have people informing a journalist, anonymously, via Facebook, who’s then informed Gardaí who’ve gone and traumatised families, requiried DNA samples from them like some kind of policing out of the Jeremy Kyle Show, traumatised children, traumatised Romany families, all in the name of protecting children. I mean it’s bizarre, Orwellian and strange. And it hasn’t been a good week for Ireland’s international reputation in the treatment of minorities.”

Seán O’Rourke: “I presume part of the thinking that informed the decision of the Gardaí and the Health Services Executive was that because there was a doubt, the whole core of these cases was whether they were, the children were with their natural parents, that there was a fear that they might have moved on or something like that.”

Bowers: “Well yeah. And listen, child welfare is paramount. It’s paramount to anybody who is intelligent and civilised and it’s particularly paramount to people within the Roma community. Something you have to remember here is that a lot of these actions from the Gardaí were based on asking a consultant, who clearly knew nothing about Roma community ‘is it likely that a Romany family can have a blonde child?’. And you can’t see me because it’s radio but I have blonde hair and blue eyes and I’m from a Romany family. So there’s a staggering amount of ignorance and incompetence led to this. But of course they were duty bound to investigate it but they, what they did is they went in with a sledgehammer and cracked a nut that didn’t need to be cracked, so it’s very bad news for the family.”

Listen here

Previously: Different Standards

It’s All Relative

Fears Of Racial Profiling

Pic: Daily Mail