Article in Journal.ie clearly written to provoke comments from “I’m not racist but…” brigade

January 6, 2017January 6, 2017 ~ jlpagano

Here’s the story…as part of Ireland’s agreements as part of the international community, 80 refugees, mostly of Syrian extraction, are to be accommodated in a refurbished hotel in County Roscommon.

For the most part, we here at FPP see that as a good thing. It’s not perfect, there are negative connotations, but given all that has been happening in the world, that a place is being found for these people where hunks of metal are not being dropped from the sky on a daily basis has to be seen as a net blessing all round.

So when you report on that, we think the “80 lives made better” thing is the best starting point.

Now…to get a clear picture of what is going on, of COURSE you look into how the locals feel about it. Of COURSE you interview local people and representatives. And of COURSE you seek out the response from the Department of Justice and the Roscommon County Council.

However, assuming there are language and logistical barriers preventing you from speaking to the refugees themselves, we believe you should ALSO interview the Irish Refugee Council, or Amnesty International, or some other such organisation who generally act as the first responders from Irish society towards such people when they arrive on our shores. Maybe get a little perspective on what it must be like for them?

According to this article in the Journal, the 80 refugees are not the story.

“Council meets to discuss housing of refugees in refurbished hotel“

The important narrative, apparently, is that the locals don’t like the way THEY have been treated.

Fine Gael Senator Maura Hopkins, a Ballaghaderreen native, says that “a number of questions need to be answered” with regard to the move.

They go on to interview a Fine Gael councillor, as well as two Fianna Fáil councillors (FF have 8 of 18 on the council by the way – FG 3, SF 1, IND 6) .

Like we point out, those viewpoints are all fine, but they are not the full story. To be fair, the article does end like this…

TheJournal.ie has contacted both the Department of Justice and Roscommon County Council on the matter.

…yet they still posted an article that purely focuses on the reaction of a handful of right-leaning councillors.

You can imagine the kind of comments that will appear below an article like this. Posted at 10:30am Friday, by 3pm there were 182 comments, like these…

The plan is to get in as many Muslims as possible until Ireland becomes as unstable and divided as Britain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, basically any country with a high Islamic fundamentalist presence. God help any of you with female kids.

Screw our own people, leave them on the streets, but look after the foreigners, that’s the humane thing to do. What the hell is wrong with this Country?

There is a cruel irony here, where sending refugees to a hotel in Rosscommon somehow makes it okay. There are absolutely no prospects of them ever finding employment, so they might be better off back in Syria where they came from and at least can fend for themselves and regain their dignity. They certainly won’t have much dignity around here.

This makes my f**king blood boil

Let’s house 80 ” refugees ” in a newly refurbished hotel …..

Meanwhile the government issue a court order to remove irish homesless people from an abandoned building …

How does this make sense ???????

Now to be fair, there are some comments going the other way…

Lots on here on about homelessness. No humanity at all

If ye feel that strong on irish homelessness open yer own door welcome in the homeless. Id say 0% of ye would. So shut up on about innocent people who didnt choose to be bombed beheaded shot HOMELESS imprisoned for nothing risking lifes spending all there money drowning trying to save there familys

Do you think 5 years ago they would choose to be in this situation and end up thousands of miles from home in ballaghaderreen.

Ps the mayo border is nearly 13 km away

…but the way the article has been presented views like this are guaranteed to be in the minority.

#IANWAE

Butchering government – how much has changed in 9 years?

January 6, 2017 ~ jlpagano

We’re not big into “long posts” on this site, but there will always be exceptions.

Thanks to Facebook’s “You have memories to look back on today” feature we were reminded of this blog post we published in 2008, obviously on a different site.

It is titled “butchering government” and we thought we’d do a repost to see how things stack up now. Remember…this was written when Bertie was still Taoiseach, George W Bush was still President and anyone who suggested a financial crisis was on the way was recommended for a straight jacket.

Short of an all-out Bolshevik revolution, the Irish left needs to unite and organise itself much in the same way as the other lot have done.

Butchering government

(posted Jan 6, 2008)

In the USA an election can drag on for weeks and sometimes months if the result is close – not only did this happen in the Bush/Gore battle in 2000 but right now there is a hotly contested Senate seat in Minnesota which the republicans are loathe to let go.

Then you have the system in the UK where you can win a seat in the House of Commons merely by having more votes than your opponents – that may seem a no-brainer on the face of it but don’t forget that it means you can still be considered a winner even if more than half the voters plumped for someone else.

So I guess on the face of it, we should be proud here in Ireland that our elected representatives are chosen by means of a system which goes by the general name “proportional representation”.

I wonder – should we really be that proud?

At a party towards the end of last year, I got chatting to a guy who told me he was a butcher. That was a first for me, and I was lost for words.

I mean – what do I say to him : “So, you chop meat, do ya? What’s that like?”

In the end we found football as a common theme to get through the conversation.

Later on I got to thinking about his job. Naturally he would have been highly insulted if I suggested that all he did for a living was chop meat. I mean, surely there are other facets to the job as well, like learning hygiene standards, dealing with suppliers, and of course, handling finicky customers.

But then I came to this conclusion – sure, there may very well be more to being a butcher than just chopping meat, but if you CAN’T chop meat, then I don’t really think you can call yourself a butcher. All the other things might be important as well, but grasping the fundamentals must be done before you can get to the other things.

Writing a blog and the odd polemic as I do, my train of thought then sped down the tracks towards this question : “What exactly is a politician’s answer to chopping meat?”

First, I have to discard the word “politics” for I see it as a very unfortunate one. When we say we are discussing “politics” what we are really talking about is “government”. The politics arises from the fact that different people have different opinions on how government should be run, and as we all know, politics is right there in all walks of life – work, love, family, everywhere.

So that last paragraph should alter my question to : “What exactly is a GOVERNMENT’s answer to chopping meat?”

Ever since I have been following Irish blogs, I have seen numerous complaints about the government of this country, and more often than not, they focus on three things – lack of funding for health, lack of funding for education and in the wake of all that, cronyism which borders on if not actually is out and out corruption.

Last year we had a situation whereby our Taoiseach, the head of our government, was waltzing in and out of a tribunal like he was some kind of rock star, trying and failing to account for large sums of money which were flung in his own direction.

This is not to mention various public moneys being squandered on e-voting machines, hairdo’s in Florida, tragically-planned road projects like the Cash Cow Roundabout which has been knocked down and rebuilt more often than Joan Rivers’ face, plus numerous other bits and pieces.

And all the while, people lie on trollies in A&E wards, children have toilets for classrooms, and we can’t afford ten million for one of the few vaccines for cancer.

So all over the blogs, I see what I consider to be justified revulsion at this state of affairs. But then I appreciate that this is a left-wing viewpoint, and to be fair, the right wing are also entitled to their say.

And what do they generally say? That government’s answer to chopping meat is looking after business.

OK, fine. So to summarize, some of us want to take care of business, some of us want to take care of schools and hospitals.

Taking the late Tony Gregory and Finian McGrath as the only left-wing Independents, as well as reluctantly counting Sinn Fein on the left, here is how I see the current spread of ideology in Dail Eireann…

Total seats- 166; Left – 32 Right – 134.

Answer me this – is THAT what you call proportional representation?

If I stop 166 people on the street around the country, will as many as 134 of them tell me they’d choose business over health and education?

I think not.

So what needs to be done?

Short of an all-out Bolshevik revolution, the Irish left needs to unite and organise itself much in the same way as the other lot have done.

I remember one particular moment from RTÉ’s coverage of the 2007 election. On the panel in their studio was the now Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform Dermot Ahern. The result from Limerick East had just been announced, and up on the monitor was the victor by a clear margin, Ahern’s fellow party member, Minister for Defence and virtual Governor of Limerick Willie O’Dea.

I thought congratulations were sure to be flowing from Deputy Ahern to Deputy O’Dea, but instead, if you can believe this, he was actually mocked!!!

Why? For having the audacity to garner as many as 38% of the first preference votes for himself, that’s why!!!

See, what he SHOULD have done is strategically go around to a portion of his supporters and tell them that it would be better for the party if they didn’t put him first and instead gave FF a shot at getting all three of their candidates into Leinster House. In the end, only two made it, with two more for Fine Gael and one for Labour.

Still, from where I’m standing, that’s four right-wing seats for Limerick East and just the one for the Left.

As long as that remains the status quo, and the Irish Left doesn’t find a way to beat their ideological opposition at their own game, then all our blogging will continue to be merely for our own benefit.

In other words, we’re standing by and letting the right butcher our government, and it’s about time we gave them the chop. Bring on the local elections, I say!

Just two things to say about the Irish budget 2016

October 13, 2016October 14, 2016 ~ jlpagano

The mainstream media in general seems more concerned with who gets an extra fiver than they do with the fact that this is essentially a coalition budget between Fianna Gael and Fine Fáil. (Not a typo)
Whatever about the Lansdowne Road Agreement I cannot wrap my head around the fact that nobody is talking about a protest march surrounding the fact that the politicians are getting a pay rise. Here at FPP, not only do we think they are morally obliged to waive it, no TD who supports it should receive any political capital for doing so. It’s like showing up to work on time…you shouldn’t get credit for something that everyone expects of you.

We haven’t been posting as often of late. We hope to get back to our post-a-day schedule soon.

News show “Democracy Now!” does exactly what it says on the tin for US VP debate

October 6, 2016October 6, 2016 ~ jlpagano

On Tuesday evening the Vice Presidential candidates in the US election, Senator Tim Kaine (D) and Governor Mike Pence (R) squared off in a debate at Longwood University in Virginia, which is curiously Kaine’s home state.

There are two other candidates running for President who are on the ballot in enough states to have a “realistic” chance of winning the election outright – Jill Stein of the Green Party and Gary Johnson of the Libertaians, but their VP choices were excluded from the debate.

For three election cycles up until 1984, the series of debates was organised by the totally non-partisan League of Women Voters but when they started to insist on “third-party candidates” being included in the process, the duopoly of Republicans and Democrats came together and forced them out, setting up instead their own organisation called the Commission for Presidential Debates that has rules which virtually guarantee just the two participants in each debate.

One of our top sources for “non-mainstream” media coverage of US affairs is Democracy Now!, hosted by Amy Goodman which has been running for around 20 years. As the two VP candidates slugged it out during the debate, Goodman had Green Party VP nominee Ajamu Baraka in studio to offer real time responses to the questions as though he were in fact part of the debate. Libertarian nominee William Weld was also invited but apparently they offered no response.

The show recently did something similar for the first Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Secretary Hillary Clinton, with the Green Party’s Jill Stein giving her responses, also in “real time” as the feed from the main debate was paused.

What Baraka proceeds to do is highlight the similarities between the two on-stage combatants, like on the subject of war where both Republicans and Democrats come from a position of war as an inevitable option – he presents the Greens as the party of peace. Whether or not you agree with this stance, true believers in democracy have to appreciate the opportunity to know the option is there on their ballot paper.

Here at FPP we would love to see this method employed during the course of an Irish election campaign given our ever-expanding selection of parties and platforms. We too have a duopoly that very much needs breaking…only in our case they are pretty much indistinguishable from each other in terms of political outlook.

MLK quote gets perfectly applied to #blacklivesmatter but also can be used for other struggles against injustice

September 30, 2016 ~ jlpagano

In the latest Best of the Left podcast there is a segment taken from Dave Zirin’s “The Edge of Sports” where he deals with the reaction to American football player Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the US national anthem in support of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Zirin uses a quote from Martin Luther King to describe the reaction of several influential people from the sport’s community to the protest, whereby they essentially say “I support the ends but not the means”.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the white citizen’s Councillor or Ku Klux Klan-er, but the “white moderate”, who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

Who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”.

Who paternalistically believes they can set the timetable for another man’s freedom, who lives by a mythical concept of time. And who constantly advises the negro to wait for a more convenient season.

Personally I have more respect for someone who bravely stands up for what he believes in than I do for someone who blindly stands up for a song and a waving piece of cloth.

But I also believe the quote is significant for wider issues around the world. Take what we have here in Ireland, like #RepealThe8th #Right2Water and #StopTTIP. Please understand that I appreciate the many differences between those struggles and those of the African American community in the US.

What I do mean is that such struggles should not be fought against the extremists at the far end of any ideological argument. It should instead be directed at those in between who stand with their backs to the resistance because while they do appreciate the injustice, they don’t see the point in resisting…at least not right now. “Maybe that day will come, but it is not today”, is essentially their argument.

They should be shown that not only can it be today, but it can also be done peacefully. If enough people believe, it can be so.

The First Presidential Debate – what the candidates weren’t asked #IssuesNotEgos

September 28, 2016 ~ jlpagano

So we’ve finally seen the two candidates on the same stage at the same time – how did they get on?

It’s quite simple…Trump got in some shots and had his opponent under pressure in the early stages but Hillary came storming back, easily got under his skin and forced him into some ramblings which I doubt even he could translate into understandable English now.

But amid all the rhetoric and back-and-forth on tax returns, emails, calling women Miss Piggy and bringing up Bill’s affairs by saying you won’t bring them up, was there much actual talk about, oh I don’t know, what they’d do as President?

Sure, there was a bit about jobs, a bit about trade and a bit about secret plans to beat ISIS, but even then it was more about how bad the opponent was rather than what each candidate would do themselves.

Yet the American mainstream media lapped up the verbal mud wrestling and proceeded to make the focus of the post-game all about “who won”.

Thankfully we have the good folks at FAIR.org to give an alternative take in their piece “Lester Holt Asks Zero Questions About Poverty, Abortion, Climate Change” by Adam Johnson.

A week before the debate,Comcast-owned NBC announced the topics, and one could already tell we weren’t going to be in for a substantive evening: “Achieving prosperity,” “America’s direction” and “securing America.” This generic approach lead to a generic debate that focused mostly on horserace disputes and vague, open-ended questions about taxes and jobs.

What I find amusing is how Americans can be so bent out of shape about their media making it all about personalities when they have over 300 millions people, just two main parties (well actually there’s four but they keep the Greens and Libertarians away from these debates), and election campaigns that last well over a year.

Here in Ireland, with a humble 5 million people, we have an ever-growing amount of political parties and campaigns squeezed into just under a month, so while the “Yanks” have plenty of time to talk about issues and seem to choose not to, here our media has so little time all they get to focus on is what would the inevitable coalition look like after the unnecessarily over-complicated voting process is done.

Democratically held elections for government should be about issues not egos, but as a general public we seem content to have them portrayed like “reality” TV shows.

“I do not feel Irish in the slightest” : Newton Emerson on being part of The Troubles generation in Northern Ireland

September 14, 2016September 14, 2016 ~ jlpagano

My “political awakening” came when I read about the Unionists in History class leading up to my Leaving Cert.

Having moved to Ireland from the USA in 1977 and spent about 10 years in Dublin, my only knowledge of what was happening in the North came from reports on the Troubles and casual gossip among “grownups” which invariably was of a “Catholic/Southern” slant.

Somehow I knew that wasn’t the whole story and when the other side of the story was presented to me in school I was fascinated…it was in fact my topic of choice in the Leaving Cert History exam. I went to the hall with the express intention of belting out my well-rehearsed Unionism essay to get me settled…thankfully the question was there for me.

But that was all very well for me living in Dublin…what could it have been like for someone of a similar age actually growing up on the “protestant side” of the North during those times?

In today’s Irish Times I got my answer in a piece by Newton Emerson titled “I do not feel Irish in the slightest“.

…if you were a respectable person, as the “head-down” mentality of the Troubles encouraged most of us to be, you looked to the mainland for anything more important than collecting the bins.

Do give it a read.