The meaning of pro-life abortion argument in Ireland -- what happens once these children are born

Pro-life billboard in Dublin

If you’ve been in Dublin recently, you can’t have failed to notice the throngs of audacious billboards and public transport ads that, well, advocate a stridently pro-life point of view, let's put it like that.

In a year that will be so important for the future of children’s rights, it’s disconcerting in the extreme to see the way in which the discussion has been pivoted onto such a narrow and divisive fraction of the debate. But even more disconcerting is the fact that the image of being pro-life exists as it does in the zeitgeist.

When you hear the term “pro-life”, it automatically conjures certain images, and usually those images are of fetuses on large placards, being carried by the most ardent single-issue campaigners in politics, picketing family planning clinics and challenging politicians about their stance outside Mass. And in the US it’s much more intense.

But not only does the term, and those who vocally self-identify with it, construct a false duality (there are, I daresay, very few people in favor of legalizing abortion who are generally pro-death) it also falls horribly short in scope. Pro-lifers of the kind we have placing billboards seem inordinately focused on unborn babies, but once they emerge into the world, then what?

This is the question we have been failing to ask ourselves for far too long, and in failing to answer it we have done our young people a serious disservice. In the last thirty years we have had innumerable schismatic debates on abortion, but what point is shouting about when life begins if we can’t provide a fundamental quality of life to our children?

In this country far too many children are born to poverty, to social deprivation, to effective pariah status because of who their parents are. In this country far too many children can’t get access to a good education or the basic resources of bettering themselves. In this country far too many children are voiceless when it comes to being given a say and a role in how their communities should be run. In this country far too many children have to grow up too early. And in this country far, far, far too many children are neglected when they should be looked out for the most. Throwing up billboards is doing nothing for them.

It’s easy to say you’re pro-life, but without a fidelity to tackling the problems that face our young people throughout their development then it just boils down to nothing more than emotionally charged, histrionic sloganizing. No matter what their age, children deserve much better than that.

Time for a new Munro Doctrine for the press: don't be a git like Obama's Irish heckler

A lot has been made in recent days about...actually, I won’t give his name, because since he’s clearly an attention seeking goon, I won’t give him any. But, the actions of that Daily Caller correspondent on the White House lawn are just the latest symptoms in a corrosion of respect that is currently riddling the American political process.

It’s not something I say lightly, but at the moment it seems the level of debate in United States is as unhealthy as it has ever been. As usual the main culprits are the far right, getting more and more established as mainstream as days go by.  Since Barack Obama took office a shrill, well-organised rump of extremists have hysterically come at him with sticks on a daily basis in a way far above and beyond what other Presidents have had to endure in recent times.

Politicians at the highest level should of course have a thick skin, but what the right have flung at the President in his first term, from calling him a commie/Nazi to insisting he wasn’t born in the country to making thinly veiled jibes at his ethnicity, is nothing short of malevolent bullying. And the right wing media hyenas are judge, jury and executioner in their witch hunt.

While simultaneously crowing about the need to bring America back to a time where authority was respected, people were decent and God was feared, the vanguard of conservative vitriol are deeply unedifying, toxic and unchristian. And while they do all this, they also try and pretend as if they have the moral high ground.

This couldn’t have been more evident than when Tucker Carlson, a man previously most famous for wearing a bowtie and getting his ass handed to him by Jon Stewart on a show that was promptly cancelled, attempted to justify his reporter’s action by claiming he was trying to his job, high-handedly suggesting that his guy is some kind of Dirty Harry-style maverick reporter, the only one who has the guts to stand up to the fancypants, emigrant loving elite. Either Carlson is deluded, cynical beyond all belief or an idiot, and I’m not sure which is worse or more dangerous.

To their credit, a great deal of Fox correspondents decried the reporter’s conduct as disrespectful and impertinent, but by the same token they also have to take responsibility for the fact that people like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Michelle Malkin and Megan Kelly have driven the standard of debate in the US so low into the ground that cheap hacks like we saw last week end up going deeper still to try and get themselves recognised. It’s a race to the bottom with no end in sight.

The prevailing wind among the right-wing media at the minute seems to be that the ends justify the means. The President needs to be opposed and questions need to be asked, and as long as you do that (and get some big attention into the bargain) who cares how sneaky, snide, hysterical, rude or undignified you are while you’re doing it? A bit of pride in method wouldn’t go amiss. Or pride in general, for that matter. 

Starbucks Ireland macchi-atone for their "British" sins, but who really cares?

Maybe it’s because summer is closing in, but this week we may have already got the silliest story of the season.

On Tuesday, Starbucks, the most famous thing to take its name from a Herman Melville book now that Moby doesn’t seem to be making records anymore, launched a UK marketing campaign to dovetail nicely with all that Jubilee business. Except, they made a now infamous geography malfunction. Now, social network marketing campaigns can be a difficult needle to thread at the best of times, but whenever you send out a tweet asking what makes proud to be British from your Irish account, you’re just asking for a hiding.

I’m not going to add to the mountain of puns (If it gets to court, will they be represented by a barista? Ha-cha cha cha cha!) but inevitably the quips came thick and fast, some of them about how Ireland is actually German and not British, and some of them funny. But in some quarters it seemed to cause genuine, high-handed annoyance. The Irish Times went as far to say it prompted “outrage." Outrage, I say! Why anyone would be annoyed by such a blunder seems almost as perplexing as people following a coffee outlet on Twitter in the first place.

After all, it’s a well-worn trope that successful people from the Emerald Isle are co-opted as British when they’re successful, and as they’re on the way down they’re Irish. Such custody battles don’t bother me, if anything we should be a bit flattered that the UK want to co-opt our famousers. After all, we take in abroad dwellers as our own all the time, from David Gray to Counting Crows to basically everyone who played football for us in the late eighties.

Ireland seems to have mastered missing the point completely. In the last few days, news eccentric TD Mick Wallace was avoiding tax to the tune of €2 million has been met with a worrying amount of moral equivalency, while last week the country essentially sleepwalked into accepting a treaty that will have far-reaching implications, with just half the country showing up at the polls. But no, it’s the coffee that really seems to get us energized.

Ireland Government's women trouble - why we badly need new gender quota

Irish female politicians past and present

Last week while browsing this website I came across an op-ed from our esteemed political analyst, Patrick Roberts, about his displeasure that gender quotas will be introduced in the next election. And I could not have disagreed with him more.

In theory, I get why quotas might be discomforting, even to avowed feminists. There’s a danger it codifies rather than breaks down the glass ceiling, merely giving women in politics a slightly larger cordon than they already have.

But a 30% quota shouldn’t be seen as the solution, but as the introduction of a bare minimum of standards. At the minute, there is a pathetic dearth of women in the Dáil, and an even more pathetic dearth of candidates. Only three constituencies had five women candidates running (none had more than that) and some constituencies had no women running in them at all. Unless you think women are physiologically less able to run for and hold elected office (i.e. insane), that means the current system is failing them badly.

There are all sorts of reasons why there haven’t been enough women in politics over the years, fundamental to them all though was a default patriarchy, a patriarchy that thanks to the 1937 Constitution has been both followed in the breach and the observance. But past practice and policy is no justification to perpetuate it, and in modern times it’s simply not acceptable to call for anyone to call for a fair race when you have a head start of miles.

The thing is, people can say they’re all for equality until their hair turns blue but it requires people to do something about it to actually achieve it. As it stands, political parties are not doing enough to shake off their just-for-the-lads mentality and seek out women candidates, women who are put off by the system as it stands and have taken their much-needed skills elsewhere. And even the ones that are in the political system are in a pitiful minority in the top jobs: three out of fifteen full cabinet ministers and four out of fifteen is a risible number in 2012.

But it’s not just a case of upping the numbers for the sake of it, we badly need the views and expertise of a wide range of people at government level and we only do ourselves a disservice by not listening to them. It’s absolute lunacy that half the voting public don’t even account for a quarter of the representation.

Not that the drive for equality should end with women, it’s just as vital that people of different cultures and creeds and classes participate in the political process and shape it to wider benefit. That requires a level of diversity and outreach that some may find unsettling or PC gone mad or what have you, but if the political system shook itself out of its’ monolithic torpor in the first place the question of quotas wouldn’t need to be broached at all.

In the landmark British sitcom Yes Prime Minister, when an idea very similar to this was proposed at a civil service meeting, all the (male) heads of department wholeheartedly agreed with the idea but one by one suggested problems implementing it. The Foreign Office couldn’t appoint women ambassadors to Arab countries, the Home Office wasn’t suitable because women couldn’t run prisons, Employment was a no-go because of the difficult to manage, burly trade unionists and Defence was out because a woman wasn’t really suitable to run security or rough it with Admirals. As sure as art imitates life, hegemony will always put up a fight, but they’re on the wrong side of this one.

Having traipsed up and down the country as a youth worker, I’ve done projects with a great many fantastic young women, young women who if they were so inclined could go right to the top of the political ladder. A lot of them come from constituencies where women were all but non-existent on the ballot paper, and so the question we have to ask ourself is, will we stand for another generation of talented young woman having obstacle and stymie thrown their way? Quotas aren’t perfect and they aren’t a solution, but we need political parties finding these young women, and we need them too. Our future depends on them. 

The Irish-American Presidents visits to Ireland - from John F Kennedy to Barack Obama

This week in County Offaly they celebrated the one year anniversary of President Obama coming to town by opening his ancestral home in Moneygall. There in attendance were the US Embassy’s director of communications, Barack’s long-lost cousin Henry Healy and Canon Stephen Neill (Trading – quite successfully - as “Paddy Anglican” on Twitter) to mark the event.

It might be seen by some as a tenuous attempt at notoriety on the back of the most powerful person in the world, but Moneygall is right to take its place among the surprisingly plentiful locations all round the island to which The 44 can trace their ancestors.

Of course, JFK’s visit to Wexford captured the imagination like no other, and Ronald Reagan’s trip to Ballyporeen, Co. Tipperary was as schmaltzy as you’d expect from The Gipper, but there have been plenty of other men who’ve taken up residence at The White House with deep connections to The Mother Country.

The family of James Buchanan, for example, originated in Ramelton in Co Donegal, which incidentally is also the home of Dave Gallaher, the first captain of the New Zealand All Black rugby team. A few generations before Woodrow Wilson dreamt up the League of Nations, his family were living outside Strabane, Co Tyrone. Andrew Jackson, most famous in modern times for his being mentioned in The West Wing for possessing a big block of cheese that was open for anyone in his White House to take a bite out of, had family from Carrickfergus in Antrim. Even The Presidents Bush, the most white bread, down home of all the Presidents, have relatives who hailed from Rathfriland, Co. Down. And lest we forget James Hoban, the Irishman who built The White House in the first place.

But my favourite story of a President of Irish extraction was one who can trace his roots back to my hometown of Lifford in Donegal. His three times great grandparents, one of whom was born at Cavanacor House on the outskirts of Lifford, emigrated from there to Maryland in the late 17th century. As the family moved inland, first to North Carolina and then Tennessee, they too had their name shortened, from Pollock to Polk. And it was James K Polk who became, not just the youngest President at the time, but also the one serving when the now famous Annapolis Naval Base, Washington Monument and The Smithsonian were all initiated. He also vastly expanded the nation’s landmass westwards and was Governor of Tennessee, Speaker of the House and Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Not bad for a Lifford fella.

And that’s why ancestral homes the likes of which we’re seeing opened in Moneygall are so important. They are in many ways a testament to the power of what people can do when they strive for something and take their opportunities and make something of themselves, even if they do so far away from whence they came. It can say to people from one-horse towns, “If a guy with relatives from my town can make it to the White House, what am I not capable of?” And most of all, it shows the extraordinary effect this island has had in shaping some of the world’s most influential leaders.

Irish sporting hero James McClean and football's culture war

James McClean

As last Sunday showed as clearly as is ever going to be shown, being a football (not soccer, not ever soccer) fan can be extremely dramatic. In the final week of the Premier League, Man City won the title in the dying seconds of their game against QPR, the kind of ending that would prompt you to roll your eyes if it came from a Disney film about a plucky team of loser kids who only needed an inspirational coach/mascot goat to believe in themselves.

The football frenzy is only likely to get more, eh, frenzied in coming weeks because of the upcoming European Championships. Ireland will of course be in there, and on the team will be Derry man James McClean. But in the last while he’s been making headlines for reasons other than his meteoric rise to stardom on the field.

After announcing on Twitter that he had been selected to play for the Republic at the Euros, James was subjected to all manner of abuse and threats, as being from Derry and having progressed through Northern Ireland’s IFA ranks, he essentially defected. McClean took the jibes (and worse) in good humour, even slagging the offending tweeters about the fact Northern Ireland will be nowhere to be seen at the tournament in Poland and Ukraine. He then unwisely suggested that Catholics don’t feel comfortable playing for the NI squad, in no small part due to omnipresent Union flags at Windsor Park. This caused his manager Martin O’Neill to suggest maybe sitting a few news cycles out for a while, but he has a point.

After all, Neil Lennon had to stop playing for Northern Ireland because of the abuse he got from his own fans, yet they react to the likes of McClean or Darron Gibson choosing to play for the Republic as if they’re Brutus getting ready to stick the knife in, as opposed to an often perfectly logical decision based on inherent cultural factors.

It would be lovely to think that in this post Good Friday Agreement era of shiny happy people that we could be a bit harmonious about things like this, but football, politics and culture are a troublesome mix. Especially so when you consider the fact that unifying Celtic and Rangers fans under one banner is about the most difficult thing you can do.

It’s frustrating that the Republic and Northern Ireland football teams still have this point of friction, especially when sports like rugby unify the whole island so well. But, the people who traditionally play rugby are not the same as those who traditionally play football, and therein lies the problem.

Working class people always tend to get the fuzzy end of the lollipop, and in Northern Ireland neither the most deprived Republican or Unionist communities have seen the full extent of the benefits of peace, love and understanding despite seeing the brunt of The Troubles. It is in these neighbourhoods that a lot of the old resentments still run deep, and in these neighbourhoods where the most diehard of fans inevitably reside. It’s only when we take the sting out of these tribal hostilities and we come to the point where a player can play for who he likes without opprobrium that we'll know we've truly moved on. 

Get them while they're young - Catholic Church are experts at recruitment

Initiation into the Catholic club

Say what you want about the failings of the Catholic Church but they are experts at recruitment.

You're a paid up member of the club by the time you can even say "christening", and once you arrive at secondary school, Catholicism is so deeply embedded with ceremonies that contain a large social element and weekly reinforcement, that it will stay with you for the rest of your life, no matter how your views evolve.

You have to hand it to them - it's a pretty successful strategy.

It's a principle we could do with using a bit more. When you get people interested in a topic at a young age and convey a subject's importance early, the better it is for their development, especially if they get to actively participate in it and feel they can shape what goes on.

And at the moment, there is scarcely anything more important than making sure young people get to use their talents, have their opinions heard and get a chance to shape the world around them.

A campaign for the voting age to be reduced to 16 is currently gathering momentum, with a recent conference in Dublin dedicated to it as well as a nascent Facebook support page.

Lowering the voting age is laudable in and of itself - it absolutely makes sense that young people get to have their say on issues like national debt and climate change, especially since it's their generation that will have to deal with the brunt of hothouse fiscal compacts.

But without a massive corresponding overhaul of the way we approach civics and politics in the classroom and beyond, it would almost be like throwing good votes after bad.

A civics class might seem like 35 minutes you'd much rather be spending anywhere else, but it's a subject that is so much more than dry stats.

Giving young people the chance to have a say and a hand in local policies and decisions like health services, education and public amenities makes enthusiastic citizens of them from an early age, and responsible ones too.It stands to reason that young people will have more interest and respect for an initiative if they've helped set it up, or indeed set it up by themselves.

The more often young people do these projects, the better they get at them, the more beneficial public service as a concept becomes to them, the more established and valued youth participation becomes in the wider community. Apathy then has to up sticks and try somewhere else.

But just as important as embedding the concepts of citizenship locally through visible projects and action is a reimagining of how we deal with national and international politics. Nobody would ever say your opinion on music is invalid if you didn't know all the instruments in an orchestra, yet politics as a topic of discussion often has a kind of snobbish high cordon around it, a minimum qualification stipulation. It needs to be taken down.

Whether people think of them as such or not, everyone has political opinions - the key is to make that as relevant and interesting as possible, and give context as to where their ideas fit in the world.

I've run myriad courses over the years designed to do just that with youth groups of very different stripes and every time I do I'm astonished at the level and enthusiasm of debate.

For example, a simulated cabinet I ran with the teenagers of the Donegal Youth Council passed a budget that dramatically increased health and education spending, resolved that nuclear power was not a viable energy source and forsook hosting a major sporting competition to invest in rail networks, all within a few hours. Give young people that chance to talk and take action and watch them fly.

In the Catholic Church, expert HR people that they are, Confirmation is the sacrament that gives the chance for 12-year-olds to reinforce for themselves something their parents did for them at birth.

The secular world too needs to build a foundation for young people, all young people, to be able to participate fully in their communities and make the changes they wish to see, for themselves and for others.

That way, by the time they come to vote at 16 they'll not only be ready, they'll be able and willing too.