Villagers 14-12-06

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Response to Vincent Browne: Voters ignorant and misinformed

Vincent Browne missed a point in his article on the Frank Luntz edition of The Week in Politics (‘Brain dead politics', Village, 7 December). What struck me about the show was not only the cynicism of the audience but also their general ignorance of political issues. They were scathing about their elected leaders, but then spoke in the most vague generalities about what they expected from them.

As someone who has campaigned in over a dozen election campaigns, I continue to be stunned at the level of ignorance the average voter has about the political decision-making process. The question is, whose fault is that? The political system is awash with sources of information, and the media too. Yet a great section of our fellow citizens almost seem to take pride in the fact that they know next to nothing about how and why decisions are made.

I am not highlighting voters who disagreed with my views – at least they were informed. I'm talking about the voters who told me that a majority of Munster is now Muslim; that the EU gave the political parties ?250m in cash to get the Nice Treaty passed; that 50 per cent of the national budget goes to pay TDs' salaries (that's ?360m per TD, per annum. Nice work if you can get it); and that the Taoiseach is chosen not by election but by an interview panel to whom he submits his CV. I'm also talking about a particular Fianna Fáil TD who recently marched in his constituency against a government decision that he supported in the Dáil – without a peep from his constituents.

If you despair at the quality, or lack thereof, in Dáil Eireann, consider this. For every moron in the Dáil, it takes around 8,500 morons to elect him. The Irish public can't just keep washing their hands of their responsibility for electing gobshites.

Jason O'Mahony, Stillorgan, Co Dublin

Product RED iPod: Product RED a problem, not a solution  

Is it really necessary to give more publicity to the nauseating Product RED celebrity “charidee” effort promoted by Bono and his rich American Hollywood and Silicon Valley cronies by describing the red iPOD Nano as a “must have” for Christmas (‘Gadgets', Village 7 December)? The hypocrisy of the Product RED initiative which fails to recognise the nature of globalisation features the involvement of major US capitalists like the Gap and Apple is part of the problem in the third world, not the solution.

Wojciech Blaska  Lombard Street West, Dublin 8

The media and the North: RTÉ doesn't ask the tough questions

On Monday 4 December, RTÉ showed two films of Ian Paisley, one as part of the news and one as part of a Prime Time programme. One showed Ian in real torrid bellicose mode in the new embryonic Stormont Chambers, marking the fact that he speaks the loudest. The other showed Ian as a friendly, demure, smiling, happy person. This was the time of the release of the Irish government's report on collusion of the British Forces with local loyalist groups. Tommie Gorman did not ask Ian about this collusion. Neither did Brian O'Connell when he reported on the Blair / Bertie meeting in London.

I might have expected these blind spots from RTÉ in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s but for them to be still fooled is very disloyal.

To be fair to Bertie, the time was spent doing this report but the media do have a role also to play in normal democracies.

Bertie had to meet Mr Mubarak of Egypt, and we read where Dermot Ahern is willing to help the Palestinians only as long as the elected government recognises one of its neighbours. This is a bit harsh as during the recent invasion of Lebanon we were also told that many other countries also refuse to recognise Israel, for example Bangladesh and Indonesia, and no sanctions are applied to these countries by the UN the EU. After all Ireland refused to recognise the UK's claim over the North and we were never isolated. Is Egypt not one of the countries named in the recent Report of the EU into Extraordinary Renditions that dabbles in this horrid practice?

Peter Kennedy, Sutton, Dublin 13

Tackling road deaths: Make speed limiters compulsory

Now that all other solutions have been tried, maybe it's time to try the obvious to eliminate the everyday horror on the roads. Simply have a moratorium on new and second-hand cars and trucks imported into Ireland unless documented proof that they are fitted with a speed limiter is provided. Let the onus lie on the importer / seller as well as the owner of the vehicles to provide it. Give every owner of a vehicle without a limiter a specific time frame to have it fitted in a DOE centre. This could be paid for by the government in conjunction with the insurance companies with a drop in premiums as an added incentive. All vehicles found without insurance or a limiter should be clamped or seized until such time as a certificate can be produced: at the owner's expense.

Ray Cawley, Rathanna, Sligo

Age of sexual consent: We must protect our children

I must take issue with the recommendation by the Fianna Fail-chaired child protection committee that the age of sexual consent be lowered to 16 rather than 17 as it is now. It is rarely that I feel at one with the Catholic Church but in this, they are correct – we must not only protect our children from irresponsible adults but more importantly, protect them from themselves. What next? In 10 years' time, consensual sex at 14?

Paul Doran, Clondalkin, Dublin 22

Labour in election 2007: Labour: progressive on transport

I support the Labour Party's pledge of 500 extra buses for Dublin and a ?1 flat-rate, universal fare for all routes should they get into power after the election next year.

Urgent measures are needed to stop Dublin's traffic grinding to complete gridlock. We need to entice people away from their cars. Great and all as the LUAS is, and the proposed Metro will be, these projects, even if they don't suffer any delays, take years to build. New buses can be bought on-stream immediately. People should remember this when they're voting next year.

Public transport / traffic and the health service will be two of the main issues in the election next year. Do you want to vote again for this Fianna Fáil / Progressive Democrat Coalition Government and their failed transport policy of favouring cars and roads over public transport? Or do you want a public transport system that is on par with the rest of Europe?

I just hope that if the Labour Party, as is quite likely, goes into coalition with either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael after the next election, that they don't dilute their pledge to provide these extra buses and amended fares.

Paul Kinsella, Santry, Dublin 9

Blood sports: The ugly face of blood sports

Christmas is never a happy time for Ireland's wildlife. Coursing clubs step up their organised abuse of our hare population, subjecting these innocent creatures to the stress and terror of baiting sessions and weeks of unnatural confinement.

Snobs on horseback will hound foxes and stags in pursuance of a tradition bequeathed to us by Britain, a country that has outlawed these cruelties.

These blots on the countryside are glamorised by Christmas cards that reproduce famous hunting scenes. Not ones that show animal baiting as it is, but benign rustic images of pomp and circumstance, of red-coated hunters and packs of hounds setting off against the background of quaint village scenes, or of the hunt in full flight. All the magic and excitement of the chase and its mythical soul-stirring elements are conjured up by such images.

Yet some of the painters who depicted hunting with apparent approval did not shrink from also revealing the truth about “the pursuit of the uneatable by the unspeakable”.

George Stubbs, whose paintings are hailed by the blood-sports fraternity, also painted a work entitled ‘The Grosvenor Hunt' (pictured above). This shows a fox on the point of death, writhing in agony and encircled by hunt followers who look on without a trace of emotion.

Edwin Landseer likewise portrayed stag hunting in a less-than-favourable light. The majestic creature, exhausted and terrified, is stranded on a loch island, awaiting the approach of the pack. The painting exudes fear and calls to mind man's inhumanity.

I might also mention the robin. I have no problem with the many colourful cards that show this bird in all its glory. But I would remind readers that the robin is one of a number of songbirds targeted by so-called ‘tourist shooters'. These trigger-happy cowboys litter the landscape with dead, maimed and mutilated singers. They kill the very symbol of Christmas.

I know ‘tis the season to be jolly, but no amount of positive imagery or glib visual propaganda will alter the fact that hunting is a disgrace to humanity.

John Fitzgerald  Callan, Co Kilkenny

Northern Ireland: Politicians stayed silent on killings

The fact that no senior ministerial figure in the 26 counties has publicly accepted any form of responsibility for not protecting the lives of Irish people from the British-inspired terror campaign conducted by loyalist gangs is truly appalling.

The report of the all-party committee under the Fianna Fáil TD Sean Ardagh did not hesitate to lay blame at the door of the British security services for the deaths and murders of innocent Irish people. Yet when these atrocities were taking place, despite concrete evidence by some of those involved, the politicians remained silent and to this day have maintained a discreet silence.

In War Without Honour, published in 1989, former intelligence officer Fred Holroyd gave details of the deaths of Irish people at the hands of British-backed terror gangs. Former British army major Colin Wallace also detailed such abuses but no one listened. Now the issue has come into the headlines.

Today MI5 are assuming control of all policing in the six counties and they are answerable to no one. The problem has not gone away, you know!.

Des Long, Corbally, Limerick

‘Northern Ireland state' a police force

Vincent Browne writes (Village, 29 November): “The problem of Northern Ireland since 1922 has been that a sizeable minority have not accepted the police force, had not accepted the state.”
What was the “Northern Ireland state” (a widely-used term)? It was a police force, and little else. In every other respect, the state was the British state.
The Northern Catholics were the only people in a state that was called a democracy for whom the state was reduced to a police force.
The way people ‘accept a state' is by participating in its political institutions. There were no political institutions, of either the British state proper, or its reduced Northern Ireland form, in which Northern catholics might participate. The state was a hostile police force and nothing else, except a kind of make-believe politics that would not be accepted by the electorates of either Britain or the Republic. And that is why a basic re-ordering of police affairs remains a precondition of Catholic participation in the new scheme.  
What is real is the police, not the make-believe of politics in Northern Ireland.
jack lane
Millstreet, Co Cork

Statement: Roche's shameful failure to control Ireland's climate pollution

The latest Sustainable Energy Ireland (SEI) figures remove the last figleaf covering the government's shameful failure to control Ireland's climate pollution. These reports must puncture the bubble of complacency and denial surrounding Minister Roche on Ireland's climate change performance. Otherwise the government's new climate action plan due in the new year won't be worth the paper it's written on.

Not only have our greenhouse emissions risen by almost twice the amount allowed under the Kyoto Protocol, but these figures confirm that Irish emissions are moving in the wrong direction, rising in line with economic growth.

Minister Roche has recently made much of the fact that emissions haven't risen as fast as economic growth since 1990, the baseline for our Kyoto commitment. This argument is similar to that used by President Bush when he reneged on Kyoto. Now even that crumb of comfort has been swept away.

It's time for a fundamental re-think of government policy across all areas if Ireland is to do its fair share to prevent climate chaos. The transformation needed over the next 20 years is as big as the one Ireland has experienced in the last 20 years. As the Stern report emphasised, if we start now the opportunities far outweigh the costs. If we fail to act, the following 20 years will see an even bigger adjustment, forced on us by climate and energy shocks, with far more disruptive and uncertain consequences.

The SEI reports came on the same day [12 December] as a study which predicts that the North Pole could be open ocean without any ice in summer as early as 2040 because of accelerating climate change.

Oisin Coghlan, Friends of the Earth, 9 Upper Mount Street, Dublin 2

Rendition flights: Government accepts assurances from liars

So the Taoiseach and Dermot Ahern are miffed at the ‘bad timing' of the revelations by the European Parliament's Temporary Committee that 147 CIA flights landed in Ireland. Sure, don't they know an election looms!

When Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern says he accepts US assurances that Ireland is not being involved in rendition / torture flights, we need to put this into context. He is speaking of a White House administration that lied about WMDs, lied about Iraq being involved with Al Qaida and 11 September, hedged about its surveillance programme on its own citizens and equivocated about the status of Guantanamo detainees so they could be quasi-legally tortured. In short, he is saying he accepts the assurances of proven liars.

The excuses given by the government for such spineless hat-tipping are as pathetic as they are transparent. It would damage Ireland's relations with the US, we are told. It would damage the economy: offended US companies would leave Ireland. As to the first, we need to distinguish between the US population and the White House. Recently the former showed its disapproval of the latter by hammering them at the election polls. If there is a change of regime in the White House, no doubt our great leaders will manage a complete U-turn without the least sense of shame. As to the second, what patriotic US companies does our government have in mind? Maybe the ones that are relocating and outsourcing outside the US in droves to avoid high rates of corporate tax – the very reason they are here in the first place? All this ‘loss of jobs' guff is the same bogeyman our government wheels out every time it wants our compliance on some policy – as with both Maastricht and Nice, for instance.

We are told we cannot close Shannon to US military and rendition / torture flights because it would mean a loss of business to the Shannon region. The truth is, Shannon could easily wean itself off any reliance on the US military. The Shannon region does not need the shame the government brings on it with money obtained from war, murder, torture and thousands of Iraqi deaths. If the government sees that it can do as it likes in this regard, it will push the boundaries of what's acceptable with its own citizens. By not caring about our government's complicity in these torture and military flights, we take a step closer to where it will believe it can treat us the same way.

Nick Folley, Carrigaline, Co Cork