Archives

OK

Random entry RSS

Loading

  • Posted in:

    Where are all the young feminists?

    by

        By Linda Kelly.   If ever there was a question to raise the hackles on the back of my neck, it is the question ‘Where are all the young feminists?’ A question which is never posed without the accompanying critique that young women simply don’t care about equality or about the path that previous generations of women warriors have beaten down for them. And why does it annoy me so much? Because, in my experience, the critique is simply not true. Firstly, there are lots of young feminists. Lots! Since the time we (Jennifer DeWan and I) set up Cork Feminista in August 2010, there has been a surge in young feminist groups. As Aisling O Connor of Sibéal says “Feminism is alive and well in Ireland today and there has been a rejuvenation of feminist activism and scholarship in recent years”. For example, there are the Irish Feminist Network, Sibéal, the Feminist Society in NUIG, the new Siren Magazine in Trinity College where the DUGES society also operates and FemSoc in NUIM. And before any of us got started there was the Belfast Feminist Network in Northern Ireland and UK Feminista which was set up by Kat Banyard, author of the Equality Illusion. Alison Spillane of the Irish Feminist Network points out that “young people in particular seem to be drawn toward the feminist movement”. For me, the problem isn’t that there are no young feminists, the problem is that the myth has been propagated to the point where it is now accepted as fact. The result is devastating – a generation of excited and passionate activists is slowly being made to feel invisible. Aisling O Connor of Sibéal considers that “The present so-called ‘wave’ of feminism is quieter than those that went before it” and she links this to the fact that many young people are not willing to call themselves a feminist though they still extol a certain level of feminist consciousness. This is definitely true of many Cork Feminista supporters and many of my own friends. And it is this which is perhaps the divider between feminist generations. Young women often refuse to use the word feminist while saying and doing very feminist things. The sting is that the activists who have gone before often feel betrayed by this and feel it’s an insult to their work and identity. And so begins the vicious cycle whereby established feminists question the activities of young feminists, and they in turn resent being silenced and become even more alienated from the traditional movement. Does this make the movement quieter? Perhaps. Less effective – not necessarily. The world has changed and activism and protest have changed with it; our generation is simply figuring out our own way of doing things. Online connections, with well-thought-out branding, are our tool of choice to engage young audiences. And it’s working. All of the groups command popular support across social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and their own blogs that get tens of thousands of hits. Yet, for whatever reason, be it that something is not clearly labelled as ’feminist’ or because it doesn’t happen in a physical room, it is often dismissed. Not only is this disheartening for the thousands who have found a home for their voice online, it also presupposes that this is the only type of activism that young feminists engage in: another myth All of the groups named hold regular events and activities, organise protests and demos and campaign on feminist issues. In the 20 months that Cork Feminista has been established we’ve had 24 events and spoken at a variety of others. Alison Spillane points out that “young feminists can be found on the streets protesting, for example, against cuts to lone parents and campaigning for long overdue changes to Ireland’s abortion laws”. Despite all of this great work, I still get asked why the young feminists are not doing anything – more often than not in spaces where emerging feminists should be getting support, like at  National Women’s Council members’ meetings. And it needs to stop. It shouldn’t be about younger feminists, or older feminists, emerging feminists or established feminists. It should be about all of us focusing on issues and campaigns and learning from each other from a platform of mutual respect. So I present you with a challenge. To those who have ever wondered where the young feminists are and to my peers who often feel ignored and invisible, remember Saturday 19th May. The Irish Feminist Network is hosting a conference entitled ‘Feminist Activism in Ireland, Past, Present & Future’. It is the perfect opportunity for all of us to bridge the current chasm that has been created by the question ‘Where are all the young feminists?’ I’ll be there. I hope you are too.     Linda Kelly is the co-founder of Cork Feminista and a Director of the Irish Family Planning Association and Hanna’s House Peace Project. @corkfeminista

    Loading

    Read more

  • Posted in:

    Vincent Salafia – Coming To A Campaign Near You. By Michael Smith and Ruadhán Mac Eoin (archive 2010)

    by

    The heroic but failed champion of Tara is leading the campaign against a motorway near Newgrange   Vincent Salafia is back with a “Save Newgrange” campaign. A man with a panache for publicity, the populace associates the 43-year old with the Tara/ M3 and Carrickmines Castle campaigns. Now he is to address plans for a Slane bypass within a half kilometre of the boundaries of the World Heritage Site at Newgrange. Given the history of 22 road fatalities in Slane – caused primarily by articulated lorries – there are good reasons why Slane’s residents want trucks to bypass their town. The NRA’s costly plan effectively delivers a motorway parallel to the M1, at one point only four miles distant, while causing significant environmental impacts once again in the Boyne Valley, making this the third motorway in the valley. It cuts between Slane and the Brú na Bóinne complex of Knowth, Dowth – and closest of all to Newgrange, Ireland’s most famous pre-historic site.   There appear to be serious questions about Salafia’s suitability to front this campaign. He has a history of falling out with campaigns over the years. As far back as 2004 Phoenix Magazine commented that he “seems to foment trouble in his own camp wherever he gets involved”.  It also noted that in 2003 “Salafia was accused by then An Taisce press spokesman, [Ruadhán] Mac Eoin (one of the co-authors of this piece), of censoring An Taisce press releases from the Carrickminescastle.org discussion forum, of which Salafia was the moderator”.  Endless self-referential and often abusive emails were exchanged between assorted environmentalists pleading with Salafia to co-operate with mainstream heritage groups, and Salafia and a small group of his cohorts. Salafia, for example, was accused of subverting an attempted alliance called the Friends of Carrickmines.   Now in 2010, Salafia has another campaign.  Once again cyberspace reverberates with personalised environmental vituperation and Salafia is being accused afresh of censorship, removing comments and distorting information. Meanwhile Salafia himself has just issued a press release, implicating others in cyber-attacks, stating “a complaint has been filed with the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation’s Computer Crime Investigation Unit, and Facebook Ireland, on behalf of the Save Newgrange campaign, alleging harassment, intimidation and cyber-stalking by the Bypass Slane Campaign”. It also complains “there has been a coordinated smear campaign against the Save Newgrange group” and that “attacks are increasing in intensity and malice”, before calling for “an investigation into the conspiracy, including links to the Fianna Fail party”. Salafia for his part says that, “the website is for supporters of the campaign only…we directed people to go to Boards [website boards.ie] and have those discussions” and that it is not a discussion forum.     As far back as 2001, the Sunday Business Post had carried a report titled “Hacker destroys Brehon Law research website”, detailing how Salafia had made a complaint to the Garda computer crime division that his website had mysteriously been attacked. How then does this heritage hero get so enmired in bitterness and fractiousness, having apparently split or been ejected from four high-profile environmental campaigns – “Carrickminders”, “Save Tara Skryne Valley”, “Campaign to Save Tara”, and most recently, “Shell 2 Sea”? He told Village “the thing is, in every single campaign in Ireland, there are always disputes: that’s just the nature of campaigns. It was the nature of the revolution in this country”.   Vincent Salafia first came to prominence in September 2002, as an occupation began at the Carrickmines Castle archaeological complex in county Dublin. At this stage Salafia was intermittently using the name “Michael O’Toole” (confusingly, his birth name;  he also passes as Ó Tuathal). At the outset of the Carrickmines campaign, Salafia had bravely indicated he would be the plaintiff in the proposed High Court action. He indicated he was a lawyer. Yet ultimately these cases were taken by fellow heritage activists Dominic Dunne and Gordon Lucas – with a subsequent case taken by Michael Mulcreevy.  While he had legal training in Florida, Village understands that although he applied many years ago to the Florida Board of Bar Examiners, he has yet to gain full qualification. Very early on at Carrickmines differences emerged between the campaigners. Around this time the first of multiple reports emerge of Salafia leaving behind debts, particularly to well-meaning environmentalists for rent. An unconscionable inability to work with others was gaining traction, with the proceeds from a benefit gig providing a source of acrimony here; a borrowed generator going missing there; and unapproved statements proving divisive thither.   According to Phoenix Magazine in 2004, Salafia was “booted out as a spokesman by the rest of the Carrickminders after several solo runs to the media”. In December 2003, while court action was underway, a press advisory was issued by Carrickmines plaintiff Dominic Dunne and others, stating Salafia “had no consent to either act on our behalf or imply any approval to do the same”. It also claimed “certain statements by him [Salafia] alluding to speak on behalf of others have been unreliable and misinformed”. Three years later in 2006, in the last of the three Carrickmines court cases, Salafia was once again turning up outside the Supreme Court, briefing the media. Once again a contradictory advisory was issued by Dominic Dunne. Salafia told Village that Carrickminders voted “democratically” for his continued involvement in the campaign, but others dispute this.   One of the more remarkable rows regarding Salafia took place in May 2004, involving the “Save the Tara-Skreen Valley Campaign”. Again campaigners issued a “please do not publish” press advisory, stating Salafia did not have either “consent or authority” to make press statements on behalf of the campaign or its individual members. As was reported in Phoenix, any committee members who voted for such action “got a solicitor’s letters from Salafia”. As at Carrickmines, Salafia had held himself out as the litigant for a legal action – while also promoting himself as spokesman. Village understands Salafia’s legal letters essentially accused the members

    Loading

    Read more

  • Posted in:

    In the Eye of the Times – a week as seen by the Irish Times

    by

      For those who see the media affected by liberal or secular bias, for those who see the media as agents of corrupt power, reading the editorial direction of any particular newspaper is a simple task. They can always find confirmation of their view in particular opinion pieces or news stories. Ireland’s newspapers do not define themselves as those of many European countries do, on liberal/conservative, left/right, secular/religious lines. Our newspapers, like our main political parties, have a bit of everything. Assessing a newspaper’s orientation thus requires more than a reading the (little-read) editorial opinion columns or contributor opinion pieces. These can give us clues, but little more. Newspapers make it their business to ensure a spread of columnists: Joe Higgins TD and Senator Ronan Mullen write in the Irish Daily Mail; John Waters and Fintan O’Toole write in The Irish Times. Inclusions and exclusions in news selection, the tendency and tone of headlines, the choice of vocabulary – all of these details, and many more, contribute to the impact a newspaper has on its readers. With these characteristics in mind I took a snapshot of The Irish Times in an arbitrarily chosen week, Monday 23rd to Saturday 28th April. Several major themes ran through the news coverage and opinion pieces for some or all of those six days: the referendum on the fiscal treaty, the troika view of and the prospects for the Irish economy, media ownership and diversity issues and internal disputes at Independent News and Media, the French presidential election and its possible impact on EU policies. All of these were also extensively covered by other media. The Irish Times also had its selected themes, carrying several stories prominently on education, and on the Catholic Church, and on the connections between them. It ran features under the rubric, The Politics of Water, and a series of pieces in the foreign news pages about the Caucasus region, ahead of a meeting in Dublin of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). No other Irish medium showed anything like the same interest in the OSCE meeting. The Irish Times’ piece in this series on Azerbaijan excluded any reference to the capital, Baku, as the location of the Eurovision Song Contest, so it did not try to connect the subject to a broad readership. The choice of topic and its treatment reflected the agenda of the inter-governmental organisation, OSCE, and of its host this week, the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs. The newspaper takes this perspective in many other matters, basing much of its agenda on the government’s and focusing its coverage on individual ministers. Front-page headlines of this week name-checked Varadkar (Monday), Gilmore (Tuesday), Howlin (Wednesday), Kenny (Friday). Gilmore was centre-stage on a report about trade unions advocating a No vote in the referendum. Howlin took the lead on a report about public service employees’ allowances being under scrutiny. Kenny was credited in a report that the state (deferentially State in The Irish Times house-style) might get a possible larger-than-expected proportion of the sale price of state assets. The first two of these stories, at least, could have been told from other perspectives, e.g. Pressure builds on ICTU to advocate No, or Public service unions vow to protect allowances. The Irish Times’s choices indicate a primary orientation to those in political, economic, cultural, educational and other elites: other front-page names during the week included O’Reilly (Thursday) of Independent News and Media, Le Brocquy (Thursday), whose death was very generously marked, and Bono (Friday), in reference to his role in a spat between property developers. Two members of the European political elite, Sarkozy and Hollande, were named in a page-1 headline on the French presidential election (Monday) as presumably familiar to readers. Personal names and personal agency were less clearly stated when it came to questionable behaviour by people in authority. A page-1 report (Monday) on ministers’ spending €7 million on outside consultancies merely listed the larger spends, without giving any standard by which to judge whether this was a lot or a little. A story on Michael Lowry (Tuesday) was another product of the assiduous work of public affairs correspondent Colm Keena: the reports on page 1 and page 5 recorded that property owned by a Lowry company was not recorded on the TD’s register of interests, and listed documented details about the company and about Lowry’s connections with disgraced financier Michael Fingleton. The Irish Times did not state, “Lowry fails to register land ownership”, much less explore his previous record in this regard or the sanctions for not making complete returns. As it turned out, there was no failure of compliance on Lowry’s part: The Irish Times (Saturday) reported that an Oireachtas committee had ruled that Lowry was not required to register details of the property transaction, just his directorship of the company involved. If this was a correction of the earlier report, it was not presented as such. The Irish Times, if we are to judge by the minuscule Corrections column, very rarely gets things wrong, and then only on relatively trivial details. A muffled 38-word first sentence led a page-1 report (Wednesday) on a Catholic priest against whom sex abuse allegations were made being allowed to continue in service. Here too, the passive voice much favoured by The Irish Times was used: “the parish pastoral council was not given any of this information”, “Father Benito was allowed to serve”, etc. The paper did not identify who was responsible for these decisions. Coverage of the Catholic Church also included extensive coverage of the forthcoming Eucharistic Congress (Tuesday), including a striking front-page photograph of a woman with the veil she wore to the 1932 Congress, and a long feature (Tuesday) about church influence in teacher education that included some critical from students. However, The Irish Times did not give as much attention as other media during the week to church-government differences over mandatory reporting of sexual abuse claims, nor to the church’s censure of broadcaster-priest

    Loading

    Read more

  • Posted in:

    Alternatives – economic, social and environmental (Village Magazine, May)

    by

    The Egalitarian Niall Crowley, equality consultant and former CEO of the Equality Authority, commissioned some alternative voices economically, socially and environmentally We are constantly told there are no alternatives. The markets allow for no flexibility, they say. The Troika demand this, they tell us. Closing down the debate inspires a hopelessness and yet it suits the dominant and doomed economic project to get us back to where we were and to protect those interests that, supposedly, retain the capacity to get us there. It stifles public debate and locks all commentators into ways of thinking that narrow the range of solutions being considered. We need alternatives now more than ever before if we are to imagine a different and better future. The current situation in Ireland “requires a refounding of the the institutions and culture of the Irish State, and a new development project for the country”, according to Kirby and Murphy in their book ‘Towards a Second Republic’ (Pluto Ireland, 2011). They bemoan the constraints to our social imagination. They quote Colin Hay writing about the situation in Britain: “that new economic paradigms are difficult to summon up, especially when you need them most”. Those who are working on alternatives – alternative policies, strategies and even models for society and the economy  do not get the public space they need.   The Economist Sinéad Pentony, Head of Policy with TASC, writes that tax determines society Taxes provide the revenue that we need to educate our children, care for those who are ill, keep our communities safe and support those who are out of work or in retirement.  Ireland is an advanced economy, with western European standards of social and economic development.  If we wish to maintain and enhance these standards, our levels of taxation will also need to be comparable to those of our most advanced European neighbours. In 2009, Ireland’s overall tax-to-GDP ratio was the third lowest in the European Union at 28 per cent, and the second lowest in the Eurozone.  This is compared to an EU average of 38 per cent.  The difference between Ireland and our European neighbours is primarily attributable to Ireland’s relatively low level of (employer and employee) social-security contributions, more commonly known as PRSI, and the relatively low levels of local-government taxation. The tax base was eroded over the last two decades by a policy of cutting taxes when they should have been increased, and through the proliferation of tax breaks that undermined the tax base and fuelled the property boom.   We need a lot of painful adjustments to make up for the mistakes of the past.  TASC has been making the case for rebuilding the tax system in a way that creates the conditions for greater equality and sustainable and job-rich growth. Government income and Government expenditure are out of line. The Government, in its first budget, has maintained the budgetary parameters set by the previous administration, prioritising spending cuts over tax increases.  TASC has proposed a different package of measures to reduce the deficit by focusing on revenue-raising measures that will minimise the impact on employment, economic growth and low-income groups. Taxation measures that promote equality and sustainable growth must target high-income groups, property assets, unproductive activity and passive income (e.g. rent), as well as protecting the environment.   For example, this would mean that the Universal Social Charge is levied on all income from inheritances, gifts and capital gains in the same way that it is currently levied on labour income.  The thresholds determining liability to Capital Gains and Acquisitions taxes would be reduced.  While the last Budget made some progress in this regard, it did not go far enough. Tax reliefs are generally regressive since they disproportionately benefit higher earners and property-owners.  The curtailment of pension-tax reliefs and reliefs relating to rental income would increase the tax take while minimising the impact on low-income families.  The domicile levy has failed to ensure that wealthy Irish people who are non-resident for tax purposes pay their fair share.  There is clearly a need for a radical rethink of how these wealthy elites should be taxed.  Other countries have successfully taxed their wealthy citizens through taxation based on citizenship or taxation of global assets.  The question is: do we have the political will to put in place equitable taxation measures for our wealthy citizens? Ireland has very low levels of local taxation compared to other European countries.  TASC supports equality-proofed residential-property tax and water charges, as these measures represent an opportunity to sustainably fund reformed local services that are more accountable and responsive to local needs. Unfortunately, the flat-rate household charge is highly regressive because people on lower incomes pay proportionately far more of their income than those on higher incomes. While there is a lack of clarity regarding how water charges will be implemented, the indications are that they will not be taking household size or circumstances into consideration, so registerig a disproportionate impact on low-income households and larger families. Ireland also has very low levels of social-security contributions.  We should be planning for gradual increases in employer and employee PRSI, combined with general taxation, to provide free-universal healthcare and earnings-related pensions. Minimising the impact of tax increases on low-income groups not only promotes equality and allows people to live in dignity, it also protects spending in the economy, which is crucial for economic recovery.   TASC’s taxation proposals outline in a credible way a realistic set of measures to move us away from an under-resourced, unsustainable and unfair tax system and towards a modern progressive European tax system. The Sociologist Mary Murphy, lecturer in Irish Politics and Society in NUI Maynooth and one of the organisers of Claiming our Future, writes that without a struggle of ideas there can be no political struggle. In ‘Shock Doctrine’ Naomi Klein chillingly describes the Right as always ready, waiting for moments of crisis, to move in and apply its prescriptive ideas.  While the Left also expects opportunity in crisis, progressives have been found

    Loading

    Read more

  • Posted in:

    Gurdgiev vs ICTU: debate on social partnership

    by

    Social Partnership is corruption.   Illegal corruption – in its various forms and expressions – is hardly a rarity in Irish society. This much we know. Perhaps less well understood are the legally permitted forms of corrupt behaviour that contribute to social and economic degradation and undermine democratic institutions and the legitimacy of the State.

    Loading

    Read more