Marching the Eighth

I have a remedial math class on Friday mornings. I can talk about that today because, if you are a Yankee-Geek, it is π Day. Purists will run around in circles just before 2 o'clock because it is then  3/14 1:59. One patissier got a contract from Google to bake an appropriate pie. Pie! Pi π  geddit?! I should also acknowledge that cosmologist Stephen Hawking died peacefully at home this morning.

The kids who turn up to Maths are those who need least help because their math-anxiety is parked and they are generally On Message. The stumbling, drifting and and generally clueless ones think an hour of Instagram is the solution to their math-deficit. As we were gearing up, I heard a young chap asserting that when the Repeal the Eighth [multiprev from last year] referendum came round in May, he would "spoil his vote". He didn't feel he knew enough about the consequences of Yes or No, to make an informed choice, and he wasn't going to make an un-informed choice. That seemed rather commendable, but one of his female colleagues was rowed into him about getting with the programme and informing himself about the issues because there was time to do this . . . and it certainly mattered to her how the vote turned out.

So much for his evidence-based scientific reasoning, he then started articulating the anecdotes and images that were uppermost in his mind. He didn't approve of young women getting pregnant and using abortion as an easy get out of jail free card. This was too much for me to let pass and I suggested that he and I didn't have a leg to stand on with that sort of argument. I certainly didn't feel I had any rights over m'daughters choices even though I had a quarter of my genes in common with an fetus she came to acquire. By implication, I was saying that he had even less rights to be judgmental about the actions, choices and consequences of any other citizen. Then I stopped my gob because I didn't think it was appropriate to have a discussion about that stuff with a student because of the gross disparity of age and authority. But I nodded to the women and said she'd better start getting her arguments in a row and articulating them with her peers over the next 3 months.

Woolly anecdotal reasoning is in the air this week because The Irish Supreme Court gave judgment on a case that was looking like a constitutional impediment to the Repeal of the Eighth amendment. This hinged on the rights of a Nigerian citizen to avoid repatriation because his Irish partner was pregnant with their child. The High Court suggested that the unborn fetus had effectively the same rights as a child born in Ireland including the right to have a father presence in their life.  The Supreme Court contrariwise held that the only right of the said fetus was a right to life partly because it was demonstrably silly to accord it the rights of free association, religious freedom etc. That out of the way, the government had a couple of days of debate on the issue. There Anne Rabitte FF brought up the fatal fetal abnormality anecdote; Billy Kelleher FF brought up the forcing a full term pregnancy on the raped anecdote; Louise O'Reilly SF identified the happy Downs child as a straw man. Floating all these ideas is deeply unhelpful because they imply that judgment is fine for those who don't fit the extreme cases. No it's not. The debate needs to grow up and level out: every woman has rights over her uterus which trump the rights of everyone else in the room. There will inevitably be officious, know-all, busy-body people who want to vindicate the rights of the one in the womb but those people need to shut up and mind their own business. There are too many people on the planet; far too many poor, unhappy, dispossessed people: we don't need any more. And that's the deal with Rights - they apply to everybody, including those we distrust and those for whom we feel contempt.

I mentioned this to Dau.II the day after. While I'd been in Maths-with-gender-politics class she had been on the Second March Rally Repeal on International Women's Day. She chid me good because she felt that as a Patriarch my arguments would have more meaning and conviction with the Young Buck. Clearly the young feller didn't have a very high opinion of the responsibility or sense of the young women of his acquaintance. Dau.lI also shared an important piece of statistical evidence, which cast up a very different image of woman-on-boat-to-England-for-termination. 54% of women who would take advantage of Irish abortion services are married women with children who know that they have done enough procreation and that another child would adversely impact the whole family.  We really need to get talking with our neighbours about how they are thinking, allaying their fears and engendering more compassion and much less judgment.

Repealin'

At the end of last week our Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, and his cabinet decided to push the boat out for seven (7! count 'em) constitutional amendments:

1. repeal the 8th amendment to the constitution (May 2018)
2. directly elected mayors (Oct 2018)
3. abolish blasphemy (Oct 2018)
4. role of women in the home (Oct 2018)
5. voting for the diaspora (2019)
6. easier divorce (2019)
7. votes for 16s (2019)

That's a helluva lot of tinkering at the edges of our Constitution and you might think it is time to dump De Valera's nit-picking intrusions into the fabric of 1937 society and write a new set of truths which we hold to be self-evident 80 years later. Because Dev had a particular romantic view of ideal family life he gave several hostages to fortune by proscribing alternative, actual, ways of forming households. Divorce and same-sex marriage got tied up in the constitution when they might have been more appropriately regulated by legislation. The unpicking costs money: every referendum costs about €25 million to implement.

Because the detail is important, let's capture the actual 8th Amendment. Article 40.3.3 now states:
The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.
If the new referendum  is as simple as "Do you wish to excise article 40.3.3. from the Constitution?", we're still a long way from abortion on demand in Tullamore.

ANNyway, Varadkar's announcement went out just before a March for Choice [above] scheduled for the last day of September. I tell ya boys, I've marched more this year than at any time since 1974, when we marched in defense of student grants and a group of Trots rushed off and occupied the Ministry of Education. In April it was March For Science with Dau.I and maybe 800 others people. As a quid pro quo for her support, in June I went out with her, Dau.II and their mother on a Repeal the Eighth rally in Cork. There were about 1,000 people on that go round the town.

The riot march was due to assemble at 1300 and kick off at 2pm to march from the far end of O''Connell Street to the back of Leinster House in Merrion Square. This 3km trek is now the standard route for protest. Dau.II came up from Cork, The Beloved returned from France, I drove up from the boondocks and we met Dau.I in a café in Smithfield D7. I was surprised and delighted to find another 4 family members sitting round a brunch-covered table making revolutionary signage. I was sort of expecting to meet a bunch of other people whom I knew but I was very much an outlier in the demographic: probably in the 1% percentile for age and in the minority sex as well.  The weather was gorgeous, sunny but crisp and autumnal with little risk of melanoma: the biggest weather problem was carrying winter coats.

The march was HUGE. Best signs. Some estimates are putting out 40,000 people on the side of change. There was also a fringe of counter-demonstrators from the pro-life side. And weirdly, as we shambled down Dublin's principal thoroughfare we saw another march - of Muslims apparently anti-ISIS - going up the other side of the street in the opposite direction. Poor them, they will garner zero publicity from their event. This issue is much edgier than free-the-gays or whether Trump is anti-science or even Brexit across the water. Although it is deeply divisive, a case could be made that nobody will die whether the UK goes or stays in the EU.  In the London solidarity for Repeal march this weekend, they tried to chalk 200,000 white crosses on the pavement outside the Irish Embassy.
<math aside> that's a helluva lot of crosses written while bent double. I've just taken 30 seconds to write 50 1cm x 1cm crosses on a sheet of paper. Chalk will take at least as long. That's 33 person hours on your knees. If each cross takes up 10cm^2 of pavement that's a stretch 2m wide and 100m long.</math aside>
If you're from the pro-life side of the debate, 200,000 'babies' is surely worth fighting for. If you're from the other side, that's 200,000 young women who have been able to pay for a solution to a life-changing situation. Whichever side you're on it is invidious to shunt the problem onto the country next door, and politically charged because we're meant to be a republic independent from that same country.

Around about 3pm we trailed into Merrion Square although still at least 100 closely packed metres from the stage and the speakers. One wizard wheeze from the speeches was the idea to take a leaf out of the post Vatican II Liturgy of the Eucharist  "Let us offer each other a sign of peace" when we were invited to shake hands with the strangers about us as a sign of solidarity.  Another high point was to wheel out Bernadette McAliskey who, in my day, as Bernadette Devlin aged 21, the youngest woman elected to the UK parliament in 1969.  That record was handed to Mhairi Black [aged 20] in 2015. McAliskey has been through the wars,

• she witnessed Bloody Sunday in 1972, 
• the next day in the House of Commons, she slapped the Home Secretary  as an act of proletarian protest when he claimed the massacre was an act of self-defense "I'm just sorry I didn't get him by the throat".
• in 1981 the McAliskey parents shot in front of their two children  by loyalist paramilitaries while a British army unit looked on. A case could be, and has been, made that McAliskey was 'taken out' with the collusion of the British government in an Israeli style realpolitik of assassination.
• in 2003 she was, still 5 feet nothing in her socks, denied entry to the US because she poses a serious threat to the security of the United States

Those are just the highlights. Along the way, and before she got married, she gave birth to a daughter Róisin. So she's been in the firing line of sexual politics as well. On Saturday she called on Sinn Féin, especially deputy leader MaryLou McDonald, to row in actively on the campaign to Repeal the Eighth. All political parties are adverse to risk; they are unwilling to take a stand on any principle if a substantive number of their traditional supporters are likely to be against it. Sinn Féin is the largest radical party, and popular among those too young to remember The Troubles. They could really show leadership and gain traction on the Repeal campaign. Have they the bottle?

Metanoia

Have you noticed how almost all Protestants have Protestant parents? It's because most people, most of the time, are not critically evaluating their choices; they are rather rolling with what is easy, normal and local. You can extend this reasoning to every aspect of society and our behaviour. In the Pub it's "Will that be the usual, sir?". We're still supporting Man.U. years after we stopped dribbling the ball
 and just dribbled.  I put it to you that we'd all be better off in a happier, more open and more tolerant society if more of us changed our minds more often. There's a word for it: Metanoia, which word-a-day is urging us to use more often: it is a noun from Gk μετάνοια A profound transformation in one’s outlook.

I am, because they are rare, much taken with people who are capable of changing their minds. A piece I wrote a while ago cited The Edge Question for 2008: What have you changed your mind about and why? As it happens both the leaders of the main political parties in Ireland - Leo Varadkar, [R below] Fine Gael and Micheál Martin [R above], Fianna Fáil - had a salutary change of heart (within a few days of each other) during the run-up to the Repeal the Eighth referendum about which I'll soon stop gabbling [backlog] - promise. I say salutary because a) they came round to Yes b) at a time when it was by no means obvious that Yes-Repeal was the The Wave of the Future c) It is a nice change for politicians to be leading from the front rather than rowing desperately in the wake of public opinion to secure another term at the next election.

For Varadkar, his volte face was achieved by listening to two of the many Difficult Cases which engaged the media at the time but also after Martin had announced that, for him, the Eighth Amendment was a cruel and unusual punishment which just didn't deal with the reality of crisis pregnancy in Ireland. I got the feeling in January 2018, that someone close to Mr Martin had bluntly told him that crisis pregnancies didn't only happen to women Out There. The alphabet soup of A B C D X & Y evidence / cases / anecdotes had all been available during all the years when Martin had been content with the post 1983 status quo, but suddenly he announced his conversion. Who knows? It doesn't matter why, it matters that his change of mind made a significant change in the tenor and impetus of the debate.  Likewise Varadkar.

In the spirit of David Attenborough, I'll show a picture of some endangered species, 31 Fianna Fáil TDs and Senators who nailed their No colours to the SS Love-Boat on 3rd May 2018:
These chaps [mostly chaps as you see despite pushing the five women to the front] will now be hoping that a general election is not called anytime soon. They have some overlap with the 32 TDs who voted against holding a referendum [full list at link] at all at all. And to be fair, there's also a good few Fine Gael and Sinn Fein pols who are adamantly No. Please remember their faces when they come round asking for your vote and ask them whether they've had any sense of metanoia so as to better to represent the will of people.

Yes Repeal the Eighth

On 25th of May, we-the-people are having another chance at Government By Referendum. The mechanics of it are quite simple: we are going to repeal the Eighth amendment to the Constitution by replacing Article 40.3.3. It's all on refcom2018.ie
The Present Article 40.3.3
The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right. This subsection shall not limit freedom to travel between the State and another state. This subsection shall not limit freedom to obtain or make available, in the State, subject to such conditions as may be laid down by law, information relating to services lawfully available in another state.
The Proposed Article 40.3.3
Provision may be made by law for the regulation of termination of pregnancy.

The short answer is that I'll be voting Yes because that's what my daughters want. I got my relevant ethics from my PhD mentor "Your rights end where my nose begins". You can work away with your version of a life-well-lived so long as it doesn't impinge on mine.  Dau.I and Dau.II defend themselves with "Your rights end where my uterus begins".  It's not about abortion-on-demand, which will be a long long time coming in rear-window focussed Ireland, it's about choice.  Dau.I was caught protesting by Newstalk Radio and featured on the 6 o'clock news a few days ago "I feel really frustrated by the whole way the referendum is going. With the marriage referendum [3 years ago] the arguments from every side seemed to be much more fact-based than this referendum which seems to be entirely about feelings". Starting with John the Bastard, son of the Laird and the red-headed cook,  our family has a long tradition of  unexpected pregnancies, only a quarter of which ended up with a child raised by two parents of different sex. In one of the other three cases, The Man [well he was only a chap really, although his plumbing worked] fucked on, contributed his teaspoonful and then fucked off. That's about the level of support a women can expect from The State or any of those people who are talking large about the rights of the unborn. In fairness, incubators women get really good care, paid for by the state, during their pregnancy so long as they continue pregnant. But 48 hours after delivery, they are on their own for the 12 or 24 years it takes to raise a child.

In one of my remedial maths classes in March, I overheard a chap say that he was going to the polling station on 25th May 2018, because he believed in participation in the democratic process; but he was going to 'spoil his vote' because he didn't have enough information about either side. I thought that was commendable and rational: like Dau.I's deprecating this referendum which seems to be entirely about feelings. But one of his female classmates was having none of it: "You should @&*$ing well go and get yourself informed about the issues before the day, so". At which he started inarticulating about how He didn't think that a young woman should be able to easily shuck off the responsibility for falling pregnant. I tell ya, The Patriarchy starts before you leave your teens. His attitude - I won't dignify it as reasoning - is wrong on at least two counts.

1. He, no more than I, doesn't have any standing on the matter. The goings on in someone else's uterus - a rather extreme example of parent-offspring conflict; about which I knew something when I was his age 40 years ago - is none of his, or my, business.
2. He has entirely the wrong demographic image in mind when he's laying down the law. The most common class of  the 4,000 [almost certainly an underestimate] Irish women who travel to the UK each year because Ireland won't deal with its own pregnancy terminations is not young wans who get drunk, get lovin' and get unlucky in the lottery of their menstrual cycle. The majority [54%!] are rather women who already have a child or children; know from years of experience both the burden and the joy of the status of motherhood; and believe that the whole family will suffer financial, emotional and psychological loss if they bring another child into the world. There are many other burdens a woman and her family can suffer beyond drawing a fatal fetal abnormality card in the lottery.

If you ever bother to listen to the safety announcements as you prepare for take-off you'll remember the exhortation to put your own oxygen mask on before you start helping those dependent on you. Because if you-the-adult flake out from oxygen deprivation while you trick about with Little Jimmy's mask then you're both dead. In the natural world, where propagating your genes into another generation is one of the most powerful drives we know about, parents have to make conscious and unconscious decisions about whether continuing to invest in this particular offspring is the 'best' option at the current time. Humans too! - you may, with advantage, read Nisa by Marjorie Shostak: the eponymous hero falls pregnant too quickly after the birth of her first child and is told that extra burden will likely kill them all in the marginal desert land they inhabited. As an evolutionary biologist and a utilitarian, I have a particular take on matters of life and death: I cannot accept that the right to life is a black and white issue. You just have to engage with a bit of trolleyology or follow the ethical reasoning of Peter Singer to see where I'm coming from. Yes, you have to read the back story because Ethics Is Hard.

I put it to you that Pro-Lifers [vote No to the proposed change] are following Immanuel Kant with his belief in absolutes of Right and Wrong. For Kant telling a lie is wrong and therefore on the same floor as kicking a dog or setting fire to a church full of people. By showing small-but-perfectly-formed aborted foetuses on their campaign posters, they are trying to elicit a sense of human empathy with something that is about the size of a kidney bean [8 weeks on the fruit and veg comparison]. But the No-change position is that all humans of whatever size, shape or colour have a Right to Life even if that life has a disastrous effect on all around it/him/her. I loath Kant: smug, priggish and detached from the realities of life in his ideal Platonic cave. It's not perfect, but Utilitarian - greatest good for the greatest number - reasoning is practicable for many normal circumstances. There are so many of them that awkward crisis pregnancies are part of normal life and here too Utility works for me. I'm by no means Certain of my position, but women should have a choice about what happens down there.  Shipping the problem to England is just contemptible.

You and I are entitled to a position on either side of a debate. It's better if we think the consequences through. Better still if we listen with care and attention to what The Other has to say. But diversity rules apply: me, I'll have compassion for a poor woman in trouble. Too few of us give a €2 damn about a small black baby dying of infectious diarrhoea over there; too many of us affect to care for a small pink kidney bean over here that we have no intention of supporting.

Sorosgeld Sorosgate

In 1930 György Schwartz was born in Budapest. In 1936 the family shed the obviously Jewish sounding Schwartz and changed their name to Soros which means next-in-line or heir apparent in Magyar. They survived the war, not without trials, and in 1947 the boy enrolled in the London School of Economics as George Soros. After a depressing stint as a travelling salesman in seaside trinkets, he started at the bottom of a London merchant bank and really hasn't looked back. HE started the very first Hedge Fund in the 1960s. He has become rich by being lucky ruthless, insightful  and well-funded in his investments. He is now in the Top 20 Rich List, although I'm not sure if that's before or after he offloaded 2/3rds of his wealth to a philanthropic fund called Open Societies Foundation in the management of which he is still active. OSF likes to make a lavish bonfire of its money to shine a light in the darkness of poverty and ignorance:

• women's rights, LGBQRST rights, sex-workers, Roma
• Education and democracy especially in Hungary and Eastern Europe
• criminal justice, palliative care, drugs policy and migration in the USA
• health esp for the dispossessed - TB & HIV

A while back the OSF donated €137,000 [$150K] to Amnesty Ireland for its My Body My Rights campaign. That could be phrased Your rights end where my uterus begins. Now, I'm all for Down with the Eighth; not least because my daughters tell me that is the correct position. They are the only people close to me who are potentially adversely affected by the currently Constitutional "Eighth Amendment" position. As an old bloke with funds, I have no locus standi on the matter; although I will have a vote in next year's referendum. There are plenty of old white men, starting the the Pope in Rome, who are happy to impose their views of rights and wrongs on young women. But you can bet they won't be in the delivery room when an unwanted pregnancy comes to term because that's what their righteousness insists upon.  Amnesty is on the Repeal side and solicited the OSF grant to push their agenda out in the campaign when it starts to roll in the New Year.

One logo is OSF's the other SIPO's

Trouble is that the Soros intervention is, well, illegal; which makes Amnesty's position, well, ironic. It's all very well taking an illegal donation if you're a hedge-fund millionaire, or a college lecturer [send 'em in, I have low standards] but Amnesty has been standing on the letter of the law since it was new-born. It is illegal because of the Standards in Public Office Act of 2001, as vindicated by Coimisiún um Chaighdeáin in Oifigí Poiblí Standards in Public Office Commission (SIPO). This was set up in the aftermath of the planning tribunals, brown envelopes, and other financial dodginess of our leaders all through the 80s and 90s - remember GUBU? that might be a starting point. The Act applies primarily to elected members of parliaments, both Irish and European, but also necessarily applies to candidates for election. If you sail into a seat in the Dáil on €1million worth of election posters bought by your Saudi cousin O'Sama Bin Liner , then you can afford to be squeaky clean afterwards. The Abortion Rights Campaign returned $25,000 from OSF in April of this year after being fingered by SIPO.

The 2001 Act requests-and-requires that politicians disclose their [financial] interests. It also puts limits on the amount of money you can shake from other people to promote your campaign:

• Anonymous donations < €100
• Known sources; individual or corporate <€200
• Unless Body Corporate is registered with SIPO
• Total annual contribution from one source <€2,500
• Furriners = nil
• A political party or any of its sub-units may not accept a donation, of any value, from an individual (other than an Irish citizen) who resides outside the island of Ireland.
• Errrrm, that would be Mr Schwartz-Soros  even if he changed his name to ui Sraitheach

Well last week Colm O'Gorman, the Chair of Amnesty was digging in his heels and refusing to return the money on a point of political principal. I think he may be claiming the money is for education not politics. This strikes me as a) wrong and b) foolish. It will cost a lot more than €137,000 to fight the case up to the Supreme Court, so there will be fewer leaflets and posters and radio ads put out to sway the electorate about the rights of women. But if the case is not thrown out and foriegn money is deemed acceotable in political debate, then the rising tide will float all boats. Colm O'Gorman must be delusional if he thinks that his side can mobilise more foreign capital than the combined forces of the Iona "Panti Wacker" Institute, the Vatican, sundry Ayatollahs, and Chuck Tubthumper from Baptism, Tennessee. Indeed, David Quinn, the eminence gris of the Iona Institute is all behind Amnesty in taking the case up the legal ladder. Me, I'd wonder what I'd been on last night, if I woke up in bed with David Quinn.

Do we want  the finances of politics to spiral out of control? In the USA, the longest pockets almost always wins elections:

94 percent of biggest House race spenders won

82 percent of biggest Senate race spenders won

Thus the US government is effectively sold to the highest bidder. The US Supreme Court decision in Buckley v Valeo (1976) & Citizens United v Federal Election Commission (2010) held that blurfing money in campaigns is an example of  [Constitutionally protected] Free Speech. The recent revocation of Title II Net Neutrality Rules by the  Federal Communications Commission  is selling access to the US internet to the highest bidder.

Now me, I am a trained researcher with  a very expensive education, so I would prefer / expect all voters to fully inform themselves about the financial interests, voting record, likelihood of campaign promises being fulfilled, of all candidates. That would require a degree of awareness, patience, research and literacy which might qualify for a bachelor's degree but which is vanishingly rare among the Irish electorate. Most people simplify their choices to a narrow tribalism or the last name they read on an election poster outside the polling station. It is therefore illegal to put up a poster within 100m of a place for voting. But I'd much rather have dullards and reactionaries voting according to their conscience than turn the whole thing over to a money-wins-let's-burn-more-money dystopia. Let's save the planet from 100,000 plastic posters for a start.

No means Yes

Repeal the Eighth News.

You have to give tribs to the opposition for getting their message out on the face of Ben Bulben just round the corner from where William Butler Patriarchy lies buried  . . . or not buried - probably not.

Until it was removed [CENSORSHIP!! no fair etc.] the sign was seen by the plain people of Donegal and Sligo as they horseman passed by; then got another bite at the publicity cherry when the Yes side expressed outrage on Twitter and in the press. But there's no point in getting angry if you can get even; and the Irish way is to pffffft deflate the pretensions of the other side rather than punching them or setting fire to their homes. The power of photoshop has been mobilised to change the message

• Does my bum look big in this? NO
• I ♥ ViNO
• kNObs
• ☑ YES ☐ NO
• BONO
• NO country for young women
• Did I leave the gas on? NO
• Vote yes: NO more exporting women for essential healthcare.

Some of these responses are by local cartoonist Annie West who summed up the response to the marriage referendum. Thisall should remind you of the ironic response to breadmageddon during Storm Emma this Spring.

Backstory of Repeal: The Dadical- Sorosgate - October 2017 - March 2018 - Current Position

Stop piffling about the climate

 . . . and DO SOMETHING! Preferably something directed, coherent and effective. No grandstanding, no empty promises, no half-measures which won't offend the Dairy Lobby. But it's better to do something, than sit on your thumbs hoping that bush-fires, hurricanes and storm surges only happen in foreign. There is an alphabet of groups who profess to have skin in the climate game: An Taisce, Birdwatch Ireland, Concern, Dublin FoE, Eco Congregation Ireland, Feasta. But on some level they owe allegiance to Stop Climate Chaos a SuperQuango or Metabund which organised a Meet The Legislature day long Zoom on Monday 7th Dec 2o2o. SCC must have some political clout because they persuaded 90-something TDs to commit 30 minutes of their day to meeting Climateers. Irish Times reports. Seemingly about 1,000 people registered for the event and stayed for at least part of the day. The Beloved and I registered separately and tuned in from different parts of the house - to fatten the crowd, like. 

Politics is the Art of the Possible [Bismarck: Die Politik ist die Lehre vom Möglichen] but in Ireland it is the Art of the Local. Citizens elected to the national assembly keep one-and-a-half feet back in the constituency scratching backs and attending funerals so they get re-elected next time round. Accordingly everyone registered for the Zoom was assigned to their constituency breakout-room and their TDs were paraded in front of them in a beauty pageant. Actually it was more like we-the-people were the job panel interviewing prospective candidates - which in a sense we were. But copying transparency / fairness protocols from job interviews it was decided that each of our 5 TDs were posed the same five questions. Which repetition a) makes it a bit boring for almost everyone in the room b) doesn't winkle out effective triggers for each TD. 

To be useful, these sessions have to change hearts and minds. So it helps to know if TDa has a brother in Transport while TDb is married to a dairy farmer. Pitching a tailored message to each parliamentary effective is more likely to move someone than generic same old same old. In the run up to the Repeal the Eighth referendum, out current Taoiseach performed a mid-campaign U-turn to support the repeal. I am convinced that a close relative opened his eyes about a trip to England to terminate an awkward pregnancy. You can adopt the moral high ground more easily when those affected are unknowns Others. For me one of the most powerful interjections came from a young teacher from the Barrow Valley who suddenly waxed passionate about a dismal future for the kids in her class at the Educate Together school. It was brilliant as theatre, including a break in the voice, because it went off script and to the heart of the matter. An image of children growing up to shat-upon world where no birds sing.

Climate Change is really the heart of the Green Agenda and the cliché Greenie is from the middle class 'burbs: all bicycles, lentils and canvas shopping bags. These people can be dismissed by the farming lobby because they all lack meadow cred. Our constituency has incubated Mullinavat Man, a farmer from South Kilkenny, who discovered climate only about two years ago. There is a stream that runs along the edge of his family farm where he used to fish as a nipper. I don't think he was really into fishing but it was something that he did along with scrumping apples and feeding the hens. He recently met a local chap who had taken his son down to the same river for some Dad-time fishing . . . and come up empty.  It was a what have we wrought? moment for him equivalent to J Robert Oppenheimer's "I am become death, destroyer of Worlds" after the Trinity Test on 16 July 1945 at Alamogordo. It was the first inkling that the lurry on the phosphates business model for Irish agriculture since WWII has had consequences . . . beyond the boost to barley yields. You can't say a farmer from Mullinavat doesn't understand rural life, its hardships and uncertainties.

I am sorry to echo de Valera but Ireland is still an agricultural nation. Ire Ag is punching way above its weight in contributing to our Carbon Footprint. And Ireland is, for total emissions, shamefully are the bottom end of the spectrum between Czecko and Estonia. In other Western European countries, Energy [effectively electricity production] and Agriculture [mostly methane rich cow burps] are running neck and neck at 25% to destroy the world we know and love. So anything that targets or de-incentivises farming is going to have more leverage than smaller sectors like domestic consumption and non CO₂ greenhouse gases: hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), sulfur hexafluoride (SF₆) and nitrogen trifluoride (NF₃). Don't get me wrong, I love cheese but cheese from cow's milk is an ecological disaster, goats convert greens to milk with far less methane than cows. And those of you who eat beef-burgers really need to think pork instead or chicken. Or even no-meat Mondays!

And the home we choose to live in! They are a disaster: concentrating radon but dissipating heat in a broiling upward plume. Before we returned to Ireland 30 years ago, The Beloved had been working for a crew in Newcastle called Energy Action which was dealing with Fuel Poverty. I still can't get my head around Fuel Poverty enough to distinguish it from Food Poverty or, like, Poverty. But Kathleen Funchion TD, Sinn Féin mentioned it during her SCC session which elicited a great despairing wail from TB. During the last 30 years 1 million new homes have been built in the Republic with staircases, ceiling heights, and roof-tiles controlled by Building Regulations. But energy loss has been a dead loss with the barest nod towards insisting on fuel efficiency or insulation, so that, as a country, we import less oil and coal and burn less peat to keep the citizenry comfortable in their own homes. That is a mammoth wasted opportunity. Retro fitting is far more expensive than doing it right first time.

What to do? Turn the thermostat down and put on a sweater! In the 1980s in Boston I discovered that I could function well indoors at ambient 60°F but not at 59°F. Your mileage may vary slightly but for me the physiological tipping point indoors is between 15°C and 15.5°C. If you are heating empty rooms to 18 or 20°C you need to examine your thermostat and your head.

Contraception? your thoughts on

Remember the Alamo Eighth! Just over a year ago Ireland experienced a dramatic volte face on the rights of women (and the rights of the unborn) when We The People voted to 2:1 to repeal the 8th Amendment to the contraception [Freudian slip there] constitution. The referendum was just the first small step opening the door to a long legal journey that will allow the termination of some unwanted pregnancies. I gather that it is still difficult to obtain a termination across large swathes [geographic, social and economic swathes] of the country. Shipping off to the UK is still an option, unsatisfactory as it might be. Who knows about the consequences of Brexit on this dimension, though?

400 hundred years ago, when WmShagsper wrote Much Ado About Nothing, infant mortality was running at about 1-in-7, and yet more children died between their 1st bday and puberty. In 1600, there were 'only' 0.5 billion people upright and walking. There was accordingly a certain imperative in Benedick's statement "The World must be peopled". Even when Kenneth Branagh uttered the anti-mortal phrase in the filum 25 years ago, a case could be made for the sentiment. In 1993, World population was 5.5 billion; since it's seen a runaway 40% increase to 7.7 bn. Surely now there are just too many people on the planet, each generating unconscionable quantities of carbon footprint while consuming far too much Stuff [not to mention the pizza and ice-cream].

Now that The People have spoken, their decision has to be implemented in legislation, regulation and effective bureaucratic systems. But let's step back a few weeks before that unwanted pregnancy became apparent. Nobody wants an abortion, so could We The State do more to preventing that pregnancy? There are two issues: education and availability.

Education for sexual health and healthy sex. I'm an old hand at this. The first honest dollar (1980) I ever earned was teaching a discussion section on BI105: Human sex, reproduction and development. At The Institute I teach Human Physiology to Pharmacy Technicians, 95% of whom are women. I tell them about the menstrual cycle and the hormonal control of ovulation, with diagrams of estrogen and progesterone swooping up and down every ~28 [95-percentile range 23-32] days. Reduced to the cartoon level at which I cover such a fascinating topic, you'd think it would be easy marks to answer a question about it [Q5b) Describe, with a diagram, the effect of changes in the levels of different hormones through one menstrual cycle] on the exams. Key to the answer:

But Nobody attempts that question, so I assume that I know more about that academic aspect of the process that anybody in the exam hall. I'll shoulder some of the blame as a crap teacher but they must have seen that picture in school. If you really have no clue about when your partner is ovulating [most blokes, surely] then you really need some help with contraception. A vasectomy works really well, I recommend it.

Availability. The Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution has recommended: “The introduction of a scheme for the provision of the most effective method of contraception, free of charge and having regard to personal circumstances, to all people who wish to avail of them within the State.” The implementation of that recommendation is going to be a long time a-coming because The Man is kicking the can down to road a piece by soliciting opinions from thee and me. You can access their questionnaire: Public consultation on access to contraception – have your say! There is no mention of vasectomy in the welter of contraceptive options which is really letting the lads off [again!].

I've had my patriarchal say. If The Blob has any sexually active, pre-menopause, Irish-domiciled readers, they have more skin in the game and should contribute their 2c to counteract mine. An unlimited supply of free government condoms will sort us all out for children's birthday-party balloons.

Women in Lego

Much as I love women, there is a special place in my heart for women in science. Indeed I write about sciwomence, those rare and wonderful creatures, on an irregular but frequent basis. Today is International Women's Day IWD 2017 and I'm sure that events are happening in a city near you. And if not, it's early yet and the day is long and I'm sure you can fix something up to raise the profile of women in some unexpected way.  I was told about today's events in Cork when I spoke to Dau.II last weekend. It wouldn't be unfair to say I was schooled about the status of women by someone who, not so long ago, was teaching herself to read. I was simultaneously humbled and proud. It turns out that the woman who runs the rota at Dau.II's place of work has scheduled it so that none of the female employees are working on the 8th of March. They are planning to have brunch together and then rock up the the March Against the Eighth [see below] at Noon. It wasn't the only thing we talked about, because I mentioned a cunning plan by Lego to raise the profile of women by selling a series of figurines to celebrate Women in NASA:

Cripes, I'm earth-bound here. I've only written about Margaret Hamilton, and not [yet!] Katherine Johnson, Sally Ride, Nancy-Grace Roman or Mae Jemison.  You'll have to google them up on your own time.

In Ireland, IWD 2017  has been chosen to push forward a particular aspect of the feminist agenda: The right to choose whether to carry a foetus to term if you fall pregnant. As it happens, I'm in the middle of the reproductive system(s) in my Human Physiology course at The Institute. It is impossible not to reflect on the inequality of it: bloke contributes 10 seconds minutes and a teaspoonful; woman is committed to 40 weeks of being invaded by a foreign body. The current status of abortion law in Ireland lies the 8th (1983), 13th (1992) and 14th (1992) Amendments to the Constitution. When I came in college in Dublin in 1973 it was illegal to sell contraceptives because that was repugnant to the Roman Catholic church. That prohibition was challenged in 1973 and found to be repugnant to the Constitution because it interfered in the private business of the family. If contraception became legal, it looked like abortion might follow suit and this started a political movement to shift abortion from a matter of 19thC statute into a part of the Constitution. This, the pro-Lifers believed, would ensure that life would begin, in Ireland, as soon as the egg was fertilised . . . they had lost the every sperm is sacred argument in 1973. The [anti]-abortion debate got increasingly acrimonious and polarising over the next decade and came to a head [think carbuncle if you want] with the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution that was put to referendum on 7th Sept 1983 and signed into law a month later. The wording was poorly drafted, led to a good bit of nit-picking in Dáil debate but the suits - overwhelmingly men, overwhelmingly Catholic - gave up on the fight and put this to the people:

• 40.3.3. The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.

Article 40.3.3  was passed by a 2:1 majority and became part of the Constitution. Another ten years of legal dog-fighting and peculiar challenging cases established the idea that the Irish unborn's right to life precluded the poor benighted mother from leaving the country to seek a termination. The Irish solution to an Irish problem was for about 10 Irish women a day to leave the country quietly and come back unpregnant. I've written about the numbers before which indicate that this is a significant under-estimate of the number of women who are taking advantage of the Health Service next door.

Article 40.3.3. is what many women of child-bearing age and their supporters Repeal Eight & Abortion Rights Campaign & the National Council for Women in Ireland now wish to remove from the constitution by repealing the 8th Amendment. News digest on the matter. Last week, the Irish Times ran a poll which indicated that a referendum to do this would fail 28% vs 38%.  With the abject failure of pollsters to correctly call the Scottish Independence Referendum and the last elections in the US and UK, nobody would take these numbers as firmly predictive about the outcome. Nevertheless, they should give the pro-Choice activists pause as to whether the time is yet right. I mentioned this poll to Dau.II and her comment was that if everyone who wasn't a women of child-bearing age would just shut up and/or stay at home, then she and her friends would be able to get control of their own bodies. It is a matter of choice and I don't have any locus standi on this any more than I have the right to stop two blokes getting married, or you playing Grand Theft Auto or Katie Taylor battering the face off another young women for money. . Your mileage may vary; you may be wholly convinced that you know what's best for my daughter. But I'm sorry Monsignor Buster, you haven't a clue.

A Great Day for Women

The Repeal the Eighth Amendment referendum [above: interim results 1530 on Count Day] was all over before the count began because two exit polls published late last night showed a decisive win for Tá - almost the mirror image of the numbers in 1983 when the Eighth Amendment was referendumed into the Constitution. Blob backstory:
Today - May18 - May18 - May18 - Mar18 - Dec17 - Oct17 - Jun17 I'll shut-up for while now!

In 1803, at the very beginning of the 19thC, impossibly romantic Robert Emmet was executed after failing to achieve Independence for Ireland. His speech from the dock goes on a bit but finishes thus:
"I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world — it is the charity of its silence! Let no man write my epitaph: for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them. let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character; when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done." [one of many sources].

A case could be made that, with the result of the referendum, Ireland has ceased being a 19thC theocracy. With women now another step forward towards being treated as autonomous independent adults, someone more poetic than me might be in a position to write Emmet's epitaph. It might bring in the sad sad story of Sarah Curran, Emmet's fiancée who was disowned by her father, lost her lover, lost her first born after marrying another man and finally died of tuberculosis at the age of 26. She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps. We have, with respect both to the status of women and the effectiveness of healthcare, come a long way since 1808.  We might don rubber-gloves, take up some tongs, dust off and recolour Fianna Fáil's 2002 election slogan:

A lot done. More to do.

Sound byte from An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar "it is the same country that it was last week, just a little bit more kinder, a little bit more tolerant and a little bit more open."
Thank you from Together For Yes head office after polls closed but before the result. M'daughters, who have worked the streets and pounded the pavements of Dublin and Cork for this . . . well, they are delilah! I am so proud of them for finding belief and backbone and grit in themselves . . . I've been a little teary all morning. They on the other hand have fought A War with a wildly diverse demographic, the kind of people whom they'd never meet normally. They are, this weekend, 10 feet tall.
Chapeau! and, like Bonnets!

The art of giving

New Day, New Year, looking forward to a year of Enough Already.  We were down with Pat the Salt, the Ancient Mariner, from Christmas Eve until the end of the week. It being Christmas we probably over-catered but I haven't thrown anything in the bin yet. Given the importance of meat in the traditional spread, it doesn't help that half the family are vegetarians. No way could I persuade Dau.II aka Cookie that chicken OR ham was a valid Boolean alternative to chicken AND ham. I have therefore spent the last week eating, not what I want, but what will go off soonest - it is part of the penance which I make of the Festival of St Mammon. On Christmas Eve, The Beloved popped out with a bag of small gifts for the immediate neighbours, who looked out for Pat and Souad when they were a potentially vulnerable elderly couple. When she returned with the bag filled, I assumed it was because the neighbours were Out. Not so: they were In but had a reciprocal gift waiting in the hall. That was a sweet [literally! biscuits and candies are safe bets in such transactions] thought and part of the tradition but really we didn't need more calories in the house. That festive almond, marzipan and cherry roulade which I made the weekend before Christmas? it weighed a kilo and I had to eat it all - because the family preferred to fill up on nut-cutlets, hang-sangs, and Christmas cake. But for the fact that I spent Th and Fr hauling brash for a tree-surgeon, I would be like a balloon now.

My mother, for as long as I've known, has used the bottom drawer of her side-board as a holding pen for house-gifts: all those chocolates and biscuits and candles which you get if you invite normal folks to dinner. If the Village Hall Committee comes round looking for donations for the fund-raising raffle, m'Mum doesn't need to go to the shops; just as far as the dining room. I suppose if she hadn't been brought up in the Hungry 30s by my thrifty Scottish granny, she might just have horsed into the sweets as soon as her guests had gone. By not adding a kilo a month to her waist from the unmetabolised calories she is still with us. But her regifting is not doing much for the economy.

In the run-up to Christmas, Dau.I aka Donata got swept up in Basket Brigade. Her local BB was not obviously associated with Tony "Motivator" Robbins: she was recruited by the local chapter of the Repeal the Eighth campaign. Having Saved the Gays and Saved the Autonomous Uterus, the rads of Dublin NorthWest set their sights on saving the dispossessed. In particular those who would otherwise be feeding on a bag chips in a hotel room over Christmas. By actively canvassing in November, they raised €3,000 to fill 100 Christmas boxes for those who had buggerall to celebrate this winter. They also leaned on the manager of the local Supervalu store to donate 100x of suitable festive fare. On Sat 15th Dec, a couple of dozen volunteers filled those 100 boxes with a chicken and ham and a bunch of other stuff to eat. You might think that an uncooked chicken is as useful in a bedsit as a dead rat, but it seems that almost every homeless family has someone who'll have them home for Christmas.
[aside: as the 1967 foot-and-mouth epidemic in Britain continued onto December, Brits were exhorted to Have an Irishman for Christmas dinner because the lads were being discouraged from going home. The waggish riposte was "No thanks, I'd rather have a turkey like last year"]
As well as the ham and chicken, the BB basket had fresh vegetables, tinned fruit, trifle, custard, a box of fancy biscuits, some paper towels, tea, instant coffee, and some candies for the very young and very old. Normal food for normal people with perhaps an edge of healthiness: Carrots and sprouts can seem like a rare treat if you've eaten nothing but take-out for months.

Just as we were packing up to come back to the mountain after Christmas with Pat the Salt, there was <bing bong> a delivery of a Basket's Galore BG hamper from one of our Rellies Abroad. These things are not designed for the dispossessed but rather for "What do you give to the man who has everything?".  I guess the cognitive dissonance clanged loudest when I found that BG hampers <not ours!> often include Heart of Lincolnshire cheddar cheese. I hate madey-uppy designer cheeses: cheddar is a supreme treat; cheddar-with-cranberries is an unnecessary travesty; cheddar pressed into a ❤ shape and covered with wax the colour of strawberry blancmange is an insult to the senses. I had a look at the BG website and was taken by their Gourmet Xmas Basket because it was 40% off. There is very little which is honest food in the table of contents:

Grace's All Butter Oatmeal Biscuits 135g

Ducs de Gascogne Authentic French Pate 90g

Lily O'Brien's Creamy Caramels Sea Salt 120g

Ditty's Bakery Savoury Oatcakes 150g

Louisiana Hickory Smoke Almonds 40g

Nim's 100% Fruit Crisps 20g

Crossogue Country Fruit Chutney 225g

Bandon Vale Vintage Cheddar Cheese 200g

Heart of Lincolnshire Mature Cheddar 200g

Glandor Red Leicester Cheese Truckle 200g

Wyndham Estate’s Bin 555 Shiraz 750g

All those fancy-sounding names speak added-value for the shareholders but not-so-much added-value for the consumers. Happy New Year. There is a no greater treat than a baked potato, slashed open and filled with a normal grated cheddar and a dob of butter.

The Dadical

Dadical is a new coinage, as far as my daughters are concerned, having been applied to me yesterday. 'Popsicle' would have been possible except that it is already a word for something cool and refreshing: hardly applicable to The Da. Back in  April, Dau.I and I went on the March for Science in Dublin. The agreement was that she'd come out For Science if I would come out for The Gays. That was tentatively fixed as having a date with the Dublin Pride March on 24th June 2017. But 2 months is a long time in radical politics and I washed up in Cork this weekend because a) it was my birthday yesterday b) therefore Dau.II had bought us tickets for ProdiJig, a hoofer troop of which she is a fan. Here we are, Dau.I and her Dadical [Left for Rights! close-up below] wearing identical repealthe8th badges.

Because good things always come in threes, it turned out that Dau.I could get her pay-back and we could have a family outing round Cork city centre, by going on the local Repeal the Eighth rally, which kicked off at 1330hrs yesterday. Here  I explained the issues about the 8th Amemndment to the Constitution back in March. With two daughters in the 20s, I get to hear about those issues from the horse's mouth as one might say. A case could be made, and the girls are quite keen to make it, that only women of child-bearing age have a locus standi on the matter and they invite nuns, grannies and blokes of any age to just hold their whisht about the rights and wrongs of abortion. My late lamented, and rarely PC boss had a phrase "your rights end where my nose begins" which I am inclined to take up on his behalf. That's  a trip-off-the tongue way of articulating an overarching tolerance of diversity. Matter-a-damn what you do at home - eat pray or love whomever or whatever you wanted because it was none of my business. It's not a literal nose as the boundary - mowing the lawn or raising cain at 0300hrs on a week-night is not tolerable unless your neighbours all have ear-plugs.

One problem with Rights is deciding who is to vindicate them. I don't think that normal people would have much tolerance for a return to trial by combat in which the strongest, fastest or wiliest fighter was demmed to have found favour with the deity. We still haven't cracked the closely related problem of trial by lawyers because it is clear statistically that the richest person wins disputes a disproportionate amount of the time. It is more or less a sham to appoint a lawyer to fight for the dispossessed because they are hobbled by lack of money.  ANNyway the effect of the 8th Amendment as it has come to be interpreted is that the right to life of the unborn trumps pretty much any right of the mother except avoidance of her death. The vindication of this right has led to one high profile case, Savita Halappanavar's, which killed both mother and child and that doesn't seem to be the best possible outcome by an objective assessment. The right to life was brought into focus again in 2015 when a woman, 17 weeks pregnant was kept on life-support after sustaining a catastrophic internal blood clot that left her brain-dead.  The Hippocratic Oath is specifically against abortion but we don't need to adopt wholesale the ethics of ancient Greeks whose civilisation had a foundation of slavery in the silver mines of Athens. We could move to the 19thC with Arthur Clough's verse advice "Thou shalt not kill / But need’st not strive / Officiously, to keep alive." which I've trotted out before on end-of-life issues.

Here's the thing, right now we are in an 'every sperm life is sacred' era: caught between a life is cheap time when a child could be hanged for stealing a handerkerchief and an uncertain future. The trouble with Rights is when they are prefaced by a starement like "We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .".  To which the skeptical reply is Whoa! no we don't. Rights that were obvious to all thinking people at some time in the past are now considered repugnant to many. The rights of the unborn are a super-polarising concept about which it is hard to have a rational discussion. Discussion degenerates into a recital of anecdotes (I gave two, Savita H and life-support,, in the prev para); young women fall pregnant for all sorts of reasons and travel to the UK for a termination - at a rate of 10-30 every day so they already have the ability to safely become unpregnant. If The Patriarchy would just shut up, this Irish Right could be vindicated in an Irish clinic. Another place to start the discussion might be to suggest that we throw out the Absolutes - because we don't give an unqualified right to life to Syrian refugees, or starvelings in the Sahel or Somali pirates. We now live in a 21stC where 7.5 billion people are eating their seed-corn and despoiling the planet. Fewer people please: coral reefs, rain-forests and every species on the IUCN red list have rights as well as every person or proto-person on the planet.