The straight double standard

// May 30th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // GE11

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Imagine if straight male politician was being interviewed and the discussion for whatever reason wandered into the zone of sex and how one is introduced to it. And imagine the man were to said something like this.

“In terms of classic seduction, as practised by the French for example, where it is an older woman introducing a younger man or I suppose more accurately a boy since we’re talking about someone under 18 but over the age of consent to adult life, I think there can be something to be said for it. And in terms of the French experience this is endemic.

Now again, this is not something that appeals to me, although when I was younger it would most certainly have appealed to me in the sense that  I would have greatly relished the prospect of an older, attractive, mature woman taking me under her wing, lovingly introducing me to sexual realities, and treating me with affection and teaching me about life – yes, I think that would be lovely; I would have enjoyed that.”..

An older man honestly saying that it’s not for them as a mature adult but had it been on offer as a teenager they could see themselves being quite interested in the idea. And the reaction of most people would be a large dose of so what. After we’re pretty well aware most teenage boys would hop on a gust of wind given the chance. I should know as I was a teenage boy and had a attractive woman in her 20s or 30s say decided that she was interested in my less that buff physique , and had I survived the likely heart attack, I’d probably have been in there like a shot, quicker than you can say Risky Business. Would it have been to my long term benefit and personal development? Who knows but I would expect people reading the comment to realise that I was speaking about it that I was talking about what I might have done not necessarily what I should have done. Now imagine the gender roles being reversed or further more that it is a same sex relationship and you even have to imagine the outrage, you can see it happening right now on foot of the reviving of a David Norris interview with Helen Lucy Burke from a decade or so ago.

There is a strong degree of hypocrisy in our views of sexual relations, recently seen in the ham-fisted approach taken to the issue of statutory rape. Indeed those bright folks at South Park have already rather expertly covered this topic in general terms in the episode Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy.

JLC’s, EROs, REAs and ELO

// May 30th, 2011 // No Comments » // GE11

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The controversy over the report conducted by Kevin Duffy, and Dr Frank Walsh of CUD and which was published by the government into the operation of JLCs and ERO has the mild whiff of a whipped up storm. Just for whose consumption would be an interesting question to ask. The report that has been published was originally commissioned by Mary Hanifin in the dying days of the last government.

Most of those commenting won’t have read the document, I’ve barely skimmed it myself. What is very much noteworthy for the fact that it is uncommented on is what hasn’t been suggested, is that there is no suggestion of abandoning the JLCs, or of reducing the standard hourly rates paid to people, either in the report or from the minister. Instead there is some mention of looking at other means of compensating people for working awkward hours and weekend work. So how did all this outrage burst into life without a single attributable sentence to hang it all on?

The reaction appears to say “How dare someone say that they want to see discussion on something without excluding all but the most uncontentious items”, and worse yet that there might be some expectation that such discussions to take place within a relatively short time frame. Imagine that, a minister puts forward proposals for consideration and discussion before then intending to bring the matter back for refinement before taking it to cabinet for their collective decision. What kind of autocracy is this?

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Quotas for Votas

// May 29th, 2011 // No Comments » // GE11

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Even the best of us can fall victim to a piece of boneheaded conventional wisdom from time to time, and the suggestion that political parties must run 30% women candidates in a general election is one of those ideas that once you start to pick it apart in detail tends to fall asunder in your hands.

The notion of quotas as the solution to various problems of under-representation in various bodies or environments is a quite long established one and it is one with considerable merit at the very outset of trying to get a minority or under-represented, or previous excluded groups into an existing system. Yet the way in which certain advocacy groups cleave to quotas long after the actual barriers have come down especially in respect of the under representation of a majority grouping puts me more in mind of the adage about a solution in search of a problem. And God knows there are plenty who are wedded to this solution.

The long standing problem of the under representation of women in the Oireachtas is not the stand alone issue that many would like to paint it as being. Indeed, as women by many counts constitute a majority of the voting population and as voting rights have been equal since the foundation of the state one might be given to wonder why no one has looked for causes other than gender as being the reason for their absence. Just as the wider societal significance of the OJ Simpson trial was that money not race was the bigger determining factor in whether or not you would be convicted of a crime. So too the absence of women from the Oireachtas is no longer primarily about gender.

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Saving the Seanad, not bloody likely

// May 27th, 2011 // No Comments » // GE11, Seanad, seanad eireann, seanad reform

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Once again the nation was treated this week to the sights and sounds of the returning Seanad. Not that most of the population had noticed that it had been away. Various people, most of them senators of long standing, used the occasion and the press attention to give voice to their strongly held view that the Seanad should be retained at all costs and indeed reformed to the benefit of all. Burdocks to that I say.

Let’s be straight with one another, without any concrete proposals being adopted by the Seanad itself to reform I won’t be voting or campaigning to save it as it is currently constituted, all on the promise that it might, one day, far off in the future, after it has had one more custard pie and a nice nap, be reformed in some way.

I stood as a candidate for the Seanad on the NUI panel on the basis that it must be reformed immediately or else abolished. My thoughts were and are that the time has long run out for last chances for this chamber, that it was time for things to be done or to dust with it. I’ve not changed my mind since that election took place. The last (the 12th in total) report from the Seanad itself on its reform was the usual weighty document, full of compromises ironed out amongst the senators themselves with one eye glancing back towards their past and future electorate of local authority members and a minority of 3rd level graduates. Hence the proposal to retain the election of some Senators by local authority members even while the general populous was to elect a portion of the chamber.

And we then saw how commitment to the reforms in that report as within the lifetime of the last Oireachtas various  senators from political parties and also noted independents welching and reneging on their support for even these watery set of reforms. Demanding, demanding no less, that even those small steps that could be enacted by a simple legislative process must not be touched unless the entire chamber was simultaneously reformed. This is beyond getting cats to walk in a line, it’s looking for them to do a synchronised about turn once they are all facing in the same direction.

That steadfast unwillingness to do even the bare minimum is the crux of the argument on any referendum on the abolition of the Seanad for me. I believe that abolition of the Seanad on its own is mere electoral window dressing and would represent a bad decision. Yet voting to keep the Seanad as is, in the forlorn hope that reforms might happen based on non-binding commitments post the referendum, would be a worse decision.

I will continue to poke those people I might chance to have access in the Dáil for the enactment of extensive changes to the Dáil electoral system which should happen simultaneously with the abolition of the Seanad. But I’m not going to make it a ‘do that or else’ demand. I will not campaign to save a chamber that can’t bring itself to present a real package of agreed reforms when faced with its own extinction. And these would have to be detailed reforms that it stand over, and could not and would not revoke. After all, if the members of the Seanad especially those most vocal in its defence can’t even act to pass a simple bill making those straightforward changes that could have been made by legislation then what right have they to demand that others must act save them and the chamber that they have done so much to keep the rest of the population away from. If they are not willing to act to save themselves then why should we bother?

I’m with Garret

// May 19th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // GE11

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Lots of people with a better way with words have already said their piece about Garret Fitzgerald and said it well. I would have first seen him on the back of a lorry in the square in Killorglin around the time of the 1981 election campaign. I remember wearing one of the cardboard hats that were made from flat cardboard but had a series of spiral cuts that allowed them to turn into baseballs type hats. We should try to revive those, they were fun! The slogan was simply “I’m with Garret”, and giddy teenager that I was at the time I believed in it 100%. There was, if I’m being completely honest, probably a small degree of blind hero worship and almost like being a Duranie rather than a Spandau Ballet fan that the other crowd were wrong in part just cos they were the other crowd but that was never the whole of it.

I’ve seen the phrase used time and time again over the last few years, when someone is discussing some point about an issue of the day and with reference to an article or comment made on air, they would say “I’m with Garret on this one”. And even when I might have disagreed with the conclusion, I recognised that in people being willing to say “I’m with Garret” was laid bare his core strength as a public figure.

It was that he convinced you, or me and others at least, by force of argument that what he believed in, he believe because the facts and logic and common sense made his conclusions the right ones. Not that you were expected to simply take his word for it, but that if you looked at the cold hard facts and applied reason and logic that you too would reach the same conclusions and he invited, no, he demanded that you do this for yourself. No blind loyalty for him, you had a responsibility to work through the argument and reach what you could then see for yourself was the correct conclusion. He wanted you to find the conclusion with him, and then join with him. It was that faith in common sense and rational debate that shaped almost entirely my approach to politics, and to what points I will argue on and why. I wouldn’t be a member of Fine Gael without Garret Fitzgerald. I probably won’t have become interested in politics at all, if it was just about personality cults and not about ideas, and debate and rationality.

Even though he is no longer with us, I’m still glad to be able to think that I once was, am still and will always be someone who can say I’m with Garret.

So how did you do in the end?

// May 6th, 2011 // No Comments » // GE11

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Not well, terrible, awful, and almost embarrassingly so. To get only half the votes what I got the last time out was very disappointing and not a little soul destroying.  Still, I was contesting it in the almost certain knowledge that I wasn’t going to be elected so distinctions in the margin of defeat matter little in the larger scheme of things. Or so I tell myself.

I am immensely grateful and appreciative of those who voted for me and those who asked others to do so on my behalf. I just wish I would have paid them back with a better showing.

The rather depressing truth is that unless you enter the Seanad campaign for either TCD or NUI with a pre-existing media profile then you won’t get a profile during the course of the campaign proper and unless you’ve got some grouping that are exclusively backing you or favourably disposed to you from knowing you or your work from having worked with you then you won’t get significant votes. It’s pointless deluding oneself that the election process (or any election process for that matter) is one orientated towards any sort of objective assessment of the respective campaigns. It requires some degree of name recognition from the get go, after that people might do some comparison shopping.

So whether it is having lectured or been known to many graduates prior to the  election taking place or having Union backing, even if it is from a minority of those union members eligible to vote, is a real significant boost.

We can’t be blind either to the role of incumbency and spending in this election, something about which there needs to be more openness at the time of the electorate casting their ballots. The problems that arise from this process give us pointers to some of the potential problems that would arise from changes to the existing Dáil electoral system.

It is also a side problem of temptation for some candidates who get swept up in the fervour of a campaign and who end up losing the run of themselves. At least one candidate in 2007 and another different one this time sent direct mail outs to votes for next to no avail. Enough money is spent on the Litir Um Thoghchan than to be compounding the problem by throwing your own money down the drain without a thought for the future. Naivety is only the half of it.

It is also long past time that a means to get people on the register more easily was allowed for. If you were someone who was all geed up by the election just past and you decide to send in your details during it, you would still not be on the register until June of 2012 and that’s just a plain unacceptable state of affairs.

There appears to have been some talk in the aftermath about the need for a unity teacher candidate, though I think that is to patronise members of the teaching profession. The majority of those who are teachers still choose not to support the various union proxies. In large part the most probable reason is that they don’t feel being a teacher is the single most important thing in their lives. The ludicrous notion is that teachers are somehow so set apart from other professions that they simply must have their own candidate in an election strikes me as odd.

There was a time when almost all primary school teachers could rely on the assumption that they were bettered educated than the parents of most of the children they taught. That is no longer the case and it would appear some teachers, at least, have not adjusted to this reality at all. Too many parents even today encounter the odd practice of teachers using ‘the voice’ on them and it strikes them as downright rude and arrogant. Teachers like individuals who have professions and those who don’t have their diverse political views and are entitled to express them, but the notion that teachers need to be contesting elections as ‘teachers’ is a practice whose day should be done.

I wish the elected Senators well in their undertaking, I do admit surprise at Prof John Crown’s pronouncement that he will not be standing again under the current system. With the stated focus on abolition, I can’t detect at present any appetite for legislation for reform just in case abolition doesn’t happen. So it’s this system or none or so it seems for now.

As for me, I can’t see what future purpose might be served by my contesting this panel as it is currently constituted. So if it’s all the all set up the next time I can’t see me running. Thanks again to those who did support me, either by voting or simply wishing me well. It was appreciated.

Could Scotland, Wales and NI win it for AV?

// May 4th, 2011 // No Comments » // 2011

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Most polling appears to show that the AV referendum is headed for a solid defeat but is the polling wrong for a odd reason. England might well vote strongly against but Wales, Scotland and NI are having regional assemblies elections and given their local voting systems are forms of PR they may well be elected to vote strongly in favour and with a considerably higher turnout rate than for the English local council elections.

In a worked example using some not unreasonable numbers.

33% turnout of 45 million would be 15 million or so. a 60/40 split for No would equate to 9 / 6 million.

The likely number of the potential voters in the regional assemblies would be around 3.5 million. If they went 3.0 million to 0.5 million (which is a big ask in fairness) in favour of AV it would lead to a much closer result than expected of 9.5 million Yes to 9 million No. Were the Yes vote to make that England result much closer that 60/40 then the higher turnout and margin of victory from the regions could actually save the result for the YES campaign. I suspect a 2:1 win in the regions for AV and if the YES vote in England can get to 45% then I think they can still win.

Between 1979 and 1996 the average turnout in local elections in England was 41 per cent but it is much closer to 30% over the last decade and a half.