Delirium wrote: » Member of Iona withdraws [...]
robindch wrote: » As a catholic, isn't that the only option available?
Delirium wrote: » Member of Iona withdraws from committee.https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/920903035743866882
Ronan Mullen wrote: If there was abortion on demand she wouldn’t have been in the hospital because she wouldn’t have been pregnant and she wouldn’t have been having a miscarriage.
Irish Times wrote: Asked about his comments on Newstalk on Thursday afternoon, Mr Mullen said any criticism of his remarks was not in good faith.
robindch wrote: » Subsequent to the above, the IT includes a picture of Senator Mullet:
Huntergonzo wrote: » Haha, it's basically Will from the Inbetweeners.
frag420 wrote: » Why do all these pubic anti choice folks look like 40 yr old virgins?
MrPudding wrote: » Because they are? MrP
Hotblack Desiato wrote: » I'm not going to start hunting on the Indo, of all places, for an article by her, of all people, but what is this amazing information she claims to have that the committee does not?
Delirium wrote: » https://twitter.com/SenLynnRuane/status/922769961701052416https://twitter.com/sharmander_says/status/922858760682557441
veliktom wrote: » I was very disappointed that Mattie McGrath decided to have his little strop yesterday. The cynic in me thinks that he did it to avoid grilling the TFMR witnesses so that he wouldn't look bad in front of his voter base, and I was so looking forward to seeing how he handled that one.
Delirium wrote: » It's theatre to take media focus away from facts that he (and Mullen) have no rebuttal for. Any of the outlets covering it yesterday were all about McGraths performance with feck all about the facts being related to committee by other parties.
veliktom wrote: » I was very disappointed that Mattie McGrath decided to have his little strop yesterday.
seamus wrote: » And the Students Union have voted to remove Ascough.https://www.rte.ie/news/2017/1026/915464-ucd-students-union/ It does go to show how she got elected in the first place though. There are 33,000 students in UCD, all of whom are eligible to vote in SU elections and polls. This was probably the most high-profile thing that has happened in the SU in decades, and yet just 6,600 ballots were cast - 20% of the student body. The poll which elected Ascough in the first place had a turnout of just 3350 - 10% of the student body. In this case Ascough was impeached simply by people bothering to turn up and vote. The "No" vote is basically the people who elected her president, plus a couple of hundred. The "Yes" vote being the 3,300 "new" people who bothered to vote, and anyone else who voted against her in the election. It looks like the best thing Ascough did as SU president was inject some life into student politics and get students interested in it.
[Katie] insisted I reduce [the budget spend on the repeal campaign] back down. Our accountant was arriving 10 minutes later and she insisted I reduce it and send it to him and her. I maintained my budget and sent it without reduction. Due to the accountant arriving and accepting my budget, and those circumstances alone, my budget increased. Katie has claimed in interviews she allowed me to increase my Repeal spend- when in fact, she ran out of time to decrease it.
it was extremely unlikely any case would have been made against it. This was the lawyers original advice over the phone. He had stated that he was willing and ready to defend us in the very unlikely case that a claim was made. [SNIP] [Katie and Barry] were both set to go on annual leave and that Thursday evening had become our print deadline. 20 minutes before she was due to leave, Katie decided to look at the book for the first time. She discovered a page on abortion information that caused her to become distressed. She insisted the info would have to be removed. She stated her family, friends and campaign team would be horrified if she stood over a book that contained information on abortion. Another sabbat and I, with Katie's and the overall SU's interests at heart, convinced her to leave the information in. We couldn't be seen to recede on last year's efforts. We wanted the information there for a female students welfare. In distress a student can view that information and doesn't have to change their name and email (out of shame) to access it. Katie reluctantly agreed to leaving the information in but wanted nothing more to do with the book and asked that we remove a page on her class trip. The book went to print. 5,000 copies arrived when I was away. I am the sabbat who was called into Katie's office 3 weeks later to be told the book would be scrapped because she had suddenly become aware the information was illegal. We had been given a talk during our crossover training discussing the proud history of the SU and how we had distributed the illegal information in the previous year’s Winging It edition. Katie was present at this talk. We also received the same talk during our election campaigns, as candidates.
I spent an afternoon with a colleague working out what we could say on the page. It was legal, informative and focused directly at a student’s welfare. Katie would not entertain this suggestion and insisted she was deciding what replaced the illegal content. We had time for the lawyer to look at it but she refused. The following Monday I was called into the office from our orientation tent to find Katie re writing the page herself. I was allowed no input and was physically blocked from accessing the computer. It has since been raised that the current information is still illegal anyway, Katie did not seek legal advice before sending the book to reprint. This prompts the question was she really concerned about the legal issue in the first place?
In the build up to that week Katie tried to manipulate me out of having UCD for Choice at our Freshers stand. I was given the task of organising the week and I gave them a space at our stand. The past two SU teams had done the very same and this year, being the referendum year, it was most important for them to be there. When Katie realised, she was unhappy, she wanted them to be removed. Again for her own sake, I told her students would notice and blame her. She put me under extreme pressure to get them out but then accepted that they'd be shoved in the corner, away from the pizza. I had no intention of making them do that. She later went to the tent organisers behind my back to try remove the group we are mandated to support. She also warned me to not recruit reps "interested in repealing the 8th amendment". She insisted I didn't post about it and told me it's something she thought about during her original campaign. She didn't want a "council chamber full of pro-choice reps".
Mark Hamill wrote: » Anyone hear her on Newstalk just now? Basically unchallenged on most/all of her claims. They pointed out that the 4 other Sabbatical Officers were against her, but didn't have any of them on to defend their side. Open letter from Barry Murphy on Monday 23rd, one of those sabbatical officers who supposedly bullied Matie Ascough is here (pretty long so I'm just posting the facebook link, but it seems to be publicly viewable without logging in). Some interesting parts: So it seems that she decided that she couldn't morally stand over what was in the book (despite promising not to even look at it) and then brought up the "suddenly aware of legal advice" excuse to remove it, despite all officers necessarily being aware of the advice twice over at that stage. She said on Newstalk that the page now has phone numbers for various support groups including the SU itself and the SU will give out the same information over the phone that was originally printed there. She claims that this protects the SU from the possibility of legal action, that giving the information by request avoids the issue of printing the information for anyone to see. That seems like a bizarre loophole, does anyone know if it is true? I'm presuming it's not and it's why her approved page isn't really legal either. So much for claims of delegation :rolleyes:.
