Post your questions for Paul Gogarty TD here.

DeVore wrote: »

Between clientelism (which gives us the Jackie Healy Rae's of this world), the party whip system and the toothless senate, we have a broken republic.

That sums up my thoughts on the state of our political nation at the moment.

For us to mature into a true democracy this has to change.

PaulGogartyTD wrote: »

Perhaps it was about playing up achievements made in the field of animal welfare and playing to a sympathetic audience for once. The award would have been given because John Gormley did more than most in his position to protect animals.

I have to take issue on that point. Supporting groups like ICABS, HSI, ALF and their ilk is supporting a minority of extremists who spend the bulk of their time issuing the basest of slanders against hunters, who - ironically enough - do more work than any other state body or NGO in the field of conservation and animal welfare. ICABS has not reintroduced species to Ireland which were driven to extinction in the past; hunters have. ICABS does not provide invaluable data to researchers on ecological trends; hunters do. ICABS does not manage deer herds through culling to prevent over-feeding, destruction of local ecological habitats for other animals and other negative side-effects, followed by massive die-backs of the entire herd from starvation; hunters do.

Groups like HSI put animal and human lives at risk every time they decide to use uncivil and irresponsible methods to protest hunting by disrupting hunts through intimidation (and violence in some cases). Not to mention writing lovely letters to the press on how all hunters are sociopaths like Larry Murphy; despite the fact that it was a pair of hunters who caught Murphy in the first place, saving a young woman's life in the process (along with the lives of his potential future victims).

As to ALF and their ilk, how any Green (or green) politician can support a group which releases thousands of mink into an ecology as a foreign species (an act which can literally wipe out entire local ecosystems), while still claiming to support animal welfare and environmental issues - well, it beggars the english language when trying to express the sheer lunacy of such a stance.

The Green Party is not against shooting

And again, I must take issue with you. I personally spent an hour in my home talking with my local Green representative (Deirdre de Burca) before the last election when she was looking for my vote; I explained what Olympic Target Shooting was, what it looked like, what we did, and how safe and harmless it was (so far, we have a perfect safety record after 168 years of active competition in Ireland). I pointed out how we were the largest Olympic event, how we were one of the most egalitarian of sports, how we in Ireland had a long history of great achievements in the sport (we have won the World Championships twice in the last decade in Olympic Shotgun in the team event and once in the individual event and at the moment, it's the Irish High Performance Coach who is the shotgun coach at the international academy; in the last few days we've seen a Northern Irish shooter medal in Dehli and another miss out by only a point or two; we've sent shooter to the games in Atlanta, Sydney and Athens and will send some to London as well).

Yet less than two years later, she (and the rest of the Green Party) slandered every pistol target shooter in the country with comments along the lines of how we were an "emerging gun culture" (all 5-600 of us out of 4,500,000 people in the country) and banned half our sports, commenting on how we were basicly one step away from using our pistols to shoot schoolchildren in their classrooms. :mad:

Doing that to people will leave them with very long-lasting memories, so when you do so (and you did vote for the Criminal Justice (Misc.Provisions) Bill 2009 which inflicted all this on us), we remember it rather vividly when you later claim to not be opposed to shooting.

But thanks to the propaganda spun by the well funded RISE campaign along with cynical FF, FG and Labour rural TDs, the Greens have been painted as haters of rural Ireland and rural values.

RISE was the end result of the implementation of Green policies Deputy; it was not a long-running propaganda campaign. It was around for barely a few weeks, and centered on a single Act, the banning of the Ward Union hunt.
Perhaps if the Greens had noticed that the largest group of people in Ireland who actually do the physical work of conserving species and preserving local ecologies were expressing mounting dissatisfaction with Green policies for some time, RISE would never have gained traction.

As to well-funded, there are 300,000 people or thereabouts involved in fieldsports (and concurrently with conservation work); there are about 6-8 core people in ICABS and maybe 30 who could be claimed as regular members. That groups like RISE are better funded and have larger demonstrations is not down to Machiavellian scheming. No doubt some take advantage of it; life was ever thus and I doubt even the Green party is free from this. But at its core, RISE are a very large group of people who should be the poster boys for the green movement but who now feel the Green party has abandoned and persecuted both them and the green movement itself.

If any of your groups want to award John Gormley with a lifetime achievement award, no doubt he will gladly accept it.

I believe they would... if he did something they felt merited it. But as I said, they feel abandoned, betrayed and persecuted by the Green Party and John stands at its head. The kind of lifetime award they would seek to award him at present would not be the kind he would wish to accept.


ps. You didn't comment on the salmon...

PaulGogartyTD wrote: »

I see some more questions and some questions that people felt weren't answered.

I think this post wasn't answered: http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=68500290#post68500290