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Lolek Ltd, Trading as 'The Iona Institute'

lazygal

Does anyone know anything about this organisation? Where it is funded from and by whom? Who runs it? Why it gets such a platform? I've been digging around a bit but its very difficult to find out anything about it.

I'm also mystified as to why David Quinn appears so often representing a relatively new body which seems to be largly self-appointed and why he is allowed such a platform.

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mansize

Didn't we have a Muslim? Or was Dr Banji Hindu?

Nodin

mansize wrote: »

Didn't we have a Muslim? Or was Dr Banji Hindu?

He was a muslim. Christ help the next one.

robindch

Nodin wrote: »

He was a muslim. Christ help the next one.

Not sure islam works that way.

recedite

I see St Andrews Church advertises "The Dail Service" here on its website, but is there really any connection at all to the Dail?

Is it similar to a local café offering "The Dail Breakfast" as a gimmick on the first day of the sitting?
Or a pub offering The "Dail Drink" on a Friday afternoon? That last one might not be any use though, seeing as they already have a subsidised bar inside the Dail

Shrap

recedite wrote: »

I see St Andrews Church advertises "The Dail Service" here on its website, but is there really any connection at all to the Dail?

Think they'd get a better reception if they started offering Dail Mass Cards (for the soul of the departed).

Hotblack Desiato

robindch wrote: »

Not sure islam works that way.

Not sure christianity works that way either :pac:

Samaris

robindch wrote: »

Not sure islam works that way.

While I'm amused at that, I'm going to be "that guy" and comment that Christ is a figure of authority in Islam as a prophet (just not as big as in Christianity), so it's fair enough even so!

Second Toughest in_the Freshers

robindch wrote: »

Not sure islam works that way.

Boom boom!

The Black Oil

Iona set to release album, Now That's What I Call Balance.

Penn

It's actually quite a skill David Quinn has for shoe-horning in references to equality and children's rights in absolutely every Independent article he writes.

"David, you're not going to write another article about why equality is bad, are you?"
"No no, of course not. (types) Capitalism is a good thing, in much the same way that equality is a bad thing..."

Penn

David Quinn in the Independent today, pretty much summing up both his career and the Iona Institute in general:

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/david-quinn/in-future-catholic-hospitals-may-be-only-ones-obeying-the-precept-do-not-kill-34669965.html

The spectre of involuntary adoption, mother and baby homes, Magdalene laundries and symphysiotomy have all been raised as test-case examples of why nuns, even today, cannot be let next nor near pregnant women. Let us leave all that to one side for a moment...

PopePalpatine

I was expecting him to be euphoric about Mullen getting into the Seanad...maybe Breda will do so tomorrow.

12Phase

Mullen just shows that recent graduates (post 1970s anyway) don't bother to register to vote.

The total valid poll was 36,293 from a potential voter base of hundreds of thousands. The NUI constituency is huge if people bothered to register.

As an NUI graduate myself I think the whole system is a joke. The level of participation is so small that it's hard to argue that the NUI Senate panel has a real mandate to represent NUI graduates at all.

Then you're presented with 30 candidates at least 90% of whom I had to Google to figure out who they were and some were so obscure that even googling them didn't help much.

It's an indictment of the NUI graduates though that hardly anyone bothers to register to vote. It's a huge privilege to have a vote in the Seanad at all.

mahoganygas

I am an NUI graduate and I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't registered to vote.
That changes today.

TheChizler

Missed the deadline to register by a few days myself. Thought the end of February was plenty of time to register for an election at the end of April but I thought wrong. At my conferring a few years ago we all signed a big book and nobody had a clue what it was for. Someone had the idea that it was confirming your registration for the Seanad elections and I'd been assuming that it was done and dusted since.

Penn

PopePalpatine wrote: »

I was expecting him to be euphoric about Mullen getting into the Seanad...maybe Breda will do so tomorrow.

Unless she got her article in early, I'd say she'll be on the defensive tomorrow after being caught misrepresenting research:
http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/amnesty-and-abortion-1.2626655

Sir, – We are the two human rights lawyers your columnist Breda O’Brien cites in her efforts to paint Amnesty International Ireland’s position on abortion as less than honest (“Amnesty abandons values of Seán MacBride”, April 23rd).
O’Brien relies on a 2008 journal article we co-authored before we joined Amnesty International, where we pointed out that only one regional human rights treaty, the African Women’s Protocol, explicitly names abortion as a human right. She says that we were “intellectually honest enough” when we wrote this, and suggests that Amnesty International, in saying that women and girls have a human right to access safe and legal abortion, is not. This carries the added implication that we somehow abandoned our “honesty” when working with Amnesty International. We are aggrieved at both suggestions.
So let us be very clear – women and girls do have a human right to access safe and legal abortion. It is an interpreted right and not an expressly stated right in UN human rights treaties.
Just as there is no explicit “right to be free from female genital mutilation (FGM)” or “right to be free from coerced or forced sterilisation” enumerated in those treaties, both are today understood as falling within the rights to privacy and to be free from torture and other ill-treatment. The rights set out in UN treaties, drafted decades ago, were designed to be applied to specific issues arising in people’s lives.
These treaties are living instruments to be interpreted by treaty bodies, made up of experts elected by states, in light of current knowledge and understanding of the impact of states’ conduct on their people. That is how the development of international law works. It is clear that your columnist does not understand this.
And, just as Amnesty International says, the same is true for abortion – women’s and girls’ right to access safe and legal abortion is firmly grounded in decades of jurisprudence from a range of human rights bodies and experts.
What we wrote in 2008 about UN treaty bodies being a useful resource for women’s rights advocates is even truer today. Particularly in the last decade, recognition of the grave impact of denying women access to safe and legal abortion has been acknowledged by nearly every human rights body at the international and regional levels. This is in large part due to women themselves raising their voices against draconian laws such as Ireland’s.
We object to being dragged into your columnist’s attack on Amnesty International Ireland because it is not only unfounded, but distracts from the reality of what is happening to women and girls, including in Ireland.
We cannot comment on O’Brien’s accusing Amnesty International Ireland of disgracing one of its founding members by advocating for women’s rights, except to say that, having worked for the organisation, we can confirm that no one person in Amnesty International’s staff or membership gets to dictate the movement’s mandate.
Rather, the organisation draws its mandate from international human rights law, and it does so without apology.
We are proud that the world’s largest human rights organisation is standing up with women, including in Ireland. This is why we joined Amnesty International. This is laudable work that safeguards women’s health and often saves their lives. – Yours, etc,
JAIME TODD-GHER,
CHRISTINA ZAMPAS,
Amnesty International,
London.

12Phase

mahoganygas wrote: »

I am an NUI graduate and I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't registered to vote.
That changes today.

It's not that complicated to register but, they could move more online with all of it.

magicbastarder

i deliberately do not vote in the seanad elections (i'm a graduate of UCD) as i think it's a joke that i have a vote, and my very politically literate father has no vote in the seanad.

12Phase

That's more of a reason for lobbying to change the way the Seanad works. Incidentally, the Seanad itself has produced a load of reports on reform and expanding its democratic mandate. The Dail steadfastly refused to do anything about implementation, probably because the upper house having a serious mabdate would terrify TDs.

My concern is, as broken as the current Seanad election system is, if a majority opt out, a minority gets very unrepresentative candidates into positions of huge public profile.

marienbad

magicbastarder wrote: »

i deliberately do not vote in the seanad elections (i'm a graduate of UCD) as i think it's a joke that i have a vote, and my very politically literate father has no vote in the seanad.

I can never understand this kind of thinking , it is a joke that you have a vote ( particularly an unused one ) and most of us don't .

Use you vote to get in there and fight for change and not pontificate from the sidelines .

And then we wonder why we have so many 'knobs' ruling us .

robindch

magicbastarder wrote: »

i deliberately do not vote in the seanad elections (i'm a graduate of UCD) as i think it's a joke that i have a vote [...]

There are three choices - vote, spoil or abstain.

Assuming that each voter votes with a similar intention, then abstaining simply increases the power of votes provided by the kind of nutters with which the field is clearly filled. Spoiling achieves the same thing. Voting for a joke candidate is unlikely to achieve anything.

The rational choice is to vote for a serious candidate, assuming there's one available, but as Bryan Caplan points out the existence of the rational voter is something of a myth:

Bryan Caplan wrote:

The greatest obstacle to sound (economic) policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters.

12Phase

There were some excellent candidates on that ballot paper too with a much more liberal outlook
It wasn't like there's a lack of choice. 30 candidates.

Mullen is a well organised candidate who gets a solid vote out. Agree with him or not, he's making use of the NUI panel and getting elected and the rest of us aren't largely because too many people either don't care or adopt a passive aggressive attitude towards the Seanad.

The TCD panel has been really enlivened by Norris and others who have kept it relevant to younger and more liberal voters.

NUI graduates need to engage and drive a bit of change.

Fred Swanson

This post has been deleted.

recedite

magicbastarder wrote: »

i deliberately do not vote in the seanad elections (i'm a graduate of UCD) as i think it's a joke that i have a vote, and my very politically literate father has no vote in the seanad.

You're right. Its just a nonsensical debating society for failed and retired TDs, which is inexplicably funded by the taxpayer. The only seanad vote I ever took part in (or was allowed to take part in) was the referendum to abolish it.

mahoganygas

recedite wrote: »

You're right. Its just a nonsensical debating society for failed and retired TDs, which is inexplicably funded by the taxpayer.

Topics like same sex marriage were first discussed in the Seanad. Long before it was ever debated in the Dail.

robindch

recedite wrote: »

Its just a nonsensical debating society for failed and retired TDs, which is inexplicably funded by the taxpayer.

It was intended to be a balancing legislative chamber to the Dail; however its legislative and review powers were hobbled by De Valera in his successful 1936 constitutional power grab, so it's a little bit useless at the moment.

Some more degree of seriousness on the part of voters would be good, as would a greater democratic mandate, and greater power.

12Phase

Here's the last major report which the Government has been using as a doorstop for over a decade.

http://www.oireachtas.ie/documents/committees29thdail/subcomonseanadreform/Report_on_Reform_of_the_Seanad.pdf

Then : http://www.merrionstreet.ie/en/ImageLibrary/20150413SeanadReformFinal1.pdf

There's something like 13 of them and there was a referendum in 1979 to extend the university constituencies to all graduates.
The 7th Amendment was passed by 92.4% in favour and has never been implemented.
So, basically all that's holding up change is legislation.

However, as we all know, some amendments and constitutional clauses are MUCH more important than other which can be safely ignored due to a la carte law.

State priorities included things like pushing through blasphemy legislation, while totally ignoring this provision and also just leaving the status quo with school patronage despite a constitutional imperative that children have access to education etc etc.

Christy42

12Phase wrote: »

There were some excellent candidates on that ballot paper too with a much more liberal outlook
It wasn't like there's a lack of choice. 30 candidates.

Mullen is a well organised candidate who gets a solid vote out. Agree with him or not, he's making use of the NUI panel and getting elected and the rest of us aren't largely because too many people either don't care or adopt a passive aggressive attitude towards the Seanad.

The TCD panel has been really enlivened by Norris and others who have kept it relevant to younger and more liberal voters.

NUI graduates need to engage and drive a bit of change.

Generally I disagree with all their policies in that they want to run for the seanad. I have a choice of two votes (I am assuming the system isn't dumb enough to allow me to vote in both) so I should apply for one but really the dang thing is barely above the self important students unions in my mind. I have spent enough time having to listen to their claims of being able to do something (anything).

I did attempt change. I voted for it to be abolished. I can try get it back on the ballot for abolishen I suppose. Or I could try get them some actual power.

marienbad

Christy42 wrote: »

Generally I disagree with all their policies in that they want to run for the seanad. I have a choice of two votes (I am assuming the system isn't dumb enough to allow me to vote in both) so I should apply for one but really the dang thing is barely above the self important students unions in my mind. I have spent enough time having to listen to their claims of being able to do something (anything).

I did attempt change. I voted for it to be abolished. I can try get it back on the ballot for abolishen I suppose. Or I could try get them some actual power.

I also voted for it to be abolished , and if that had happened then most would revert to just being cranks , now because people think it is beneath them to vote we end up with cranks with megaphones and legitimacy .

And the rest of us with no vote have to just look on .

Lurkio

marienbad wrote: »

I also voted for it to be abolished , and if that had happened then most would revert to just being cranks , now because people think it is beneath them to vote we end up with cranks with megaphones and legitimacy .

And the rest of us with no vote have to just look on .

...well, with megaphones anyway....