oughterard people - see OP for Mod warning 29/09/19

riffmongous wrote: »

I don't know Wibbs, the days of young men being forced to die for dictators are finally behind us and I'm glad it's that way. For sure there are chancers but let the asylum system do its job and if it's not working reform it till it does work.. not condemn people just because they are young and male

A) those days of young men being forced to die for dictators are nowhere near over, or y'know we wouldn't have warzones. I condemn them because too many are going on boats to the "promised land" paying thousands to ratbag traffickers to facilitate this, being picked up and ferried by European naval ships to said promised land(you couldn't make it up) and a large proportion of them are not coming from warzones, or are not Syrians, but are economic migrants.

Great, if they were trained and educated for roles they could fill in this society, but few enough are. So no, I certainly don't want more of them. I certainly don't want Irish towns and cities to go down the retarded route of following our European neighbours decades long multiple examples of ghettoisation and local social issues and unrest offered up on that busted flush altar of modern "multiculturalism". And no, we won't do it any differently, we won't make a success of it where every single other European country that bought into this nonsense couldn't. And I doubt I'm alone in this opinion and that opinion will grow and we will have those problems where we didn't have them before. Come back in ten, twenty years and observe.

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

Asylum seekers can work after 9 months in the system.

They also have children who can buoy up the numbers (and so, capitation funding) for rural schools. This is a win-win situation for Oughterard, and while there will be some teething problems, it's an absolute folly to pretend there is a sufficiently strong justification for that town's narrow-minded behaviour. Most communities would be delighted at population growth. It seems that the new people are simply 'the wrong type' for this community.

Ah that old saw of "the need for population growth" we hear all the time. I have more than a few issues with that mantra. For a start it's mostly to do with making more people to make more stuff, so more people can buy it. Yet many who push this mantra are also going on about damage to the environment. Cross purposes there Ted, but anyway. Secondly, while this mantra may and I stress may be in play in some European countries with falling birthrates, this does not apply to Ireland. Ireland has along with France the highest birthrates in the EU, so that spurious "reason" simply doesn't wash here.

As far as rural decay being reversed by this? Not gonna happen. Hasn't happened in other parts of Europe. Spain tried it with South American folks invited over to repopulate villages and what happened was as soon as their time limit was up they headed for the bigger towns and cities, just like the locals had before them. Even in the "boom" here where houses were sprouting like weeds throughout the land, where were the ghost estates? The vast majority weren't in urban areas that's for sure.

And being the "wrong type" is most certainly a big factor. Yep it's racist, but regard human nature over time and we are inherently tribal and local and that niggle in the back of the brain is always there among a large enough part of any population and yep even generations down the line their kids and grandkids will rarely be "Irish enough" for many. I prefer to look at the realities, rather than keep hoping that we'll all join hands in some melting pot singing cum by ya, we won't and history, even recent history shows this time and time again. Pick the most progressive and inclusive society you can find today and I guarantee you that they have ethnicities, often more than one that are not quite living the dream to the same degree as the "locals".

About the only times "multiculturalism" has worked was in pretty "right wing" superstates and empires where any dissent from the agreed cultural norm was heavily curtailed or stamped out. Even then there were always some ethnicities that were more outside than inside.

Don't you occasionally point out, when lamenting feminism, that it is men who are disproportionately the victims of political persecution/ war/ violence?

It would be rather a strange thing to ignore single men on that basis. If I were a psychoanalyst, I'd find this bizarre suspicion towards single men almost territorial.

Well thank Christ you're not a psychoanalyst as going by the above statement you would seem incapable of reasoning that two separate opinions on two different angles on a matter can be held at once.

Outside of self serving political hobby horses like "feminism" everyone is a victim of war and violence. However the fact remains that in damned near every conflict before where refugees were fleeing it's has been overwhelmingly women, kids and the elderly who were doing the fleeing, not men. Even elsewhere in the world today like in the venezuelan refugee crisis(which is also largely economic) the demographics are much more balanced, not like the demographics of European refugee crisis.