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Seanad Eireann – Take it off the road, it has failed the NCT!

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Seanad Eireann – Take it off the road, it has failed the NCT!

On Friday a Referendum will take place in Ireland and if you are an Irish citizen you are allowed and definitely should vote. As a foreigner myself and many of you are not allowed to vote. But that doesn’t stop us from having an opinion and having a right to have an opinion. Nobody has to agree, but that is the case with all opinions, isn’t it?

One of the two questions on Friday is if the Seanad should be abolished (YES) or if it should be kept (NO). In the beginning of that discussion there was a strong opinion in favour of closing it, it seemed, but oddly this changed in the last few weeks.

The Seanad is a totally and utterly undemocratic institution. Many many people in Ireland are never allowed to vote for any of the members. It is set up in such a way that always the current government has a majority in the Seanad and it seems to be the political retirement home of Ireland.

The reason why many are never allowed to vote is because a strange system was chosen when it was set up that allows for example people who went to SOME of the Irish Universities to vote and others not and if you didn’t go to university then you most likely are not allowed to vote. The reason why the government always will have a majority is because the Taoiseach is putting 11 unelected (usually failed) party members and friends in as Senators.

If it is not bad enough that the Senate is completely undemocratic, it gets worse if you look at what it has every achieved. It is meant to be a control instance (an Upper House) that controls the Dail (Lower House), but the Senate is not even allowed to veto anything. All they can do is delay a law and if I read that right, they did that only TWICE in their whole history. No surprise if the current government has always the majority in the Senate.

Recently many started saying the Senate should remain but it HAS to be overhauled. And interestingly Fianna Fail, the party that was in government until the last elections and for many years until then is the loudest shouter. The demand correction of the Seanad, but wait, why did they NEVER make an attempt when they were in power? A total joke!

In my opinion it would be good to have a control instance, an Upper House. But that won’t happen with the current Senate and repairing is sometimes not possible. If the foundation of your house is totally useless, then you have to tear down the house and build it new. Getting the paint can out will not make any significant difference.

The Senate is a house that needs to be torn down and re-built or a car that needs to be taken off the road because it failed ALL tests and it has to be newly built! Everything else will not achieve anything and it is not even clear if the politicians in government or in the opposition know how to fix it anyway because no one submitted a comprehensive plan.

So, I would vote YES! Get rid of it and then re-build it again. You say the rebuilding will not happen? Well the parties that think it should be there have to submit a proper proposal and even if the Senate will be gone for 4 or 8 years, it is better to do that than to keep a totally useless organisation in place.

Elections, Politics, , ,

Seanad or no Seanad?

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Seanad or no Seanad?

Before they got elected Fine Gael promised that they would abolish the Seanad. At the time most people saw this Upper House of the Parliament as an undemocratic, costly and unnecessary institution that should be removed rather sooner than later. At the time Fine Gael was very popular as they had just won the election. Since then a lot has happened.
Fine Gael is not at all that popular anymore and has less support than Fine Fail, the party that was blamed for the Irish recession and a party that many declared as a “dead man walking”. This turn around happened in such a short time that Fine Gael should be seriously worried.

A consequence of that public change of mind is that people now don’t trust Fine Gael anymore and suddenly think a parliamentary control instance might still be a good idea. They ignore that the elections to the Seanad are COMPLETELY undemocratic as the system of electing Seanad members is a very odd mechanism that was dreamt up by the founders of the Irish democracy who clearly had a somewhat twisted view (from today’s perspective) of democracy. A huge proportion of people in Ireland have absolutely no voting rights.

So Fine Gael has screwed up and now the opinion about the Seanad changes and more people ask for a change or improvement of the Seanad instead of an abolition.

In my opinion the Seanad COULD be a very helpful instance, but only if a way was found that gives EVERY Irish citizen a voting right AND only if the election to the Seanad is completely different than the election to the Dail. One way could be a nationwide list system that is put together by each party completely constituency independent. It would have to rule out Independent candidates (unless they organise themselves in a list of Independents) and the Universities would have to lose their candidates. Another aspect would have to be that the Taoiseach must not have the right to put his friends on the Seanad by-passing the elections.

Significant changes, but they would make the Seanad to what it should be. Without that? Get rid of this unnecessary forum.

Some people have different agendas though and they are always shouting very loud. David Norris is one of them. He will disappear in a deserved political insignificance if the Seanad is abolished and he is fighting for his “importance”. He is attacking “Enda bloody Kenny” (Norris, sophisticated and polite as always!) for trying to abolish the Seanad and calls anyone who supports the plans to scrap the Seanad a “liar, thief and traitor to the Irish people”. www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/norris-slams-enda-bloody-kenny-for-seanad-abolition-attempt-598691.html

David Norris is a rude bully and people like him make me hope that the Seanad will be gone soon.

Elections, Politics, , , ,

Internet Censorship to hit Ireland

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Internet Censorship to hit Ireland

EMI, Sony, Warner Music and Universal won a court case against UPC, Imagine, Vodafone, Digiweb, Hutchison 3G Ltd and Telefonica O2 Ireland Ltd forcing them to block access to PirateBay websites within 30 days (Eircom had already given in years ago). www.rte.ie/news/business/2013/0612/456177-pirate-bay-court/ This is the first time – but won’t be the last time – when the Irish SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) legislation that thanks to Junior Minister Sean Sherlock and the current Fine Gael government will bring various forms of Internet censorship to Ireland.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not in favour of Copyright Infringement and Online Piracy. It is illegal and therefore its status is clear. However, ThePirateBay.org does not provide illegal content, it is just a listing or linking site (not much different than Google in its concept). And blocking access to it, is not much different than blocking access to websites that list organisations that the government of the day does not like.If that was something we heard about from China, we would all be in uproar about the oppressive government.

Find out more about the law that is used to force the Internet block here www.stopsopaireland.com/#3 Worryingly, the same law can be used to block complete access to Facebook, YouTube and all other similar websites if ANYBODY from ANYWHERE in the world ever posted material on these platforms that infringes any copyright. Is the Chinese situation now that far fetched?

What does the ruling mean for you? If you use any of the listed providers for Internet connectivity, you will soon not be able to reach the Pirate Bay website anymore if you are a normal Internet user. However, the decentralised structure of the Internet will mean that a total block is close to impossible for people “in the know”.

And there is another interesting side-effect: The National Broadband Plan in Ireland for which your taxpayer money is used, is TOTALLY overspec’d now. Because 99% of users will never be able to use their super-high-bandwidth Internet connection to the max, if they don’t use it to download illegal material.

Justice, Politics, Society, Taxes, , , , , , , , , ,

Labour Party Minister hurts his voters and sides with the rich

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Labour Party Minister hurts his voters and sides with the rich

The previous government was bad and we all thought that it can only get better, but it is amazing how incompetent and useless the majority of the Irish politicians are. Many were hoping that the Labour Party would give a social component and a balance to the policies of Fine Gael, but then Pat Rabbitte became Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and he just seems to screw up everywhere.

I had hoped that a Labour Party Minister would be a little more careful with Ireland’s Natural Resources, but identical to his Fianna Fail predecessor Rabbitte just gave licenses for oil and gas away for nothing, squandering the few resources that Ireland has and giving them as a present to big commercial companies. But if you thought that was enough of a screw-up you were wrong. Rabbitte, who is also responsible for RTE and is in charge of the TV licence re-organisation is again showing his incompetence. I dare to say that apart from the job holders, nobody thinks the ridiculous salaries in RTE for people like Pat Kenny, Marianne Finucane, Ryan Tubridy, Joe Duffy etc are justified. Nobody apart from the people themselves AND Pat Rabbitte. Because instead of sorting out RTE, reducing their budget and forcing them to justify their existence, he wants to give them MORE money.

The TV licence fee should be a thing of the past. It might have had its justification when the TV and radio stations were not commercial entities, but RTE is as commercial as TV3, just that RTE delivery in a lot of aspects even worse quality. So, the TV licence fee should be reduced or abolished OR if it stays in place then ALL TV and Radio stations should be allowed to apply for part of the funds and get fair subsidies. It is ridiculous that each household is financing a commercial Radio and TV station with EUR 160 per year.

But it comes worse! People that can’t afford licence fee and cable TV charges etc currently have the option not to have a TV and then don’t need to pay. Rabbitte wants to change that. Probably from around middle of this year he wants to force everybody to pay a “Broadcast fee”. And all that money goes exclusively to RTE! So even if you never in your life watch RTE or listen to RTE, you will have to pay them a minimum of EUR 160 per year. The justification that Rabbitte uses is that we don’t need to have TV anymore to watch RTE. But has he not realised that young generations are not interested in RTE in its current form anymore?

Now, who are the people that currently don’t pay the licence fee and will have to pay it in future? The majority is people that have limited financial means. The rest has a TV and already pays the licence fee. So the Labour Minister has left his social principles and ideologies in the cupboard and instead sides with the rich and overpaid in RTE. Odd!!

Interestingly RTE has estimated that up to 15pc of households do not pay the TV licence fee – even though 99pc of houses allegedly have a TV. So that means the government is incapable of getting the money and for that reason they a new fee is introduced. If the RTE figures are right, then Rabbitte’s argument that the new fee is needed to capture the people that have no TV is a lie. He even claims even those without a TV, benefit from “publicly-funded, public service broadcasting”. Nonsense!
www.independent.ie/irish-news/broadcast-charge-to-hit-all-homes-even-those-with-no-tv-29096806.html
www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/kim-bielenberg-why-the-breaking-bad-generation-wont-pay-rabbittes-broadcast-charge-29098836.html

Politics, Society, Taxes, , ,

Mayor of Limerick – What an eejit!

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Mayor of Limerick – What an eejit!

I am of the strong opinion that Irish Mayors are a waste of space. This is not necessarily (only) their fault, but they all are complicit in keeping the nonsensical alive.

However, it is one thing to be in a nonsensical role and it is another thing to to come up with stupid ideas and to promote them in the media. The new mayor of Limerick, Gerry McLoughlin, seems to have superseded all of them on the stupidity scale this week, when he suggested that Limerick’s street signs should also be in Polish and in “African” to make foreigners living there feel more at home.

www.limerickleader.ie/news/local/mayor-of-limerick-wants-polish-street-signs-1-4011509

Do I even have to say more to that? I am sure everyone sees that there is sooo much wrong with even just the idea.

Oh, by the way, there are an estimated 3000 (!!) African languages!

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