There is nothing more sinisters than ministers in dresses...

“There is nothing more sinister than ministers in dresses” or so said the singers of Reverend Black Grape Shaun Ryder previously of the most excellent band Happy Mondays.

And so it was on the 02nd of July 2011in the year of our lord anno dominion that a paltry but determined 300 prochoice supporters braved the religious right parading down the main streets of Dublin. And in the opposite corner? A religious right brigade made of 2500 strong zealots, screaming obscenities and armed with bizarrely enough, yellow smiley face signs that wouldn’t look out of place in the Manchester acid scene that Shaun Ryder was associated with.
I am usually apathetic towards the gardai who are more worried about checking car tax and beating protestors but somehow the human wall was actually useful. The pro-lifers had crucifixes and heavy statues and ,ah we had ah, homemade banners and placards never mind being hopelessly outnumbered.
We were fortunate that the gardai were there as angry pro-lifers tried to get around them to get in people’s faces. People who had never being at a pro-choice demo looked shocked and ashen-faced by the in-yer-face and hostile screamers. A little old lady with a cross ran up to me and a friend who said i was once a foetus and she was one too. I said yes but the difference is now she’s an idiot and I’m human. She went off to annoy more indulgent listeners and when she was asked about the serious issue of child abuse in the church she said ‘oh that’s a not a tradition’. The church should always have a say about what goes on. I mean if abortion is legalised in Ireland there’s less chance priests being able to fuck children. God times are getting tough for paedophiles aren’t they?
There were families there with young kids (and the poor suckers looked bored, fed up and thinking they could have stayed at home toturtering the neighbour’s cat instead). One thing that had changed from previous protests was the lack of graphic imagery from the previous march in 2009. Commentators had raised questions having small children walking alongside horror and computer altered propaganda.
One tall sombre man trying to do a Vincent Price gait slowly walked by with a cross trying to ward off the protestors waving his cross. It didn’t work; I would suggest he should bring garlic next year. A lot of women go to these events and good for them they never needed an abortion. The pro-choice were better prepared than previous years but didn’t lack the serious paraphernalia or organisation of the zealots marching towards them. Ah well another small counter-demo another year gone by. Cant wait for the next one...or maybe I can

The problem with voting for someone called Mary...

Or the alternative title - The problem with voting for political dynasties, Opus Dei members and people who swing small implements around at councillor meetings…

“Oh Mary why don’t you have some sense? Please do something to restore my confidence”…or so wailed truthfully the Irish Band, ‘The Four of Us’. And it could have been probably written about a few ministers we know.

A lot of people in Ireland are against the idea of gender quotas in politics and I used to think the same. Critics would say, ‘well it should be the best person for the job’ or ‘why should women be put forward, why should they be singled out, isn’t it discrimatory? Bleeding fascist feminists looking for more, are ye not happy ye earn 70% to what a man earns in this country? Sure this equality lark is working out grand for ye. Put on the kettle there, will ye? Good girl!’
Well we had lots of so-called qualified and experienced people in the Dail and look where that got us: paying for all the crimes of the old boys club and their cohorts. In every Irish government dynasty politics was the status quo and no one openly criticised that until recently. However there is one problem voting for women in Irish politics and with damning evidence for the opposition to pounce on regarding the gender quotas argument. As the upcoming female representatives will show, these candidates were voted in by women and not only did they ignore their electorate but then with further betrayal they happily endorsed the rules of the old boys club. Here’s the roll call and in no particular order of unmitigating damage done: Mary Hanafin, Mary O’Rouke, Mary Harney,Mary Coughlan & Mary White.

Culprit no 1 - Mary Hanafin, former schoolteacher, preening daughter of conservative TD Des Hanafin. Known for her Opus Dei membership pro-life and conservative views and she was probably the girl at school who got all her Girl Guide badges (god I hate girl guides but that's another tale woe). In her time she did a brutal job as minster for social affairs getting rid of the Christmas bonus and cutting the payments all round and refused to support children with autism.
Conviction - Famously stuck to her guns contesting her seat in Dun Laoghaire and lost it but threatened like the terminator that she will be back. After a good self-flagellating, of course.

Mary O’Rourke - known as the ‘Mammy of the Dail’ and the eccentric and entertaining auntie of the failed minister for Finance Brian Lenihan and his kicked-in-the-head-as-a-child-startled-looking brother Conor Lenihan who also lost his seat. Mammy was the minister for Public Enterprise for encouraging privatisation of state- owned telephone company Eircom. When that failed, Mammy was handsomely rewarded with a seat in the Seanad.
Conviction – telling bedtime stories to little Conor and Brian about the good oul’ days of Fianna Fail yehaw!

Mary Harney- the worst of the Marys with her failure to improve the Irish health service. She was an easy target to caricature due to her size and her taste for excess. She had a good start in the 80s with banning the bituminous coal eliminating smog in Dublin city. However her turn as the Health Minister trying to manage the cumbersome HSE (Health Service Executive) went up in flames.
Her taste for the finer things in life at the expense of the ordinary taxpayer were well-recorded, she used a govt jet to open a friend’s off-license in Leitrim, then went on an infamous expenses trip to Florida purchasing unflattering haircuts and treatments (honey there ain’t enough money for...). Good at playing the bully as she was able to break the power of the pharmacists but couldn’t go after the real culprits, the pharmaceutical giants and their inflated costs until too late. She also made enemies of the Irish Nurses organisation and wanted nurses to do overtime for free. The minister certainly would not have tried the same bullying tactics with doctors.
Conviction – scarpered before the election but not before she was famously covered in red paint by Eirigi councillor Louise Minahan at the Cherry Orchard hospital for crimes against the health service.

Mary Coughlan - a popular minister for Agriculture and the farmers with her no-nonsense language (lots of swearing, tut, tut, etc) and again her dad and uncle were already in politics so you know the nepotism drill, etc.Her down-to-earth tomboy manner didn’t work with the businessmen (these guys never swear don't you know) when she took the role of Tanaiste and as the Minister for Enterprise, Trade & Employment. Like many of those brought into politics because of family connections Mary soon fell afoul of the public. She also became an easy target of the media contributing gaffs by mixing up Darwin’s theory of Evolution to Einstein and saying to the international press:
'Emigration what emigration? Sure the young love a bit of travel. Oh there's a recession on? It's amazing what happens when you talk to a few people isn't it?'
Conviction – too light but a few science classes in her local community education class followed by an exam on Darwin and Einstein.

Mary White – token female Minister of the Green party and Minister for Equality (har di har). I heard her speech at the UCC women’s political representation in September 2010 where she entertained the audience of her time as a local councillor and her efforts to get speaking time. The former Minister made a device with a bell attached to catch the deputy’s attention at councillor meetings. For her time in the Dail she should have brought a catapult and a big rock as she acquiesced to cuts, approved the bank bailout and positively contributed... well feck-all, in office. Along with the rest of the party she voted for the cuts in the minimum wage affecting low-paid women workers and stated herself that she was against gender quotas.
Conviction – a keen hill walker she might get some fresh air and take a long walk off a short pier...

It’s hard to feel sorry for this lot, they walk off with big severance packages for the damage they have caused and it’s the ordinary woman that suffers from their cuts. So granted, the Marys haven’t advanced the cause of equality in Ireland but that’s not to say that gender quotas couldn’t work. Ireland is a corrupt country with political scandals leaking every day. Gender quotas introduced for a certain period can help change the old boys club and the greedy cronyism. The women listed above were voted in for every reason but gender quota implementation and they have created years of damage. Women candidates mobilised by their grassroots organisations using gender quotas can implement their electorate’s wishes then the objective of striving for fair, equal and better representation will have succeeded. If the electorate want to break cronyism then gender quotas is one of the best options for their future.

So if someone knocks on your door and they’re called Mary, do the follow: cross yourself (don’t say a hail Mary), eat some garlic and break into the well-known tune by ‘The Four of Us’.
Yeah that’ll work.

Mary Hanafin – payoff of €99K and a pension of €226K
Mary Coughlan – TD & Ministerial pension of €104K plus lump sum of €148K
Mary O’Rourke – initial payoff of €310K plus
Mary Harney – Lump sum payoff of €300K and a yearly Ministerial pension of €70K per year and TD’s pension of €50K
Mary White – lump sum payoff of €43,780 and a yearly pension of €7,514.00







 

Menstruation Is Murder

By Climbing Trees

So, in the U.S. (where else?) a Georgia Republican wants women who have miscarriages to prove they weren’t the result of, um, intervention. i.e. it all came out by itself.

Reminds me of the great Mikhaela Reid cartoon “The Egg Rescue Squad.” So let’s, as Mikhaela did, take this a little bit further. Why isn’t Mr I Hate Menstruating Women Because They Aren’t Fulfilling Their God Given Duty to Reproduce demanding that all used tampons be checked for possible fertilised eggs. After all, [PDF!!] only about 50 percent of these teeny tiny “people” actually implant in the womb. Why is it that ProLiferators and the GOP don’t seem a sh*t about the kind of tampon massacres that are going on every day. Ladies, when YOU lift the lid on those tampon disposal bins in the loo, don’t you sometimes feel just heartsick at the thought of all the tiny dead people in there? Those things are like mass graves. Maybe Repubs could fund something like Reid’s Egg Rescue Squad to regularly clear out those “sanitary disposal units” (talk about euphemistic! “Killing Fields” is more like it). Locate the eggs, take DNA samples, and then git out there and hunt down and lock up the callous murdering menstruating wimmin responsible. It’s outrageous.

I was listening to Bill Maher’s show the other day. Bill can be an annoying, sexist wanker, but I have a soft sport for his irreverence (especially over religion). Anyway, he was whining on about how badly Muslim men treat “their” women. Tavis Smiley (the guy can talk!) challenged him by rather gently suggesting that Americans don’t treat “their” women so damned well either. Bill was apoplectic. But way to go Tavis. Bill, of course, cited the example of the Muslim guy who cut off his wife’s head. Never mind that non-Muslim men are killing their wives and girlfriends every damned day – there was probably one just down the block from the studio that afternoon. But I digress – as Bill waxed on about how terrible it is for women in Saudi because they aren’t allowed to drive or fly planes (sure, it sucks!), and I was thinking, well, what’s more important, being allowed to fly a phucking plane or being able to control your own goddamned eggs? Is America really such a female paradise when its elected officials want to put miscarrying and/or menstruating women in the dock?

I doubt I’ll live long enough to see another feminist revolution – no sign yet that enough people give a cr*p about women’s rights – but I sure hope … that … one of these days … the Sisterhood Will Rise Up! All We Have to Lose Are Our Tampons… or something.

UPDATE LATER THAT SAME DAY: I swear I hadn't seen this really great blog post -- "Dear Rep. Franklin: I submit my used tampons as evidence" -- by Jill Filipovic when I wrote this. But she Nails It! Does anyone smell a fabulous political action here...involving the sending of scores and scores of tampons to anti-choice politicians? Or is it just me?

Why Don't Men Give a Cr*p?

By Climbing Trees

Why don’t brothers, fathers, husbands, sons of women care more about protecting their sisters, mothers, wives, daughters reproductive rights? Men seem to care so very deeply about protecting fertilised eggs, why don’t they seem to give a cr*p about women? It’s not because they don’t care about how women live their lives. They seem to care very deeply about it, since they are on the front lines of the battle to take away women’s reproductive rights (or, where we don’t have any, to make sure we never get them). There have been lots of good answers over the years, the patriarchy primary among them. That’s really shorthand for a complex story about men needing and wanting desperately to have control over women, and to have control over women, step no. 1 is to get control of their fertility. So, sistahs, despite the second-wave, despite this being called by some (idiots) the post-feminist era, we never won that struggle. The men and their henchwomen are still lining up against us in droves, and they’re making a lot of gains – especially in the U.S. It’s pretty neat the way they managed to conjure up a world in which those aspects of fertility that have to do with men (you know, the sperm side of things), attracts no political interest at all. Who cares if men do or do not get vasectomies. As Ashley Sayeau pointed out recently on The Guardian site, while the Obama admin is all cautious about whether contraception (for women) should be counted as preventive care and so made free (or cheaper at least), no one is losing sleep over vasectomies, “which are widely covered by insurance agencies.” And for every unplanned and/or unwanted pregnancy, there were sperm involved. Really! So why aren’t there public campaigns urging men to take responsibility? Why aren’t men whose sperm were responsible for unwanted and/or unplanned pregnancies excoriated like women are? The really cool Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker points out that American policymakers believe in ensoulment, essentially when sperm meets egg. That means sperm don’t have souls so having vasectomies isn’t messing with any God-given souls. Contraception like IUDs or Plan B – even the pill according to the really hard-core antis – might possibly, at a stretch, in one case out of a zillion, mess with an ensouled cell, and so women mustn’t be allowed to get hold of it. As a friend of mine put it, we are up against the medieval mind – though I think that’s a bit rough on the medievals. OK, so this post doesn’t really put forward a nice, clear argument about, well, anything. I was just feeling so bummed about men getting all the breaks, and not (with a few notable exceptions…I do know I have some fabulous pro-choice brothers out there) helping out with what I think is a frontline battle between modernity and the f**king dark ages.

GPs cranky response to morning-after-pill now available in Boots pharmacy in Ireland

By Used2bSnowwhite

‘This is very unfair, I’ll have to wait until next year to buy my upgrade Rolex’, said a downtrodden Irish GP twiddling his bowtie and waving his placard outside Boots pharmacy. The Irish GP was a representative of minority group, ‘Irish Doctors looking to keep inflated fees’, and were fighting for their rights outside Boots pharmacy chain.

Abortion may not be legal in Ireland but at least with UK Pharmacy chain Boots, the option for women to obtain the MAP (morning-after-pill) has just gotten easier and safer.

Ireland is a backwards country so stringent that obtaining emergency contraception, for example, on a Sunday is a nightmare between running around finding a GP’s surgery that is actually open, paying 60 euros and then forking another €10.00 for the pill at the pharmacy. Stressful, expensive and never mind that an Irish doctor can refuse you the morning-after-pill on ‘moral’ grounds which was a recent case in Co Kerry last year.

One friend of mine living in Cobh four years ago went to the local GP for the morning-after pill only to be criticised for her request. He subsequently started lecturing her on her morals and that she should go on her knees to pray. Instead of his listening to the rest of the lecture she fled the surgery only to have to travel to Cork city, a distance of 25 km and she was lucky she had her own car unlike a lot of young women in rural areas.

Sure, ‘tis a hard life for Irish doctors, you know, the average salary can be €220,000.00 *and upwards per year. One can only imagine the impact the loss of these essential prescription fees on their lives and hopefully they will be well-compensated for this. They could for example, start off with a letter-writing campaign with Amnesty International, twitter updates, an online petition and a boycott against ‘2 for 1’ products in Boots, etc.


The Irish state continues to ignore the dangers they create for its citizens with its hypocritical and backward nature regarding contraception and especially abortion. A few years ago, reports were released that found the black market version of mifepristone or RU-486 was seized by gardai in Dublin and the confiscation by the IMB (Irish Medicines Board) of the abortion pill. When women are desperate enough to try unsafe medicine the pressure should be put on the Department of Health to ensure safe access to medicine. Now the MAP initiative has come into force through a legal loophole that the Health service knew about for years. Boots are now able to dispense prescription-only medications once they have the direction of a GP to do so and this came from Boots own medical director, a GP. Boots being the corporation will ignore the hissing of general practitioners and legal warnings of the incumbent Dept of Health who could have allowed such a simple practice to take place years ago.

Dr Mel Bates of the group, Irish College of General Practitioners huffed about the new regulation saying:

“My concern is that the company is cherry picking those who know they probably are not pregnant. In the GP setting, we make them aware that the morning-after pill may be unnecessary in their cases and then they make their own decision."

Em, what? Do the GPS have a crystal ball that tells you within 72 hours whether you are pregnant without taking the MAP? I don’t remember reading about that scientific breakthrough. How on earth do GPS make them aware that it’s unnecessary?
Surely the only way you are not pregnant is if you haven’t had sexual intercourse but otherwise if you have had unprotected sex, the condom broke etc; it’s a good precaution to buy the MAP.

Boots reasonable answer to the doctor’s representative was that: they have a private consultation room to discuss safe sex, contraception and prevention against STI’s; it’ll be a service similar to the GP’s; less stressful and more affordable. Simply, the same service but without having to pay two qualified medical professionals for the same medicine. And really how many weekends would you like to spend your time with a pharmacist explaining the obvious?

Listening to another reason for keeping the MAP’s fees with General Practioners, the doctor from the ICGP was this:

“The moment you increase access to any service, you increase demand for it”.


Well I did pop into the local Boots after hearing the riot news but there was no clamouring of wanton women climbing over the counter, running off with the pill and running after every man they could find. There was a queue for a very good deal on make-up palettes and perfumes though.

In wake of the UK chain’s announcement the IPU (Irish Pharmacy Union) have agreed that other pharmacies should follow suit which is good news for women in rural areas. Even though Boots and other pharmacies have stated they are making it affordable the cost of the pill here will be €45.00 as opposed to £24.99 in the six counties. The cost of contraception in the land of backwardness is still the highest in Europe.

Meanwhile back at the protest with the minority group, ‘Doctors for over-inflated fees…’

• Figures based on GP salaries income from medical card holders’ fees released from the HSE 2009.

European court of Human Rights state the obvious re ABC Abortion case V Ireland

The ECHR announced on December 16th 2010 that the woman known as ‘C’ who was suffering from Cancer and fell pregnant had her human rights violated. The fact that she was unable to receive abortion treatment in Ireland was a violation ofArticle 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to respect one’s private and family life. Well the Irish have never very good at minding their own business anyway so we needed a telling-off there from mainland Europe. She was one of three women supported by the IFPA (Irish Family Planning Association) who took the case against Ireland but ‘A’ and ‘B’ were unable to win their cases. The other woman ‘A’ suffered with alcoholism, unemployed, in poverty and had four children already which social welfare had taken from her due to her condition. As she recovered, it was possible that ‘A’ could be reunited with her children and she didn’t want to risk another pregnancy affecting her chances of a successful recovery. The woman known as ‘B’, had an unplanned pregnancy and was informed that she was at risk of an ectopic pregnancy. She took the safe option of abortion but had to travel to England like the others.

The hearing overall has been welcome news to pro-choice supporters however it does not change the law in Ireland and thank goodness for that, waffles outdated government officials after hearing the result.

Our former radical minister for Health, Mary Harney, said the government would have to “reflect carefully”, on the issue i.e. dodge the bullet until the next government gets elected. This is the same coward who was responsible for the two-tiered Health service in Ireland which if you can’t afford insurance, you’re going to have to wait no matter how serious your condition including life-threatening illnesses. This minister loved her private healthcare service so much she didn’t mind hearing reports of people being left to die on hospital trollies.

Unfortunately for pro-choice campaigners and activists the results left militant pro-life group, ‘Youth defence’, on the war path calling a demonstration on the following Saturday outside the GPO and a family planning clinic in Dublin city centre. And there’s nothing like extreme zealots running up and down the streets interrupting my shopping afternoon, I’ll have you know. (See pictures attached.) The group lined along O’Connell Street with graphic posters and had also set up a makeshift crib with a Legion of Mary group handing out rosary beads, crosses and cards and praying for ‘lost’ babies at Christmas. There were no displays or prayers of sympathy for the women at the ABC case. According to these demonstrators who are holier-than-thou, those harpies will not be making it to heaven.

The result has been good news for pro-choice groups and the IFPA who supported the case but be warned, extremists will be out with shock propaganda if a referendum is going to be called for. Everyone on the green isle should batter down the hatches and prepare for assault from pro-lifers and religious fundamentalists in the near future.

Link:

http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkp197/view.asp?action=html&documentId=878721&portal=hbkm&source=externalbydocnumber&table=F69A27FD8FB86142BF01C1166DEA398649

A Short Film About Choice