The Irish

Jesus they'd go for that I'm practically authorised to speak on behalf of killybegs meself

yellow, really? if there were enough Irish ilxors for a poll, I'd expect purple to walk it.

purple def the type of niche indie option I'd expect ILX to go for tbh!

but I would not be able to vote in such a poll a world without any of em is a poorer place and they occupy v different needs imo

I guess what I'm rly saying is that

I dont care if you're pink, yellow, purple

definitive snack ranking

purple
yellow

pink

Purple. Pink only for culchie primary school teachers along with king crisps.

put up your 29 fists

Is crystal meth really legal until Thursday?

disgraceful, could they not stretch it out until monday?

may i call people's attention to this Best Irish Films ?

http://www.thejournal.ie/tds-emergency-laws-drugs-1983239-Mar2015/

Dia dhuit Éire

hiiiiiiiii

it's completely unsurprising that this has been allowed to happen. This country's drug policy over the last decade has basically been a series of cobbled together quick fixes inspired by particularly heated episodes of Liveline

darragh spent the night off his nut stroking his nipples while listening to "live forever" on repeat

u know it

Definitely an image more for Adrian Kennedy than Joe Duffy.

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/family-fortunes-men-were-a-rare-species-on-achill-in-the-1950s-1.2138780

uncle michéal with some thoughts. my mum is in braces in the front row.

That's brilliant. Also a great picture!

Achill is one of the greatest places (totally sidestepping the sadder parts of the story, sorry).

http://i.imgur.com/6KyQBO8.jpg?1

lads

sports and social committee at work are holding a fundraiser night for a yes vote.

is there a way to point out that this is not rly cool without it being a dick move. obv I'm voting yes myself.

Who ate all the pies... in the future.

i read that story yesterday, i can't believe the stats in it are accurate, plus anyway weren't we hungry long enough?!

lads

sports and social committee at work are holding a fundraiser night for a yes vote.

is there a way to point out that this is not rly cool without it being a dick move. obv I'm voting yes myself.

curious on this one, deems. what was your issue with it?

was it appropriate/fair for a work event to take a stance kind of thing?

had two people on my team raise it, one from the above POV and the other, imo, from a POV of a no voter that had yknow actual issues with specifically a yes campaign in the work environment

I raised it informally with a member of the committee, she kinda et me, which annoyed me but i wasn't carrying a torch for pushing it or anything so I left it at that, I was told to ask kinda thing.

senior management pulled the event fwiw

i guess it depends how attached to the office and company the sports/social team is. i wasn't sure of that until your clarification there.

interested in the referendum generally, do any of you know any no voters? my dad said he was voting no, my mum is voting yes. dad said "when i tell people they think i've grown horns". i tried to gently offer some persuasive arguments, he mostly was reasonable about it but i assume some baseline homophobia is his motivation.

I know of one confirmed and he had horns already

I heard one person express that they were considering it because she wasn't sure, having looked at it, that it wasn't anything more than a sop

her four adult kids went fuckin nuts at her, like I was a bit embarrassed for them.

other than that, its all yes, but hey I wouldn't be much for mixing it 'no' circles. one gay fella I knkw said he might vote no cos he's against marriage and the conformity aspect, but he's a law unto himself the same man.

my mum is voting yes but still seemed to believe it was only a sop, as you put it.

he mostly was reasonable about it but i assume some baseline homophobia is his motivation.

Out of interest, what were his reasonable reasons? Are they based in religious beliefs?

I'd be suprised if anyone in my family was voting No. Even if my gay cousins weren't a consideration, my family just would not think it was their business to say who was and wasn't allowed to get married.

I know a few people who are in the "never voted, never will" camp, which is even worse.

"what happens when the parents get divorced? do the children get divorced too?"

"im sure its the same as when a straight couple get divorced, ma. One parent has custody and the kids see the other parent on weekends probably"

"hmmm, i dunno"

ha

Out of interest, what were his reasonable reasons? Are they based in religious beliefs?

ah his reasons were't reasonable at allreally - there are no reasonable reasons in favour of a "no" imo - i guess i just meant he wasn't attacking people or belligerent, he had some vague thing about distinguishing marriage based on who can biologically have kids, nothing which stood up. don't think he was particularly bothered either way - which is prob why this will be carried. wouldn't surprise me if he didn't actually vote.

I'm not an advocate of even bringing up the obvious counter arguments, but didja ask him about the straight couple that can't/won't have kids corollary?

kids. such a bizarre thing to fixate on in re a tax arrangement like marriage.

i think a lot of people of my parents' generation might vote no tho, and talking to friends backs this up. i mean i dunno, personally my parents are from an incredibly old-fashioned world - they prob have never been friends with a gay person or someone who isn't white. i had a grand uncle who was incredibly camp, moved to chicago in the 50s, was a hairdresser and dance teacher, visited ireland on his way to see his friend julio in spain every year, and gave my mum leopard print sheets for christmas, i mean i can remember the idea he was being ludicrous in a stern way for my parents, until a few years ago when it seemed to become accepted family truth, in line with the times.

i mean obviously there is real virulent shit coming out of the religious right, and it's a disgrace if this referendum doesn't get carried, but one generation back in ireland is still a v strange and conservative world. doesn't mean these people are morons or bigots. dunno what i'd think if i had religion beaten into me my whole life.

xpost my dad was saying "but they'll never have equality" because of the biologically can't have kids issue, and i just kinda needled him towards "well we can't yet change that which is why we should change every legal status that we can change" - i felt he was fairly receptive but it wouldn't have changed his vote. as i say tho, he was more like "my two cents" knowing it's going to get carried. it all kinda came up cos i went to uni (and my debs) with a certain irish columnist who wrote that fairly arresting article last week.

that was a follow-up to my own comment, before my xpost to darragh in the last par

xpost he had some vague thing about distinguishing marriage based on who can biologically have kids

yeah this is pretty much my mum's reasoning also

and i meant to say about my uncle "i can remember the idea he was gay being ludicrous for my parents" xpost

xpost also she raises the "they have civil partnership isnt that enough?" argument

lol same. my mum is voting yes and she raised that.

Late Late Show on Friday had a debate with a gay guy saying hes in a civil partnership and that was enough for him. She felt somewhat vindicated by this.

I hope that most of the older people who don't really like the idea of gay marriage but aren't hateful have the good grace to just stay at home rather than vote No.

if you thought it was good grace you'd vote yes

You're right.

Oh, please let this pass. We could use a win. Poor fat Ireland.

The Irish

The Irish experience is another thread in Europe’s emerging racial dis- course. Ireland became part of European Christendom in 461 CE, not long after Gaul (France) in 397, and before England between 597 and 664. 95 Even so, the Irish were subjected to processes of conquest, colonization, and cultural transformation similar to those used eastern Europe and Spain, two other peripheries of Frankish-Latin Europe. 96 By the twelfth century the Irish were seen by elites of England, France, and Italy as alien to Latin Christendom. Bartlett explains, “Although the Irish were of ancient Christian faith and shared the creed of Frankish Europe, they exhibited pronounced differences in culture and social organization.” Critics regarded Irish social structures and customs as “barbaric” and “beastlike” and held that even though the Irish were Christian, they could be treated as though they were not. 97 During the late Middle Ages, England made this view of Irish otherness an effective tool in their colonization of Ireland. At the request of England’s King Henry II (1154–89), Pope Adrian IV authorized England to rule over the Irish in order to expand the church’s boundaries and “to proclaim the truths of the Christian religion to a rude and ignorant people.” The guiding assumption was that the Irish were fellow human beings but lived a less than fully human Christian life. 99 As England’s noble families began to reside in Ireland, the English eventually developed policies such as the Statutes of Kilkenny (1366) to differentiate the English and the Irish of Ireland. The statutes acknowledged a “mixed nation” of English families that had intermarried with leading Irish families. To contain this “degeneracy” the statutes banned marriage, “concubinage[,] or amour” between the English and Irish and called for a strict separation between them in language and customs. The English at this time did not regard the Irish as biologically different but rather as “uncivilized.” 100 Moreover, until the sixteenth century feudal Ireland remained largely independent from England economically. England launched a more aggressive colonization under the Tudor Dynasty of Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I. By 1541, Henry VIII had enjoined the Anglo-Irish Parliament to proclaim him the spiritual head of the Church of Ireland, obliged all government officials in Ireland to swear allegiance to the church, and established the king of England as the king of Ireland. 101

This marked the beginning of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. Under Elizabeth (r. 1558–1603) and James I (r. 1603–25), English 98 policy became more heavy-handed. This involved the expropriation of Irish-owned land, direct exploitation of Irish labor, and forced resettlement of those whose land had been taken. 102 English policy included attempts to establish plantations in Ireland (mostly unsuccessful). The basic model was for English tenants to supplant Irish tenants and for native Irish to be made the primary laborers, with no rights to own land. With the Protestant Ascendancy and the enactment of the Penal Laws, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England devised a colonial regime that prefigured expressly racist forms of colonial rule that England adopted elsewhere in its empire. The Penal Laws effectively excluded Catholics, who were three-quarters of the Irish population, from all important positions in their country, ownership of property, and education. 104 Still, English colonial rule in Ireland from the mid–seventeenth to the late eighteenth century was something distinct from racial oppression. While English domination of the Irish was as harsh as many other cases of colonial subjugation, it was based on claims about cultural and religious differences rather than on race. 106 The English occasionally used the term race in loose ways to refer to the “wild Irish,” but they lacked a systematic discourse of racial difference. 107 For instance, English Protestants accepted the possibility of Irish Catholics becoming Protestant through conversion, something that is precluded by notions of racial difference. There is often a fine line between these two forms of oppression, however. Moreover, in nineteenth century, after the development of modern racialist thought, the Irish were often explicitly regarded in Europe and the United States as a distinct “Celtic race” by raciologists and in popular racist discourse (see chapters 3 and 4). 109

uk politics imo

Your man with glasses letter reaches Buncrana man Barry Henderson

A friend has pointed out that this is really not that obscure an address - their friend Zach used to carry around a postcard that had been delivered to 'Z, Kerry, Ireland'.

Loving these photos from Feile '91

https://scontent-ams2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/11008546_1596002253991173_8396305506691603646_n.jpg?oh=8d954437145ea980e4e4e2b6d928c50b&oe=563CF2FC

https://scontent-ams2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xta1/v/t1.0-9/10353190_1597902443801154_596490600386841591_n.jpg?oh=44fef7a90c6a575901ebb49cf916c781&oe=56405111

https://scontent-ams2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1/v/t1.0-9/11215508_1597902397134492_915272703083476707_n.jpg?oh=327564421f4684eb7e31d335b8c6fabe&oe=56421FD6

https://scontent-ams2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xat1/v/t1.0-9/11401235_1596002243991174_6562680474787148966_n.jpg?oh=b0b351806ac036aadab8718641679c93&oe=5644274C

"Will ye ... meet me over by the bin?"
"... the atein' bin?"

Perfectly willing to hear correction on ateing vs ating.

it's a ting