The Irish

"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

Cmere eamonn and bridgid is great stuff

Will queue it up for when I need a decent accent and have finished Catastrophe - the Republic of Telly sketch above is probably played out now but doesn't stop being true.

Andrew, you did watch the Rubberbandits Guide to 1916, didn't you? It's so good. And surprisingly educational.

I have no idea why I thought that would be a good idea to watch in work.

Oh yeah, you shouldn't do that.

http://www.dailyedge.ie/grand-canal-docks-sign-2220207-Jul2015/?utm_source=facebook_short

*wipes tear*

*cleanses and sutures tear*

https://twitter.com/mathaiaus/status/850943096334409728

18degC? pshaw, it's 21degC in South East England.

Just now I was outside, wearing a sunhat.

Identifying himself only with the Kurdish pseudonym Çiya Demhat — which means ‘mountains of our time’ — he explained why he felt obliged to travel to Syria.

Speaking in a strong Irish accent, he said: “I’m from Ireland. I came here to fight with the YPG against the IS.

“Right now, we’re a few kilometres west of Raqqa. I came here two months ago and for the last three weeks I’ve been with the heavy weapons tabor unit.

quite resent this tbh

ULSTER FRY

was excellent, can't even pretend

Gone native, so ye have.

Twasnt ever us that weren't native hi

ulster will fry and ulster will be fried

they used to say the highest sea cliffs thing about Slieve League too

also when I was growing up they always used to tell us Letterkenny was the "fastest growing town in Europe"

― Number None, Wednesday, 30 October 2013 13:01 (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The aul fella just got into a fight on Wikipedia with a Donegal man about this

And some fella from Malta intervenes with the dingli cliffs, blows em both outta the water

Ice cold

this lad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Fenton

I feel conflicted over #repeal - glad that not being in the country means I’ll hear about the poisonous campaign secondhand, but also angry that I can’t vote. Reproductive rights are incredibly important to me and I wasn’t old enough to vote. Think repeal will squeeze it but it’ll be narrow, and the campaign is vile. I remember as a child that I would often see campaigners out in town with placards with pictures of mangled foetuses on them - in a country where it had been illegal since before I was born. So yeah, this is going to be fucking ugly.

*the last time we had a vote that touched on the subject (2002)

You'll never beat the Irish (at being socially conservative in Northern Europe)

Fuck the media

There won't be anything like a debate for the majority

Just nutters on each side which neatly sidesteps that one side is p much all nutters

Nutters and/or Americans.

Who are the pro-choice equivalents? I wasn’t aware there were any with the profile of the Iona Institute.

couldn't find an irish lit thread

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/books/review/time-pieces-john-banville-memoir.html

So, “Time Pieces.” The title is a four-way pun, I believe, referring to wrist and pocket watches, pieces of writing on the subject of time, fragments or units of time and the assemblage of memories that time pieces together, such as this memoir. Banville’s book is about time, insofar as a memoir is about anything, and about the past particularly, of which Banville is an honored citizen. In his Benjamin Black crime novels, he often takes up residence there, as he did in early novels like“Kepler,”“The Newton Letter” and “Doctor Copernicus.” In the recent novel“Mrs. Osmond,” his sequel to “The Portrait of a Lady,” he extends the past as he picks up Isabel Archer’s story where Henry James thought he’d ended it. It’s no surprise, then, that in “Time Pieces,” Banville asks himself, “When does the past become the past?”

Driving around town with his friend and travel companion Cicero, in Cicero’s little red roadster, he becomes the flâneur with wheels, greeting the past as he goes. He touches on the pain of leaving Dublin as a boy after a visit to his aunt, hiding his tears on the train ride home to Wexford because “something was ending” and thus becoming the past. He also veers into old Dublin as he writes of the preserved stones of the Abbey Theater, destroyed in a fire in 1951, and pauses for a recollection of Georgie Yeats, the poet’s wife, and her penetrating black eyes that glanced at Banville “straight out of the past.” In a house on Henrietta Street, he notices a fragment of wallpaper whose survival unaccountably reminds him of the ruins of Herculaneum, sections of which were preserved in volcanic dust, spared from the lava flow that destroyed Pompeii. “How many imbricated layers of the past am I standing on?” he wonders, an echo of an earlier quote he recalls from Rilke: ”But this/having been once, though only once,/having been once on earth — can it ever be cancelled?”

It never can be. The only tense we live in is the past; the present moves so fast that it becomes the past even as it’s observed and experienced. And the future is, well, the future. And since the people, events and objects of our little histories are never commonly agreed upon — I saw it one way, you saw it another — the past becomes endlessly interesting, as changeable and unnerving as any work of art. Perhaps childhood never leaves us because we were pure artists then, unfettered by much personal history. Childhood fascinates Banville because it’s “a state of constantly recurring astonishment.” When the astonishment ebbs, the past clouds over into itself. “The process of growing up,” he writes, “is, sadly, a process of turning the mysterious into the mundane.” Only when the adult artist revives it are we excited at the prospect of what is long behind us.

Jesus Christ that writing has made me tense in the present

Yanks shouldn't get to write about Irish writers that's a stinking piece.

write us one dmac

I would but I haven't read anything

Yanks shouldn't get to write about Irish writers that's a stinking piece.

LOL deems, so right.