Irish Political News

Which is why cricket is so great? It's one of the only games in the world where you have sufficient time to wander round a field thinking 'why am I doing this?'

Which is why cricket is so great. It's one of the only games in the world where you have sufficient time to wander round a field thinking 'why am I doing this?'

Hmm, what to post on: the embryo research bill, celebrity trial outcomes: Jesus vs Heather Mills, the trials of being an England cricket fan … Despite the trend for calling this the ‘Bank Holiday Weekend’, it’s Easter. You know, that whole Jesus coming back from the dead thing. The inevitable seasonal survey this week found that over half of Britons believe Jesus rose from the dead, though about half of these believed that Jesus rose ’spiritually’. Whatever that means. As soon as we try to analyse or describe Easter, it suddenly loses most of its impact. The Beeb’s ‘The Passion‘ is doing a pretty decent job, and it does the job by just telling the story. So here are some extracts from a couple of well known stories for Easter Saturday. The longer one first “He is dead” Narcissa Malfoy called to the watchers. And now they shouted, now they yelled in triumph and stamped their feet, and through his eyelids Harry saw bursts of red and silver light shoot into the air in celebration “You see?” screeched Voldemort over the tumult. “Harry Potter is dead by my hand, and no man alive can threaten me now! Watch! Crucio!” Harry was thrown once, twice, three times into the air.. and when he fell to the ground for the last time the clearing echoed with jeers and shrieks of laughter. “Protego!” roared Harry, and the Shield Charm expanded in the middle of the hall, and Voldemort stared around for the source as Harry pulled off the Invisibility Cloak at last. The yell of shock, the cheers, the screams on every side of “Harry!” “HE’S ALIVE!” were stifled at once Voldemort and Harry began, at the same moment, to circle each other. “I don’t want anyone else to help,” Harry said loudly “It’s got to be like this, it’s got to be me…“You won’t be killing anyone else tonight,” said Harry as they circled and stared into each others eyes, green into red. ‘You won’t be able to kill any of them, ever again. Don’t you get it? I was ready to die to stop you hurting these people they’re protected from you. Haven’t you noticed how none of the spells you put on them are binding? You can’t torture them. You can’t touch them. You don’t learn from your mistakes, Riddle, do you?” an edge of the dazzling sun appeared over the sill of the nearest window. The light hit both of their faces at the same time, so that Voldemorts was suddenly a flaming blur. Harry heard the high voice shriek as he too, yelled his best hope to the heavens, pointing Dracos wand: ‘Avada Kedavra’ ‘Expelliamus’ The bang was like a cannon-blast and the golden flames that erupted between them, at the dead centre of the circle they had been treading, marked the point where the spells collided. Harry saw the Elder Wand fly high.. spinning through the air towards the master it would not kill, who had come to take full possession of it at last. And Harry, with the unerring skill of the Seeker, caught the wand in his free hand as Voldemort fell backwards, arms splayed, the slit pupils of the scarlet eyes rolling upwards Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse, and Harry stood with two wands in his hand, staring down at his enemy’s shell. (JK Rowling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Chapter 36 ‘The Flaw in the Plan’) and the shorter one “God made you alive with Christ… and having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” (St. Pauls Letter to the Colossians, chapter 2 verse 13, 15) Any similarity to persons living, dead, or resurrected, is…. well you’ll have to ask JK Rowling that one. Have a happy Easter. As they say where I come from: Christ is risen! David Keen blogs at St. Aidan to Abbey Manor. Tags: easter story, david keen, touching base

It’s been a big week for sin. First, a Vatican official talked about sin in a newspaper interview. Not a big deal, they probably do it a lot of the time, but this suddenly became ‘Vatican announces 7 new deadly sins’, and before you could say Magisterium every blog and media outlet was following the story (but credit to Reuters for reporting the facts). It probably didn’t help that the Vatican was slow off the mark. This particular horse was 2 laps round the track by the time they shut the stable door and pointed out that everyone had got it wrong (they should have asked Rowan Williams for advice on that one). But it was all worth it for the this cartoon from Indexed (the Pope might not agree): Sin When You’re Winning Staying with horses, the weather accurately reasoned that a government who promote casinos probably weren’t going to tax gambling in the budget. After 2 days of the Cheltenham festival were cancelled, the wind abated, point made. The Director of Racing at William Hill estimates that around £500million is bet at Cheltenham. Meanwhile the UK is inching its way towards a US-style gambling regime (a country which has 7 times the UK rate of problem gambling), and the BMA wants gambling to be clinically recognised as an addiction. We have to ask in this context whether it’s right for an iconic event in the gamblers calendar to have royal patronage. Maybe the Queen Mother, God rest her soul, liked the occasional flutter. She could afford it. 300,000 other people can’t. The effect on the jockeys is something else, and the bigger the sport gets, the more we’ll see the kind of breakdowns that have hit cricket in the last year or two. Sin Tax: Error? And so to the budget. Sin hogged the headlines there as well. As most of his budget for this year had already been written for him 12 months ago by Gordon £rown, the only thing left for Alastair Darling to do was an upward tweak on fuel, drink and smokes. The Beeb called it a ’saints and sinners budget’, thus accepting implicitly the new Vatican line that pollution is a sin. Sin as a Power Tool? What is sin anyway? The Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood (don’t click the link with the volume up, it’s not pleasant) depicts sin as a tool used by the church to wield power over people. When Pastor Sunday finally has the upper hand over Daniel-Day Lewis’s amoral oil prospector, he humiliates him by having him ‘confess his sins’ in public, and submit to baptism. In turn the prospector’s confession is a sham, he is only going through with the charade in order to seal a deal on some land. Neither churchman nor capitalist takes sin seriously enough. (more…)

GK Chesterton said a lot of profound things, here is one of them: “Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough… It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again,” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again,” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” Winehouse vs Dolls House Watch children at play for any length of time. Having fun comes naturally to them. How do we lose that ability? How come that so many adults need to dose up on alcohol, drugs or adrenaline before we even feel ready to enjoy ourselves? Okay, children are free from a lot of the worries the rest of us have: they don’t have a mortgage to pay, a bullying boss, a struggling marriage, or a hairline receding at the same speed that our waistline is expanding. But watching the kids at the school gate on ‘Book Day’ this week, all dressed as pirates, princesses and superheroes, it was hard not to smile and sense the joy and thrill they felt. A wrong attitude to fun? Author John Ortberg argues that for a long time Christians have had the wrong attitude to fun. Because the happier we are, the easier we find it to do what’s right, rather than be tempted to do something wrong. If you’re content with you’re lot, you won’t steal. If you’re enjoying life, an affair or a tax fiddle seems like a daft option. (more…)

In the film Minority Report Tom Cruise’s (clearly non-Japanese) character, having had a backstreet eye transplant to avoid detection by retinal scanners, walks through a shopping mall. The advertising billboards, who retinally scan passers by, start to talk to him: “Welcome back to Gap, Mr Yakamoto”. Minority Report sets retinal scanning and mass surveillance by marketing and security services in 2054 - nearly fifty years away. However, current Sunday night drama The Last Enemy fast forwards this to the (almost) present day. The programme homepage has various cautionary facts and figures about CCTV, fingerprinting and ID cards. It is a drama with a message, a cautionary tale about how much personal information we allow the state to hold, and how far we allow surveillance to invade our personal space. Whose side are they on? With the demise of the surveillance states behind the Iron Curtain, we have turned the microscope on our own society. Film and TV mythology give us 2 alternative pictures. These 2 interpretations both seem to strike a chord, and it’s hard to quantify how much we absorb these issues through the stories we tell ourselves in the visual arts, or think about them in opinion columns and blogs. Are they Saviour spies? In one future side we have Spooks/James Bond - the saviour spies who use technology and surveillance information to thwart evil and protect the world. Or surveillance spies? In the other possible future is The Last Enemy/Bourne trilogy, (and a host of other surveillance thrillers - e.g. Will Smiths Enemy of the State), where rogue elements within the security services use surveillance information to suppress the truth, manipulate people, and perpetrate evil. Despite well intentioned governments passing security laws and ratcheting up the surveillance for our own protection, there will always be someone (so runs the story) who will get their hands on the information and use it against us. Personally I’m more worried that it will be Disney or Tesco rather than Jack Straw, but it’s always the one you least expect. (more…)

Back in early December I posted a run-down of the list of weekly columns on the Wardman Wire, using the excuse that the site “has been a bit of a building site recently with a lot of changes”. I’m pleased to say that the move from a personal political blog to a site with a wider team of writers is nearly complete - so there may be a bit more stability round here for the next few months (at least in terms of who is writing). This is an extra Blog Platform column to map out where we are and where we may be going. What Happens each Week I’m doing a rundown by day this time. There’s more to say, but I’ll keep this post as short as I can manage. Now that the rate of change on the blog is slowing down (at least in terms of new and guest writers), I’ll see if I can be more reliable at making sure that things appear on the right day. Our practice is - with one or two exceptions - to publish the column each day at 11:00am, to give time for the article to hit the RSS feed in time for the lunch break. Then nothing else appears until perhaps 4pm. As ever, the best way not to miss anything is to subscribe to our RSS feed. Nearly Every day “The Daily Roundup” is currently a roundup of 10 or a dozen newspaper stories designed to provide “blog fodder” for our readers. It focuses on interesting and occasionally unusual stories. On good days it is published around 1am; on not quite so good days with breakfast or a little later. As you can see from the podcast player in the sidebar, we experimented with a daily podcast - I hope to take that forward, but I’m thinking about a practical approach. The “Morning Funny” (which needs a better name) is a cartoon or joke which appears at the start of the day - usually at around 9:00am. There are agreements in place with 5 or 6 different cartoonists to reproduce their work, and I sometimes re-recycle a joke from the Adam Smith Institute Jokester; make that “used to re-recycle” - he has retired. Monday “The Day Job” is about what bloggers do when they are not blogging. I have only done one of these, and intend to increase the frequency. Tuesday “Politics Decoded” is Garbos weekly political comment column - running for 6 months now. Garbo publishes his “bon mots” before lunch on a Tuesday with the reliability of Mr Gordon asking Mr Cameron questions at PMQs instead of answering them. (more…)

Those of us who are have stuck it out this far through Lent might have been struck by the flurry of apologies earlier this week. Trouble is, none of them seemed to be quite good enough for everyone. 1. Australian Humility? That Can’t be Right…. The apology made by the Australian PM, in a public event, to the Aboriginal peoples, was the strongest statement yet made to the native inhabitants of ‘Australia’ by the white colonisers. However, it’s been criticised as being talk but no action, in the absence of concrete actions to back it up. After years of calling for an official recognition of the wrongs done to them by settlers, many Aboriginal leaders and communities (the first Australians) were today rejoicing at the gesture. But they point out that concrete resources are needed to address the legacy of historical injustices. (from Ekklesia ) This is reminiscent of the debate over slavery in the UK around this time last year, and whether any form of compensation over and above an apology would be appropriate. It’s a fairly new Oz government, so Kevin Rudd probably needs more time. 2. The Lightening Conductor Speaks The apology made by the Archbishop of Canterbury I must of course take responsibility for any unclarity in either that text or in the radio interview, and for any misleading choice of words that has helped to cause distress or misunderstanding among the public at large and especially among my fellow Christians . It’s Lent, and one of the great penitential phrases of the Psalms will be in all our minds " ‘Who can tell how oft he offendeth? Cleanse thou me from my secret faults’. This seemed as far as he could go, since there are major questions over whether he has anything to apologise for, or whether wilful misinterpretation by the media is the prime culprit. The most pathetic sight of the start of the week was the BBC news trying to find somebody, anybody, in the CofE who wanted Rowan Williams to resign, in a desperate attempt to keep the story running. The round of applause at General Synod killed the resignation story, and the Beeb have since ignored the issue, Question Time excepted. 3. A Running Sore? Then there’s Dwain Chambers, who apologises, pays the penalty, changes his behaviour, and then is just too good on his return to the sport. There is a question about whether he’s sorry he did drugs, or sorry he got caught, but he’s certainly got guts to face his critics. Mind you: He can run away faster than they can chase him. By the sight of him, it’s not him who’d be running away. (more…)

Whilst everyone else is calling for the head, or at least the beard, of the Archbishop of Canterbury, MP’s everywhere are breathing a sigh of relief. The heat is off. The media pack has found another prey to chase. But you’d better keep those receipts just in case. How good it was, in the prehistoric era that was Shrove Tuesday this week, to find both Labour and the Conservatives donning their hair shirts in readiness for Lent. Very fitting, as the season of fasting begins, for our MP’s to display their contrition, and rein in their appetites for expensive dinners and well paid relatives. Lent is the lost season. The shops are filled with cards for Valentines Day, Mothers Day, even Easter eggs, but nobody makes much of a fuss about Lent. Indeed, the Health and Safety fundamentalists managed to kill off the Shrove Tuesday pancake race in Ripon this week. Maybe next year we’ll see a backlash, there’s always hope. We ignore Lent at our peril. We are culturally averse to giving things up. It is destroying us, and it is destroying our planet. Too Many Toys, Not Enough Planet The root of the problem is ingratitude. We simply aren’t thankful enough. Try a case study: 2 boys: one has 1 toy, one has 100. Both are given a new toy. Who will appreciate it more? Unless he’s clinically depressed, or it’s a Barbie, it’ll be the kid with 1 toy. The less we’ve got, the more we appreciate it. The converse is true, the more we have, the less we appreciate any individual item. Economists call it the law of diminishing returns. This law drives consumerism in circles: We have more stuff. We aren’t satisfied with it. We buy/experience even more to compensate. But with each new purchase/experience our capacity to be satisfied falls. Global Consumption is Consuming the Globe And ingratitude is at the root of global warming. Our consumption of the worlds resources is running ahead of the planets capacity to cope. But what is we stopped buying gadgets… But what would happen if we didn’t want more? What about all those shiny toys … the plasma TV, the foreign holiday, the quad bike for the kids, the 15 gadgets on standby from the phone charger to the electronic toothbrush - what would happen if we could be happy without any of this stuff, and just didn’t have it? If we were thankful for what we had, we wouldn’t want for more. …and stopped caring about buying them It’s tied up with depression too. Consumer culture teaches us to be dissatisfied with pretty much everything: our possessions, our bodies, our homes (the Radio Times review of ‘Grand Designs’ this week begins ‘covetousness crouches at the elbow of this programme’), our children, our partners, our cars, our jobs, our holidays. There’s only so much of this a normal person can cope with before they turn into Eeyore. (more…)

[ED: Sorry comments left closed by mistake. Now open.] Following Rowan Williams lecture on Tuesday about the blasphemy law, Dave Walker has a piece on some of the reactions to it. Here’s my take. As someone with a full-time job, I don’t have the 3 days necessary to grapple with every sentence in the AB of C’s lecture. It is what it is: a lecture, not an article in the Sun. It’s all the more disappointing that some of the reports and reactions don’t take this into account. The Times report gives just as much airtime to Terry Sanderson, the president of the rent-a-quote National Secular Society (membership 7,000), who called the lecture a ‘blatant pitch for new legislation to replace the blasphemy laws’. Sorry Mr. S, but the one thing you can’t accuse Rowan Williams of being is blatant. Nuanced, dense, impenetrable even (I don’t know if this got a laugh at the lecture - at one stage he restates one of his phrases ‘in plainer English’), but not blatant. Jerry Springer the Opera 1, Church of England 0? Williams basic argument seems to be that the blasphemy law is finished, but that we do need to provide some sort of protection against religious abuse. Hence he has been shot at by American conservatives for being limp on the blasphemy law, and by secularists for wanting to protect religion. But judging by the picture, he’s still smiling. (more…)

Has anyone told you this week they’re feeling fed up? Down? Miserable even? There are two possible explanations: 1. The release of a new Morrissey single 2. This: 1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA. Where W is weather, D is debt - minus the money (d) due on January’s pay day - and T is the time since Christmas. Q is the period since the failure to quit a bad habit, M stands for general motivational levels and NA is the need to take action and do something about it. Which is, of course, the formula for how miserable people get in early January, and peaked on Monday 21st January this year. It may not be a co-incidence that divorce lawyers report their busiest time in the weeks after Christmas, nor that there have been several tragic headline stories this week about people taking their own lives. One in Four …of us will get clinical depression at some point in our lives, and other mental illnesses like OCD (which affects 2 or 3 in 100 people) are in the World Health Organisations top 10 most debilitating illnesses. Psychologist Oliver James, amongst others, has written about how consumer society is toxic to mental health. Rates of depression and mental distress are steadily rising. At the same time we are hard-wiring them deeper into every new generation. (more…)

Two snapshots from the last 24 hours, whilst the BBC was jetting Huw Edwards and Nick Robinson out to China to ask Gordon £rown about global warming (What was that all about, then, boys?). Our local globalised dentist Do a search for my area, and youll find that the dentists taking NHS patients have names like Marschner and Andrikonite. The NHS dentist who treated us was Romanian, recently arrived, and very good. Meanwhile all the local dentists who arent taking any more NHS patients have good solid British names like Irvine and Wright. Who has the time to stop and care? How many people drove past that Exeter roundabout before Karl-Heinz Korzenietz stopped to look at all the confidential documents blowing around in the wind? Ok hes from Dawlish, but Ill wager his great-grandparents werent. What if … our model citizens turned out to be immigrants? Forget the economic argument for a moment, what if the people coming into the UK from overseas are actually better citizens than we are? When a Polish boy has to go back home to get a decent education, after being failed by an English school, maybe it makes us start asking questions. When we discover that our European neighbours have lower rates of mental illness than we do, perhaps their presence becomes a helpful mirror on the sort of society we may be turning into. Or if … immigrants all turned out to be like some of us Im all in favour of integration, but maybe its a two-way street. Consider what would full integration of “foreigners” into UK society might look like: The divorce rate among Poles would hit 40%. Muslim girls would be binge drinking every weekend. Pretty much everyone driving past on the other side, whether its a box of papers or a mugging. Or even if … we tried to be like them Its a bit of a caricature, but immigration offers us the chance to learn from the best aspects of other cultures. Asian politeness, Eastern European hospitality? Anyone? Wrapping Up In Extreme Pilgrim, Sussex vicar Peter Owen Jones, 3 weeks into living alone in a cave in the Egyptian desert says: “When I came here I was numb. Ive only just realised that, but now Im coming alive.” Everyone has blind spots, and there are some things we only discover by immersion in a different place, and a different culture. Every new person who comes to the UK is a chance to listen, look at ourselves, and learn, not to mention an opportunity to show hospitality and care. Who knows, it may be just what a numb society needs?

Following Matt’s challenge, and having zero track record as a pundit, here’s the Touching Base Janus Horribilis (after the 2-faced Roman god of the new year , which as I’m sure you all know we get ‘January’ from) Face 1: 2007 Moment of the Year was Sam Tyler jumping off the roof in Life on Mars . In the words of his fellow Mancunian, Morrissey “tried living in the real world instead of a sham/but before I began/I was bored before I even began.” (Shoplifters of the World, Unite. For information, we are officially the worst shoplifters in Europe, therefore by the law of averages immigration should reduce the crime rate….) So ended the best TV series of the 21st century so far, on the nightmare thought that if you thought the 70’s were boring, they ain’t nothing compared to the anyodyne forms-in-triplicate risk-free parody of life that passes for the noughties. In the end Tyler, having spent most of the series in a coma in 2005, dreaming he was in the 70’s, opts for the dream over the real world. Who am I? In the meantime, the series brilliantly plumbed the question of identity: how do you hold on to who you are, when you live in a place which challenges all of it? Tyler is an alien in a strange land, and struggles to remember where he comes from, whilst beginning to adapt to and feel at home in where he is. The past is another country, and so is tomorrow - we are constantly (unconsciously) all going through the same process as Sam Tyler. As a nation and as individuals, all that we are comes from the past, but we have to adapt to life in the present, and every value system, whether informed by the past, or by faith, or by philosophy, has to find ways to relate those values to reality. Who are US? The USA is currently having its 4-yearly test of values against reality, and realising it has some catching up to do. Meanwhile in the UK the Bishop of Rochester’s recent comments are wrestling with a nation has forgotten where it’s come from, and which has many communities which aren’t making much attempt to adapt to the country where they are. And who are UK? This is the big debate of UK politics in the 21st century so far. Whilst Labour and the Conservatives offer minor variations on capitalism with a conscience, the bigger question of the nature of British identity is in the melting pot. We talk about British values, but have forgotten what they are (if we ever knew), and struggle to relate them to a changing world. In a sense Blair was the first 21st century politician because he realised that old Labour values needed to catch up with reality. He also embodies the danger: that pragmatism takes over entirely from principle, and we forget what principles we had in the first place . The Christian principles undergirding British law and society are currently up for negotiation - the blasphemy law being a case in point - and everyone from Richard Dawkins to the Roman Catholics have a view. (more…)