Is it just me or have you noticed that racists and homophobes tend to share the same political and ideological fixations? I mean, you rarely find a racist who is not a homophobe, or a homophobe who is not a racist. It seems that prejudicial views attract bigots like excrement attracts flies. The flies aren’t terribly concerned about the specific origin or composition of the bodily waste they are attracted to and neither are the bigots. It is just enough that the prejudice exists and they must be a part of it. Talking of which here is Jim Allister, leader of the TUV (the ultra British and Unionist party in the north-east of the country), bewailing the public funding of organisations from within the Irish-speaking and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender communities, as reported by the Newsletter:
“TUV leader Jim Allister has claimed that almost £3 million has been “squandered on many undeserving projects” by the Department of Social Development (DSD).
Mr Allister made the claim as he published the response to a series of Assembly Questions he had posed to the department, asking for details of spending from the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund under DUP ministers since 2011.
…in another question tabled on December 3 and answered on December 19, he asked the DSD minister to detail “how much funding has been supplied by his department to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) groups since May 2011”.
The answers received revealed that amongst the spend: £1,064,546.17 was spent on GAA clubs, with £273,000 spent on one club alone in Strabane, Strabane Sigerson’s Club; £1,134,100.33 was spent on Irish language groups; £138,997.78 was spent on a republican ex-prisoners group, Tar Anall; £83,176.18 was spent on the Bloody Sunday Trust; £259,087.93 was spent on Carrick Hill Residents Association; and £231,681.00 was spent on LGBT projects, including £170,000 to support the Strabane & Lifford LGBT group alone, and annual subventions to Belfast Pride.
Mr Allister said: “With so many areas needing real help to tackle deprivation, I am angered to find so much money, supposedly for tackling disadvantage, is being squandered on such irrelevant projects.
“This extravagant feting of GAA clubs, Irish language groups, ex-prisoners’ groups and LGBT campaigners is all the more surprising considering it is happening under DUP ministers at DSD.
It seems the Sinn Féin wish list is not as disdained as some would like to pretend.”
One can only imagine the horror the average TUV member would experience if he or she ever met a hurley-playing, Irish-speaking gay man. It would probably require several days of self-flagellation, human sacrifices and fervent praying to a wrathful Old Testament god for the wretched TUVer to purify himself after an encounter with a minion of the Gaylick Satan. Such is the legacy of colonial racism and intolerance that several centuries of British occupation have bequeathed to our island nation.
Meanwhile, mention a Gael and who shall appear but the Irish Independent’s very own pipsqueak-demagogue, Ian O’Doherty, with his latest sermon from the mount:
“…it was interesting to see that the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht issued a report this week which, quelle surprise, called for more money to be flushed down the endless toilet that is the Irish language industry. The cause for concern is the fact that, apparently, only 2pc of Irish civil servants can speak Irish “to the required level”.
So, with dreary inevitability, we were told that we need an “even more radical and systematic overhaul to ensure the State could deliver on Irish citizens’ rights”.
The apparent crisis caused by the lack of fluent Irish speakers in the civil service is a result of the farcical 2001 Supreme Court decision which decreed that anyone who wanted to conduct official business as Gaeilge should be facilitated. That, in itself, is a classic example of Irish illogic. Sure, people might like to think that we are a bilingual country and the aspirational notion of everyone being able to switch effortlessly from English to Irish and back again is something which appeals to some, if not necessarily all, of the population. The problem is that all of the population, regardless of their opinion on the matter, will now be expected to fund more expensive language training courses for civil servants, simply to cater for cranks who could, but won’t, speak English.”
Imagine that, Irish people in Ireland wanting to speak Irish? Next thing you know Danish people in Denmark will want to speak Danish or German people in Germany will want to speak German. And we all know that the citizens of those nations have high levels of English language fluency so those who decline to use the Queen’s speech must also be “cranks”.
“The exact figures for Government spending on Irish are as mysterious as those dreaded Irish noun declensions we had to learn in school, but most sources accept that it is somewhere in the figure of a billion euro a year. A billion euro, there or thereabouts, to keep a dying language on artificial life support is not just intellectually counter-intuitive, it’s morally bankrupt.”
Actually it averages around 100 million euros per annum, which is somewhat less than a billion euros – or even thereabouts.
“It was interesting to note that the same day this report came out, there was another Government press release trumpeting the fact that we spent €600m on foreign aid in 2014. Combine the two and that’s roughly €1.5bn of our money that this Government just splashed against the wall for absolutely no benefit.”
Irish-speaking men, women and children, and impoverished foreign men, women and children? Surely these two categories of recidivist are the twin evils threatening the prosperity of modern Ireland. However, despite his hatred of all things native the Keeper of the Anglophone Flame on the island-that-is-not-West-Britain cannot help but admit that:
“More people have developed an interest in Irish as a result of TG4 – the most innovative TV station in this country – than they ever did from their time at school.
After all, TG4 manages to present the language as a living, breathing, vibrant and sexy beast.”
The most “innovative TV station” in the country, Ian? But you have scolded us week after week with the admonishment that Irish is a “dead language” spoken by no one. So how can it have a television station? Is it staffed by the living dead? And watched by them too? For what have we also learned this week but that (Hibernophone) TG4 surpassed (Anglophone) RTÉ 2 in the audience ratings for New Years Day, making it the third most-watched TV channel in Ireland, just behind (Anglophone) TV3, and well ahead of (Anglophone) television channels like UTV and Channel 4.
Then again, who ever said bigotry and prejudice needed to be based on sense or logic?
[ASF: With thanks to @MisneachNYC]
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
the similarities are obvious between the xenophobic attitudes of the establishment in this state and intolerant loyalism. The attitudes of the TUV hardly need explanation. the hatred of the gaelic irish has a long and obnoxious history on this island, on Britain, and further abroad. The poor quality of journalism in Ireland is depressing though. the sections of the article you show above lurch from inconsistent to simply untrue. For example, the public is expected to fund “expensive language training courses for civil servants.” What training courses? even rudimentary research would have that Gaeleagras was closed down about 5 years ago. There is no language training at all in the civil service, expensive or otherwise. incidently, the expensive training amounted to the employment of 3 civil servants to provide training for well in excess of 20000 civil servants. No civil servant was compelled to learn irish. it was voluntary thing.
“simply to cater for cranks,” straight forward intolerance!
Then we’re treated to the ‘apparent’ lack of irish speakers in the civil service. The word apparent is used for two reasons i suspect. firstly, its can be safely assumed that no research was carried out in writing the article, so there is no evidence to contradict the lack of irish speakers in the civil service. secondly, in the unlikely event that research was performed, there will only be evidence to confirm the lack of irish speakers in the civil service. “Apparently” is thus used to weaken the an explicit statement of fact.
We are also told that the exact figures for spending on Irish are mysterious (research again!) but most sources (possibly referring to a few guys he met in the pub) accept that it is somewhere in the figure of a billion euro a year (sic). The last time i read the figure of a billion it was in relation to the expenditure by the department of education on irish teaching. the obvious flaw in this unreasoning is that the money is spent on teachers salaries, not the teaching of irish per se. unless you sack those teachers, no money is saved by them not teaching irish. in that sense, the teaching of irish has a much lower cost. In my opinion, any disadvantages are vastly outweighed by the advantages of teaching irish. maybe irish could be taught better, but that is a different issue.
Anyway, i could go on as i find depressing the propaganda that is passed for reasoned journalism in this country. it might be more productive if i put the laptop down and bring my kid out for some fresh air.
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There are many civil servants that speak it, and with a little organisation, they could be providing the services in Irish at least where needed most. Another thing they may consider doing is awarding the same proficiency and location bonuses as they do for other language proficiencies to provide incentives.
As for TV4, this says everything about them you ever need to know….
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/television/tv-news/channel-4-under-fire-for-new-series-set-to-be-the-shameless-in-famine-ireland-30879468.html
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Ian O’Doherty is right – as I said before – the Irish language legislation is an expensive cargo cult.
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Is Ian O Doherty also “right” when he calls for drug addicts to be sterilized?
Or that US troops need to be in the Middle East for Peacekeeping???
Or that Roma are UnterMensch. ( all Ian’s views )
The guy is a right wing Toe rag…End of.
And the fact that you find yourself in agreement with him about anything;should cause yourself to reflect on yourself.
Also, his figures are bogus as ASF points out….So How can he be right when he pulled the figures out of his a$$ in the same way that an Anglo Irish banker got his figures asking for Government cash!!!!!
Juiz Luiz.
Janis living under communism has made you into a right wing fascist!!!!! IMHO.
With your love in for Reagan and Thatcher.
Yuck.
Your “heroes” god Bless you.
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maggie didn’t just harm Britain
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2014/04/how-thatcher-gave-pol-pot-hand
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Yes she was a Biatch. I read that before about Pol Pot. And she was a great Pal of Pinochet also.
I experienced Janis type before.
On a Gawker media site..Which is a real Pro British American site. Regrugiates “stories” from the Daily Mail.etc
Anyway I used to read Jalopnik, about cars.
It had a “writer” called Mate Petany Or some such,.
He was a former Eastern Euro type who had a massive hard on for Thatcher and the Brits.
So much so, that he referred to GM in Europe as Vauxhalls.
Despite the fact that in Russia and most of the EU they are Opels. They are even engineered in Germany .
And the only tw*ts that use Vauxhall are the Brits.
So, I met Janis types before.
They are blinded by their pasts. They are so vehemantately anti Commie that Right wing Murders like thatcher and Reagan will do
I often wonder If I was to write on a Lativan Blog, Or Estonian blog that the Russians were lovely lads Didn’t they leave trams for Public transport and socialized medicine etc..How well received would I be????
Or Stalin rebuilt Warsaw..So the Poles should suck up to Moscow Coz their warped view is the Irish should hug the British State..
Coz Thatcher and Reagan are their “heroes”
f**K Dat..I say.
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I agree with him on this topic not on everything.
I also would like that the world was policed by a perfect and omnipotent god.
But unfortunately we live in the real world and I’d rather have the Americans calling the shots than the Russians or the Chinese.
You were very lucky that the Brits shielded you from the real enemies of civilised Europe – the USSR/Russia.
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I agree with you on the I’d rather have America calling the shots than the Russians or the Chinese. I’d rather have them call shots than any European country either. The Brits didn’t shield anyone from anybody., they were done in ’46. The Americans were done as of 2012, sold out in insatiable greed. It’s a brave new world and unless something changes real fast, the Chinese have the helm.
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“The Brits” couldn’t “shield” their way out of a paper bag. They were humiliatingly hammered by an untrained local militia in Basra Iraq and likewise in Afghanistan. And by the way, far from attempting to shield Ireland from the USSR, “the Brits” sponsored the pro-Soviet Workers Party/Official IRA in both the North and South of Ireland. Much of this sponsorship occurred during the premiership of the allegedly fanatically anti-Communist Mrs Thatcher. Many of the pro-Unionist neo-revisionist anti-Irish journos in the Sindo, RTE and the Irish Times belonged to this ultra-Stalinist outfit. There are two possibilities here: either Mrs Thatcher’s alleged anti-communism was a complete sham, or the Workers Party/Official IRA alleged communism was a complete sham, and WP/OIRA was really a bespoke missionary outfit on behalf of British intelligence, the role of which was to proselytise in communist countries on behalf of British rule in Ireland. Not to mention, of course – and even more importantly – providing a pseudo working-class leftist image to bourgeois Unionism/Revisionism in Ireland. The subsequent neo-conservative careers of Harris, Gregg & co strongly indicate the latter is the truth of the matter. By the way, wasn’t it Alexander Solzhenitsyn who recalled the way British soldiers forced eastern European refugees at gunpoint on to boats back to Communist tyranny at the end of the War?
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Mr. Veshnyakov is right, all Latvians of Russian heritage should have Russian citizenship and be afforded all “protections” thereof.
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That’s right – they should have Russian citizenship, and those who think that Latvia is a fascist country should move back to Russia.
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Or have Russian troops move in to protect them. That worked in the Ukraine. ; )
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That worked really well indeed.
Russia got the poorest areas of Ukraine and bombed their infrastructure to shit.
And they can’t supply Crimea properly and its naval base is nearly useless, because their ships can’t enter or exit the Black sea without NATO’s approval.
They just made a neutral/friendly country their worst enemy and caused their neighbours to hate them even more – even Finland and Sweden are considering NATO membership now.
Georgia and Ukraine want to join it too.
Also their currency lost more than 50% of its value and the only thing that keeps them afloat – the oil price tanked too.
And the west can still harm Russia even harder without firing a single shot.
Just disable their access to Visa, Mastercard and SWIFT payment systems and the Russian economy will be in deep shit.
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It is about as expensive of a cargo cult than the separation of Latvia from “Mother Russia.” Some things are simply worth the money.
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I’m calling it a “cargo cult”, because that legislation is basically copied and pasted from other countries that have a very different linguistic environments.
It’s meant for a fully bilingual country whose citizens speak both languages equally well.
(The Netherlands, Sweden or Latvia are way closer to this model than Ireland)
Ireland is not a bilingual country. It’s a monolingual country with a few regions where a small regional minority language is spoken.
That’s why the legislation is not working and despite the obscene amounts of money that have been flushed down the drain I still have yet to hear an actual conversation in Irish.
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how much money is this obscene amount? The cost of providing services in Irish is the same as providing them in English.
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If the cost is the same then it’s a huge waste of money, because less that 5% actually speak Irish.
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Jānis, from Wikipedia: “A cargo cult is a Melanesian millenarian movement encompassing a diverse range of practices and occurring in the wake of contact with the commercial networks of colonizing societies. The name derives from the belief that various ritualistic acts will lead to a bestowing of material wealth (“cargo”).”
Which pretty much sums up the culture of Anglophiliac Ireland.
As I have said to you before, there but for the grace of god would have gone Latvia. If Russification had been successful in the Baltics in the 1800s and 1900s would you really refer to the desire to restore Latvian as the main language of Latvia as a “cargo cult”, despite the nation being majority Russian-speaking? You know as well as I how close that came to happening. You may consider yourself very lucky indeed to be speaking Latvian not Russian.
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There’s nothing wrong with the desire to restore Irish as the main language of Ireland.
But the related legislation is basically this:
————
the belief that various ritualistic acts will lead to a bestowing of material wealth (“cargo”).
————
You have been doing these ritualistic acts for 90+ years and still haven’t got the results you wanted.
Quite the opposite actually – there were more Irish speakers during the British rule than now.
So maybe it’s time to change it?
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Jānis, the “legislation” did not exist until 2003. Until then it was the clauses of a Constitutional article with an inbuilt “get-out” excuse that all governments of all hues used to escape any serious attempt to restore the language or even serve those who still spoke it. For those 90 years Irish and Irish-speaking communities were ignored beyond electoral expressions of piety and fidelity every 5 years or so. Or on St. Patrick’s Day.
Time to change, yes. From decades of lip-service, tokenism, apathy and outright hostility.
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Yes, that’s what I’m talking about.
Irish is not the 1st and national language of the country. It’s a regional minority language.
And it should have been specified in the constitution as such.
People tend to disrespect and ignore laws that ignore reality. And that’s what happened in Ireland.
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Most of the Free Presbyterians I know are NOT racist, but strongly oppose sodomite sex-perversion. I am an ultra conservative English Protestant but am not bigoted against Catholics, Irish, nor anyone else. Disapproval of sinful behavior is NOT “bigotry”
This post is dumb, like the lying American pro-homosexual advocates who compare people speaking out against their evil same-sex “marriages” to Jim Crow advocates who condemned interracial unions between a male and a female.
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Why is it sinful?
Because a Jewish book of fairy tales says so?
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By the by, Are you sure of your caption? I see a startling resemblance.
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It just occured to me.
Ian O doherty is a second rate Jeremy Clarkson wannabe.
A west Brit Clarkson..the only difference is that Jeremy Clarkson is funny at times and O’Doherty is as funny as an anal wart.
And Clarkson stole lots of his material and Style from P.J O’Rourke. The american.
So that makes O’Doherty a second rate copy of a second rate copy.
So suck it up O’Doherty fans.
Yet another sad example of the West Brit Oirish Independent rag having to have an Irish Copy of a British copy of an American!!!!!!!!!!!
My advice???
If you like right wing shock-Jocks..Seek out the originals..Not the copy-cat. 4th Rate gobshites.
Happy New Year. except if your name is Ian O’Dohherty.
I would love O’Doherty to read this comment. It would make the fat p**ck cry.
Coz he knows I’m right. in his “soul”. If such a troll has such a thing.
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No soul…just a piece of paper for a brain. Has “I O U one brain, signed God” written on it.
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The sad bit is..He makes a “living” from such nonsense which at times is hate speech.
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