OK, I didn’t vote for the first time in my life. Not because I was confused, nor because there was no one to vote for (after all there was the Left Alliance, and particularly the Socialist Party), nor even because I didn’t feel strongly enough about getting Fianna Fail out. But because I realized, finally, that the system does not work. That laws are not made by the Dail but by cabinet and that the enforcement of the party whip does not allow members to vote independently. And that many of the laws on the books are anti-equality anyway.
But this does not mean that I have nothing to say, even if some of my friends say that not voting does not give me the right to comment (since when is voting compulsory? Not voting is also a political act). Continue reading “First reflections on Irish elections, February 2011”
Category: Ireland
The hidden lives of migrant women workers
I saw Alan Grossman and Aine O’Brien’s film ‘Promise and unrest’, the story of mother and daughter Noemi and Gracelle from the Philippines, and was reminded, yet again, of the hidden lives of thousands of migrant women care workers in post-Tiger Ireland.
Noemi came to Ireland when her daughter Gracelle was seven months to work as a care worker for an elderly person in Dublin. She is one of many domestic and care workers who have become a feature of Ireland once independent and enterprising Irish women returned to the workplace in their thousands, requiring enterprising and independent migrant women to take their place – the assumption being that this is ‘women’s work’. Continue reading “The hidden lives of migrant women workers”
Asylum seekers are not ‘things’
In July 2010 the government of the Republic of Ireland began a review of its policies of dispersal and direct provision for asylum seekers. This may sound positive particularly in light of the criticism by the Free Legal Advice Centre (FLAC) in 2003, that the direct provision scheme is ‘gravely detrimental of the human rights of a group of people legally present in the country and to whom the government has moral and legal obligations under national and international law’, and recommendation that the scheme be ‘abandoned immediately’. Continue reading “Asylum seekers are not ‘things’”
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