That's how I see it, but then again, I'm Catholic.
"32 police officers, lawmaker hurt in north Belfast riots; Protestant parade sparked attacks fifth year in a row" by Shawn Pogatchnik | Associated Press, July 13, 2013
BELFAST — Hundreds of police reinforcements from Britain were deployed on Belfast’s rubble-strewn streets Saturday after Protestant riots over a blocked march left 32 officers, a senior lawmaker, and at least eight rioters wounded.
Northern Ireland’s police commander, Chief Constable Matt Baggott, blamed leaders of the Orange Order brotherhood for inciting six hours of running street battles in two parts of Belfast that subsided early Saturday. He derided their leadership as reckless and said they had no plan for controlling the crowds they had summoned.
The anti-Catholic fraternity’s annual July 12 marches always raise tensions with the Irish Catholic minority. Over each of the previous four years, Irish republican militants in the Catholic district of Ardoyne have attacked police after an Orange parade passed by, the most bitterly divided part of the capital.
This year British authorities ordered the Orangemen to avoid the section of road nearest Ardoyne, an order that police enforced by blocking their parade route with seven armored vehicles. Orange leaders took that as a challenge and rallied thousands of supporters to the spot, where some attacked the vehicles and lines of heavily armored officers behind them.
Baggott said the Orange leaders behaved recklessly and should not duck responsibility for the mayhem....
Orange leaders insisted the blockade decision was the problem, not the alcohol-fueled fury of their own members.
I noticed nothing good ever happens when fueled by alcohol.
But they backed off their original threat to mount indefinite street protests across Northern Ireland and ordered a suspension of protests early Saturday....
This is the first time police from other parts of the United Kingdom have been deployed against Northern Ireland rioters. The approach stems from Northern Ireland’s recent peaceful hosting of the Group of Eight summit, when officers from Britain received antiriot training before the event here last month.
See: Getting in a Round of Golf at the G8
Putting for par.
But the sudden need for reinforcements also suggests the Northern Ireland police, though riot-savvy and heavily armed, lack sufficient numbers to cope with the seasonal flare-ups of mob violence.
Ban booze!
The Orange Order’s July 12 parades commemorate a 17th-century victory over Catholics.
Time to let it go.
But the mass military-themed mobilizations — including 550 on Friday alone — provide a graphic annual test of whether Protestants still wield control in a land where the government and police for decades were almost exclusively Protestant.
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Maybe there is something to the Jewish war paper's promotion of religious and sectarian strife wherever it is to be found after all. Never cared much for the Protestants 'round h're, them and their ministers and churches. Always preferred my priestly cathedrals -- until they touched me.
Speaking of terrorists:
"8 suspects arrested in ‘New IRA’ case" by Shawn Pogatchnik | Associated Press, July 06, 2013
DUBLIN — Irish police charged eight men with Irish Republican Army membership Friday after police raided a suspected meeting of the outlaws’ Dublin leadership, inflicting what a senior policeman called a major blow to the ‘‘New IRA’’ splinter group....
A senior police officer, speaking on condition he not be identified because he was not authorized to discuss the raid, said officers have kept Dublin-based activists of the New IRA faction under surveillance in anticipation of catching them in a meeting....
That script is getting old.
Most IRA members renounced violence and disarmed in 2005 following a failed 1970-1997 campaign to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom. Several small splinter groups have persisted with sporadic attacks.
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Also see: Real Terror in Ireland
Turns out it was mostly British false flags.
"Kennedys, Irish mark 50th anniversary of JFK visit; ‘Eternal flame’ from his grave passed to town" by Shawn Pogatchnik | Associated Press, June 23, 2013
DUBLIN — The Irish government and the Kennedy clan celebrated the 50th anniversary of one of Ireland’s most fondly recalled moments, the visit of President Kennedy, with a daylong street party Saturday that was capped by the lighting of Ireland’s own ‘‘eternal flame.’’
‘‘JFK 50: The Homecoming’’ celebrations focused on the County Wexford town of New Ross, from where Patrick Kennedy departed in 1848 at the height of Ireland’s potato famine to resettle in Boston. In June 1963, his great-grandson John returned to the town as the United States’ first and only Irish Catholic president.
During his four-day tour across Ireland, Kennedy so charmed the nation that, even decades later, his portrait adorns many living room walls as the ultimate symbol of Irish success in America.
Prime Minister Enda Kenny of Ireland joined Kennedy’s only surviving sibling, Jean Kennedy Smith, and his only surviving child, Caroline Kennedy, to hold three torches together that light a flame encased within an iron globe.
The flame had been carried Olympics-style from Kennedy’s plot in Arlington Cemetery by aircraft to Dublin, then by Irish Navy vessel up the River Barrow to the New Ross dockside. It was the first time the Kennedy eternal flame had been passed along in this fashion.
‘‘May it be a symbol of the fire in the Irish heart, imagination, and soul,’’ Kenny told more than 10,000 who had gathered along the river bank.
Several members of Ireland’s Special Olympics team helped carry the flame from the Irish naval vessel to the ceremony, a gesture to the memory of Kennedy’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics movement. She died in 2009.
And in a symbolic passing of the family political torch, Caroline Kennedy asked her 20-year-old son, Jack, to handle the main Kennedy part of the ceremony.
His polished and idealistic speech reflected his long-expressed hopes to follow his grandfather into US national politics after graduating from Yale.
‘‘We have been told over and over that America is no longer the great country that it was when my grandfather was president,’’ he said, noting that his generation would ‘‘inherit a series of problems that previous generations refused to address.’’
He listed rising sea levels, the US national debt, incessant Middle East conflicts, and declining US competitiveness as problems that ‘‘cynics and skeptics’’ could never solve.
But he said Ireland’s ability to rise from centuries of poverty, emigration, and social strife demonstrated that Kennedy-style ambition and optimism could find a home in the 21st century, too.
‘‘The glow from this flame can truly light the world,’’ he said.
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The flame soon went out on that story, although I saw a flicker later.
"Abortion foes march in Dublin
DUBLIN — More than 35,000 antiabortion activists marched through Dublin to oppose government plans to enact a bill legalizing terminations for women in life-threatening pregnancies. Saturday’s demonstration was by far the biggest in a series of protests against the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill, which is expected to be passed into law next week. Demonstrators called on Prime Minister Enda Kenny to withdraw the bill. Ireland’s government says the bill must be passed to end two decades of legal confusion over women’s right to receive abortions in medical emergencies. A parliamentary vote is expected Wednesday (AP)."
Related:
Irish lawmakers back bill allowing some abortions
Ireland backs easing abortion law
"A miscarrying woman who died in an Irish hospital should have had her blood poisoning detected much sooner and been offered an abortion to improve her odds of survival, a report concluded Thursday in a case that is forcing Ireland to modernize its abortion laws. The 108-page report into the October death of Savita Halappanavar documented what the lead investigator described as “a cascade of mistakes.”
Also see: Aborting This Post About Ireland
Related: Ireland's Dirty Laundry
"Irish Magdalenes to get $45m; Catholic workers compensated for unpaid labor" by Shawn Pogatchnik | Associated Press, June 27, 2013
DUBLIN — Ireland will pay several hundred former residents of Catholic-run Magdalene laundries at least $45 million to compensate them for their years of unpaid labor and public shame, the government announced on Wednesday, following a decade-long campaign by former residents of the workhouses.
Justice Minister Alan Shatter apologized to the women — an estimated 770 survivors out of more than 10,000 who lived in the dozen facilities from 1922 to 1996 — that it had taken so long for them to receive compensation. The move marked the latest step in a two-decade effort by Ireland to investigate and redress human rights abuses in its Catholic institutions....
I can never figure out why it alway$ takes government $o long to right things.
In remarks to former Magdalenes, some of them in the press-conference audience, Shatter said he hoped they would accept the compensation plans as ‘‘a sincere expression of the state’s regret for failing you in the past, its recognition of your current needs, and its commitment to respecting your dignity and human rights as full, equal members of our nation.’’
And in a challenge to the four orders of nuns that ran the workhouses, Shatter called on them to help pay the bill....
Looks like Ireland's government is just as offensive as all the rest.
The nuns noted that they still were providing homes to more than 100 former laundry workers who chose to remain in church care when the last of the laundries closed, while virtually none of the nuns involved in running the workhouses are still alive today....
As part of the plans, former Magdalenes also will receive state-funded retirement pensions and free medical care at state-funded facilities.
They are owed that, and it's better than money going to some banker.
Activists representing the so-called ‘‘Maggies’’ had demanded justice and state compensation since 2002, when a previous government launched a compensation fund for people abused in Catholic-run orphanages and workhouses for children.
Former Magdalene residents were declared ineligible, as the government contended that the laundries were privately run institutions with negligible state involvement. Taxpayers since have paid more than $1.3 billion to more than 13,000 people who suffered sexual, physical, and psychological abuse in the children’s residences.
A government-commissioned investigation in February found that the state was legally responsible for overseeing the laundries, too. Prime Minister Enda Kenny offered an official apology for what he called ‘‘a cruel, pitiless Ireland’’ that had abused the women with ‘‘untrue and offensive stereotypes.’’
Investigators trawling through decades of the laundries’ residency records found that more than a quarter of women were directly committed to the laundries by public officials, such as judges or truancy officers, and all residents spent their days in menial labor without access to education.
Most did laundry for hotels, hospitals, and prisons, while others scrubbed floors or made rosary beads for the church’s profit.
The report found that the average length of stay was just seven months, not the lifetime imprisonment commonly depicted in fictional works....
The report did dispute depictions in popular culture of physical beatings in the institutions, noting that many Magdalene residents had transferred there as teenagers from Catholic-run industrial schools where such violence was common, and some survivors in their adult recollections failed to distinguish between the two....
No sex abuse, just slaves.
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Back home to the shire:
"Shire is one of more than a dozen global biopharmaceutical giants — many of the from Europe —that have set up shop in the region, hoping to sprinkle stardust from the area’s famed research and development laboratories on their own drug-discovery efforts."
