“We need to make an example of this particular incident..”
Interesting interjection by DUP MLA Jim Wells, and one I entirely agree with, on the felling of a number of protected trees in a private estate on the outskirts of Newcastle, County Down. One for the Northern Ireland Minister for the Environment, the DUP’s Arlene Foster, to ponder.. As the Woodland Trust spokesman says,
Patrick Craig from the Woodland Trust said: “We’re just absolutely appalled that yet again some more native trees have been destroyed.“The legislation is very, very strong, but unfortunately when it comes to enforcement, there doesn’t seem to be the willingness or ability of anybody to actually enforce those protection orders.”
Also from the BBC report
A DOE spokesperson said: “Planning Service can confirm that investigations into a possible breach of planning control in the Bryansford area of Newcastle are ongoing, however we cannot comment on the details of the investigation at this stage.”
A possible breach?
Nevin
>>Eoghan, are inveterate tree huggers barking mad or just informers for the Special Branch?<<
I reckon we will have to dig deep to get to the root of the problem, however I reckon that we may well be barking up the proverbial, best leaf it to those who can see the wood fir the trees!
*you’re just a silly arse,*
*to put it plainly you are full of shit*
Ah such wit, such erudition, my what devastating rebuttals! Good to see that the man playing rule is alive and well and being fully abused on this thread.
Let’s deal with the towering intellectual steve first shall we? It’s usually a good rule of thumb steve old chum that when you as you yourself admit “haven’t a clue” about a subject not to allege that someone who does actually know what he’s talking about is “full of shit”.
Steyn is not a nazi, he’s a perfectly legitimate commentator for a leading Canadian magazine who are both being prosecuted in several star chambers (one, and only one, of the HRC’s has declined to pursue his prosecution) for his having the temerity to express opinions that the government disapproves of.
In the course of this prosecution the accuser gets to have his legal fees paid for but the defendent has to pay for their own defence. The particular law invoked has so far had a 100% conviction rate and half of the cases have been brought by one man, a former employee of the HRC who has got very rich indeed out of these cases.
In the course of another case it has been proven (despite the efforts of the HRC to cover it up) that several HRC staff have joined Nazi organisations in order to plant evidence that they then use to convict.
If you believe that constitutes free speech in Canada then I am afraid sir it is clearly you that is full of the excrement.
Your asinine statement “if the governmet is prosecuting him I am more than confident that he is deserving of censorship” shows that you know nothing about civil liberties, freedom of speech and censorship, you are in short a government lickspittle who would join the queues for the”showers” giving your passive little bleats and apologising to the state troopers for your thought crimes.
For the full details see “Canada vs Free Speech” in “steynonline.com”.
You might also want to check out this article in Der Sturmer, oh sorry the National Post;
“http://www.nationalpost.com/todays_paper/story.html?id=391873&p=1″
Cut and paste the webpage, I still don’t get the hang of this link posting thing.
Now to the trees, my point is a simple one; there is too much infantilising of debate when it comes to environmental issues.
Let me make it plain; trees are not some sort of Disneyfied mystical beings, they are big lumps of wood with leaves on them and we’ve been knocking them down since time immemorial. They’ve provided fuel for our homes, timber to build ships and houses and even paper to spread literacy, we have dragged ourselves out of the caves and swamps by cutting down trees, believe it or not folks they grow again!
Furthermore, the societies that have been knocking down trees when they felt it was necessary are the exact same societies that are today the most advanced, progressive, best educated, healthiest, longest living and cleanest on planet earth, Northern Ireland along with the rest of western Europe fall into this category.
Societies that worship trees and rocks tend to have a life expectancy of 35 and most of their children don’t make it to their fifth birthday, you don’t hear so many proverbs from the Crees today you may have noticed.
I am a fan of the human race, I like human progress. I dislike smug, self satisfied beneficiaries of that same human progress (posters here) pretending that they would rather live in buckskin loincloths around campfires singing hymns to mother Earth. They’re being hypocritical “silly arses”.
Another element in human development has been the hard won and long fought for rights of the citizen against the state, as well as the right of a citizen to enjoy ownership of his property free from the whimsical fiats of the state.
Now if these trees were so goddamned precious the government could have bloody well bought them and turned the area into a national park, the posters of sluggerotoole could have had a whip around to pay for this, but they didn’t. Instead they purse their lips like anal retentive nannies and demand that the government tell some person what he does with his own property.
Cheap, self-satisfied hypocrites tend to get my dander up.
Maybe the trees are lovely, maybe the developer is a brutish philistine, but when I hear the nanny statists get on their high horse I reach for my chain saw and let ‘er rip.
the human rights commision of Canada investigates only complaints that are filed with them
And have you considered that the reason for upholding nearly 100% of those cases that are taken as far as a trial is that they only prosecute those cases that are in violation of their rules and in cases like Steyn they Refuse to prosecute frivolous cases
Harry
My heartfelt thanks.
There was me considering a future of tree and rock worship but just in time I read your wise words and reconsidered.
I had not previously thought that we were discussing primitive religion, rather the extraordinary capacity of certain individuals to flout the law.
Perhaps you would like to congratulate these other rugged libertarians.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=548431&in_page_id=1770
“Will the Minister or her Committee be ‘minded’ to investigate this allegation?”
…or even better will she investigate why a gap was allowed to develop, who allowed it, why they allowed it and will she ensure that suitable disciplinary action is taken to discourage them from doing it again.
I’m on the Liberal Party’s list of public enemies in Canada, I suspect they’ll skip the Human Rights Commission approach and arrange a boating accident instead.
Ezra Levant’s magazine (Western Standard) helped me out with the Pettigrew issue.
He was also brought up in front of the Commission for publishing the Danish cartoons.
“I’m not going to try to minimise what I’ve done and beg for mercy,” he told the BBC News website. “I have the right to violate all those Koranic precepts because we follow Queen Elizabeth’s law, not Muhammad’s law.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7273870.stm
Which is a position I suppose.
G.
Mark Steyn : isnt he one of DAVID ICKE’s lizards ?
Steve, let me help you here, Steyn is being prosecuted, only one court declined to pursue the complaint the other three are prosecuting him.
Clear enough for you so far?
Good, let us continue, you say no frivolous complaints get prosecuted, you believe only nazis get prosecuted, you say nothing about the shocking abuse of legal process whereby state officials planted evidence against these ‘nazis’, I mean if they’re such a danger why the need to make stuff up?.
So the restaurant owner who was prosecuted and fined for asking a vagrant not to smoke dope in his doorway, he was a nazi was he?
The plastic surgeon who declined to carry out a labiaplasty on a transsexual on the reasonable grounds that he’d never worked on transsexuals before, he was a nazi too?
And Ezra Levant, the only editor in the civilised world to face prosecution for publishing the Danish cartoons, is he a nazi? Look at his name again and tell me whether a man called Ezra Levant is likely to be a nazi?
Canada presents herself to the world as the shining beacon of freedom and liberty (especially in relation to her southern neighbour). Unfortunately the nasty suppurating herpes sores all over her lips called the “Human Rights” Courts, would indicate that Canada has quite a few ugly secrets that she would prefer the rest of us not to know about.
Try a little research steve, read about these cases, don’t just swallow the government propaganda, find out the truth, your country abuses civil, religious and press freedoms, it’s ugly and you should be thoroughly ashamed of what your government is doing.
Harry
I took your advice and read up a little on these cases.
Maybe you should too.
Mark Steyn writes very wittily and with considerable self-deprecation, useful qualities when you are expressing a forthright opinion. As he writes here:
http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/1023/128/
There are 2 cases outstanding against him. So at last we can quantify your exaggeration. 50%
Some readers may find this letter helpful in providing balance and maybe even a few facts in some of the other cases you highlighted.
http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/resources/news/globedop
Picking on ordinary people and ruining their business in set-up style charges, is a bit below the belt.
It is so ultra-PC, like that lottery grant that didn’t happen because the lifeboat wasn’t rescuing enough gay people.
G.
“Let me make it plain; trees are not some sort of Disneyfied mystical beings, they are big lumps of wood with leaves on them and we’ve been knocking them down since time immemorial. believe it or not folks they grow again!
But only if there is somewhere left for them to grow. And that’s where you stumbled, fell, and ended up in shite the first time round. Read up on it. Take a look around. You may actually learn something.
The amount of land that is use-able for native tree forestation in this country is down to around 10 percent. This stuff doesn’t grow like the Ministry Men’s favourite weed, conifers.
The state doesn’t have to step in and buy. It put TPOs on the land. This guy will, with a bit of luck, get screwed royally by the planners. And slap it up him.
Some of us do pay, and pay heftily. We pay to belong to organisations like the Woodland Trust.
We don’t wish to live in loinskins. We want to see sustainable development. Again, look it up. It’s the reason PPS14 is in place, and hopefully why the majority of it will stay. Sustainable development is the reason they are installing the tidal turbine in Strangford this week. Just so silly arses like you can leave your PC on stand-by over night.
We don’t save trees for the craic or because they are “Disneyfied”. Did you read the first post from TreesRus? Did you note the part where he mentioned the salmon run? It’s called interdependency. When we cut down all the native trees, we do more than just clear sites for chipeater bungalows. Again, if you can access it from your Helen’s Bay bungalow, check out EHS’s annual bio-diversity report.
If you feel that a 20% increase in the number of red-listed species in this region alone is acceptable, who am I to make you look less of a fool…?
The Raven
Good stuff. Though to be fair to Harry – he lives a lot closer to Botany Bay than Helen’s Bay.
At this point can I recommend a bit of work I did in a previous life.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/schools/11_16/ks3geography/nonswf/ecosystems/ecosystems.shtml
Yes, willis I did think that it’s a bit rich for someone to call me an idiot when he makes a clown of himself twice accusing me of living in a town in which I never set foot, but I didn’t pick it up because small little issues don’t actually matter to the larger point.
In the same way that it doesn’t matter whether Steyn was orinally arraigned before two or three provincial HRC courts as well the federal one before one dropped out when my blindingly obvious point is that he shouldn’t be prosecuted by any damned court whatsoever for exercising his legitimate rights as a journalist.
Not too complicated I’d have thought.
Have a read of what one of the chief instigators in these cases wrote about a leading black politician, Ann Cools, in one of the websites that then got prosecuted by him for what he had himself written (!):
“Cools don’t belong in our Senate
Not only is Canadian Senator Anne Cools a Negro, she is also an immigrant! And she is also one helluva preachy c*nt. She does NOT belong in my Canada. My Anglo-Germanic people were here before there was a Canada and her kind have jumped in, polluted our race, and forced their bull**** down our throats. Time to go back to when the women n**ger imports knew their place…And that place was NOT in public!”
What is odd about this is that the politician in question is a conservative one who had recently spoken out against same sex marriage, and the person who planted the comment after she spoke out against it and who prosecuted based on the comment (and is the plaintiff in half the cases, which have a 100% conviction rate) just happens to be a leading public proponent of gay marriage.
Hmmmm, stinks to high heaven in my opinion but keep on trying to defend the system that meant Canada was the only so called free society on earth that prosecuted a editor for publishing the Mohammed cartoons.
Free speech in Canada? My arse.
The problem the gays had Amsterdam, was that they were so few. In Britain, to describe them as not terribly numerous would be to over-state their demographic.
This was of course before the days when Blairite stats could turn a million immigrants into 15,000.
The best way to prevent gay marriage is perhaps to make it a crime to do it more than once, international, same-gender revolutionary, campaign tourism bigamy.
The politics is about winning, it is not about whether there is a market for the benefits being wrestled from a dazed society.
Foreigners take lead in Toronto same-sex weddings
Fri Jun 22, 2007 6:21 PM EDT148
TORONTO (Reuters) – In the city that was home to Canada’s first legalized gay wedding — and the host of the country’s biggest and brashest Pride Week celebrations — so far this year only one marriage license has been issued to a Canadian same-sex couple.’
When San Francisco, New Orleans and everywhere in between has to be dragged to Toronto to do weddings, it gets to the stage folks are being married two or three times.
It is surely funny, it is possibly proof that gay rights is the most successful public relations engine in history, it is not however authentic sexual liberation. Nope, faith, family, patriarchy, that’s all to be destroyed.
It is of course most certainly a business. When I think back to the COC era in the Netherlands when homophile integration was abandoned, one of the reasons was the cash from pornography, gay-bars, prostitution and narcotics,
I mean when do the IRA/ETA/FARC stop robbing banks? The thing about revolution, and this works for sexual liberation, and Human Rights Commissions is that it is frequently habit forming, and the money is useful.
“At this point can I recommend a bit of work I did in a previous life.”
I cycled into the 3rd(?) Lock on the Lagan Valley Towpath, the cops at Castlereagh were unable to find it, it is right beside the lock-keepers cottage and new center that was built.
I trashed a new cycle, wrecked the lights, and the PSNI (Castlereagh) were telling me that although it is in their area, they’ve not responded to anything there since 1959.
(which is always good to know if one is planning a clandestine meeting of some kind.)
They tried to bump it over to the Lisburn Road who they thought might have a map. I also done the wheels of a road bike in leafleting for the UUP on New Forge Lane, so I only use hybrids or mountin bikes on the route now.
I also figure gay people plant a lot of conifers. However the tree debris that chews up cycles will be of the more desirable kind, I’m up for any type of tree,
I think I’ve mentioned that one of the SF’s more recent acts of landscaping was to whack the big one in my garden.
So Squinter gor off light in some respects, he could have been chainsawed, or invited to one of their group-think meetings.
SF would like Canada.
G.
Here’s a 1742 lease for the townland of Ballyallaght, parish of Billy, which details the number of trees that had to be planted during the duration of the lease and the default penalty imposed. The tree choices were ash, oak, sycamore or elm.
It is not clear that there was any gap in the TPO. Even if there is question mark over TPO the tree felling commenced well after 18th March. It actually commenced at 7am on Wednesday 26th and ended at approx 11.30pm on Thursday. The police visited the site at around 3pm on Wednesday but did not stop the felling. There was a breach of the law ongoing and no steps were made to prevent it. If it had been some kid on teh street breaking windows he would have been arrested. I believe the planning office also visited as did Jim Wells but no one stopped it happening. By Friday morning the site was quiet. Even the birds were quiet – obviously off looking for new habitat. Badgers, red squirrels, foxes and even a few deer (these animals really do live in gardens such as these) – all gone.
We have few areas of natural beauty and teh views from teh Mournes are ruined by sites along this area in Newcastle scarred by overdevelopment.
The fine for breach of a TPO is unlimited. The £30k only applies if the case is before a magistrates court and it is not clear if it is £30k per tree or per order. If it goes to High Court the fine is unlimited and finacial benefit is a consideatoin. The developer shoudl be fined a figure whihc outweighs the benefit from teh felling plus a penalty in other words £3 to £4million.
This is environmental carnage. It is illegal and the law must be enforced against the rich – it always is against the poor and disenfranchised.
Harry
May I suggest you enrol in Anger Management therapy. Open your eyes and witness the environmental destruction caused, by amongst other crimes, the felling of protected trees. Are you sure you’re a native earth dweller . . sounds more like you’ve just landed from Mars seeking the company of your fellow “brutish philistines”!