Slugger O'Toole

Latest comments from Comrade Stalin (see all)

Comrade Stalin has commented 2,208 times (36 in the last month).

1. Comment on “I do apologise for anyone who misunderstood the way I was using the metaphor…”
   on 20 May 2012 at 12:16 pm

   I got a few questions about whether I think unionists and nationalists are inherently sectarian.

   My answer is yes, of course they are. Unionism and nationalism represent two sides of the coin; it was a conflict they created and perpetuated. It’s still extremely difficult to get any of them to properly admit to this or even take serious steps to addressing the real, underlying causes of division.

   And did the middle classes play their role in the conflict ? Of course they did. They voted for the conflict; they financed it; a lot of them made money out of legal services, construction business and all the rest. In the earlier days they created it through their hiring and promotion policies in the companies they ran. They were only stopped when legislation was introduced.

   It is a gross inaccuracy to characterize the conflict here as a squabble among the proles while blameless suburbanites looked on in horror.

   Harry :

   who voted overwhelmingly for peaceful, non-violent political parties,

   You’re doing a fair bit of revisionism here. The political parties that have represented Northern Ireland over the past century were not peaceful nor were they non-violent. You seem to be falling into this trap of thinking that anyone who wasn’t caught with a gun or a bomb was not responsible for the conflict. If only it were that simple.

   I’ll always remember the reaction to the IRA ceasefire in 1994. James Molyneaux believed it was a prelude to civil war. Loyalists who were preparing to respond with their own ceasefire later reported that they received phonecalls from leading unionist politicians who tried to discourage them.

   Peaceful my ass.

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2. Comment on “I do apologise for anyone who misunderstood the way I was using the metaphor…”
   on 20 May 2012 at 12:06 pm

   Why would Ford ask the PSNI about prosecution when the PPS performs that function?

   Beside the point really; any citizen can report a crime to the police, the police are required to investigate.

   I’m not completely convinced about the reporting of this matter. McGuinness has party colleagues on the Police Board, I think he knows full well that they are the people to ask. I imagine this was a casual discussion with Ford rather than some sort of formal business.

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3. Comment on The withering of Irish Catholicism sees Sunday attendance plummet in the cities…
   on 20 May 2012 at 11:48 am

   My parents aren’t quite as old as some discussed here. I think they were in the first generation that was just beginning to question what it was all about, especially when the church decided to go on the attack against pop music in the 60s.

   The child abuse matter is the most serious question that has come up within the church, but most people brought up a generation or two back will recall different kinds of abuse. Corporal punishment, not just for bad behaviour but often for simply getting the wrong answers, or for being left-handed or a bit slow, was considered acceptable and such was the level of trust in the church that it was held that if the priests or nuns (or their delegates) used the cane they must have had a good reason. Later, the same generation witnessed priests abusing their power, often in subtle ways, influencing life within the community often in ways which were not necessarily to its interest. It was only after the fact that people began to question this and I think this has fed into the general disillusionment.

   Finally, not to sound clichéd but these days people are much better educated and better travelled than a generation or two ago. People expect to have a say in things, especially matters such as the need for celibacy, gay marriage, the role of women and so on. That is not how the church works, it seems to believe that its congregation is conservative/traditional and has no desire for such things. I think this is the single biggest problem with the church’s response to child abuse; it’s very much “we’ll take care of it, stop worrying yourselves”; it does not have the capacity to supplicate an angry congregation.

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4. Comment on “I do apologise for anyone who misunderstood the way I was using the metaphor…”
   on 17 May 2012 at 8:00 am

   I agree with Billy Pilgrim here, I don’t think J Bell was going after the golf clubs, I think he meant it as a metaphor for the middle and upper classes. People like to think that the middle classes are resisted to the baser urges of religious hate, which is especially ridiculous when you consider that kids who stay in school typically meet very few kids outside of their own religious background while they are at school – and it is the establishment who created and maintain that system.

   Harry,

   This is a common argument and was often evinced by the late David Dunseath, the unfortunate fact is that it simply isn’t true.

   Yes, it is true. You can see it in the election results. Irrespective of class, everyone votes for the same small set of parties with substantially similar views, especially when you consider that electoral turnout tends to be lower in poorer areas.

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5. Comment on Paisley: I have nothing to apologise for…
   on 16 May 2012 at 10:15 pm

   The Assembly authorizes an annual budget approaching £15bn. Yet we concern ourselves with the tiny fraction of this spent on supporting MLA’s office costs.

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6. Comment on #EUREF: “Voting No would rapidly expose how unimportant we now are”
   on 14 May 2012 at 8:27 pm

   Paul,

   Which answers the question on property prices, high interest rates where need to calm prices as it pushes up monthly repayments.

   Indeed. The central banks kept the rate artificially low.

   But the problem I have with the eurosceptics here is that all the banks across the West kept the rates artificially low. The idea that Irish Central Bank would have set a responsible interest rate throughout the 2000s is clearly ridiculous, especially when you consider that the Central Bank/regulator knew about many serious abuses such as those at Anglo Irish/Sean Quinn etc and did nothing to stop them.

   I doubt that increasing interest rates in the midst of a boom would have been politically possible to accomplish. The government would have been blamed for killing the economy. That is why it did not happen in any of the non-Eurozone countries.

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7. Comment on #EUREF: “Voting No would rapidly expose how unimportant we now are”
   on 14 May 2012 at 8:15 pm

   Alias,

   Compare the housing bubble in France to the housing bubble in Ireland, both of them caused by membership of the eurozone:

   But there was a bubble in non eurozone countries, eg Iceland, the UK, the USA, all very different economies yet they all had a big bubble at around the same time.

   Could it be that the bubble countries all have something in common which is not inspired by Europe ?

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8. Comment on “Mr Varadkar said Ireland and Britain could become a ‘mini-Schengen’”
   on 14 May 2012 at 8:13 pm

   The Irish Government could always ask the UK to capture that necessary data for them… Just a thought.

   I think the Irish government are quite right to opt out of this ridiculous security theatre. Biometric fingerprints wouldn’t have prevented any kind of terrorism in the past and they still won’t in the future. If the UK wants to treat its visitors as terrorist suspects I see no reason why Ireland should participate.

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9. Comment on #EUREF: “Voting No would rapidly expose how unimportant we now are”
   on 13 May 2012 at 4:06 pm

   In the sense that they used them to make themselves even more competitive while the Irish and Spanish used them to allow themselves to buy houses at credulously inflated prices,

   I really hope I’m not repeating myself again here, but I still don’t understand why people claim that the Irish and Spanish house price inflation and runaway debts were caused by the Euro, given that other Eurozone countries managed to keep it under control, and given that non-Eurozone countries such as Iceland and the UK also experienced serious overborrowing and property inflation.

   Let’s imagine Ireland still had the punt. Why do you think they would have avoided the temptations to borrow and lend that Iceland succombed to ?

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10. Comment on Obama endorses gay marriage
    on 13 May 2012 at 3:52 pm

    Romney’s main case against Obama is that Obama’s a nice enough guy, but over his head in the presidency.

    The opportunity to make that case has been missed. Obama now has four years of experience in the White House versus Romney’s zero; and in any case, Biden’s there.

    However, it may reach the point where Romney will have to expose Obama for the thug that he is.

    If the GOP try to launch full frontal attacks on Obama they will lose.

    The only way the GOP can win is to keep the economy on the top of the agenda and to hammer the message home that they can do a better job of it.

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