Senator Norris on Palestine, Israel, Syria, Ukraine

An outstanding speech by Irish Independent Senator David Norris on Palestine, Israel, Syria, Ukraine
Norris is a former university lecturer and a member of the Oireachtas, serving in Seanad Éireann since 1987. He was the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in Ireland. Founder of the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform, he is also a prominent member of the Church of Ireland.

Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers

In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam. Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.

More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.

“The bones are still there,” local historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered the origins of the mass grave in a batch of never-before-released documents, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “The children who died in the Home, this was them.”

The grim findings, which are being investigated by police, provide a glimpse into a particularly dark time for unmarried pregnant women in Ireland, where societal and religious mores stigmatized them. Without means to support themselves, women by the hundreds wound up at the Home. “When daughters became pregnant, they were ostracized completely,” Corless said. “Families would be afraid of neighbours finding out, because to get pregnant out of marriage was the worst thing on Earth. It was the worst crime a woman could commit, even though a lot of the time it had been because of a rape.”

More at Washington Post

Fake Store Fronts in Belfast to Boost Economy?

WeAreChange goes to Belfast see for themselves the way Northern Ireland has decided to handle the economic hardships in their neighborhoods. Thought various cities, the Northern Irish government has spent around £2 million on plastering up photos of fake store fronts where businesses once operates. These have been here for over a year but governments in multiple other cities have decided to do the same to put up a false sense of a thriving economy for the G8. This is another example of governments attempting to mask the problems of recession since the bank bailouts instead of actually doing something about it.

WeAreChange Youtube channel - Luke Rudkowski Twitter from Belfast @Lukewearechange

The Assassination of Michael Collins

Wikipedia

Ireland says sorry to the 10,000 'women slaves' of its Catholic workhouses who were locked up and brutalised by nuns

Women who had their childhoods ‘stolen away’, locked up in Catholic-run workhouses received a qualified apology from the Irish government yesterday. Over a period of 70 years, an estimated 10,000 were sent to the ‘Magdalene laundries’ to carry out unpaid manual labour under the supervision of nuns. Some were sent because they were the children of unmarried mothers, others for crimes as minor as not paying a train ticket.

Irish prime minister Enda Kenny apologised for the stigma and conditions saying they were a product of a ‘harsh and uncompromising Ireland’. Survivors quickly rejected his apology, and demanded a fuller and more frank admission from government and the religious orders involved. Maureen Sullivan, 60, of Magdalene Survivors Together, and the youngest known victim, said: ‘He is the taoiseach of the Irish people, and that is not a proper apology.’

She was 12 when taken from her school and put in the Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry  in New Ross, County Wexford, because her father had died and mother remarried. Miss Sullivan said she was told it  would further her education, but  she never saw her schoolbooks again.

For 48 years she says she has been haunted by memories of a lost  childhood and slave labour and is demanding a full apology from the government and religious orders for stealing her education, name, identity and life. ‘I feel that they are still in denial, but other parts of this report clearly state that we were telling the truth,’ she said.

By day she worked in the laundry, was fed bread and dripping, and then made sweaters or rosary beads before bedtime. ‘It was long, hard tedious work,’ she said. ‘I remember being hidden in a tunnel when the school inspectors came. I can only assume this was because I should not have been working in the laundry.’

More on Mail Online - Also see magdalenelaundries abuse

Coward

Coward is a 28 minute film set during World War 1 that brings to light some of the brutal treatment soldiers received for suffering what would now be known as shell-shock. It follows two cousins, Andrew and James, from their home in Northern Ireland who join the British Army to fight for their Country and make their families proud. Through their eyes we see the reality of life on the front lines.

Woman who was refused an abortion has died

Irish health chiefs have launched investigations following the death of a woman in a Galway hospital after she was refused an abortion.
Savita Halappanavar, a dentist aged 31, was 17 weeks pregnant when she died after suffering a miscarriage and septicaemia.

The woman’s husband Praveen Halappanavar, 34, claimed she had complained of being in agonising pain while in University Hospital Galway.
He has said that doctors refused to carry out a medical termination because the foetus’s heartbeat was present.
Mr Halappanavar has claimed that following several requests by his late wife for a termination, they were told: “This is a Catholic country.”
The woman’s death is expected to spark a backlash against the Government for failing to reform health laws to allow abortion if the life of the mother is in danger

Irish Examiner

Mamamia

Queen offers sympathy to Irish victims of troubles

The British Queen has offered her "sincere thoughts and deep sympathy" to the victims of Ireland and the UK's troubled past.

At a banquet in Dublin Castle she said with hindsight "we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all". She went on to praise the "lasting rapport" now between the countries.

An apology was not expected, BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell said, but the Queen came "pretty close". The Queen said that the two countries' relationship over the centuries had "not always been straightforward" nor "entirely benign".

Meanwhile, near the castle, gardai clashed with protesters opposed to the visit.

The Queen is the first British monarch ever to visit the Republic.

BBC News - More on The Irish Story

Top-down engineered financial crash designed to take over Europe

There are fresh demonstrations in Madrid against severe budget cuts as the country tries to reduce its massive debt. Spain has been tipped as the next Eurozone economy at risk of needing a bailout, but some say it could be too big to save. RT talks to Jim Corr, a political activist and musician from the Irish band the Corrs.

RussiaToday

An Irishman tells it like it is

A wee bit of discontent…

Fury was mounting last night as it emerged that Irish bankers will pocket multi-million pound bonuses after being bailed out by British taxpayers.

The Allied Irish Bank will hand out £34million in bonuses for its executives this month, despite being on the brink of another rescue package. Britain stumped up £3.2billion to save Ireland from collapse last month as part of a £72.1billion European bail-out.

The handout comes at a time when millions of hard-pressed Britons are struggling with the Government’s austerity measures to reduce its own budget deficit.

Read more: Daily Express