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Cóir Date: 25.02.2010 Parents for Children (PFC) have warned that the proposals brought forward to amend Article 42 of the Constitution could transfer power from parents to the State to the detriment of children. Writing in a letter to the Irish Times, PFC spokeswoman Maria Mhic Meanmain said:
Madam,
I am glad to see that The Irish Times has called for a debate on the proposed referendum on children, given that the committee proposing these changes ignored the views of parents when bringing forward this proposal.
There are several important sections of this proposal that require debate; where parents need to take centre stage. These include the questions: 1. Why has the term “exceptional cases” been removed, if not to make it easier for the State to seize children? 2. Why does the State want this expanded power considering the dreadful record it has in caring for children taken from families, as we’ve seen from the Ryan report and elsewhere? 3. Why are married parents being demonised? 4. Is our marital commitment to be seen as suspicious and dangerous?
This State has fought parents who tried to get their autistic children appropriate education, closed down children’s wards in our hospitals, removed special-needs assistants from classrooms, reduced child benefit and scrapped the early childhood supplement. Clearly child welfare is far from the top of the Government’s agenda. Parents cannot trust this State to vindicate the rights of our children.
It was reported in this paper recently that there has been an increase in the number of children taken into care because families are struggling to deal with the recession. Is being poor now an offence? Will this new proposal see us return to the practices of the 1950s, where children were taken from families only because those families were poor and then placed in institutions where they were abused?
Why is this being portrayed as a virtuous shifting of balance between the rights of the family and the rights of the child, when it is in fact a shifting of the balance between the rights of the family and the power of the State? There are times when children need protection. Let us not confuse that with endangering even more of our children who are loved and cared for by their parents.
Writing on the same subject in The Irish Times journalist John Waters said that the only “equality” created by the proposal would be, “the equal right of all parents to have their children snatched by the State”, adding that: “Irish children need to be protected, but history tells us that mainly they need to be protected from the State”.
Read more at: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0219/1224264799796.html
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Cóir Date: 25.02.2010 After Fine Gael's dirty laundry was aired in public with the departure of George Lee, the public has finally started to learn what Mr Lee had actually said in the Dáil and elsewhere. As though kept secret by the media and the party, in case the public should discover that not all politicians march in lock-step, what has come to the fore regarding George Lee's economic view are two issues: one, his regard for the family; and, two, his realisation that the EU's rules about government deficit might well stymie Ireland's economic recovery.
As regards the family, Lee not only opposed tax individualisation and cuts in welfare, but also supported the universal child benefit. Commenting on Mr Lee's stances, Cóir spokesman, Richard Greene, said: “It's a pity that more politicians don't speak up like this. The family is the most important unit in society and if it breaks down, the economy is surely going to be negatively impacted. So apart from the social and moral aspects of protecting the family as the centre of Irish society, such action also has huge economic ramifications as well – and George Lee obviously recognised that fact.”
Mr Lee also criticised the heavy-handed approach taken by the EU regarding its demand that Irish government reduce its deficit to 3% of GDP by 2013 and 2014, from where we are today, at around 12%. He contended that, instead of cutting back on spending, the Government must continue to spend to invest in and create job, because, as he said: “You will not recover banking until you get jobs. You will not get anyone buying houses until you get jobs.”
Instead, however, as we are all so painfully aware, the Government cut E4 billion Euro from the budget for this year, and, because of the EU's rules on deficit spending, faces the same type of cuts for the next three or more years. On the issue of EU regulation in this case, Mr Lee told the Dáil in November (Since then the situation has changed slightly with the emergence of Greece's debt problems, though the essence of what he said still remains true): “What Europe is asking us to do has never been asked of any other economy...Jobs should be at the centre of our economic adjustment so that we can have employment, not the long-term consequences of following a blind mantra on cutting everything because someone else says so.”
Cóir spokesman, Richard Greene, had this to say: “Given Mr Lee's prominent status as a celebrity politician, it is peculiar how his Dáil speeches on these matters never made front-page headlines. Perhaps, he had strayed too far off the reservation, and, even though well-liked among his former peers, the media were never going to make it known that the EU were actually behind the terrible cuts being imposed on the Irish people. How could they, when they had been the most vociferous proponents of giving the EU even more power with Lisbon. What has been made quite clear from our current economic woes is that the EU is primarily of, by and for the Big States of Europe.”
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Cóir Date: 25.02.2010 In the wake of the passage of the Lisbon Treaty here in Ireland, Sporting bodies around Europe have signalled their deep concern about possible, future EU interference in sport. Article 165 of the Lisbon Treaty gives the EU a new competence in sport which, prior to Lisbon, they did not have. And although the Article indicates that the EU will respect, “the specific nature of sport, its structures based on voluntary activity and its social and educational functions,” nevertheless, the prevalence of so-called “competence creep”, within the EU and its competences, clearly has worried the world of European sport.
FIFA, the International Football Federation, along with the Olympic Movement and the International Rugby Board (IRB) have recently presented a position paper to the European Commission urging them to give “specific treatment” to the rules and principles currently governing sport. In other words, they are kindly asking the Commission to give these rules and principles wide latitude where full compliance with EU regulations is concerned.
The sport governing bodies are particularly concerned about free movement of players, arbitration and the collective selling of the commercial and media rights of sports competitions; however, they have also pleaded with the Commission not to interfere with the mundane aspects of their sports, including the technical rules for different sports, such as ball size, number of players and referee behaviour.
Commenting on this turn of events, Cóir spokesman, Brian T Hickey, said: “On one memorable episode of Question Time, in reference to the nanny-state gone mad, a politician said that, 'Orwell was meant to be read as a warning, not as a template'. Well, when Cóir were arguing against the passage of the Lisbon Treaty, this is the kind of thing we were trying to warn people about. But, our cowardly politicians, not one of whom would side with the majority of the people after the result of Lisbon I, as well as our compliant media, have brought us to the point where the bureaucrats in Brussels now have the power to decide how big a sliothar can be. If that is not absurd, then I don't know what is.”
Mr Hickey went on to say that: “Cóir are committed to stopping this kind of madness, by doing what we can to re-claim as much of our right to make our own decisions as possible. Cóir do not believe that organisations such as the GAA should have to grovel before the almighty Commission to ensure that they are exempt from some nanny'ing by the EU. Economic integration is one thing, though, even there, we can now see cracks in the Euro facade appearing, but social and political integration is clearly a pitch too far.”
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Cóir Date: 25.02.2010 A well-respected Munich-based research group, CESifo, have published their report on the European economy for 2010. In it, Ireland and Finland are identified as the only two eurozone members for whom participation in the euro is “not optimal”.
The report also put Ireland in another unenviable category, that as one of two of the “most [financially] exposed countries”. Being listed in this category means that Ireland, and in this case, Greece, are the most likely of Eurozone countries to experience a sovereign default or to actually exit the Euro.
The report went on to identify two of the ironies of Ireland's participation in the Eurozone. With regard to the current recession, it found that: “While membership of the Euro area is favourable for financial stability...it may make the actual contractionary impact of the crisis more severe by preventing a quick adjustment of the exchange rate.” In other words, the recession is made more severe because we don't have our own currency which we could devalue in our favour.
And the second irony of Ireland's participation in the Eurozone is more generally about the increased tendency of “peripheral countries” in the Eurozone, like Ireland, to be more liable to crisis when times are bad. Here, the report states: “While euro membership provides an insuranc against currency and financial crises, its real effects on peripheral countries may lead to such large imbalances that they may end up in crisis despite the safe haven effect.”
On seeing the recent German report, Cóir spokesman, Brian T Hickey said: “It is becoming clearer with each passing month that Ireland's participation in the Euro - with the consequent loss of the Irish Punt and of our ability to devalue it, as well as the loss of the ability of the Central Bank of Ireland to set interest rates with Irish people in mind – has had a huge cost attached to it. It is possible that those who were promoting the Eurozone were not thinking primarily about the financial concerns of the people who would suffer if it didn't work, but rather, about further and deeper integration at any cost.”
And in other news regarding the Euro...
Former ECB Board member lets the cat out of the bag: the Euro was a step towards political union.
Also, writing recently in the FT, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, former European Central Bank Executive Board member, wrote that the, “monetary union came before political union. But it did not come with a promise that there would never be such a union. Quite to the contrary: the founding fathers wanted the euro primarily as a step towards political union, knowing little of the overriding technical arguments in its favour...”
On reading this statement by such a key internal source, Cóir's spokesman, Brian T Hickey, had this to say: “What the former EU banker says about political union should really come as no surprise, as everyone knows that monetary union was a big step towards the creation of the Euro-elites’ new federal union. However, what he reveals about the founders' lack of technical knowledge is a bit of a surprise. Basically, what he says is that the founders were willing to sacrifice the economic welfare of entire nations in their zeal to federalise the European Community. Mr Padoa-Schioppa says that the founders knew little of the “arguments in its [the Euro's] favour”. Logic, therefore, dictates that these so-called founders knew as much or less about arguments against the Euro, if things didn't go exactly according to plan. So, for those who are now suffering extreme economic hardship right across Europe, the exchange of pre-Euro economic sovereignty for a post-Euro federal state is a gross injustice.”
Soros has questions about the Euro
Writing recently in the FT, billionaire investor, and staunch EU advocate, George Soros, has said that even after the current crisis with Greece is over, questions still surround the survival of the Euro. He said: “A makeshift assistance should be enough for Greece, but that leaves Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland. Together they constitute too large of a portion of euro land to be helped in this way [i.e., with the same kind of arrangement obtained by Greece].” And he went further, saying: “The survival of Greece would still leave the future of the euro in question.”
In order to prevent the fall of the Euro, Soros suggests that, among other things, the EU needs more intrusive monitoring.
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Cóir Date: 23.02.2010 Former Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France, Jean-Michel Quillardet, has told the Belgian daily, Le Soir, that part of the freemason movement want to open a Brussels office to counter the increasing prominence of religion in decision-making in the EU.
He said: “The masonic orders should practice politics in the positive sense of the term: So that despite their own partisan divisions, they speak out on the side of secularism...I think we will one day manage to create a general masonic delegation, for the sake of free-thinking in the European institutions.”
Of course, the ascendency of Masonry in the institutions of the EU is no secret, as EU Commission head, Jose Manuel Barroso, met with representatives of various European lodges in 2008. In addition to this outward recognition, the masonic orders were then given significant internal recognition by the Commission in the form of representation in Bepa, the Bureau of European Policy Advisors, which is a EU Commission think-tank.
Cóir Spokesman, Richard Greene, comments that: “Here again, we see the influence of masonry within the EU. There are several open Freemasons in the senior ranks of the EU, and, of course, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the architect, par excellence, of the EU Constitution, then renamed the Lisbon Treaty is proud of his masonic roots.”
“Apart from directly side-swiping Europe's Christian heritage, the EU have given a secret, all-male society internal representation on one of the bodies which actually helps to analyse and formulate EU Commission policy. Most Europeans would recognise Europe's Christian roots, but not the EU – as was painfully clear from their stand during the Constitution/Lisbon deliberations. And so, what we have is a un-elected Commission, amongst whose ranks are many masons, taking direction from a secret society on the issue religion in the EU.”
“Cóir respect the right of peoples to express different opinions in a democracy, and the right of people to form lobbying groups to try to influence the decision-making which goes on in a democracy. That is the world in which we live. However, we cannot condone the EU giving time and influence to a secret society. The masons hardly need to open an office in Brussels, when it is apparent that the masons within the EU institutions are in full contact with the masons outside the institutions of the EU.”
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