President Mary McAleese

queerday.com reports:

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In Ireland, President Mary McAleese denounced homophobia several times during her address at an all-male Londonderry school [a city where reported attacks on gays have tripled in the last year alone, according to The Times online].

She said, "Those citizens of tomorrow . . . what do they say when their friends make sexist, racist, sectarian or homophobic jibes — do they stay silent and let the poison of contempt go on its cruel way, or do they have the guts to stop it in its tracks and say such words are unacceptable and dangerous? Do they have the backbone and the conviction to lead their friends in the right direction even if it seems the loneliest place in the world?”

McAleese was attending the 125th anniversary celebration at St Columb's College.

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[ 14 June 2005: Message edited by: Hephaestion ]

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Originally posted by 4t2:
Someone want to explain why there's steam coming from my ears?

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The city's name is a subject of dispute between nationalists (usually Catholics) and unionists (mostly Protestants), with nationalists calling it Derry, and some unionists, Londonderry. The majority of the city's inhabitants use Derry. The city council is controlled by nationalist parties, and has officially changed its name to Derry City Council. The name of the city is still specified by its Royal Charter as Londonderry, and many unionists continue to call it Londonderry.

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But Heph has misspelled it anyway as "Londonberry". Whoops. Edited to add: It's OK now.

more on Derry and that other name

[ 14 June 2005: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

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Originally posted by RP.:
Because you're doing a caricature of some Irish stereotype?

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Originally posted by Hephaestion:
"Eire" is the ancient name for the island, before it was *artificially* divided by colonizing savages.

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
But Heph has misspelled it anyway as "Londonberry". Whoops.

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For example, "Ulster" is the name of the ancient province of Ireland that includes present-day "Northern Ireland" and three more counties that are in the "Republic of Ireland". When Ireland was divided in the early part of the last century the 3 counties that are in "Ulster" were chopped off to form part of what would become the "Republic of Ireland". The new unit of "Northern Ireland" had a built-in "Loyalist" majority that would not have been so one-sided had the 3 counties been kept as part of the new unit.

Thing is, the new state of "Northern Ireland" is often called "Ulster" just as "Derry" is called "Londonderry". This practice has even extended to the names of songs.

The neighbourhood of "the Bogside" in "Derry" is famous in Irish political life and the civil rights struggle among the "Nationalist" population.

I think I've used my quota of scare quotes for the next ten years. But perhaps it is worthwhile to draw attention to the incendiary and political nature of much of the terminology for the benefit of those who have no idea of the minefield they may be stepping into.

[ 14 June 2005: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

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Originally posted by kurichina:
Heh. "Savages". Interesting.

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Originally posted by RP.:
Not having read the Irish constitution, I wonder, then, what the Irish-language word for Ireland is? And why "Eire" appears on their postage stamps?

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Eire

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The name Éire is the nominative form in modern Irish of the name for the goddess Ériu, a mythical figure who helped the Gaels conquer Ireland as described in the Book of Invasions. Éire is still used in the Irish language today to refer to the island of Ireland as well as the state. The dative form Éirinn is anglicized as Erin, which is occasionally used as a poetic name for Ireland in English, and which has become a common girl's name in English.

The name was given in Article 4 of the 1937 Irish constitution to the 26-county Irish state, created under the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which was known between 1922 and 1937 as the Irish Free State. Article 4 stated that: "The name of the state is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland."

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Originally posted by Hephaestion:
were still runnin' around bare-arsed savages."

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Éire is rarely, if ever, used by Irish residents, unless they're speaking Irish - the most common use is in the British media, and it generally refers to 26-county rather than whole-island - that's why I found the use of Éire for a city in 'the North' interesting and a teeny bit curious.

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In post-ceasefire Northern Ireland, where sectarian and racist attacks are rapidly rising, homophobic violence is the latest grim reality of a society where being different can get you killed.

There have been an estimated five homophobic murders in the past six years. In south Belfast a 31-year-old civil servant was stabbed and battered to death with a wheel-brace by two teenage boys out on what a judge called a "queer bashing expedition". In the past year homophobic incidents reported to police have more than doubled to almost 200, including two attempted murders and five threats or conspiracy to murder. One man was stabbed and battered with a bedside locker and an iron in the bedroom of his home in Derry.

In a deeply conservative society, where the leader of the largest political party once led a Save Ulster from Sodomy campaign, homophobia is still seen as a "respectable and acceptable prejudice", according to Belfast's Institute for Conflict Research. Only 27% of gay, lesbian or bisexual people in Northern Ireland feel safe walking down the street at night.

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Originally posted by Hephaestion:

As my Uncle Liam once sniffed at my Uncle Stan (from the British side of the family), "I'll have you know, there were kings in Ireland when your people were still runnin' around bare-arsed savages."

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Originally posted by Hephaestion:

As my Uncle Liam once sniffed at my Uncle Stan (from the British side of the family), "I'll have you know, there were kings in Ireland when your people were still runnin' around bare-arsed savages."

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Originally posted by HeywoodFloyd:
And there's your poor uncle Liam with a unionist name.

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Well, Uncle Liam was born and raised in a Unionist household, but he has overcome that admirably. Predominantly, I think he was just trying to get Uncle Stan's goat, though.

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Originally posted by RealityBites:
Or as the family now refers to it, "the day little Hephaestion became an anglophile."

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As with Uncle Liam, I have progressed far beyond my roots. I was given a very Irish-Canadian Protestant upbringing, but as I grew and read more I became more and more fed up with assholes like the Orange Order and more sympathetic toward the nationalist viewpoint (just not the Catholic church.) I am still somewhat of an anglophile, as Stan (and some of the others) are some of my favourite relatives — I just have no tolerance for the sterotypical unionist bigotry. The English should have got the fuck out of Ireland centuries ago. The Irish have enough of their *own* problems....

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Originally posted by Hephaestion:

As with Uncle Liam, I have progressed far beyond my roots.

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Not having read the Irish constitution, I wonder, then, what the Irish-language word for Ireland is? And why "Eire" appears on their postage stamps?

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Maybe for the same reason that stamps from Switzerland say "Helvetia".

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And what about the guttural r?

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
Maybe for the same reason that stamps from Switzerland say "Helvetia".

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I'm still relatively new here.. Are posts that say nothing more than "I think you're proving my point" seen as unduly last-word grabby?

I always thought that Eire, in modern usage, had become the name for the Irish Republic, and Ulster was the North. Maybe that is just Sassenach newspaper practice?

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Originally posted by Bacchus:
Sorry to disappoint you but truly the unionists and the republicans are both ethnically irish

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Originally posted by Stockholm:

Maybe for the same reason that stamps from Switzerland say "Helvetia".

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Fear and loathing (The Guardian)

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Politicians and organisations such as the Northern Ireland Commission for Human Rights (NICHR) and the Institute for Conflict Research (NIICR) are pondering why a community so long ravaged by bigoted attitudes appears to be embracing fresh ones. Some speculate that Northern Ireland's legacy of violence makes it unusually fertile ground for racists and homophobes. When a young gay man was attacked outside a Belfast club last year in an ostensibly "gay bashing" incident, his assailant called him a "Fenian bastard", as if the reasons behind the violence were blurred beyond recognition - as if the violence itself, and not the target, mattered.

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It's not hard to believe that we are talking about deeply traumatized communities -- the violence was always worst in the poorest communities, and many of those communities have still to benefit from any recovery. Note the accompanying rise in domestic violence as well. Also, it appears that some bureaucratic tall forehead has been sending new immigrants all alone into precisely those traumatized areas: what were they thinking?

A friend of ours from the republic has been saying ever since I can remember that the IRA in the south simply turned to organized crime when the political reason for their fighting was gone. Sad progression, but believable.

And in answer to a question of NDP Newbie's above: Not that it should matter when we're talking about people who were settled in the early C17, after all (since we're not racists), but no, most of them were not "English." James I of England / VI of Scotland transported numbers of newly converted Scots Protestants, mainly from poor communities in the southwest of Scotland, to Ulster in the early C17 as a means of counterbalancing anti-royalist Catholic rebellion. Those Scots were ethnically Irish in the first place (the first Scots were the Irish invaders who displaced the Picts), so yes, the majority of Northern Irish are ethnically pretty much the same people, as much as one can ever expect over a millennium and a half of life.

The Anglo-Irish are a quite different story, and matter more in the south, or anywhere there were large, wealthy estates.

[ 29 June 2005: Message edited by: skdadl ]

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Originally posted by skdadl:
Also, it appears that some bureaucratic tall forehead has been sending new immigrants all alone into precisely those traumatized areas: what were they thinking?

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Actually that's pretty much in keeping with refugee policy across the UK. Labour basically bought the idea that it was numerical "swamping" that "provoked" racism against refugees. So, it was thought that spreading the asylum-seekers out all across the UK would solve this. Thatcher had tried a similar thing earlier but it wasn't so extensive.

Anyway, the problem with this is with all the measures to take refugees off of government assistance that had been done earlier (also to appease racists er, voters) meant that most asylum-seekers rely on charities for their basic living provisions. They aren't allowed to work until their cases are resolved. So once the "dispersion" policy took place, you had a hundreds of asylum-seekers sent to small towns where they could very well be the only people of colour with no support networks from either the charities or their ethnic group established. Combine this with a number of unemployed and underemployed workers who already threatened with economic exclusion and not accustomed to other cultures and you can imagine what happened. In many cases the local government was also unsupportive because, with the exception of Glasgow (who requested to be a refugee centre for economic reasons), all of the towns were forced to accept refugees against their will.

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Originally posted by Mandos:
Or Germans to call "Frankreich" France?

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Why do you want the Germans to call this guy "France"?