Tag Archives: community

The Gideon international, thier books and schools.

We all know that the Gideon are a group who put bibles in every place they can squeeze one in. apprently they have managed 1.5 billion in hotels, hospitals prisons army and now schools here in Ireland.

The young lad who is in 1st year came home with a pocket edition of the new testament and proverbs and psalms, they came into the community school gave them out and he was instructed by the teacher to take one and to put his name on it and to keep it in his bag and the class was told to read a bit from it every day.

This book is not on the book list it is not part of the curriculum, but this evangelical organisation was allowed in the school and it’s literature was pressed on every child. The book has a special index in the front which points to passages to help with life’s problems, christian virtue and character.

I am staggered they were allowed in the school and it was given out and that my son who is not christian (and the teachers are aware of that) was instructed to take one and put his name on it.

Am I the only one who thinks this is well out of order?

Today is Bisexual Visibility Day.

What is Bisexual visibility day?
Well it’s a day to talk about and celebrate being Bisexual.

Bisexual erasure is something which happens a fair bit, it is the presumption that if a person who is Bi is in a relationship with someone of the same gender that they are now gay or if they are in a relationship with someone of the opposite gender that they are now straight.

The gender of the other person doesn’t change their sexuality they are still bisexual. They are still the person they were before.

There are a lot of negative assumptions about people who are bisexual and there is a lot of biphobia in society in both the ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ communities. The only way to try and reduce this is to talk about it and that won’t happen unless people are visible.

Celebrate Bisexuality day or Bisexual Visibility Day has been running for the last 11 years and has been spreading steadily.

There are groups and supports for those who are coming out as bi or who just want some support from others who understand.

Outhouse hosts a belong to group for teens to young adults and the Bi Irish group.

While a lot of people understand and accept people who are gay there are those who still don’t accept or understand that someone can be bisexual and that they are not greedy, or confused or afraid to come all the way out, or that they can not be in a monogamous relationship or that bisexuals are not likely to cheat more then anyone else.

Sexuality is not a binary, it’s not just homosexual or heterosexual there is a space in between, not everyone is one or the other some of us are attracted to people of either gender rather then just one.

New school, new term, new learning curve.

Spent the morning in meeting in the school, Secured permission for my eldest to read “novels” at the back of religion class must get Ghandi Rand Vedic texts prose Edda for him 😀

Had a bit of a show down with the Vice head who is in her sixties when I asked for my name to noted on the contact file as I was getting phone calls asking for Mrs X and letters addressed as Mr & Mrs X. “Oh we just assume that as his name is X that…” I pointed out how wrong the assumption was and that the majority of children born the last 10 years are to parents who are not married and she then said but it’s just easier, so I pointed out that even the primary school uses “parents/guardians of X” on all the letters and she was confused as to why and I pointed out that one of the new intake who was in my son’s class in primary had his mother die in the last 6 months and another girl is an orphan being raised by her grandparents.

Why a decade into the 21st Century am I having to point these thing out ?

“Pride” and famlies and teachers.

This week is Pride week in Dublin as well as many places around the Globe.
It has been great to see it become a full week with many events on which show a lot more
of the diversity of the LGBTQ community.

The listing of the events can be found here: http://www.dublinpride.ie/

Two which caught my eye is the week long showing of The Wizard of Oz in the Screen Cinema.
Who wouldn’t want a chance to see this on the large screen also it is something I can bring my brats to.

Usually Pride and kids would be something which most people would not think would or should mix,
I have had encounters which were less then friendly when I have been in town with them and brought them to have a look at the parade in previous years. Indeed most people seem to think ‘gay’ people don’t have kids or don’t have contact with kids or should not have contact with kids both those in the ‘straight’ and ‘gay’ communities but that has got to change.

This year Outhouse is having a family fun house event.

Come to the Family Fun House afternoon where there will be clowns, face painters, a bouncing castle, a games console on the big screen and make-and-eat chocolate treats. This is a day for parents to unwind and let the kids have fun, so bring your sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, cousin’s and younger siblings along for some great fun and bring out the kid in you too. (All Children must be accompanied by an adult)

For further information please contact Fiona on (01) 873-4999.

Admission: Free
No tickets required.

I am really glad to see this, people who are lgbt are also parents, aunt, uncles ect and children should in my opinion aware that there are lgbt family members. My own two know that some people like men, and some people like women and some people like both it’s not weird it’s just how people are. This way children grow up with positive messages about
being lgbt and if they are when they grow up they don’t feel so isolated and have no one to relate to which can cause a lot of issues.

This year also in the Pride Parade all the primary and second-level teaching unions (INTO, TUI, ASTI) will have an official presence. This is a huge step forward.

Currently under Section 37 of the Employment Equality Act, schools can fire teachers who are LGBT as it is said to conflict with the ethos of the school, which means as 92% of all primary schools have a catholic ethos, all of those schools can fire a teacher if they are outed. Hopefully this will change there have been calls to have it abolished.

I think all of this is a massive step forward towards shifting away from the idea that ‘Gays’ don’t have families we are after all, someone’s sons and daughters, brother, sister and being lgbt does not make a person anti family, or that they don’t have pride in their family.

“Ten things an Irish woman could not do in 1970”

Yesterday there was a booklet in the times about Irish women and how times and things have changed. As the saying goes eaten bread is soon forgotten and we have a generation of Irish women who have grown up benefiting from the hard work put in to make socail change and not knowing how things were before and all to happy to distance themselves from being considered a Feminist or Womens’ Libber (hell some of them wouldn’t know the term Womens’ Libber) and don’t think that socail change is possible or that they can effect it.

Yes men played a part in this too, supporting the changes and making them happen,
there are male feminists out there, and more feminists of both genders then most people in Ireland would suspect.

http://www.irishtimes.com/indepth/sisters/changes-from-1970s.html

1 Keep her job in the public service or a bank when she got married

Female civil servants and other public servants (primary teachers, from 1958, were excluded from the so-called “marriage bar”) had to resign from their jobs when they got married, on the grounds that they were occupying a job that should go to a man. Banks operated a similar policy.

How it changed

The marriage bar in the public service was removed in July 1973, on foot of the report of the first Commission on the Status of Women. In 1977, the Employment Equality Act prohibited discrimination on the grounds of gender or marital status in almost all areas of employment.

2 Sit on a jury

Under the 1927 Juries Act, members of juries had to be property owners and, in effect, male.

How it changed

Mairín de Burca and Mary Anderson challenged the Act and won their case in the Supreme Court in 1976. The old Act was repealed and citizens over 18 who are on the electoral register are eligible for juries.

3 Buy contraceptives

The 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act banned the import, sale and distribution of contraceptives. Some women were able to get doctors to prescribe the Pill as a “cycle regulator” or to fit devices such as the cap. In 1969, the Fertility Guidance Clinic was established in Dublin and used a loophole in the law to give away the Pill for free. (It was thus not being sold.) Most rural and working class women had no access to contraceptives.

How it changed

The Commission on the Status of Women in 1972 delicately suggested that “parents have the right to regulate the number and spacing of their family” but stopped short of an open demand for contraception. The Rotunda hospital, the Irish Family Planning Association and student unions began to distribute contraceptives. The law, however, changed very slowly. The McGee case of 1973 established a right to import contraceptives for personal use, but did not allow them to be sold. A Bill to allow for controlled access was defeated in 1974. In 1979, in an infamous “Irish solution to an Irish problem”, an Act was passed to allow doctors to prescribe contraceptives to married couples only. A 1985 Act allowed contraceptives to be sold to anyone over 18 but only in chemists. The IFPA and Virgin Megastore were prosecuted for selling condoms in 1991. Later that year, the sale of contraceptives was liberalised.

4 Drink a pint in a pub

In 1970, some pubs refused to allow women to enter at all, some allowed women only if accompanied by a man and very many refused to serve women pints of beer. Women who were accidentally served a pint would be instructed to pour it into two half-pint glasses.

How it changed

Women’s groups staged protests in the early 1970s. In one instance, Nell McCafferty led a group of 30 women who ordered, and were served, 30 brandies.They then ordered one pint of Guinness. When the pint was refused, they drank the brandies and refused to pay as their order was not served. In 2002, the Equal Status Act banned gender discrimination in the provision of goods and services. It defined discrimination as “less favourable treatment”. Service can be refused only if there is a reasonable risk of disorderly or criminal conduct.

5 Collect her children’s allowance

The 1944 legislation that introduced the payment of children’s allowances (now called child benefit) specified that they be paid to the father. The father could, if he chose, mandate his wife to collect the money, but she had no right to it.

How it changed

Responding to the report of the Commission on the Status of Women, the 1974 Social Welfare Act entitled mothers to collect the allowance.

6 Get a barring order against a violent partner

In 1970, a women who was hospitalised after a beating by her husband faced a choice of either returning home to her abuser or becoming homeless. Abusive spouses could not be ordered to stay away from the family home, leaving many women little choice but to seek refuge elsewhere.

How it changed

Women’s Aid campaigned for changes in the law, and in 1976 the Family Law Act, Ireland’s first legislation on domestic violence, enabled one spouse to seek a barring order against the other where the welfare or safety of a spouse or children was at risk. The orders were for three months and were poorly implemented. In 1981, protection orders were introduced and barring orders were increased up to 12 months.

7 Live securely in her family home

Under Irish law, a married woman had no right to a share in her family home, even if she was the breadwinner. Her husband could sell the home without her consent.

How it changed

Under the Family Home Protection Act of 1976, neither spouse can sell the family home without the written consent of the other.

8 Refuse to have sex with her husband

In 1970 the phrase “marital rape” was a contradiction in terms. A husband was assumed to have the right to have sex with his wife and consent was not, in the eyes of the law, an issue.

Women’s adultery was also specifically penalised in the civil law, the notorious tort of “criminal conversation” or “CrimCon”: a husband could legally sue another man for compensation for sleeping with his wife.

How it changed

The Council for the Status of Women urged the creation of a crime of marital rape. In 1979 the Minister for Justice Gerard Collins declined to introduce legislation to this effect. Even when new legislation on rape was introduced in 1981, the situation did not change. It was not until 1990 that marital rape was defined as a crime. The first trial, in 1992, collapsed within minutes. The first successful prosecution for marital rape was in 2002.

Crim Con was abolished by the Family Law Act (1981). The Act also, as a dubious quid pro quo, abolished the right to sue for “breach of promise” of marriage – an ancient provision that was occasionally used by jilted women, although it was in theory also available to men.

9 Choose her official place of domicile

Under Irish law, a married woman was deemed to have the same “domicile” as her husband. This meant that if her husband left her and moved to Australia, her legal domicile was deemed to be Australia. Women, who could not get a divorce in Ireland, could find themselves divorced in countries where their husbands were domiciled.

How it changed

Acting on a report from the Law Reform Commission, the Fine Gael junior minister for women’s affairs Nuala Fennell drove forward the Domicile and Recognition of Foreign Divorces Bill in 1985. It granted married women the right to an independent domicile.

10 Get the same rate for a job as a man

In 1970, almost all women were paid less than male colleagues doing the same job. In March 1970, the average hourly pay for women was five shillings, while that for men was over nine. In areas covered by a statutory minimum wage, the female rate was two-thirds that of men.

How it changed

Legislation on equal pay was introduced in 1974 and employment equality legislation followed in 1977, both as a result of European directives.

Are We On Social Network xyz? – Dominion

What can happen when you don’t sign up on a socail networking site for your group/club/event.

Are We On Social Network xyz? – Dominion.

Are We On Social Network Du Jour

One question we are being increasingly asked by people is:
I sent you X amount of messages on FaceBook/MySpace/Bebo/Friendster etc. and you haven’t responded.
our reply of course is:
Dominion doesn’t have a FaceBook/MySpace/Bebo/Friendster, if you found one it isn’t us!

We are not into the idea of only members of a certain social networking site/service being able to contact us, or members of a particular service getting a different (either better or worse) service from us than non-members, (like for example only xxx service users seeing feedback posted to us on that service), we like equality (whether the information or service is good/bad is less important than open and available to everyone).

Fans/friends/well-wishers have mistakenly decided to set these up (Dominion Profiles/Groups/Networks) on our behalf, and usually eventually get bored stop maintaining or forget the password for them, and most importantly dont send us the messages, give us the accounts, or shut them down when we ask them to. Currently we know of several on each service, some very popular, and some with 0 friends, but we ask you to please de-friend (so as not to mis-lead others to them).

Feel free to politely ask them to close/delete whatever (they are probably un-maintained so there is little point), do not abuse/insult or negatively message the owners/operators, they probably thought any advertising is good but stale/misleading info is worse than none (as we have seen with our own recent outage).

For example, one particular site that seems to have gained a large following is the Facebook group Dominion Dublin – this is not, repeat NOT, run by us (the people who run the actual club), and indeed has very little to do with the club other than the name – please de-friend it, or at least don’t expect it to have any official information about the club… for example, some people might have missed it when we had DJ Jeyenne from XPQ-21 playing in Dominion a while back, as the Dominion Dublin Facebook site was actually advertising something completely different at the time. 0_o

This website is the only official source of information about forthcoming events, playlists, DJs etc – if this situation changes it will be announced here first.

Obviously, some of the people involved in the club also have their own personal Facebook/LiveJournal/MySpace etc pages – these are sometimes used to pass on information about upcoming events etc., and can be useful for those who forget/don’t have time to check this site regularly, but shouldn’t be taken as gospel – as always, check the information against this site if there’s any confusion or ambiguity.

At the same time we heartily encourage people to post links to our events and news on their own Facebook/LiveJournal/MySpace (we have even added buttons to make this easier to the site) as this way if/when the information changes the link published will continue to point at the correct information, as opposed to cutting/pasting the information from our page, and thus your readers not recieving updates.

Also, feel free to pass this page on to your friends also (using our handy new shiny social network buttons).

For those people who don’t have time to check the website itself every week, or forget to, or whatever, we also have a public RSS feed (provided by LiveJournal*) however it does allow feedbackcommenting by anyone, whether you have a LiveJournal account or not – please feel free to comment or ask questions there too, all feedback is appreciated.
Facebook users can as always “friend” the RSS via:
profile> settings> Imported Stories> Blog/Rss> add (enter dominion.gothic.ie into the field provided)

We are also now providing an announcement-only mailing-list for those not able to subscribe via RSS (experimentation still ongoing so expect some duplicates/).

Thanks to all the people, past, present and future, who support Dominion and help us remain Ireland’s longest-running weekly Goth/EBM/Industrial club – keep it up, and keep visiting http://dominion.gothic.ie/

Dominion is the only weekly nightclub in the whole island of Ireland devoted to gothic, industrial, EBM and associated alternative music. Launched in July 1999 and has kept going changing venues over the years,  it currently resides in The Cellar in Murrays Bar (formerly Frazers), 33-34 O’Connell Street, Dublin 1 , running on Saturdays from 9:30pm to 2:30am.

Did you know that today is international Women’s Day?

Did you know that today is International Women’s Day?

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Did you know that it’s a 100 years from the first one?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Women%27s_Day

In 1910 the first international women’s conference was held in Copenhagen (in the labour-movement building located at Jagtvej 69, which until recently housed Ungdomshuset) by the Second International and an ‘International Women’s Day’ was established, which was submitted by the important German Socialist Clara Zetkin, although no date was specified.[1] The following year, 1911, IWD was marked by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, on March 19.[2]

However, soon thereafter, on March 25, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City killed over 140 garment workers. A lack of safety measures was blamed for the high death toll. Furthermore, on the eve of World War I, women across Europe held peace rallies on 8 March 1913. In the West, International Women’s Day was commemorated during the 1910s and 1920s, but dwindled. It was revived by the rise of feminism in the 1960s.

Demonstrations marking International Women’s Day in Russia proved to be the first stage of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Following the October Revolution, the Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai persuaded Lenin to make it an official holiday in the Soviet Union, and it was established, but was a working day until 1965. On May 8, 1965 by the decree of the USSR Presidium of the Supreme Soviet International Women’s Day was declared as a non working day in the USSR “in commemoration of the outstanding merits of Soviet women in communistic construction, in the defense of their Fatherland during the Great Patriotic War, in their heroism and selflessness at the front and in the rear, and also marking the great contribution of women to strengthening friendship between peoples, and the struggle for peace. But still, women’s day must be celebrated as are other holidays.”

How is Women’s Day Celebrated?

On this day it is customary for men to give the women in their lives – mothers, wives, girlfriends, daughters, colleagues, etc – flowers and small gifts. In some countries (such as Romania) it is also observed as an equivalent of Mother’s Day, where children also give small presents to their mothers and grandmothers.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union celebrations of IWD were abandoned in Armenia. Instead April 7 was introduced as state holiday of ‘Beauty and Motherhood.’ The new holiday immediately got popular among Armenians, as it commemorates one of the main holidays of Armenian Church, Annunciation. However, people still kept celebrating IWD on March 8 as well. Public discussion held on the topic of two ‘Women’s Days’ in Armenia resulted in the recognition of the so called ‘Women’s Month’ which is the period between March 8 and April 7.

In Italy, to celebrate the day, men give yellow mimosas to women.[19][20] Yellow mimosas and chocolate are also one of the most common March 8 presents in Russia and Albania.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, Moldova, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Serbia the custom of giving women flowers still prevails. Women sometimes get gifts from their employers too. Schoolchildren often bring gifts for their teachers as well.

The 2005 Congress (conference) of the British Trades Union Congress overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for IWD to be designated a public holiday in the United Kingdom.

This year the theme is equality.
[YOUTUBE=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye8iGQ1d9Cg]

There are 47 events happening in Ireland to mark the day.
http://www.internationalwomensday.com/search.asp?country=102

Timing is everything.

I started up this blog about a week ago, finally fed up and disheartened with the broken and lack of functionality of the outdated version of wordpress which was running on journals.ie and the fact that it was honestly not a priory for the boards ltd tech staff as they were tasked with sorting out the main site and honestly it’s good that is the way things are esp when things like today happen.

So I got out and got the data files from the old blog roughly 5 years worth.
I do intent on transferring the files to here if I can find away to do it, journals.ie exported it all as 1 rather large XML file which is 4 times the size of the limit for uploading to this blog and this one is looking for WRX file, oh the joys.

But hopefully there is a way to do it, and hell I may even learn a thing or three trying.

I will miss journals.ie but at this stage only myself and on other were regularly using the site and I miss how it use to have blogs by a lot of people I got to know on boards.
Not everything someone wants to talk about can fit in even one of the numerous forums on the site and most of what they posted was well worth reading.

I’ve never done the blogoshere thingy, it’s very odd at times and can seem very cliquey from the outside looking in, I have used live journal for a similar amount of time but that again was a different group a different community and most people in the Irish Gaming community. So I don’t write here to get notice or acclaim I write here mostly for me, things I want to say and things I want to remember and look back on.

Which I guess is why I clung on to the journals.ie site for so long, there I have scrap booked so much of what was going on in my life and what I was thinking about certain things and I didn’t want to have the hassle of trying to put it up else were.

So what will be up here, as the title of the blog suggest what ever I get passionate about, things which interest me, irk me annoy me, and information on things which other people not knowing does my head in so that I can point them to them. I guess with the zip file on my desk top and journals.ie being down and the gods only know when it’s coming back it is what has forced me not to think of here as a replace me for the other one but this is now my new scrapbook and rant space and after 5 years I wonder what the next will hold and what I will write about.

boards.ie hacked!

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/private.php

We are undergoing maintenance

Fellow Boards Members,

Today, Thursday 21 Jan 2009 at 11:20 GMT the Boards.ie database was attacked by a source external to Ireland. This triggered our security response policy and as a result we are sending you this warning email.

In this attack, part of the database which includes our members usernames, email addresses and obfuscated passwords was accessed. While our investigations indicate that individual user accounts are not in danger we have taken the step of changing all user passwords.

We also recommend that if you used the same username/email and password on other sites that you change your password there too as a precaution.

What happened:

* This morning our database server was accessed by an unauthorised source.
* We discovered this intrusion and took the site offline.
* As a precaution We contacted the Gardaí, the Data Protection Commissioner and an independent security consultancy.
* We have followed the advice we have received on how to proceed.
* Like all large sites we are regularly the target for disruption and take continual actions to proactively protect your data. This particular attack was completely unprecedented despite our rigorous security measures and while we have no idea if this data will be used for any malicious reasons, we felt it vital to tell you this immediately.

What you need to know and do:

* If you use the same password on Boards as you do on other services, you should change it on those other services to be safe. Boards passwords are NOT stored in plain text, they are obscured with the standard vBulletin “Hash”. While this provides strong protection, we have altered all passwords on Boards as a precaution and suggest you take this time to allter other similar passwords.
* If you are a subscriber, please be assured, we do NOT store credit card details or any payment details on our servers. Nothing of that nature is held on our site and as a result such data was not compromised.
* We apologise for this inconvenience. We do not want to over stress the problem, however we felt the situation requires full disclosure.

Tom Murphy.

I am so glad that the password that I use for my boards account is not used for anything else, I am a but concerned re the email address but time will tell.
All of the sites and domains which boards ltd own are down and may remain so while they figure out what happened.

The timing it seems was pretty awful with some of the threads which were on going and hot topics on the site in the helpdesk forum and feedback forums. While this enforced time out mean that people will have cooler heads going back or result in them feeling that well I managed with out the site for an extended amount of time and detach from it?

As ever we live in intresting times and it will be interesting to see what the impact down time and breach in security will lead to, and who will profit by it, if anyone.

New Fingal CC Street Sweeper.

As a kid growing up I remember seeing the sweeper man, he would come around with a red cart with a shovel and several yard brushes and would sweep down the paths. The road sweeper would come on the day before and do the gutters of the roads but the sweeper man did the baths and it made for a huge difference to the streets esp one with hordes of kids on it.

Such street maintenance I think is important it is the type of little detail which lifts moral of those who live there and people then respect the area more and petty crime and graffiti is less likely to happen, but the sweeper man is very much something of the past. Yes occasionally there have been Fingal workers out picking up papers and the local kids do a clean up, but as we are on one of the busy route for foot traffic to and from the Blanchardstown shopping centre we get a lot of litter dropped as it’s just the right distance it seems for people to have finished their ice cream, drink or crisps and there are no litter bins.

This morning the street sweeping machines was on the road, I could hear it as I took advantage of the good weather to open all the windows to air the house out, it seemed a lot louder then what I am used to and seemed to be doing several passes. When I looked out I was surprised to see it was a new mini street sweeper.

Designed to be the exact width of the path and it did the road and all the paths so the annoyance of the extra noise soon passed as the road looks a lot better. Amazing what clean paths, roads and trimmed grass verges can do to the look and feel of a place, from unkempt and unloved to trim, tidy and more respectable.
sweeper