At the time of the divorce referendum, the death of marriage was predicted by those opposed to divorce. Even those in favour had to admit that the institution was wobbling, and that the introduction of divorce wouldn't help.
And right enough, many more marriages are ending in failure. The number of divorced couples nearly doubled between the censuses of 2002 and 2006. Many more have been separated and others are not getting married at all.
However, the development missed by all sides in the divorce wars has been the demand that marriage be extended to various other parts of the population. Getting married, if not staying married, is still very popular.
Marriage is a two-sided pact. The practical end is a legal contract which commits the contractees to all sorts of financial and property commitments. The other end is the ideal of a universal institution designed to elevate the idea of partnership and secure the rearing of children.
The two new claims for marriage come from the live-in couples and the gay community. They mainly want the legal end of things as many of both groups are left high and dry when a relationship ends or a partner dies. The answer to this has been civil partnerships and there is widespread support for this across society as a measure of justice.
So for some people we have had to address the risk of not getting married. And now, it seems, we have to address the risk for those who actually do want to get married.
Last month an expert legal group recommended to the Government that pre-nuptial agreements be recognised by the state.
Many on the traditional side of the house will feel that pre-nuptial agreements are another attack on the institution of marriage. They're probably right. We're getting to the stage where everyone will be able to design their own marriages.
That sounds fair enough but it is the end of marriage as a universally recognised institution. What is the point if everyone can make up their own?
At the moment pre-nupts have no legal status. And even if the Government make the recommended change, they still won't have legal force. It will simply allow the courts to use the pre-nupts as a guide when divvying up the spoils of marriage.
I think I'm with the conservatives on this one. A pre-nuptial agreement is just hedging your bets. It is avoiding commitment.
I have argued before that marriage of itself can't guarantee anything and we know this from the break-ups, violence, cheating, etc. But many people in our society do have a deep respect for marriage and believe that it can help to make relationships last. Those people want to enter into an institution that is respected and durable.
Pre-nuptial agreements make a joke of the whole thing. It is the outworking of our feckless and shallow consumer society where people want to know the price of everything without seeing the value of anything.
If a man and a woman want to enter into a legal contract to share their lives with an agreement on how to split the goodies when it all goes wrong...then that's grand.
But don't call it marriage.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
By the time you read this there will be the usual whingeing in the media about our slow election count. But the fact is that we have the best electoral system in the world.
The count is not a trivial affair. Unlike other systems it explains how people voted, who they transferred to and most importantly, whatever their preference, their vote is never wasted unless they want it to be.
The political parties don't like it because it lets power slip from their grasp. In some other electoral systems voters are faced with just one candidate from each party. In others the parties draw up a list so that the voters don't directly choose their MPs. In Ireland each candidate is directly accountable to their constituents. They can always be replaced by those voters, even by someone else from the same party.
The calls to speed up the count should be paid no heed. Why speed up the count? So that the news machine can move on to other stories?
The slow feed of the count in Ireland does a huge service to the public as it helps explain the political system here in a way that draws out the soundbites.
The commentary from politicians is far more candid and revealing in the two day count after the election than in the four week campaign before it. They have nothing to gain from spinning the news.
That said I would be far happier about using gadgetry to speed up the count a wee bit than any relapse to electronic voting and the millions that was wasted on it.
In Scotland they have introduced our STV system for their local authority elections. Scandalised by the idea that their count might last more than a day they brought in counting machines and automatic readers. Then the fun started. They had to make a plea that voters refrain from folding their votes so that the counting staff wouldn't have to unfold them. Some voters took this to be an assault on the secrecy of the ballot in that they would have to walk around the polling station with an open ballot paper.
Then, of course, is the problem of handwriting which I've covered in this column before. No two people in the world writes their numbers in the same way. It like fingerprinting.
The machines were programmed to spit out any ballot which might be inconclusive. And so it did. So each one of these has to be checked by sight.
It all ended up that they might as well have had an entirely manual count.
And I note that the new govener of Florida has ordered that their infamous electronic punching machines be replaced by good old fashioned pen and paper. So hopefully the Irish election count will be with us for some years to come.
But the whole debate about the voting system misses out on the main democratic failing of our system and in really in the rest of the democratic. That is: we don't elect our government. We only elect a parliament.
Right now I'll bet that neither of the coalitions have a majority and the parties are jostling and jockying for position.
I think this is wrong. Cabinet seats should be apportioned according to the wishes of the people. That would be real democracy.
The count is not a trivial affair. Unlike other systems it explains how people voted, who they transferred to and most importantly, whatever their preference, their vote is never wasted unless they want it to be.
The political parties don't like it because it lets power slip from their grasp. In some other electoral systems voters are faced with just one candidate from each party. In others the parties draw up a list so that the voters don't directly choose their MPs. In Ireland each candidate is directly accountable to their constituents. They can always be replaced by those voters, even by someone else from the same party.
The calls to speed up the count should be paid no heed. Why speed up the count? So that the news machine can move on to other stories?
The slow feed of the count in Ireland does a huge service to the public as it helps explain the political system here in a way that draws out the soundbites.
The commentary from politicians is far more candid and revealing in the two day count after the election than in the four week campaign before it. They have nothing to gain from spinning the news.
That said I would be far happier about using gadgetry to speed up the count a wee bit than any relapse to electronic voting and the millions that was wasted on it.
In Scotland they have introduced our STV system for their local authority elections. Scandalised by the idea that their count might last more than a day they brought in counting machines and automatic readers. Then the fun started. They had to make a plea that voters refrain from folding their votes so that the counting staff wouldn't have to unfold them. Some voters took this to be an assault on the secrecy of the ballot in that they would have to walk around the polling station with an open ballot paper.
Then, of course, is the problem of handwriting which I've covered in this column before. No two people in the world writes their numbers in the same way. It like fingerprinting.
The machines were programmed to spit out any ballot which might be inconclusive. And so it did. So each one of these has to be checked by sight.
It all ended up that they might as well have had an entirely manual count.
And I note that the new govener of Florida has ordered that their infamous electronic punching machines be replaced by good old fashioned pen and paper. So hopefully the Irish election count will be with us for some years to come.
But the whole debate about the voting system misses out on the main democratic failing of our system and in really in the rest of the democratic. That is: we don't elect our government. We only elect a parliament.
Right now I'll bet that neither of the coalitions have a majority and the parties are jostling and jockying for position.
I think this is wrong. Cabinet seats should be apportioned according to the wishes of the people. That would be real democracy.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
I have nobody to vote for
I would like to vote for some who is opposed to the smoking ban. And opposed to random breath testing. And opposed to the ban on cannabis and other drugs.
I would like to vote for someone who shares my opposition to compulsory safety laws like the seatbelt law or the helmet law, and the precedents that these set.
I would like to vote for someone who opposes the wholesale extension of the power of the state that is going on all over the western world, whether it is on grounds of security, the so-called 'war-on-terror' or the tabloid inspired over-reaction to crime.
What I want is a philosophy where people are allowed to take their own risks. It's called freedom.
But there is no candidate standing in this election, anywhere in the state, who is prepared to fight the growth of state power.
Now you may say that the big issues are the state of the health service, education, pensions or the economy, stupid.
Well they are indeed big issues. But I don't honestly believe that either coalition alternative is not going to make a lot of difference on these issues.
Look at the situation that will exist over the five years of the next government. Ninety-five percent of the laws of 2007 will still be in place. A huge swathe of laws and policies are determined by the EU. Most of our economic and social policies are determined by the partnership talks.
And if all that weren't true, the ideological ground in dispute has narrowed to almost nothing. All over Europe the concept of right and left is almost redundant as political parties compete to occupy the middle ground.
There's a great website online called politicalcompass.org and the purpose of this site is to determine your position on the political compass. It not only measures right and left but also the range between authoritarianism and libertarianism.
You answer a series of questions and the site places you on the political compass. You can see how you compare to people like Stalin, Thatcher, Mandela or Hitler.
They even have a page showing the positions of the Irish political parties.
We know that the western world has settled, more or less, on the social market economy model to run society. So there's really not much to choose from in terms of ideology. If people were honest the battle is mainly about personalities and banalities. Spin, a la Blair, if you like.
Meanwhile, the political movement along the other great political axis, between liberty and state control, is all going in one direction. We are sleepwalking ourselves into a police state.
And none of our political parties has anything principled to say about this. Over the next twenty years the ability of the state to gather information about people and to process it will expand tremendously with computing power, especially with wireless computer chips.
The usual thicko response is: "if you're not doing anything wrong, you've nothing to fear." The word 'wrong' here means a refusal to comply with laws on your personal safety that you have never been asked about or that are imposed by a majority on a minority. I don't want to live in a society like that but our political parties don't mind.
I think I'll have to start my own party for the next election.
I would like to vote for someone who shares my opposition to compulsory safety laws like the seatbelt law or the helmet law, and the precedents that these set.
I would like to vote for someone who opposes the wholesale extension of the power of the state that is going on all over the western world, whether it is on grounds of security, the so-called 'war-on-terror' or the tabloid inspired over-reaction to crime.
What I want is a philosophy where people are allowed to take their own risks. It's called freedom.
But there is no candidate standing in this election, anywhere in the state, who is prepared to fight the growth of state power.
Now you may say that the big issues are the state of the health service, education, pensions or the economy, stupid.
Well they are indeed big issues. But I don't honestly believe that either coalition alternative is not going to make a lot of difference on these issues.
Look at the situation that will exist over the five years of the next government. Ninety-five percent of the laws of 2007 will still be in place. A huge swathe of laws and policies are determined by the EU. Most of our economic and social policies are determined by the partnership talks.
And if all that weren't true, the ideological ground in dispute has narrowed to almost nothing. All over Europe the concept of right and left is almost redundant as political parties compete to occupy the middle ground.
There's a great website online called politicalcompass.org and the purpose of this site is to determine your position on the political compass. It not only measures right and left but also the range between authoritarianism and libertarianism.
You answer a series of questions and the site places you on the political compass. You can see how you compare to people like Stalin, Thatcher, Mandela or Hitler.
They even have a page showing the positions of the Irish political parties.
We know that the western world has settled, more or less, on the social market economy model to run society. So there's really not much to choose from in terms of ideology. If people were honest the battle is mainly about personalities and banalities. Spin, a la Blair, if you like.
Meanwhile, the political movement along the other great political axis, between liberty and state control, is all going in one direction. We are sleepwalking ourselves into a police state.
And none of our political parties has anything principled to say about this. Over the next twenty years the ability of the state to gather information about people and to process it will expand tremendously with computing power, especially with wireless computer chips.
The usual thicko response is: "if you're not doing anything wrong, you've nothing to fear." The word 'wrong' here means a refusal to comply with laws on your personal safety that you have never been asked about or that are imposed by a majority on a minority. I don't want to live in a society like that but our political parties don't mind.
I think I'll have to start my own party for the next election.
Walking could be the new Luas
Why would you walk when you could take the car? For most of the last century the answer to that question was: you wouldn’t. It was a matter of logic.
We might, in our suffering, like to think that Dublin is unique in the gravity of its traffic problems. For sure, it’s worse than a lot of European cities in that we never cracked the public transport problem. And we’re mightily blighted by urban sprawl which makes designing public transport an economic nightmare.
But most cities, more or less, are in the same boat. A large part of their population is dependent on the car to get them to work or education.
And what is happening is that car speeds are getting slower every year because congestion is increasing. It’s now got to the point where walking is now competitive again.
But is there really scope for people to walk? And would it make any difference?
Well consider these numbers. Every working day in Dublin 33,000 journeys are made to school or college in a car over a distance of less than a mile. Can you believe it? And another 27,000 similar journeys are under two miles.
Going to work is pretty similar. 55,000 car trips to work are under two miles.
So walking, if it were a mass transit system, has the capability and market to shift a lot of bodies.
There has been a couple of developments in the last few years that might well make walking a mass transit system. This has been the evolution of fast walkways systems.
The first of these opened in Paris around three years ago in Montparnasse train station. This revolutionary system has the ability to move you along at 11kmph and if you were to walk on it at the same time you would be moving along at around 16kmph, quite a clip.
Of course, there’s a problem. In order to accelerate you up to speed the engineers used a system of rollers, each one moving slightly faster than the last. It works fine, as long as you have your feet on the ground. If you don’t, you’re likely to go ass over tit, as many poor unfortunates have. The result has been the need for staff to oversee people getting onto the walkway and the average speed has been reduced to 9kmph.
The new Pier F in Toronto has a similar system which moves along at 7kmph or 12kmph if you are walking. The system they have used is reputedly better at keeping you upright during acceleration than the Paris concept.
Nevertheless, even though these walkways extend only a couple of hundred meters, it shows that walking, as opposed to putting up massive expensive tram and train projects, can work.
Think, for example, if walkways had been used instead of the Luas. The average speed of the Luas is less than 20kmph and you’ve got to wait for it. If sections of walkway were built in 500m lengths, for example, it wouldn’t be long before a network could be built that would better replicate the journeys that people undertake.
Of course, it wouldn’t work in all situations and it would form a bit of a barrier in parts of the city but overpasses and underpasses should be easy to design as you’re only carrying people.
Remember, you read it here first. If technology can solve some of our problems then moving walkways have a future.
We might, in our suffering, like to think that Dublin is unique in the gravity of its traffic problems. For sure, it’s worse than a lot of European cities in that we never cracked the public transport problem. And we’re mightily blighted by urban sprawl which makes designing public transport an economic nightmare.
But most cities, more or less, are in the same boat. A large part of their population is dependent on the car to get them to work or education.
And what is happening is that car speeds are getting slower every year because congestion is increasing. It’s now got to the point where walking is now competitive again.
But is there really scope for people to walk? And would it make any difference?
Well consider these numbers. Every working day in Dublin 33,000 journeys are made to school or college in a car over a distance of less than a mile. Can you believe it? And another 27,000 similar journeys are under two miles.
Going to work is pretty similar. 55,000 car trips to work are under two miles.
So walking, if it were a mass transit system, has the capability and market to shift a lot of bodies.
There has been a couple of developments in the last few years that might well make walking a mass transit system. This has been the evolution of fast walkways systems.
The first of these opened in Paris around three years ago in Montparnasse train station. This revolutionary system has the ability to move you along at 11kmph and if you were to walk on it at the same time you would be moving along at around 16kmph, quite a clip.
Of course, there’s a problem. In order to accelerate you up to speed the engineers used a system of rollers, each one moving slightly faster than the last. It works fine, as long as you have your feet on the ground. If you don’t, you’re likely to go ass over tit, as many poor unfortunates have. The result has been the need for staff to oversee people getting onto the walkway and the average speed has been reduced to 9kmph.
The new Pier F in Toronto has a similar system which moves along at 7kmph or 12kmph if you are walking. The system they have used is reputedly better at keeping you upright during acceleration than the Paris concept.
Nevertheless, even though these walkways extend only a couple of hundred meters, it shows that walking, as opposed to putting up massive expensive tram and train projects, can work.
Think, for example, if walkways had been used instead of the Luas. The average speed of the Luas is less than 20kmph and you’ve got to wait for it. If sections of walkway were built in 500m lengths, for example, it wouldn’t be long before a network could be built that would better replicate the journeys that people undertake.
Of course, it wouldn’t work in all situations and it would form a bit of a barrier in parts of the city but overpasses and underpasses should be easy to design as you’re only carrying people.
Remember, you read it here first. If technology can solve some of our problems then moving walkways have a future.
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