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He for She

29/9/2014

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Mostly in response to Emma Watson’s decision to step out of the feminist closet I decided to have a look at the main principles of the feminist movement and broke it down to the following three points:

1)      Equal Pay

2)      To ensure we have more female politicians

3)      Women should have control over their own bodies

On the first point the HeforShe campaign states Gender equality is not only a women’s issue, it is a human rights issue. I couldn’t agree more with this, in fact equality between genders is one of the fundamental principles of EU law and legislation for equal rights between women and men has existed since the very early days of the European Community. In Ireland to ensure we have fair pay amongst the labor force, ie to ensure that a man and woman get equal pay for equal work, we encourage the development of trade unions, in fact it is your legal and constitutional right to join a trade union and right now trade union membership across Ireland is at an historic high. There are now more people in unions than at any time in our history. Trade unions help protect their members and historically speaking they’ve helped improve working conditions as well as ensuring equal pay for their members.

The second thing most ‘feminists’ hope to achieve is to have more women in politics. The issue with this is that trying to reach a quota to satisfy a lobby group is not very democratic. Secondly everyone has the right to vote and everyone in Ireland has the right to enter politics, so really this is not something we can simply lobby for, it is something that must develop over time by having high quality female candidates. On this note Ireland has always had strong female leaders in politics from Constance Markievicz to Bernadette Devlin to Mary Robinson, the later of whom served as Ireland’s first female president and as a United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.              

The third point which does cause a some divide is the right to control your own body, ultimately this means that women should have the right to an abortion as they should be able to decide whether or not they carry a child. Now this is something I’m in agreement with also so that must make me a feminist right? Well maybe I’m just pro-choice and I am liberal enough to realise that there is a place for abortion in modern Ireland.

So from examining the feminist movement part of me has begun to develop the opinion that the main points are really just basic human & civil rights, and all feminism has really done is extract fundamental ideas from various movements, repackage them and slap some lipstick on it.

Now the danger with this is that perhaps feminism has detracted from the development of broader issues, for instance in the quest for equal pay for women are we ignoring the basic concept of equal pay for all? In the quest for more female politicians do we end up in world run by Sarah Palins? Is the pro-choice movement ignored by male society because it’s seen as a woman’s issue? Perhaps feminism has separated human rights and women’s rights to the point whereby feminists have excluded men from the civil rights process and thus feminism is synonymous with womanhood and is completely inaccessible to man. Perhaps feminists need to step out of the feminist closet and re-engage with the world.

Emma Watson I don’t believe you have declared yourself as a feminist so much as you’ve declared yourself as a woman who believes in civil  & human rights #heforshe.  


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Letter to the governor

29/9/2014

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Reading through the Irish Times recently I came across more distasteful American   politics, Governor Pat McCrory unable to comprehend the value people’s health plays over that of the profits of the vile tobacco industry. The article reads

‘The governor of North Carolina Pat McCrory is the latest American politician to call on the Government to scrap its plans to introduce plain packaging on cigarettes and other tobacco products.’

The article further details the governor’s fight to help protect tobacco brands;

“Imagine if the United States required Guinness to be stripped of its universally recognised brand and be marketed solely as ‘beer’ or Jameson to be labelled simply as ‘whiskey’ and Baileys as ‘liqueur’,” said the governor

Of course when the tobacco industry brings in over $32 billion in taxation to the American government it will have a few advocates. Thankfully the Irish people have already taken a stand against the agents of evil, so I think that anyone who has come across Mr McCrorys letter should drop him a line to let him know what the people of Ireland think about his brand values.

'Dear Governor McCrory,

In response to your letter appealing to the Irish people to protect your cancer brands I would first like to introduce you to the concept that we are not a nation of senseless whiskey guzzlers as portrayed in many of your nations most popular media streams.

Comparing items such as anthrax and cigarettes to international alcoholic beverages does not make us feel any closer to your cause.

The reason we are introducing plain packaging is to fight the battle against lung cancer, see lung cancer is one of the most common cancers in Ireland and 90% of all cases are caused directly by smoking.

Ireland is a small nation, I don’t believe we can deliver world peace or solve global warming or put a man on the moon any time soon, but what we can do is to identify a clear injustice in the world, an injustice whereby Tobacco companies profiteer from the lives of ordinary people, and what we have done is declared a war on cancer and if that means taking on the tobacco industry so be it, because every life saved is a life worth fighting for.

In March 2004 Ireland became the first country in the world to introduce comprehensive legislation banning smoking in workplaces, this included public houses and restaurants, traditionally a stronghold of the tobacco companies, the result was that cigarette sales fell by 60% in bars and it was reported that that 7,000 people gave up smoking in the first 12 months after the ban came into effect, doesn’t sound like a lot, well Mr McCrory that is 7,000 lives as far as I’m concerned and nearly twice the death toll of US soldiers in your war on Iraq, to put things in context.

Plain packaging has already been introduced in Australia and studies show the fastest decline in smoking in over twenty years, encouraging for our goal to be tobacco free by 2025.

Mr McRory we will not deter form reaching our goal, we may not be the largest nation on this green earth but we will prevail in our fight against cancer agents, and we will lead the way for our European neighbors.

Please feel free to die of lung cancer if you are still in opposition to plain packaging by the time you read this.

Regards

The People’s Champ'

I decided to e-mail the Gov myself so hopefully he will write back and we can be friends and stuff, also please feel free to drop him a line if you're anti-cancer

http://www.governor.state.nc.us/contact/email-pat


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