Had a read through this post and alot of people seemed to have gotten lost on it somehow Anyway i wouldnt think the grandmother clause is in much use these days as hell were all (almost) European now and immigration is hammered out at an EU level. If you live and work in a country i belive your entitled to the benifits of that country reguardless of how long ya have been here. And to me that would include a passport. But for the passport obvioulsy not right away but after a degree of time if you choose to settle in the country start and familly or maybe on your own but a degree of time would be nessicary to become a citizen.
As for the grandmother clause.....well i say keep it the Irish football team needs some good English players !
Im Far from a tipster but for the hell of it ill give what id pick for the races tommorrow and i might even have a punt on a few while im at it. As always keep your money in your pocket its the safest place and dont listen to tips!!! and if you do bet at least do it Each way.
So ill have an imaginary 1 Euro bet on each selection and hopefully ill be up by tommorrow ! lol yeah right but anyway.....
Oh and dont get me wrong we want the same things and so do our politicans i think also but its not so easy to do and maybe thats why you think your not being listened too.
Well you have to hunt the information for yourself if you want to make a truely informed decsion. The information might have been on a Deating site but it was sourced from else where and becides the chat forums is a social network for talking to people about whatever be it love life or loss or even current affairs so i dont think it that unusual.
Well if a treaty was sent to every house it would be used for kindling in most places lol but we were sent out the main yes and no arguments and i remember seeing yes and no conferences advertised and held around town during the referendum. But naturally the stuff that come through your door is biased to the relative argument thats why you use your own head take it on board and hunt down the rest yourself. Wikipedia i found was a great help in this.
Personally i would have loved a treaty through the door and plenty of time to read it. But its just the kinda stuff im interested in so id make an effort to go through it as best i could.
Well what do you want to say to the government ? What do you feel they control about your life ? You have no say in what ? The running of the country ? What do you want to change ?
Never knew a Cuban wrote our constitution ! Source if you have one please id love to read about it.
If you can dig up the old Lisbon treaty threads that have been posted here a while back during the Referendum you will find an abundance of easy to read information that myself (yes camp) and PatrickThomas (no camp) Debated about and we each posted links and our own personal view on the matters at hand.
Its not that hard to understand because both parties during the referendum highlighted and debated the main issuses. The reason Most politicians didnt understand it is because most politicians arent lawers and there is alot of technical mumbo jumbo but it as since been brought down to an easy to read level that you should find if you look through the threads. But be warned although it is easy to read there is alot of eeerrrmmm reading to do. I spent the best part of a month looking through the damn thing
"Would you really sign a contract without knowing what was in it?"
I assume your taling about Lisbon....I did know what was in it i read the white paper and the consolodated version and was quiet happy with it. I thought i was a very good deal.
We do run our own country, we have control over our police, judicary system, defense forces, tourism, Taxes, sports, elections, European Elections, and referendum voting etc..!
My problem is with you self suffient statement worthy of Dev's attempt during the 50s your bold statment of moving back to an agricultuaral society from an industrial one and pulling out of the EU. You only have to look at how the country was run until we joined the EU to see just how crazy it is.
But if you have a plan or some resoning behind your statment id love to hear it!
Had the treaty passed their was for the first time (i thinnk) a statment in it that said any country can leave at anytime. At the moment i dont think there is a mechanism to get out (as always open to corrections)
The penalty for pulling out is probably trade tariffs to countries within the EU the loss of grants and the EU giving us a bolliking and of course the country going back 30 years.
Yeah its almost fascintating and scary to watch to re-emergence of State and Church. Most resonable countries mostly in the western world made the seperation of State and Church and rightly so. (Forget the year Ireland did it) But these days it can be seen creeping back in. Not so Much in Europe unless you could point out some examples but the likes of America. 20 years ago it was all about kissing babies on the street and stating your all about the familly. Now you cant get elected unless your seen coming out of a church. Also that insidious nonsense of intelligent design is getting its funding and Air time from somewhere with connections up the political ladder.
Im not sure you could fault them for being Economic organisations as some of the religions have there followers in the hundred of millions and they all donate. What they do with the money i dont know but id imagine its redistributed to grass route clergy and charitable organisations. Perhaps some sidlined for lobbying politicans ? Wouldnt suprise me. But a Mass organisation needs good accounting and i feel they do good with their wealth.
I would be very interested to know how and what was taught for religion in your days at school.
For me i dont recall anything in primary school as for secondary we had a religion class taught by the school priest who had no idea how to control teenagers. Ended up doing homework chatting with me mates or just going home! It was later replaced with civics class i think but that got cancelled to.
And this was all during the start of boom time so perhaps a transitional period for religion in schools ??
In reguards to the thread i think it should definatly not be thaught in primary school for secondary yeah sure but should be called something like cultural diversity class and give a more broad perscective about other peoples religion and cultures and about the countries they have come from as well as our own. I think that would hold a teenagers mind longer the waffleing about a God or Gods or praying for your soul.
Personally i know myself and what i can do and it good enough for me.
But its the uncurable human tendancy to explore and question. Now i find myself thinking is Death the end ? Is that all there is to life ? This is where spirituality comes in. Meet with others with the same view and the next thing you know your in a cult or god forbid going back to mass. But like you said it all comes down to your own strength of character. "Gods" gift of freedom of choice
Yes and you can see evidence of it all around in the power vaccume that was left behind from a move away from mass organizsed religions.
Waco, that mormon bigomy sect not so long ago, Shirah law (spell?) Islamic extremism, Christian extremism (particularly Intelligent design movment they really irritate me).
And i think it was corkguy that pointed it out that a religion is usless without a spiritual leader to well ummmm lead which has lead to the rise in the above organisations.
Humans got to belive in something wheather it be science, war, love, religion or spirituality.
Im actually guilty of constantly viewing profiles......just bad memory. Or a changed pic might make me think its new profile or perhaps im just dawdling over will i or wont i message her.
Shoddy aint the word for it PT id go as far to say all out paddywhackery.
What up with this whole Sarkozy visit shambles. Havent had a chance to read the papers but the media seems to be stirring up alot of fall out from this frenchquarkery it would seem.
Well i read that irish times article and it almost swayed me Patrick. But i belive Ireland has an adeqet voice and protection in this treaty. And what clinched it today was reading an article about how the EU are trying to get the same pay and working condition for temporary and recruitment workers as their full time counterparts. That is what the EU is about and that is the kind of thing they work for.
However i think the No vote will pervail. For the simple reason they ran a better campaign. Clearly the government learned nothing from nice and rushed this out leaving a larger part of the populus in the dark. There ads where very unimformative. Unlike the No camp which raised there points on their ads. However mis leading or hald truths they were. The best i saw near my polling station was "Israel killed 200 odd palestinians and the EU didnt sancition them VOTE NO" lol if anything its a reason to vote yes to make a stronger union.
Anyway for a bit of light conspiricy theory relief
Maybe the Government wanted a NO but appear to tow the EU line. Think about it. How could they make the exact same mistakes as NICE. Rushing out to get us to vote without giving us any real time or information to digest and think about the issues ? But still look like there all for the EU !? with that though i leave you
Hopefully that politics show on RTE whats it called ....hmmm well hopefully if they have any clue at all will have a live debate between yes and no to put any lingering doubts to rest. A FF SF debate would be great.
I suggest you have a read through this thread its very interesting if long. A poster called Scooflaw makes excellent arguments for the treaty and seem very well informed and has swayed me to vote yes. And he seems to debunk "no" arguments and explain very well what the treaty really means. Of course that all hinges if what you think he says is true which personally i do. Bullcrappers tend to get kicked from forums.
The link above deals with your particular bone with the treaty and the following posts on the forum as it happens is my quieries on the treaty (Mark2701)
If you spend long enough looking through this fine thread most of the arguments are made and answered intelligently its just a question of time and willingness. And like i said draw your own conclusions on wheather he knows what hes talking about or not.
Well i agree that we are losing our neutrality but we are moving towards a united Europe where we all try to sing from the same hymn sheet so its a more of a natural progression in my opinion. And i think i made the point before that i cant see ireland playing an active role in any kind of army but more a supportive role which im fine with and which we actually did until recently (lebanon). As for our country part-taking in oil wars i think its an argument left for a different thread.
You are right about the condensed version of both sides coming out to my door and have read both carefully and find still in favour of yes. And i think all sides can agree that there is alot of grey areas whcih can be argued either way and if that is the case the treaty cannot effect us that negativly. This treaty did not spring up over night it has a good few years work behind it to make everyone happy and i suspect that is why it has been argued down to a "grey area".
And you seem an intelligent person how can you say voting no because you dont understand is the way to go ? You should vote on the facts represented to you and make your decision based on that not because you simply dont understand. If you dont understand people should take a leaf out of your book and get informed as obviously you have dived right into the nitty gritty of this treaty.
If its a no and in 3 years we do it all again do you think the treaty will have changed that much since ? I find it unlikely like i said alot of work has already gone into it to get a general consenus across all the countries.
What about the new EU army ? I wouldnt be suprised to see our defense forces playing some kind of supporting role. But isnt that what we pay them for ? And the bulk will be made up of british and french troops. And our EU army will be off fighting for oil and gas to keep our econmoys running.....erm thats different how from today ?
Voting no to give the goverment a hard time is not a good idea. Its about creation a new and cohesive europe not about the government. We had our chance to give them a hard time in the general election when i belived we where all frustrated at corruption the econmy and things in general but suprise suprise the same old faces where given there jobs back.
Conscrition as in other countries. Now thats good scaremongering. It throws up feelings of soliders coming to a door of a familly and tearing away a young 16 year old boy out of his mothers bosom to go fight in a trench somewhere. But lets look at this conscription. Fair enough in Israel its the last place you would want to be to do it but in the likes of Germany where its optional and Romania where its compulsory its more like national service. I worked with a man from Romania and he enjoyed it. And i wouldnt be completly agaist the idea here if it was optional but of course the whole thing is a non start with the cost involved. And do you honestly belive we are all going to be forced into the army ?
I dont particularly feel pressured to vote yes. I have got both sides of the argument through my door and i still feel ok voting yes. However I am as always open to have my mind changed with facts. Its the beautiful thing about being human nothing is set in stone. And i would really appreciate it if you e mail me your sources or links or maybe even tell me about these arcticles that have you in the no camp. I would be aprecitated as personally im trying to be as involved as possibe in what i think is a historic vote.
TheRoadRunner Forum Posts (46)
RE: What's the most romantic thing you've ever done??
Constantly doing things i didnt want to do for the woman i loved. Thats my romantic side.