Mortals Dream

Mortal’s dream or so we are told.
Their night flights to their desires are mold.
Here they are what they wish, and do what they will;
Knights in armour with dragons to kill.
Worlds beyond counting, dangers concealed.
And dark sweet secrets strangely revealed.

 

Less then 5% of cases sent to the DPP result in a conviction.

I have known for the years the stats are bad and I have blogged about it before and that even if you do report it to the garda ( and according to the rape cirises network only 10% do go to the gards) that then there is a good chance that after your attacker being brought to the garda station for statements and the file being sent to the Department of Public prosecution they may choose not to take the case but I didn’t know it was as high as 70%.

http://examiner.ie/ireland/crime/dpp-rejects-70-of-sex-crime-referrals-172463.html

DPP rejects 70% of sex crime referrals

By Jennifer Hough

Tuesday, November 01, 2011

AT least 70% of suspects in sex offence cases are not being prosecuted by the Director of Public Prosecutions, figures obtained by the Irish Examiner have revealed.

Statistics provided by the DPP also reveal that, since 2008, there have been just 24 convictions in cases relating to people aged under 18. They were secured from 531 files submitted to the office by gardaí.

So far this year, a high of 179 cases concerning under 18-year-olds, in which there were 201 suspects, were sent to the DPP.

An analysis of the figures from 2008 to October 2011 shows:

* In 2010, 1,254 files with 1,407 suspects were sent to the DPP. No prosecution was directed in 1,002 (70%) of those;

* In 2009, 1,043 files with 1,204 suspects were sent. No prosecution was taken against 883 (73%) suspects;

* In 2008, 962 files with 1,055 suspects were sent. No prosecution was directed in 784 (74%) cases.

To October 2011, gardaí sent 1,083 files concerning 1,213 suspects to the DPP. There was no prosecution taken in relation to 736 suspects. A further 270 are pending.

The figures reveal that conviction rates for serious sex offences in the higher courts are not going up — despite a steady rise in the number of files submitted to the DPP in recent years.

Since 2008, there have been 233 convictions in the Central Criminal Court and Circuit Court. In 443 cases over the same timeframe, “no final outcome” was recorded. There can be several reasons for this, for example, if the gardaí cannot locate the accused, if a case is still pending or if a case is awaiting a re-trial where the jury could not reach a verdict during an earlier trial.

The Rape Crisis Network of Ireland called on the DPP to give victims reasons for not prosecuting a case.

“Very many survivors of sexual violence who take the decision to report the crime to the guards will not have their case prosecuted,” said a network spokesperson.

“For survivors, this can be very difficult to understand and accept.

“We would like to see the DPP extend a pilot project to start giving people reasons for non-prosecution in relation to unlawful killing to include sexual offences.”

The figures show that, in 2010, just 10 convictions were secured in the Central Criminal Court, where 67 people were initially prosecuted. Of the 145 offences tried in the Circuit Court concerning 154 suspects, there were 32 convictions.

Also last year, of 203 suspects in 173 alleged crimes against under 18-year-olds, the DPP did not prosecute 163 (80%) of the suspects.

There was one conviction in the Central Criminal Court, and five in the Circuit Court. One case is still pending direction.

According to the DPP’s office, it receives a file in all detected cases of a sexual nature. Gardaí do not filter “unprosecutable” cases.

For this reason, the office receives a large number of files, some of which are seriously lacking in evidence.

This means they will only bother with cases which they can get a jury to prosecute and given the horrible attitudes to wards sex and women in this country, as over 1/3 of people think the victim is at fault. It means that you have to be a ‘good girl’ and have very little of a sexual history for to have them think it’s not your ‘fault’.

Given that even if the DPP takes your case it can take up to 118 weeks, that’s over two years before it sees the inside of a court room and you have to live with that hanging over you and that’s even harder if the attacker is someone you know which statically is likely.

The system is beyond deeply flawed and needs to change.

 

I had to talk to my kids over breakfast about the bombs on a bus in Maynooth and on the LUAS this morning, they were worried about going to school, our friends in Maynooth and family members who work in Dublin city.

WTF this is not the Ireland they know and it is one which I hoped we would never return to.
Those carrying out these pointless terrorist attacks on Irish people need to stop.
NOT IN MY NAME!

 

Rape Culture in advertising?

I really really don’t like this ad.
Actually I am pretty horrified by what it’s portraying.
It shows a woman who is almost save home, to the point she has is at her hall door, with her keys, being waylaid, held against her will by a figure bigger then she is and having an someting forced into her mouth.

It’s part of the Knorr beat the slump advertising campaign.
But the ad with the woman is it just does not compare or contrast equally with the other’s in the series.

The blurb that does with the images are.

http://www.facebook.com/knorrquicksoup?sk=info

Knorr QuickSoup Ireland

Slump-busting? Meet Mr. Slump. You’re probably familiar with him already. So you know that he has a away of sneaking up on you when you’re at your most vulnerable, like mid-afternoon or mid morning.

He takes advantage of your hunger-induced daze and he makes you do stupid stuff that you’d really rather not.

He’ll tell you to chomp that whole bar of chocolate right now, that it’s just what you need.

Or he’ll order you to take a nap at your desk and not to worry if the boss is hovering at the desk beside you.

You get the picture. You know the story. So don’t let your Slump get the better of you. Get Knorr QuickSoup instead.

So the guys are studying and at work and being made sleep or slack off but the women is in the ‘traditional’ role, of out getting the shopping to be at home to make dinner, that’s annoying enough with out the enactment of oral rape with an object and implying it’s her fault.

Yup for double bonus this ad has victim blaming,
that there was something she could have done and as she didn’t it’s her fault she is vulnerable and that Mr Slump has taken advantage and is force feeding her chocolate.

Something you may like on occasion, being forced on you with out your consent, is scary and should not happen to anyone never mind it be used as an ad for something as common place and trivial as a cupa soup.

Knorr is a Unilever brand food and yes I have already lodged a complaint with them and with the advertising standards authority.

 

And none of the Irish papers covered it.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/republic-of-ireland/catholic-bishops-wash-feet-of-abuse-victims-15091012.html

Catholic bishops wash feet of abuse victims

Monday, 21 February 2011

Victims of paedophile clerics made their presence felt yesterday at a forgiveness service in Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral where two senior Catholic Church clergymen washed the feet of eight victims.

Boston-based Cardinal Sean O’Malley and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin — in “an act of humble service” — washed the feet of “a representative group” of those affected by the sexual abuse of priests. The group included prominent victims Marie Collins and Christine Buckley.

On behalf of the Pope who asked him to conduct an external probe into the scandal-ridden Archdiocese of Dublin, Cardinal O’Malley asked for forgiveness for the horrendous abuse cases catalogued in the Murphy Report, and for the systematic cover-up by church authorities.

But the one hour-and-40-minute service was interrupted twice by two victims who walked on to the altar and spoke of their failure to receive justice.

Both men were allowed to have their say by Archbishop Martin, and their contributions were applauded by the congregation.

Robert Dempsey, who said he was speaking for all victims, spoke of how he was placed in a mental institution when he was only three, and later of how he was raped by a cleric in another institution when he was 15.

Claiming that a court case that he had taken to obtain justice had been stalled for 10 years, Mr Dempsey handed Archbishop Martin a file of legal documents and urged him to use his influence with the judiciary to have his case heard and settled.

The second intervention came from Christopher Heaphy, who spoke of receiving “the lash and the whip” when he was aged five as a resident of Greenmount, run by the Presentation Brothers in Co Cork.

Speaking later, Mr Heaphy said that victims, many now elderly, still wanted justice and compensation, which he claimed had not been given by the hierarchy and religious orders.

A third victim, Paddy Doyle, a disability activist, approached the precincts of the sanctuary, before directing his wheelchair out a side exit. Referring to the presence of two gardai, Mr Doyle said: “Cardinal O’Malley is the most protected man in the building.”

But Ms Collins said she was pleased to have taken part in the service as one of those who selected and contributed to the prayers.

“It was a clear and definite expression of repentance by Archbishop Martin on behalf of the Dublin archdiocese,” said Ms Collins.

In his address, Archbishop Martin said that the service was only the first step toward healing, and warned against an attitude of “now we can get back to normal”.

“The archdiocese of Dublin will never be the same again,” said Archbishop Martin.

Unnoticed among the congregation was Cardinal Desmond Connell, the former Archbishop of Dublin, whose 16-year reign from 1988 to 2004 was “devastated” by the abuse scandals.

It is a start, it is over a decade over due and too late even as a gesture to those who died and those who’s lives were destroyed or effected due having a child abused or a partner or a parent who endured such abuse but it’s a symbolic start and none of the Irish papers covered it.

 

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?

 

Sister of Mercy excommunicated for being well merciful.

This is insane.
Those that ruined lives are still being protected by the roman catholic church, while those who are seeking to save them are being excommunicated. Is the church really that much of an old boys network?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126985072

Last November, a 27-year-old woman was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. She was 11 weeks pregnant with her fifth child, and she was gravely ill. According to a hospital document, she had “right heart failure,” and her doctors told her that if she continued with the pregnancy, her risk of mortality was “close to 100 percent.”

The patient, who was too ill to be moved to the operating room much less another hospital, agreed to an abortion. But there was a complication: She was at a Catholic hospital.

“They were in quite a dilemma,” says Lisa Sowle Cahill, who teaches Catholic theology at Boston College. “There was no good way out of it. The official church position would mandate that the correct solution would be to let both the mother and the child die. I think in the practical situation that would be a very hard choice to make.”

But the hospital felt it could proceed because of an exception — called Directive 47 in the U.S. Catholic Church’s ethical guidelines for health care providers — that allows, in some circumstance, procedures that could kill the fetus to save the mother. Sister Margaret McBride, who was an administrator at the hospital as well as its liaison to the diocese, gave her approval.
Documents
Church Q&A On Abortion, Sister Margaret McBride And Excommunication
Catholic Hospitals Fact Sheet About Abortion

The woman survived. When Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted heard about the abortion, he declared that McBride was automatically excommunicated — the most serious penalty the church can levy.

“She consented in the murder of an unborn child,” says the Rev. John Ehrich, the medical ethics director for the Diocese of Phoenix. “There are some situations where the mother may in fact die along with her child. But — and this is the Catholic perspective — you can’t do evil to bring about good. The end does not justify the means.”

Ehrich adds that under canon or church law, the nun should be expelled from her order, the Sisters of Mercy, unless the order can find an alternative penalty. Ehrich concedes that the circumstances of this case were “hard.”

“But there are certain things that we don’t really have a choice” about, he says. “You know, if it’s been done and there’s public scandal, the bishop has to take care of that, because he has to say, ‘Look, this can’t happen.’ “

A Double Standard?

But according to the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer, the bishop “clearly had other alternatives than to declare her excommunicated.” Doyle says Olmsted could have looked at the situation, realized that the nun faced an agonizing choice and shown her some mercy. He adds that this case highlights a “gross inequity” in how the church chooses to handle scandal.
Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted in 2003
Enlarge Roy Dabner/AP

Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, shown here in 2003, declared that McBride was automatically excommunicated because she allowed a patient at a Catholic hospital to get an abortion. But some say her quick punishment stands in stark contrast to the protection many pedophile priests have received from their bishops.
Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted in 2003
Roy Dabner/AP

Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, shown here in 2003, declared that McBride was automatically excommunicated because she allowed a patient at a Catholic hospital to get an abortion. But some say her quick punishment stands in stark contrast to the protection many pedophile priests have received from their bishops.

“In the case of priests who are credibly accused and known to be guilty of sexually abusing children, they are in a sense let off the hook,” Doyle says.

Doyle says no pedophile priests have been excommunicated. When priests have been caught, he says, their bishops have protected them, and it has taken years or decades to defrock them, if ever.

“Yet in this instance we have a sister who was trying to save the life of a woman, and what happens to her? The bishop swoops down [and] declares her excommunicated before he even looks at all the facts of the case,” Doyle says.

Ehrich agrees that sexual abuse can’t be tolerated. But he says neither can McBride’s actions.

“She said, ‘Yes, you can kill that unborn child.’ That’s a heinous act. And I’m not going to make a distinction between what’s worse. They’re both abhorrent,” Ehrich says.

Ehrich says the nun can be admitted back into the Catholic community by going to confession and repenting. McBride still works at the hospital in another position. Whether she is allowed to remain in her religious order, Erich says that is up to the Sisters of Mercy

 

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.

 

Someone you know has had an abortion.

IFPA Launches Campaign for Safe and Legal Abortion in Ireland

http://www.ifpa.ie/news/index.php?mr=111

Quote:
Between January 1980 and December 2004, at least 117,673 women traveled from Ireland for abortion services in Britain. There are no statistics to account for the number of women who travel to other countries for abortion services

http://www.ifpa.ie/abortion/iabst.html

These are not faceless numbers.

This is your sister, your friend, your work college, your aunt, your mother, your girl friend,
your ex girl friend, the person you see on the dart, luas, bus every morning,the girl in the newsagents,
or checkouts or the girl that was giving you the eye the last time you were in that bar.

Every one of them made that very hard choice made even harder
by having to travel and in years gone by not being able to get information.

And then you have those that could not get the money together.
Who say they love their kid but wished their life could have been different
but they did not have the money for flights ect.

Ideally every act of conception should be one that both people have planned
but life doesn’t work that way, esp with the lack of education and of cheap
contraception in this country.

So we ignore the big taboo.
Women don’t tell their stories.
They don’t share why they full of relief, guilt,sadness and happiness twice a year,
usually the date of their termination and that date the child would hve been born.

Being in the enviable position of having to think about an abortion is hard.
Having to make that choice is hard.
Having to make an appointment to get information or a referral is hard.
Keeping that appointment and talking out loud about your choice is hard.
Booking flights and traveling over, knowing that the mid morning flights
carry other women like you and the air stewards can spot them is hard.
Having to get into a taxi and give the name of the clinic and seeing the look of sympathy or shock hard.
Facing the dr and the counselor in the clinic in th UK and having then ask
you if you are sure even after you have traveled all the way there is hard.
Traveling home, telling no one, having to go through the mental , emotional,
hormonal and physical aftermath of a termination and most people not knowing what is up with you and you can’t tell them is hard.
Having this topic bandied about by people who have never been through it is hard.
Seeing pro lifer nuts on the streets of our city condemning so many women is hard.
Having it used as a political foot ball is hard.
Having it said that it is political foot ball is hard.
Having people make moral judgment about who would or could have a termination is hard.

And they say we DON’T punish women for having abortions in this country don’t make me laugh.

Being able to be there for a friend and travel with them and offer solace
and waiting for their call or text on those two days a year is hard also
but nothing compared to what they have been through.