Do the Irish really want unification?

I’ve come back from three recent trips to Ireland marvelling: this is what a grown-up country looks like. A giant, potentially divisive issue comes along — the sudden prospect of a united Ireland, a republican dream since long before Irish partition in 1921 — and instead of treating it as a winner-take-all, biff-bang argument as in certain countries one could mention, almost all Irish seem determined to move slowly, seriously and fairly.

How to reassure mostly Protestant Unionists in Northern Ireland, who for generations have identified as British? I’ve seen a hall full of Irish people applaud a woman urging them “to be open and inclusive to Unionists”. The 4.8m Irish in the Republic and 1.9m in Northern Ireland still face a scary decade. Irish unification could revive the north’s violent Troubles. But blessedly, most Irish people realise that. Here’s a rare case of a country learning from history.

English politicians and Northern Ireland’s Unionists have done more to unite Ireland in three years than Irish republicans managed in a century. “Brexit has catapulted this issue forward,” says Padraig Ó Muirigh, adviser to the republican Sinn Féin party. “There is a real sense that we’re living in historical times.”

Last month, Boris Johnson agreed to place the de facto future border in the sea between mainland Britain and Northern Ireland. That put both Irelands in one economic zone, and showed Unionists that the English nationalist Conservatives considered them expendable. In fact, some Unionists feel they’ve had more understanding from the Dublin government.

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement stipulates that if both sides of Ireland vote in a referendum to unite, it will happen. That could be soon. Next year a hard Brexit, or a Scottish vote for independence, could encourage Northern Ireland to escape the British mess. Then, the 2021 census would become the first ever to show self-described Catholics — who traditionally back Irish unification — outnumbering Protestants in the north.

It’s as if a genie appeared and told the Irish: “Here, have your national dream.” But the Irish now aren’t sure they want it. Inching towards unification is like “juggling with china”, says Noelle O’Connell of the European Movement Ireland. For many people, it’s heart against head, explains Neale Richmond, senator for the ruling Fine Gael party. The heart says: yes. The head says: not yet, just 21 years into the generations-long process of healing sectarianism.

Does the Republic really want to import several hundred thousand hard-core Unionists, some of whom may kill for their identity? “The boys haven’t gone away,” as some there put it. And after nearly a century apart, even northern and southern Catholics have different identities.

Then there’s money. Northern income per capita is about half that of the Republic. Northern Ireland now gets about €10bn in annual British subsidies. Replacing that would cost the average person in the Republic more than €2,000 a year, possibly for decades (Germany still hasn’t closed its divide). In a poll commissioned by the broadcasters RTE and BBC in 2015, 66 per cent in the Republic supported a united Ireland in their lifetimes. But if it meant higher taxes, support dropped to 31 per cent.

As Britain has shown, there’s a simple way to settle a complex question. However, Brexit has been a crash course in the pitfalls of romantic nationalist referendums in which you vote first and discuss details afterwards. The Irish have developed a more sophisticated method: citizens’ assemblies. An assembly of 100 people was created in 2016 to study, consult broadly and report on several national issues. It’s a tool suited to a small country. The assembly’s recommendations drove a widely accepted outcome to last year’s referendum legalising abortion. One day, another assembly could prepare for unification.

But even then, the outcome could be a united Ireland containing an irreconcilable minority of mostly working-class East Belfast Protestants, some of them tattooed with queen’s heads and Union Jacks. To my surprise, even Sinn Féin doesn’t seem to want to defeat Unionists outright. The movement that spent a century fighting British rule now says it’s open to the possibility of a united Ireland rejoining the Commonwealth. Ó Muirigh hopes a new Ireland will be “a warm house for Unionists”. His father Sean “Spike” Murray, a senior Sinn Féin figure jailed for 12 years during the Troubles, told me: “We don’t want people who feel British put in a situation where their Britishness is left adrift. How can I assure that your Britishness is guaranteed?”

Murray insisted he didn’t want Unionists to “feel abandoned” by a united Irish state the way nationalists had felt under British rule. Would he or people around him have talked like that 30 years ago? “No,” he admitted. “Things were more polarised then.” The educational effect of 21 years of cross-community discussions had been “unbelievable”, he added.

Such Republican talk may simply be a bad-faith bid to gull Unionists. Things could end badly. However, I suspect the Irish will keep prioritising peace over unification. In fact, they could teach Britons and Americans something about reaching out across divides.

SOURCE 






The counterproductive cruelties of occupational licensing

by Jeff Jacoby

An applicant for a Massachusetts cosmetology license must log 1,000 hours of education, plus two full years of hands-on experience.

COSMETOLOGISTS AND emergency medical technicians don't have much in common.

Cosmetologists treat skin, style hair, and paint nails. EMTs respond to 911 calls, administer urgent medical care, and rush patients by ambulance to hospitals.

Cosmetologists are beauty-industry professionals who help people feel good about their appearance. EMTs are first responders who help people survive violent traumas and heart attacks.

Cosmetologists rarely face a life-threatening crisis on the job. EMTs make life-or-death decisions every day.

But there is one thing cosmetologists and EMTs do have in common: Both must be licensed by the state. The amount of training and experience needed to obtain those licenses, however, could hardly be more different. An applicant for a Massachusetts EMT license has to complete just 150 hours of education in order to qualify. But anyone seeking a cosmetology license faces a far higher hurdle: An applicant must log 1,000 hours of education, plus two full years of hands-on experience, before the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will allow them to go into the beauty business.

The gaping disparity seems bizarre. You can do the critical lifesaving work of an emergency first responder after little more than a month of study, but you can't color hair and give manicures without years of training?

That's just one of the perversities highlighted in a new reporton occupational licensing in Massachusetts from the Pioneer Institute, a Boston think tank. Building on the work of the Institute for Justice, a liberty-oriented law firm that mounts legal challenges to oppressive occupational licensing rules, the Pioneer report notes that the state's licensing laws for lower-income occupations — not surgeons and airline pilots, but barbers and massage therapists — are among the most burdensome in the nation. "On average," researcher Alex Muresianu writes, "one has to pay $309 in fees, spend roughly 513 days in education and training, and take at least one exam to receive an occupational license in the Bay State."

The steep barriers to entry for cosmetologists are heavier here than in any other state, and that isn't the only profession for which Massachusetts law makes it especially difficult to acquire a license. Commercial sheet metal contractors, for example, must undergo five years of training and pay hundreds of dollars in fees to get the government's permission to work. Why? There is nothing particularly complex or dangerous about working with clients to install and repair sheet metal products. In 24 states, no license to do such work is required at all.

Similarly, Massachusetts is one of only three states that makes funeral attendants obtain a government license. It's one of only nine to require licensing for dental assistants. State law even authorizes municipalities to license fortune tellers.

And lawmakers always want to go further. Bills to impose new licensing requirements are introduced regularly. "Currently unlicensed professions legislators have tried to license," the think tank observes, "include associate home inspector, interior designer, swimming pool builder or service contractor, refrigerator technician, speech pathologist, drain cleaner, personal care attendant, and, most strangely, art therapist."

Years of empirical studies prove that requiring licenses for such occupations does little to protect public health or consumer welfare. The nation's well-being is not being eroded by all the funeral attendants and art therapists doing their work without government approval. Yet occupational licenses aren't merely ineffective; they are affirmatively harmful.

Pioneer itemizes the many negative consequences: Licensing laws sharply reduce mobility of workers between states. They depress low-income entrepreneurship. They disproportionately hurt young people, by protecting incumbent workers and obstructing those just entering the workforce. They have a particularly negative impact on minorities and the poor. In some states, including Massachusetts, they even exacerbate the student loan crisis: Occupational licenses can be stripped from borrowers who default, making it even harder for them to pay their debts.

Under Massachusetts law, cities and towns are authorized to license even fortune tellers.

Add it up, and the financial impact imposed by occupational licensing is staggering. The data compiled by Pioneer suggests that such laws cost Massachusetts more than 64,000 jobs, and deprive the state of at least $411 million in economic activity.

For any licensing requirement, there will always be a small but fervent cohort of defenders: Those already in the field who want to minimize competition. The benefit they enjoy is very real — but it comes a heavy cost to everyone else.

Pioneer puts the stakes bluntly: "Occupational licensing laws make it a crime to engage in simple behaviors like cutting hair, doing someone's nails, or arranging flowers in exchange for payment." Government shouldn't be in the business of keeping people from making a living. After all, you don't need the state's permission to be a politician or a journalist. Why should you need its approval to be a dental assistant?

SOURCE 






Shock — Some Women Still Choose Motherhood

Women who take paid leave often end up choosing to be stay-at-home moms.

A recent study of the paid child leave law in California is proving one thing — if you subsidize something, you get more of it. The Left is none too pleased and is now pivoting away from paid leave to paid childcare.

Yeah, that motherhood thing just can’t be tolerated! So, what happened?

An analysis of tax and employment data from 2001 and 2015 by economists of the University of Utah, the University of Michigan, Middlebury College, and Chicago’s Federal Reserve reviewed the impact of the Golden State paid leave law launched in 2004. The state program uses a payroll tax aimed at encouraging women to return to work following a window of time receiving part of their salary while nurturing their newborn child at home. Both parents are permitted to take up to six weeks of paid leave.

Yet this payment to first-time mothers didn’t prevent a 7% reduction in the employment rates of these women. When these women were permitted to remain home, they ultimately decided to take themselves out of the workplace, as demonstrated by an overall reduction in wages paid to the aggregate of first-time mothers by $24,000 that did not occur to men who took advantage of the law but went back to work. Men chose to return to work, if they took time off, as evidenced by no reduction in lost wages as experienced by women abandoning their work outside the home.

Oof. That is not what the militant feminists wanted to see! In another look at this data, a MarketWatch article included this revealing opinion: “As more states follow California’s lead and enact paid leave laws, the study is a reminder about the potential for unintended consequences.”

Absolutely! Who would want women to make a personal decision to remain in the home, if possible, and care for her child?

But a finding in the study makes a piercing statement: “If investment in parenting is increasing in time spent with infants … additional leave may encourage women to invest more in their children (and less in their careers) — even if treatment by employers at the time they return to work is the same.”

Put simply, paying to spend time with their babies is resulting in … wait for it … mothers spending time with their babies! Even if women and men are treated equally with access to paid leave and treated equally to resume their work and wages upon return, it’s the women who are choosing to be a stay-at-home Mom and abandon or delay their careers.

Ruh-roh.

Law professor Ann Althouse captures the commentary of an economist at Stanford, Maya Rossin in-Slater, who praised the study’s design and large data set but also warned that the California leave law didn’t fix the need for postpartum mothers to return to work: “They have fantastic data and large sample sizes relative to the prior papers, and that’s a big advance. This paper cautions us that paid leave is not a silver bullet. There are other policy tools we need to implement.”

As has been noted consistently here in our humble shop, the value of motherhood cannot be assigned with monetary currency. The time invested in children by mothers, whose fingerprints leave the indelible marks of a legacy of love, cannot be measured. Yet the work of the militant feminist movement is to minimize this value and disincentivize the choice women may make to “stay home.”

Reality proves that not every woman has that ability, but the fascinating aspect of this data was that even when barriers are removed for women to remain home and return to work, the trend is to stay home.

Just as men and women are not the same, nor are women uniform automatons.

As has also been discussed at The Patriot Post, the stated goal of the angry leftist women to achieve sameness sure does come with a lot of special demands and rights that are many times not afforded men. This sameness is not equality. It typically comes by mocking men, working to feminize them or ridicule them as dangerous, testosterone-driven oppressors. True equality values the difference but treats the equal contributions of all. That’s called merit.

One other finding in the study of the California leave law has the Left confused. Only about 15% of the claims for parental leave were by men and, when fulfilled, were for only two or three days off work, not the full benefit of up to six weeks.

What? How dare these men not allow the mother of their child to return to work immediately!

What’s wrong with these women? Choosing motherhood instead of employment is a decision that must be made in the home.

So, while this large study found that women with access to paid leave demonstrated no more likelihood of sticking with their employer than those without paid leave, one of the trials researchers, University of Michigan’s Professor Martha Bailey, told MarketWatch, “Subsidized child care would be one possible solution.”

Barriers to employment exist. Childcare is among those real issues for women who are needing employment. But mothers choosing to stay home should be honored and seen as a value to our society, not subsidized out of existence.

SOURCE 





Uncaring Australian army top brass

Maybe just another bureaucracy but if he had been female you would never have been able to shut them up.  They are very politically "correct" these days and real heroism such as we saw from Ben are old hat or even contemptible in that mindset

The country's most decorated soldier, Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith, has lashed out at the nation's defence chiefs for failing to publicly back him as his reputation and military record suffered sustained attacks over allegations he committed war crimes during his service in Afghanistan.

Mr Roberts-Smith said be had recently been contacted by .the Australian Defence Force to conduct a "welfare check", seven years after he left the army and nearly two years after he first appeared in a series of media reports accusing him of war crimes.

The call came just days after he publicly criticised the leadership of the ADF for failing to look after soldiers after they left the military.

Mr Roberts-Smith confirmed he had been contacted by the ADF, telling The Weekend Australian: "While I appreciate the sentiment of a welfare check, it does highlight the issue at hand — it is a reactive step that occurred after my public comments."

Mr Roberts-Smith said the ADF culture "has always been this reactive self-protection from the senior leadership" and criticised the lack of support offered to transitioning Diggers, who were statistically at a higher risk of suicide after they left the military.

Mr Roberts-Smith is locked in a personal battle to clear his reputation after being accused of war crimes in a series of stories by Nine Media. He is also being investigated by the Australian Federal Police over a possible war crime committed in the Afghan village of Daman in 2012.

Mr Roberts-Smith vehemently denies any wrongdoing and is suing Fairfax Media, now owned by Nine, over the stories. He said he was loathe to compare his own troubles with those of struggling former soldiers, who he said were at greater risk. But he noted that at no point had his former bosses offered any public comment of support; despite the allegations against him being unproven.

"Given the public scrutiny I've faced and the false accusations made against me, I would have assumed the Defence Force, which created my profile and placed me on a pedestal in the public arena, would have made some public comment about my good character and service given that at no stage have I ever been approached by law enforcement," Mr Roberts-Smith said.

Mr Roberts-Smith clarified he was. not calling for Defence chiefs to be sacked after being quoted on Friday morning saying he "absolutely" believed new leadership was needed at the top of the ADF.

National president of the RSL Greg Melick said there was no need for ADF leadership to step down because of their treatment of veterans. Mr Melick said if this was the view of Mr Roberts-Smith, then "I don't agree with him".

From the "Weekend Australian" of 16/11/19

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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