The terrible tale of Tuam

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Continuing my usual practice of being late to press has the advantage of letting more details of a story emerge, being very late means that other people still cover the fuller picture before I do but I can cope.

A little while back a tale of terrible cruelty from Ireland’s past emerged involving as always the Catholic church and cruelty to children. Stories about bad things the Catholic church is alleged to have done in the past, much like accusations against aging celebrities, causes even usually calm heads to discard their usual rigor and leap upon the most sensationalist headlines of the churnalistic machine.

Due to the saving grace of cynicism and idleness the fuller story emerged before I said anything. So I shared the more accurate story which was really an awful lot less shocking with the book of face as surely people would be glad to know that terrible things hadn’t actually happened. I will admit that I did take the moment to advise people that they might want to “check their narrative” before leaping upon headlines.

I was somewhat surprised (but only somewhat) that the general reaction was that it was still terrible and we couldn’t possibly believe the more accurate story.

So what if the only witness of the “skeletons in the septic tank” said there was “about 20” skeletons it could still be “50-100 dead kids in an old sewage tank”. Yep the only witness said about 20, but because they saw it a long time ago and were of a young age at the time they are unreliable witnesses so the body count must be far more. No possibility that it could be less or even that it might not even be human skeletons, nope it must be more. All of the children invovled in this manufactured horror had a death certificate so really not much of a cover up, and a bit of research quite quickly revealed that the average death rate for the home wasn’t actually unusual for the time and area concerned, they were in fact doing a bit better than the average.

Nope still doesn’t matter there must be an inquiry into all historical children’s homes, presumably to see if they also correctly recorded deaths for the lower than average death rate. I’m sure the great and good and much concerned will be queuing to jump on that gravy train to ensure that defunct state and Catholic Children’s homes can be thoroughly investigated to reveal the horror of low death rates and proper death certificates.

That cynicism aside I was at a loss to why people still considered it to be horrific and why an inquiry was a good thing. After all better than average survival rate and properly recorded deaths doesn’t sound to bad to me. Ah apparently it was because they children didn’t have “dignity in death”. quite how this is known given that apart from the sensationalist headlines we’ve no data at all. I suspect it’s that ever so evocative phrase “sewage tank” conjuring up scenes from cheap horror films of recently deceased babies thrown by the ankles into bubbling sewage. The idea that an empty concrete vessel but be reused to provide a grave to poor children and they might be laid to rest with tenderness and all the relevant rights doesn’t seem to be a possibility. It was once a sewage tank so the poor babies must have been just thrown in my callous evil Irish Catholic nuns, after all we’ve all seen Angela’s ashes (or the Blues Brothers), we all know that the church is purely a vehicle of evil right?

Much easier to discount the new story and stick to the horrific headlines of top notch churnalism than admit that maybe once again the press has been less than accurate and that there isn’t a story. Nope why check your narrative when it’s so clear that another witch hunt into Ireland’s Catholic past can be unleashed.

Spiked goes into Tuam rather better and looks at the myth of evil Ireland, which seems rather to resemble how much of the British past is recast as unrelentingly evil and all celebrities from the 60’s and 70’s. Finally over at the Telegraph there’s a few more inaccuracies with Tuam listed and gone into more details, including such gems as “The home never left the hands of the County Council”, but hey as is said in Ireland why let the facts get in the way of a good story, let a lone a profitable inquiry.

Update As ever Anna Raccoon has a few words of clarity to say about this, and do read the comments for such relevant information as:
“The Gardai have issued the following statement:

The grounds in Tuam were being surveyed in 2012 and bones were found, they are historical burials going back to Famine times, there is no suggestion of any impropriety and there is no Garda investigation. Also there is no confirmation from any source that there are between 750 and 800 bodies present.”

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Halal and labeling

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There’s been quite a bit of talk about halal meat being served by popular fast food chains of late. Quite a few people have tried to frame this as a racist attack on Muslims (conflating as ever a religion with a race, or are Saudi Muslims, Pakistani Muslims and all other Muslims all the same race?). Other people have taken the view that it really doesn’t matter as long as the welfare of the animals are the same, and apparently some of the food vendors do tell you that they use halal meat if you go to their website and look for such information.

I’d like to suggest an alternative view, serving halal meat is of course a matter entirely for the businesses concerned if it makes good business sense then obviously it’s something they’d should do. However I would say that they do need to improve their labeling, especially the various schools that reportedly only use halal meat, and for one simple reason – consideration to peoples religious beliefs. I’d assume that the move to serve halal meat was to cater to the needs of Muslim customers, however if one is concerned about your customers religion then clear labeling is vital as people follow other religions such as Sikhs are prohibited from eating halal food, and I can well imagine that adherents of other religions may not be so keen on eating meat offered to a different god. So serving Halal food without labeling it is hardly being culturally sensitive, unless the only culture you’re concerned about is Islam. In this case as well dismissing those other religions as superstitious beliefs (a common argument against making allowances for any religion) won’t work as the problem is making allowance for one religion over and above others.

So as is so often the case, if it makes business sense to use halal meat then do so, but advertise it as such so that those that have objections to eating such meat know that you don’t want their custom and so that your potential customers can make an informed choice without being expected to track down the information hidden away on corporate web sites. After all if it is a sound business decision there can surely be no reason to not clearly advertise it?

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UKIP, UAF and reporting

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UKIP London Rally

Yesterday UKIP had a rally in central London and the UAF protested it, as apparently they think that UKIP are a racist and fascist party. Normally I don’t go to part political meetings and in fact yesterday was the first one I’ve been to as an adult, so despite not being a UKIP supporter the prospect of UAF based amusement dragged me up into town. I’m not going to bother talking about what UKIP said, as that’s been badly covered by the mainstream media and besides it was the usual rally the troops sort of deal – so if you don’t like UKIP you’ll accuse it all of being staged and if you support UKIP then it’s just stuff you’ll likely agree with. Instead I’m going to concern myself with the coverage of the vent and the protesters. Regular readers of this blog (both of them) will know that generally I don’t think that much of protesters, and UAFs efforts last night haven’t made me change my mind. UAFs megaphone was audible from quite some distance away, but sadly what they were shouting wasn’t terribly intelligible even close up. The police had the UAF group across the road from the UKIP event queue but even that close their message wasn’t well delivered – it really isn’t enough to just have a megaphone you also need to know how to speak. From what I saw the UAF protestors were less ethnically diverse and at least as middle class as the people queuing to get into the UKIP event. Their message seemed to boil down to three key points:
UKIP are a fascist party
UKIP are a racist party
Immigrants are here to stay
With of course a side helping of accusing everyone in the queue of being all manner of bigot.

They really didn’t make much of an impact and once actually inside the venue were completely inaudible. I’m not quite sure what they were trying to achieve with the demo, as they weren’t saying anything that hasn’t been said repeatedly in the main stream media before, they were a substantially smaller crowd than attending the UKIP event and had no actual rebuttals to UKIP beyond the aforementioned accusations.

The coverage of the event by the mainstream press has been rather enlightening, especially given all of the claims from that press that UKIP are a one man show. There were quite a few speakers over the course of the evening, it lasted 2 hours after all, and I think only 2 have been quoted beyond Mr Farage. Of course he is the UKIP party leader so it’s expected he’ll get more words written about him, but it really was hardly a one man show.

Taking an one line report first from the Huffington post, from the headline:
“Hecklers Cause Chaos At Ukip London Rally”
and much of the tone of the article you’d thing that it had been a stunning success for the UAF. There were no traded insults whilst I was in the queue, quiet mocking of the UAF but no shouting, the hecklers inside all decided to heckle early and didn’t have their act together.
“hecklers shouted ‘racist’ as each speaker took the platform.”
Erm, no they didn’t they tended to shout towards the end of the speeches. There may have been about a half dozen groups of hecklers there were more speakers, so the UAF ran out of hecklers well before the half way mark. It also really isn’t terribly smart to get apparently middle class white youths to accuse mixed race/ethnic speakers of being racist. I’m not quite sure how the huffington post can say:
“Hecklers popped up at every speech,”
(emphasis mine), when they previously admit
“None remained to heckle Farage by the time the Ukip leader came onstage.”.

Talk of hecklers infiltrating the event are also rather implausible given the security I suspect they actually did the same as me and shelled out a fiver for a ticket on line.

Keeping up the spin we have the BBC with an impressively well framed photo. Taken at about the same time as the photo at the top of the page the BBC managed to get this:
ukip bbc version
Looks like a very predominantly white group from the BBC point of view, yet pull back ever so slightly and a slight move to the right of frame gives you this picture by the Telegraph which show a rather different mix of people around Mr Farage:
UKIP Telegraph
As they all want to keep the focus on Mr Farage and those ever so photogenic hand gestures I doubt anywhere will show the full picture of all the candidates in the diversity that UKIP were wanting to demonstrate.

Reward for best reporting probably goes to The Express

Just to complete the round up the Independent has some video, and doesn’t mention the heckler and protest that much. Though does as with the other reports continue using the same few examples to illustrate the “string” of UKIP related figures that have come in for criticism. Which I do tend to think doesn’t stack up that badly against the other parties when you consider the UKIP “string” includes supporters, random party members, local Councillors and statements made by those same people when they were actually members of other parties. Those other parties not seeming to have a problem with them at the time.

As I suspect many people who have been at random demo’s in the past few years have come to suspect the reporting of the mainstream media from those events, I can’t say that they’ve done any better in terms of actual accuracy with this event. For me at least the tactic of accusing UKIP of being X and then saying the fact that they spend so much time denying that they’re X is proof that they really are is getting really very very tired indeed. If UKIP are as evil incarnate as the likes of UAF would have us believe then I’d have thought there would be some actual policy items or official statements that could be attacked, rather than just name calling and the really rather small “string” of statements that get repeatedly recycled.

Finally for another perspective on the events of UAF Vs. UKIP Katabasis has a few words.

update spiked also have an interestign take on the UAF Vs. UKIP fun and games.

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