The Civil Unions Bill seems destined to suffer an almost identical fate once more, as the Government have tabled an amendment once again, this time delaying it to “the earliest possible date” instead of by 6 months:
“Amendment: 1. To delete all words after “Dáil Éireann” and substitute the following: “notes: — that legislative reform must be [...]
Archive for October, 2007
Civil Unions, Part III
Posted in Uncategorized on October 31, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Civil Unions, Part II
Posted in Irish Labour Party, Labour, Labour LGBT, Neil Ward on October 31, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Tonight, from 7-8.30pm, will be the first stage of debate on a Private Members’ motion being introduced by Deputy Brendan Howlin (the second stage will take place at some point during tomorrow’s running order). The motion will seek to restore the Civil Unions Bill to the Order Paper – a move which would see the Bill [...]
Labour Youth Conference
Posted in Irish Labour Party, Labour, Labour Youth, Neil Ward on October 30, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
On Friday evening and Saturday, Labour Youth Conference (yes, that’s me in the front left of the photo, sitting beside my comrade and NEC opponent Paul Dillon!) took place in the ATGWU, attended by over 100 members of Labour Youth. The Conference passed a range of motions, from support of legalisation of cannabis to support of an academic [...]
Constituency Commission reports
Posted in Irish Elections, Irish Labour Party, Labour, Neil Ward on October 26, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
On Tuesday of this week, a little after 2pm, the Constituency Commission published their report on General Election boundary revisions. I had a lot of opinions once I looked at it, but I wanted to take a couple of days to mull them over before I posted up here. The big question is whether they [...]
Civil Unions
Posted in Irish Labour Party, Labour, Labour LGBT on October 25, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Next Wednesday (Oct 31st), Labour will once again introduce the Civil Unions Bill to the floor of the Dáil. The Bill was first put to the floor of the Dáil on Feb 20th and 21st of this year. At that time, Fianna Fáil and the PDs voted in favour of an amendment which [...]
The TV Debate
Posted in Irish Labour Party, Labour, Neil Ward on October 24, 2007 | 2 Comments »
I was at a branch meeting in Dublin South-Central last night, continuing the campaign trail. In advance of the meeting, Michael had given the NEC candidates who would be attending a heads-up on a question he intended asking us. When he mentioned the question to me, I immediately had an answer formed in my head. [...]
Some support
Posted in Irish Labour Party, Labour, Neil Ward on October 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
It has been a rollercoaster few weeks, travelling from branch to branch, drumming up bits of support here and there. And there are 3 weeks left to go, during which I still have a lot of votes to make up. But I wanted to pause for a moment, to thank the party sections which have [...]
Increasing membership
Posted in Irish Labour Party, Labour, Neil Ward on October 19, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Thanks to Ian for his comments on my last post - they relate to how we can increase membership, so I’ll tackle them in a new post.
In his first comment, he points out that many paper members do not even pay their own fees, but branches or public reps pay their fees in order to retain higher [...]
A disappointing turnout?
Posted in Internal democracy, Irish Labour Party, Labour, Neil Ward on October 17, 2007 | 2 Comments »
Much has been written about the recent Labour Party Deputy Leadership contest in recent weeks, from Justine McCarthy’s rant in the Indo about the lack of women’s representation in the party (without even mentioning that we have the same number of female TDs as Fianna Fáil!) to widespread debate about what the role should involve.
But examining [...]
Red-green relations
Posted in Trade unionism on October 10, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
I only have a moment, but Michael Taft has written an open letter to Ciarán Cuffe TD, in response to his speech to the Ireland Institute, which I thought needed to be advertised far and wide.
In this post, Michael tackles Cuffe’s contention that the unions are vested interests, and that they receive preferential treatment to environmental [...]
