Killing off the needy

I am sure pretty much everyone in the UK knows that Northern Ireland is cold and wet. It really is. Some summers are fantastic, but the best you can hope for is a few decent months to break up the wet and cold weather.

Last winter the city centre, and major motorways, were closed for days as a result of huge amounts of snow.

It really is cold.

So then, I find (on good old BBC News) an interesting piece which seems to be a Christian “charity” planning to slowly kill off people in Belfast who need access to social housing:

Dozens of new homes will be so energy efficient that they are to be built without central heating systems, those behind a new venture have announced.

More than 50 social housing properties will be constructed over the next three years in the scheme which is led by by Habitat for Humanity Northern Ireland. (from BBC Northern Ireland)

Wow. Can you imagine sitting there, without central heating, while enough snow falls to close down the busiest motorway in the country? I can understand making them so heating efficient that central heating could be sparsely used – however not providing the facility strikes me as a cruel and unusual punishment for two main reasons:

1 – Should unpredictably bad weather arrive, or the house has been unoccupied for two weeks in a cold spell etc., there is no easy, cost-efficient way to reheat the home to a habitable temperature. Do they expect the needy to shiver for a week, or burn furniture?

2 – The house has no resale value. No one would willingly buy a house like this other than those in desperate need. ‘Nuff said.

Its not that simple though, not only are those in need of social housing expected to freeze to death in the winter, they still have to pay 80% of the price of a normal house in the area:

Construction is set to begin shortly at Madrid Street and the first completed houses will cost in the region of £100,000.

That is not enough for the cruel, greedy, Christians though:

People who want to live in the properties will have to get their hands dirty though. Habitat for Humanity is a Christian organisation which helps families to build their own homes, with the help of volunteers. The entire project will require 84,000 hours of volunteer time.

So they have to pay to build their own house. Wow. How “charitable.” It gets weirder though. Just in case these selfish needy people manage to survive the winter in their social housing, there is one last sting in the tail:

The properties will be made air-tight and will be fitted with triple-glazed windows.

Is this legal? While I cant be bothered calculating the volume of air they will have, surely life wont last long…

Aren’t Christian Charities Wonderful…………

Inside Carrickfergus Castle

As I am away, I will use this opportunity to showcase some of my pictures here. As always you can view the full photostream on Flickr and comments are always welcome:

Carrickfergus Castle - Inside

Thanks.

The art of war

As a reminder of the UK’s old TWAT, there are some amazing photos of Belfast’s militant art in the Belfast set on the Flickr site of Gerry Ward.

I have been told that many of these Northern Ireland murals have been painted over as part of the peace process, which is a pretty powerful artistic metaphor for political processes that are painting over the old sectarian divisions.

I feel completely ambivalent about these images. I’m not exactly convinced that seeing adverts for murder – with direct sentimental appeals to religion, nationalism, a sense of injustice – can be anything other than spurs to cultivate hatred. I am, deliberately, putting this in too mealy-mouthed a way. In reality, this is propaganda that helped to foster violence for decades.

At the same time, I don’t like the idea of erasing history. And many of these murals are chillingly beautiful. On balance, I would like to feel that the NI population is reaching a condition in which they can appreciate the paintings as historical truth, while marvelling at the alienness of the world-views expressed in this art of war.

But, what has the UK government learned after 30-odd years of homegrown warfare? Nothing like enough, it seems. Gordon Brown seems to think there is no comparison with the current TWAT, almost presenting the IRA/UVF with the same self-deluding nostalgia as the lunatics who talk about the era of the Krays, as if they were lovable cockney villains.

One lesson is surely be that repression fuels resistance. As in the instance of the murals, repression can spark awe-inspiring levels of creativity in the expression of resistance. But, repression, in itself, is pretty bad at dispersing the will to resist. (Think French Resistance or Yugoslav and Italian partisans in World War II.) The only road to peace is conflict resolution. It always comes to that in the end, unless we are going to make war on abstract nouns for ever.

Journalistic Integrity

I am naive enough to think I remember a time when there was some modicum of journalistic integrity in the media. I am sure I remember a time when the news was reported in an understated, even handed manner. I am not so insane that I think the news has ever been really free of some element of spin and “PR” work, however it strikes me that today it is so endemic no one notices any more.

Two recent examples have highlighted how the use of English can create a massively different news item.

The first came up during a bored spell spend looking over regional news items and regional news papers. The Belfast Telegraph had an article on a man who had survived a horrific attack by the Shankill Butchers and apparently died of a stroke recently. I suspect the lazy journalists at the Belfast Telegraph have over-used Wikipedia as a source, which highlighted my initial concern. Before I go on, I should emphasise I am not disagreeing that they were ruthless, evil sadists and that this person survived after having both wrists slit is amazing.

The Wiki entry on the Shankill Butchers (today at least) reads:

The “Shankill Butchers” were a group of Ulster Volunteer Force members in Belfast, Northern Ireland, who abducted Roman Catholics usually walking home from a night out, tortured and/or savagely beat them, and killed them, usually by cutting their throats.

In the Telegraph it was similar, with the emphasis being on how the sadistic nutters terrorised the Catholic community. Interestingly, they are “credited” with torturing and killing 19 people, of whom 7 were Catholics. Given that, at that time in Northern Ireland, it is unlikely any of the victims would have been described as “atheists” it seems logical to say 12 of the victims were Protestants.

The Shankill Butchers killed 150% more Protestants than Catholics, yet almost all the media reports about them describe them as almost exclusively targeting Catholics.

The point I am trying to make here is not one group suffered more than the other and I am not trying to trivialise the suffering the communities underwent as a result of their insane behaviour. What interests (and worries) me is that by dismissing a whole spectrum of their activities the larger group of victims is marginalised to the point at which they cease to exist. Instead of describing this as a shared community horror, it is sold to the public as a 100% sectarian event, possibly inflaming relatives of the dead.

How can that be good for bringing the two communities together?

The next recent issue is unrelated. Listening to today’s Radio 1 news (yes, sorry) there was a bit in the morning where they talked about domestic abuse. The newsreader read out that the number of reported cases of domestic abuse has tripled over (memory hazy but 3 years seems what they said), however in an alarming manner he also reported “the number of convictions remains the same at 17%.” I cant find the exact numbers used but it was along the lines of 1000 has increased to 3000.

Wow. How terrible. The implication was that more cases were going to court but the “system” had not managed to secure any more convictions, and what a terrible legal system we must have if these people (who are obviously guilty because it has gone to court…) are getting away with it.

However, given ten seconds consideration and you can see the language used by the newsreader was inherently misleading.

The first part of the item gave a number. Hard figures. It might not have been a nicely rounded as 1000 to 3000 but it was something like that. This is something you can hang your hat on. The optimist will see this increase as people feeling able to report more abuse, the pessimist will see it as more abuse happening. (Or vice versa…). That is not the issue.

When the news reader stated the “number” of convictions had remained the same he then went on to give a percentage rather than an actual number. This is a significant issue. If we take round numbers, you can see there is a HUGE difference between 1000 reports and 170 convictions which has increased to 3000 reports with 170 convictions and 1000 reports / 170 convictions becoming 3000 reports and 510 convictions.

In the first example, it would indicate a problem and he would be correct that the “number” of convictions was the same. The second example uses the numbers the newsreader used, but the “number” of convictions has certainly changed.

If you want to spin a news item to make people worry about an ineffective legal system you say “the numbers haven’t changed” (which is, actually, a lie). Was that BBC Radio 1’s intention? One of the reasons this annoyed me, is that on getting into my workplace – filled with supposedly “thoughtful” and “analytical” people, I had several conversations about how the legal system was letting people down and despite more reports, they hadn’t managed to get more convictions…

The world is mad.