Voting

The Irish General Election is finally upon us (thank god), and even with an eve of polling day silent media there's a great sense of drama about the event. Given the highly competitive nature of the present campaign we can only hope that there will be a high turn out, though the numbers will be lessened somewhat by the fact that Thursday is a dreadful day to hold an election (a very cynical move on the part of the government). Why not the weekend, so that students and the many thousands of voters from outside Dublin who work in the city can return home to vote?

While some will argue that it is possible for them to register and vote in whatever Dublin consitutency they happen to live in at present, many people who have moved to Dublin for work and perhaps change rented accomodation every couple of years will have much stronger ties with their own communities in the places they originally came from and a much stronger interest in the candidates being elected than they do in what for many seems like a somewhat temporary home in Dublin.

The other issue is that of having the vote take place on one single day. Why not have voting spread over an extended period of time, say 3 days, as they have done with great success (in terms of numbers of people turning out to vote) in other European countries such as Finland.
Surely having results which reflect the wishes of the greatest number of people should be the objective.

In a defence of the electronic voting system upon which so much public money was squandered, Bertie Ahern has said that we are the laughing stock of Europe because we have to wait so long for our votes to be counted. While he may have been trying to appeal to some kind of locker room sense of insecurity about what the other lads in Europe will think of him when he has to meet them, the truth of the matter is that waiting a day and a half to get our results counted is absolutely acceptable if it provides a transparent and secure system of counting. Do we really want to have 100,000 spoilt votes like they had in Scotland recently? Just for the sake of knowing the outcome sooner? Much better the old system, even if it could do with reform, and at least there's a bit of excitement watching the results coming in and seeing what kind of shape the governemnt of the next five years is going to take.

As for how the results are going to pan out, I have no idea which way its going to fall. I support Labour, and before Monday's polls it looked like the alternative slightly ahead, but its all to play for now, whatever Fianna Fail have to say. The suspense is killing me.

Apolitical Pontiff

"If the church were to start transforming herself into a directly political subject, she would do less, not more, for the poor and for justice, because she would lose her independence and her moral authority," Pope Benedict has said in an attack on the doctrine of Liberation Theology, which believes that the church's primary concern must be the poor and the oppressed.

In a desperate attempt to plug the gushing flood of impoverished Christians who are leaving his church in desperation and crossing the street to join the fast-talking forhead-slapping suits of evangelicism, who welcome them with open arms and eyes smiling as bright as shiny pennies,
Pope Benidect has called for his devotees to stay loyal to the church. The present Pontiff has always been a political animal, and spent a large amount of his time under John Paul II attacking and excommunicating like a crusading inquisitor those of the clergy in Latin America who were doing some of the most important and self-sacrificing work amongst the poor. Why? Because many of their ideas are close to socialist in thinking.

As far as Ratzinger is concerned, the church in Latin America has traditionally aligned itself with powerful and wealthy elites, with a respectful distance between the poor and the authority of the church, and he has no interest in upsetting the status quo that has allowed the Catholic church to maintain its authority in so many nations. Earning the respect of those on the bottom through working with them in their struggles would go against the natural order of things; it must be a respect enforced from the top down and gained through charity and authority rather than solidarity, with a strong capitalist consensus to back it up (like the evangelical model in many ways).

Thus he can ask conservative governments to act as kinder rulers and pay heed to 'the ever-increasing sectors of society that find themselves oppressed by immense poverty or even despoiled of their own natural resources', and at the same time condemn those governments who are actually making the radical changes necessary to help towards solving these problems.

While representing the Catholic Church's 'moral authority' the present Pope has shown himself a dab hand at blurring the boundaries between politics and religion. In an elegant contradiction, he argues passionately for a politically independent church, something rarely seen in the history books, during an address in which he warns against the general swing towards left wing government amongst Latin American voters.

Ratzinger was speaking at the opening of the fifth General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean at the end of a five day pastoral visit to Brazil, his first visit as Pope to the region. "There are grounds for concern in the face of authoritarian forms of government and regimes wedded to certain ideologies that we thought had been superseded, and which do not correspond to the Christian vision of man and society as taught by the social doctrine of the church," the pope said in his opening speech, clearly referring to the election of left leaning governments in Bolivia, Venezuela and other countries across the region.

So the church's position as Ratzinger outlines it seems to be as follows:

A. Liberation theology is wrong because the church should stay out of politics in order to preserve its independence and moral authority.

B. However, the church believes that Left wing ideologies do not correspond to the Christian vision of man and society (which seems to be naturally conservative).

C. This is not a political position (because he said so-see point A)

Delight in Disorder

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness :
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction :
An erring lace which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher :
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly :
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat :
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility :
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

..................... Robert Herrick