Protest against 3-day "National Hare Coursing" event.

Location: The Department of Agriculture, Kildare Street, Dublin.

Date: January 30^th 2012.

Time: 1 pm to 2 pm.

 The so-called "sport" of live hare coursing continues over the Christmas season and in fact escalates at this time of year. In the new year radical members of Dail Eireann will move a Private Members Bill in an effort to abolish this cruel practise.  

They will aim to achieve protection for the Irish Hare, one of the gentlest and most inoffensive creatures in our countryside and an intregal part of our wonderful wildlife heritage.  

With the cruel practise of live hare coursing still shaming our country, I wish to inform everbody that Bad Hare Days, the critically acclaimed memoir by anti-bloodsports campaigner John Fitzgerald, is now available as a free e book (link below).

This is a guest post from Brian Burn

What I hope to hear from the next protest I go to.
--------------------
What if one man spoke and said,
. .. . . . ..
If one man holds on to his mortgage payment for 6 months, the bank you helped to bail out will come after him. But what if all the mortgage payments of all the people here .What if each and every one of you held on to your payment. What if two hundred thousand, mortgage holders held back payment. What if they stood as one united in a common cause.
Instead of a single individual trying to negotiate with the nonnegotiable?
Who then I ask would have the power of negotiation.

This is a guest post from Fiachra O'Luain.

Michael D Higgins was there for us when hundreds of us travelled to Sellafield in February 2002 to protest the introduction of the MOX reprocessing plant. Michael D turned up at 7am in Dun Laoghaire on a Saturday morning to simply wish us his support before we sailed for Britain.

All email addresses have now been updated for the 31st Dail. You can view the file that I have created with a full listing of email addresses by party and constituency here. (If you happen to notice any thing is amiss in that file, please get in contact with me so I can fix it.)

Thanks for your patience in this matter and thanks for your continued use of Contact.ie.

Sit down and bargain
All you like, grizzled old foxes.
We’ll wall you up in a splendid palace
With food, wine, good beds and a good fire
Provided that you discuss, negotiate
For our and your children’s lives.
May all the wisdom of the universe
Converge to bless your minds
And guide you in the maze.
But outside in the cold we will be waiting for you,
The army of those who died in vain,
We of the Marne, of Montecassino,
Treblinka, Dresden and Hiroshima.
And with us will be
The leprous and the people with trachoma,

Enda Kenny has received his seal of office and posted a lovely picture of this on the Fine Gael facebook page. Contact.ie wishes we were still allowed to post or comment on posts on the Fine Gael page or that Enda Kenny hadn't defriended us from his personal facebook page - especially after all the talk from Fine Gael about "we want to listen to you". (Click on Image to Enlarge.)

Members of Ireland’s wealthy elite have announced plans to meet outside the Central Bank in Dublin’s Dame Street on Thursday 10th March at 6p.m. to celebrate the fact that it’s “business as usual now that the election is out of the way”.
 
“We’re proud of the fact that Irish society and politics continues to promote wealth inequality,” said one of the event’s organisers who said he would prefer to remain anonymous.
 

The debts that Ireland owes to the IMF/ECB have been repaid in ful, less than four months after they were borrowed. Mark C of Contact.ie decided it was time for someone to step up to the plate and payoff the debts that were ratcheted up by the follies of speculators, builders, and the mismanagement of the economy by successive Fianna Fail governments.

Speaking at the handover of the cheque, Mark C had the following to say: "I just looked in my bank account and had some spare money left on my over draft, and thought, 'let's get this paid'. The debt is going up at a rate of €35,000 a  minute, so if it's not paid soon, it'll never be paid, and since no political party is willing to seriously discuss (or threaten) default, then I thought, I might as well pay it myself".

Now, with the debt cleared, we can start talking about real political reforms, proper control of our workspaces, resources and economy utilising direct, particpatory democracy.

Here's the cheque, just for proof: