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Censorship or not? Maser Art and Dublin City

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Censorship or not? Maser Art and Dublin City

Dublin is never boring and Dublin City regularly gets into hot water and often enough screws up big time. Something emerged again last week that had “Big Screw-up” written all over it, but is it that?

The Background: Street Artist Maser painted a big mural on the wall of the Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar about 4 weeks ago. It was a read heart that had “Repeal the 8th” written in it. To understand that fully, you need to know that it refers to the 8th amendment, which was added to the Irish constitution in 1983 and which says “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”

Supporters see it as a clause protecting life, but the flip side is that it makes abortion illegal by constitution. Now, abortion was always illegal based on Irish laws and that amendment wouldn’t have been needed, but the anti-abortion campaigners were worried back then that the other laws wouldn’t be strong enough. At the time 67% of the voters in a referendum were in favour of this amendment.

Many people’s views about abortion have changed, however in the last 33 years and these changed views do support the availability of abortion in Ireland either in a restricted number of situations/scenarios or in every situation. And since the Irish laws haven’t prevented abortions, but made it extremely difficult and emotionally stressful for women in Ireland to get an abortion by travelling to other countries, these laws are useless anyway.

Since 1981, the “Repeal the 8th” campaign has grown and become stronger and the website “The HunReal Issues”, which promotes women’s issues, has commissioned street artist Maser to create this mural in Temple Bar.

Dublin City received 50 complaints and then told the Project Arts Centre that they will have to remove the mural because it is against planning legislation. But it seems that legal situation is not crystal clear.

The Journal.ie writes “A spokesperson for Dublin City Council said that class 12 of schedule two in part one of the Planning and Development Regulations 2001 “exempts the painting of the external part of any building or other structure from requiring planning permission”.” So that means you do NOT have to ask for permission to paint the external part of a building, right? But then the Dublin City folks continued saying “Murals and other artistic designs require planning permission when applied to the external part of any structure.” I might be missing something here and maybe the key is in “painting” vs “mural”, but JUST with that information I can’t see how the law was broken.

What got me at first was that the Project Arts Centre said that they never experienced any planning legislation issues despite the fact that they regularly have murals on the side of the building. If a abortion related mural was treated differently by Dublin City than other murals, that would certainly not be ok.

But then I tried to “test” a few other angles:

What if Dublin City didn’t get any complaints for previous paintings? If they don’t get active UNLESS they get complaints, then the current situation is not censorship. – What if previous murals didn’t contain a political (or commercial) message but were just pieces of art? Then it would be more about an “ad” vs a pretty picture. – And how would I feel if someone put a big promotion on a building of an idea I was opposed to? Anti-abortion murals on house walls maybe? How tolerant would we then be?

And taking all this into consideration, I can see why this specific mural is different than someone painting a pretty flower pot on the side of a building.

The mural is the expression of a free opinion and the expression of opinions has to be protected by our laws, but there are MANY ways to express an opinion and not every way has to be allowed. So, I would have a serious problem if it was made illegal to express “Repeal the 8th”, but I don’t think if one path of expression was declared as not permitted.

And, to be honest, it couldn’t have come better for the Repeal the 8th campaign: Many people (including myself) hadn’t heard anything about this mural before Dublin City stepped in. Best PR ever! ;-)

Dublin, Dublin City Council, Politics, Society, , , ,

Event Marketing the odd way!

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Event Marketing the odd way!

Publishing the Dublin Event Guide (for Free Events) means that occasionally I experience exceptional behaviour of people. (This is the most politically correct way I can describe it.) And this is a story that emerged from that spare-time activity of mine:

Some weeks ago I saw on Social Media that a sizeable event that is happening this weekend had seemingly some event for media to tell them about the event. I didn’t know any details because no details were shared with me. So I contacted the marketing person to suggest to keep the Dublin Event Guide informed as well.

At first I got a mail telling me that they would happily do that the next time they inform the media, but then the next day I got a phone call from the marketing person in which he firstly “interrogated” me about the relative importance of the Dublin Event Guide for his event and after declaring that he will only invite real journalists (he measures that through membership in the Journalist Union NUJ) he wanted to start an argument about who would qualify to be informed and who wouldn’t.

This is just silly!! Every organiser can invite or not invite whoever they want to whatever informational event they run or not. But if there are people offering to spread the word about your event, it is just nonsensical to try to start an argument about their importance or not.

When I tried to say that him and after repeated interruptions, he said in a huff that he would send on any press releases but that he would not provide any other information. WTF!? Is he trying trying to market an event or not? Needless to say that no Press Release was ever sent to me.

That is Event Marketing the odd way!! ;-)

 

Events, Odd

Killings in Nice and how NOT to react

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Killings in Nice and how NOT to react

Once again, a mass killing shook our world. Last night somebody drove an articulated truck into a mass of people at the strand promenade in Nice and killed more than 84 people, left 200 injured and some of them still in critical condition. This is a terrible event and it really shocked us. France has declared 3 days of mourning, the USA has topped that and will mourn for the people in France for 4 days and political leaders from all over the world declare their sympathy and solidarity with the people in Nice.

Can anybody remember a similar reaction when just 12 days earlier, 0n 03 July, 292 people were killed by an ISIS truck bomb in Baghdad and 200 got injured? I didn’t read anything about state mournings in the western world. Saying this is NOT criticising France or the US about the reaction to the attack in Nice, but why is it that we measure death so dramatically different?

The driver of the truck was shot by the police, so we will never find out what really was behind this terrible act. But we learned that he rented the truck 2 days earlier and that oddly he had non-working fake guns and fake hand grenades in the back of the truck. We also hear that allegedly he shot on people while he was driving into the viewers of a 14 July fireworks on Bastille Day in Nice, but since the police shot at the truck, it remains to be seen if it was the attackers shots or the police shots that the people heard.

Well BEFORE anything was known about the driver, social media channels and comment-enabled news sites like TheJournal.ie were full of comments from people about these terrible Muslims attacking us. That was BEFORE ANYTHING was known about the attacker. We are very fast making assumptions!?

Unfortunately, however, it turned out that the attacker is indeed from Tunisia and with the name Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, we can also assume that he most likely is Muslim. But French police has confirmed that he was not known to or on the watch list of French intelligence services, but was known to the police in connection with crimes like theft and violence,

No terror organisation claimed responsibility, so it is possible that this was the act of a deranged individual, but because he is most likely Muslim, many still blame the religion.

Nothing justifies killing people but it shouldn’t matter if this is a white deranged person, a black deranged person, a Muslim deranged person, a Christian deranged person or a group of deranged people. It also doesn’t matter if this is the police in the US, who seem to be on a rampage against every black American at the moment or if it is a Tunisian who lives in Nice who indiscriminately kills harmlesss life-enjoying people on what was meant to be a nice night out.

The reaction of many people on Facebook was “when will it stop” or “where is it all going to end” and as brutal as it sounds, but the tough truth is that it will NOT stop!! Since mankind exists, innocent people have been killed by deranged people and that will continue. Does that mean we have to accept it? No! But don’t ask nonsensical questions because the answer will depress you more.

I read another comment where someone suggested that the only way to stop the world from having gone crazy is that every single country needs to close its borders to stop “crazy religious people” from doing their terrorism. The American police that is killing innocent black people or crazy people that do mass shootings in Norway or the USA or anywhere else will NOT be hindered by that. A person that lives for many years in France (independent from his nationality) will also not be influenced by that. Do people even think for a second when they splurge out cr*p?

But governments are not much better it seems! The French government, who had decided to step down the “state of emergency” at the end of July has decided to continue it for another 3 month. Because ONE deranged person did a horrible thing? France also has decided to call in reserve soldiers and to increase the control of the borders. What is that for? This guy in Nice didn’t cross any border! He rented a truck in neighbouring town! How do reserve soldiers and stronger border controls help against that? A state of Emergency is TOTALLY and utterly in effective against this type of attack.

So why do countries things like that? Because they are as helpless as everybody else (but they need to be seen to do SOMETHING). The bottom line is that there is NO defence against attacks of that kind. And while this is a truly tough fact to accept, there is no other option than to accept it.

Is there ANY chance to stop it? It will sound VERY hippy, but the ONLY way to stop attacks and conflicts and killings and terrorism is with LOVE. Very hippy, I know! But only love and acceptance and showing that nothing will be achieved with force and killing has the slightest chance to stop madness.

Elsewhere, Politics, ,

Busking under threat! City Councillors are determined to make Dublin boring

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Busking under threat! City Councillors are determined to make Dublin boring

For a number of years, the Dublin City Councillors are trying to re-organise the busking in the city and they are making a mess of it.

The problem is that the shops in the areas where busking makes sense don’t like buskers. They make noise and block the street, Busking at night also disturbs people’s sleep (more in Temple Bar than in Grafton Street where nobody lives). And then there are some really really bad buskers who shouldn’t be on the street at all.

So, it is totally accepted that a bit of structure needs to be injected. But the Councillors went over the top. They introduced the requirement for buskers to have a license that they need to buy from Dublin City and they defined the amount of noise buskers are allowed to make (but that is difficult to measure) and they created busking free zones and defined how far buskers should be from each other and for how long they are allowed to sing and how often they are allowed to repeat their songs. They even considered introducing the requirement of auditions for buskers!!! Mad!!

There was a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel! The previous busking laws were time limited to be reviewed some while later. This some while later has come now and with a LOT of delays finally the councillors discussed busking again and…made things worse again.

Because the noise measurement doesn’t work, now they have forbidden the use of backing tracks!!

Not too long ago, I saw a busker who played something like a pan flute. He wasn’t one of the Mexican flute player that can be found all over the world who mainly sell their CDs, but it was a guy whose hand was severely disabled. He could hold the pan flute but wouldn’t have been able to play any other instrument. With the new rules, he is out! Because pan flute without any backing track just doesn’t work.

A few years ago I heard two guys in Grafton Street who were amazing. They were the type of power or pop violinists that you see sometimes. Extremely talented, playing the violin like gods but they couldn’t do their gig without an orchestra. Obviously they didn’t bring their orchestra but had a backing track. You won’t see anything like that in Dublin anymore! …thanks to our City Councillors!

But it gets worse! Some of them even want to forbid the use of amplifiers. I am totally ok with a limitation of the amplifier use. Otherwise we will have huge PAs at some stage in Grafton Street and Temple Bar, but there are small 5-15W amps that help a bass player (for example) just to be heard without having to buy a new instrument. They don’t really make noise, they just allow the use of a normally amplified instrument in a more acoustic environment.

Dublin has a great musical tradition and a huge musical talent in our midst, but we (at least _I_) also like hearing “travelling musicians” and there HAS to be a way to use soft and careful limitations to improve the situation for ALL sides instead of forbidding everything!! City Councillors are meant to improve things in our City not destroy culture and variety.

Dublin, Dublin City Council, Events, Tourism, ,

Serious disease targets men in Ireland! – No cure found for Umbrellaphobia yet.

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Serious disease targets men in Ireland! – No cure found for Umbrellaphobia yet.

New empirical studies have shown that men in Ireland suffer from a debilitating disease that not only affects men, but also attacks their wardrobe. The disease only breaks out on rainy days, but then spreads faster than the feared winter vomiting bug until it reaches every corner of Dublin. The disease is called Umbrellaphobia and is a chronic aversion against the use of umbrellas and it can even escalate to an outright fear of umbrellas. Luckily the Umbrellaphobia disappears once the rain stop, but subsequent wet days show that it never gets cured, it only gets temporarily pushed back a bit.

This Umbrellaphobia seems to affect the brain of the majority of men in Ireland and makes logical thinking and the slightest bit of risk assessment an impossible thing. The prevalence of the disease is significantly higher in Irish males in comparison to non-irish males, but it does affect both population groups.

What happened? Last Wednesday, a wet early morning, I saw with my own eyes how Irish men in particular and many men in general have such a fear of umbrellas – or the image that the use of an umbrella might create (or destroy), – that destroying their clothes, walking around looking like a wet cat and getting drowned in the Dublin rain is preferred over using a stretched out piece of fabric, spanned over a collapsible metal frame.

I saw not one, not two, not three, no FOUR men who had full suits on, but walked along the canal with no jacket and no umbrella, looking like someone had dragged them through the canal. What is wrong with (Irish) men!? Why does a simple umbrella scare the bejaysus out of them so that they would be rather seen dead (or drowned) than with an umbrella in their hand.

Odd!! Luckily the women are significantly more logical and analytical when it comes to the rain and its effects.

Dublin, Irish, Society, , ,
 
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