Thou Shalt Not Marry

3. 1o The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.

2o No law shall be enacted providing for the grant of a dissolution of marriage

2º A Court designated by law may grant a dissolution of marriage where, but only where, it is satisfied that—

i. at the date of the institution of the proceedings, the spouses have lived apart from one another for a period of, or periods amounting to, at least four years during the previous five years,

ii. there is no reasonable prospect of a reconciliation between the spouses,

iii. such provision as the Court considers proper having regard to the circumstances exists or will be made for the spouses, any children of either or both of them and any other person prescribed by law, and

iv. any further conditions prescribed by law are complied with.[87]

Above is printed Article 41 of the Irish constitution. The original provision outlawing divorce is shown alongside the amendment which made provisions for it following the referendum in 1995. In light of the Oireachtas report published last Wednesday, which concluded that no adjustments need be made to the definition of the family contained within the constitution, thus ruling out the possibility of same-sex marriage, I ask: if the concept of marriage can be altered over time to include the possibility of divorce, why similarly may not the concept of marriage be amended to include the possiblity of same-sex unions(by union here I mean marriage)?

Mentalmeanderings and Sicilian Notes have been at loggerheads over the last few days on issues arising from the report (Click here to get a helpful click-through guide to the tete-a-tete from Disillusioned Lefty, who has yet to offer his two cents on the subject). DeLondras proudly wears her sexuality on her sleeve. I'm not sure what Richard Waghorne's orientation is. He takes umbrage at DeLondras' lecturing him on growing up gay so I'm assuming (maybe wrongly) that he's gay or bi or transgender or questioning. Alas, neither of them really gets to grips with the specious reasoning of the report in upholding the orthodox and discriminatory defintion of marriage as that between a male and female.

Reading through the Oireachtas report, I come to two conclusions: firstly, the main problem besetting the aspirations of same-sex marriage advocates is the peculiar precedence awarded by the 1937 constitution to the institution of the family, to the extent that it does not deal with marriage outside of or separate from the unit; secondly, the term "family" as we conceive it today is completely divorced from the term as it was first conceived in the constitution, and in so far as it relates to the family, there is a high incidence of repeated tinkering with the constitution over the years by legislators to primp and pramp it according to the exigencies of the day.

The rights of a couple to seek to consolidate their relationship and enjoy the protections and privileges offered by the state through the institution of marriage are not dealt with outside the idea of family. It is clear that the original constitution could conceive neither of children without a married couple nor of a married couple without children. The report devotes precious little time to dealing with the terrible consequences of this gross selectivism, which saw thousands of single mothers cast into life in laundry homes and their "illegitimate" offspring sentenced to spend their childhoods enduring the hardships and abuses of the Catholic-run orphanages.

The report does devote a lot of time to looking at the problems that the constitution's "family" fetish threw up over the years. It states that articles 41 and 42 were drawn up against a world background of spreading communism and Russian totalitarianism, which had tried to outlaw the family. Thus the constitution sought to protect the family from interference by the state. The problem was that it didn't deal individually with the two components of family: children and parents.

Over the years, the family concept enshrined in those articles has changed radically. The first change came about as a result of the Commission on Emigration's 1954 report in which it recommended the removal of the marriage bar for civil servants and teachers and in banks, on the grounds that it would help raise the marriage rate(p.41). As a result, labour participation by married women increased while the marital fertility rate declined. Starting in 1958 and culminating in Ireland's entry into the EEC in 1973 the prohibitions placed on married women remaining in the workforce were removed. The role of the mother as stay-at-home care-giver in the constitution's concept of family was effectively done away with. The most recent example of a legislator introducing incentives for married women to join the workforce is probably Charlie McCreevey's invidualisation of the tax codes in Budget 2000(p.42).

The other major legislative blow to the 1937 concept of the family was the 1995 divorce amendment. What was previously dissoluble only by God was now dissoluble in a civil court and the guarantee was in the constitution(pp.38-39).

In light of the divorce amendment, the only difference between married couples and cohabiting ones is the privileges married couples enjoy. The report concludes in favour of introducing civil-partnership rights which extend the privileges of marriage to cohabiting hetero- and homosexual couples, while it advocates that the constitutional protections given to the "family" unit not be extended through a broadening of that term.

In my view, in light of the earlier accommodation of the constitutional concept of family to the contemporary exigencies outlined above, the drawing of a line at this point rests on shaky ground. It is clear that the nuclear family conceived in the 1937 constitution has been done away with over the years by acts and amendments. Why the oireachtas committee insists on dealing with the two components of children and parents together,is anyone's guess. If marriage is to be denied to same-sex couples on the grounds that they can't procreate, then why should childless heterosexual couples be allowed to enjoy its special protections? Is the institution of marriage only socially useful if it produces offsping?

If we can separate the idea of marriage for one moment from the idea of procreation, what justification is there for conferring partnership rights while denying the protections of marriage? Only that the union of man and woman is superior to that of man and man or woman and woman. In my eyes, that is discrimination and arguments for it can only be found in religion and bigotry. Just as in the past, the idea of a catholic marrying a protestant or a black man marrying a white girl scandalized the self-righteous and bigoted, so similarly does the idea of same-sex unions today. In the past southern US states argued that in providing separate toilets and train cars for black people, they weren't discriminating as long as there was no qualatitive difference in the services offered to both whites and blacks. Today those who would award gays partnership rights but deny them marriage make the same case.

The Irish constitution needs to make provisions for couples who seek to formalise their emotional bond, independently of whether or not it is their intention to have children. Similarly it must make provisions for those couples who embark on the journey of raising a family. The committee is right in saying that family is a bedrock of our society. It is wrong to seek to retain a definition of what constitutes that family that is so narrow that only a privileged number can enjoy the constitutional protections afforded.

Richard Waghorne essentially wishes to avoid a debate about gay marriage in his taking to task of Fiona DeLondras but in spite of himself he offers up a few explanations as to where he stands. In his ideal world, the govt serves to maximise freedom. He would thus do away with civil marriage, reducing it to contracts and leaving its more ceremonious and symbolic aspects to religions. Govts today, however, are involved in far more than maximising freedom and one of their roles is protecting equality. In denying marriage to gay couples, a govt is simply saying that homosexuals are not equal to heterosexuals. It will allow gay couples through civil unions to take responsibility for each other but in the eyes of the law they will not be equal to their heterosexual counterparts. Simply put: discrimination. The govt is not required, as Fiona DeLondras argues, to celebrate gay unions or to promote them in any way. But it is obliged to ensure that all its citizens are treated equally and have the same rights.

I will not deal here with the arguments put forward by various religious-motivated groups as I believe that people of my generation are more than able to weigh their merits. I can understand perfectly why people of older generations might feel in their bones that a gay union is inherently wrong or unequal. Most of my generation, and the younger generations coming up behind us,do not live with that bone-deep sense of the unseemliness of gay relationships. The constitution, if it does not change soon, will be giving a clear message to the younger generations that gay relationships are not on an equal footing with straight ones. In short, it will be promoting discrimination.

Gay Catholic Caucus' submission to the committee included this list of differences between gay couples and married heterosexual ones(p. 77/78):

• They pay higher income tax.
• They pay higher capital gains tax.
• They pay higher stamp duty.
• They pay higher inheritance and gift tax if they make any
gifts or bequests to each other.
• Their non-Irish spouse cannot easily work and live in
Ireland.
• They may face discrimination in pension benefits.
• In cases of domestic violence, they are less protected by
the law because they cannot claim barring orders under
the Domestic Violence Act 1996.
• They may not be recognised as next of kin if their
partner is hospitalised.
• The partner of a deceased gay person will have no
entitlement equivalent to that of a spouse, to a share of
the estate of the deceased.
• In case of pregnancy, the partner of the pregnant person
will not be entitled to parental leave.
• They can adopt but only as single people.
• The child of a gay couple is disadvantaged because he or
she cannot legally be recognised as a child of both parents.
The disadvantages relate to gifts, inheritance and custody.

To read somebody dealing far more eloquently with the substantive arguments than I've done, check out this letter by Anglo-American gay conservative, Andrew Sullivan, published in Slate in 1997.

Disillusioning Lefties

"Hey! Hey! Hey! Chávez is here to stay!"

Just another march through Caracas by Chávez supporters? Not quite. These chants were heard inside the first session of the year of Venezuela's supreme court. Towards the end of a long speech by the supreme court president, Omar Mora Díáz, in which he condemned the partisanship of the courts under the 4th republic and acclaimed the independence and impartiality of the judiciary in today's 5th republic, the audience reacted with cheers and cries of the above chant ("Uh! Ah! Chávez no se va!" - in Spanish) and were joined by the members of the supreme court, who rose to their feet, clapping and chanting, "hey! hey! hey! Chávez is here to stay!"

Unthinkable in any democratic country you'd care to live in. Not so in Venezuela, which went through the looking-glass quite a while back, unfortunately. Now the fun starts as we get to watch first world lefties bending over backwards to justify such gross flaunting of impartiality by the highest judicial power in Venezuela. Yes, that's right: the one that's supposed to keep the executive branch in check!!!

Hat tip: Caracas Chronicles



For those of you not nauseated by the right-wing reputation of Foreign Policy magazine, here's quite a good, compact article from the Jan/Feb issue on why Venezuela under Chávez is not a functioning democracy:

Hugo Boss

You know you're old when......

I've been spending a lot of time hanging round the comments boxes of other blogs lately - to the point where I imagine I've become that little boy from the neighbourhood who's always playing in your house and being a mild irritant to your mother, who wishes he'd just go the hell back to his own house and play there for a while.

So I guess I'm home to play by myself for a while:

Over Christmas I was back home taking it easy at my parents' house and would invariably start the day breakfasting on the sofa in front of the Sky Box. One morning, as I flicked through the rather too many MTV and assorted music channels, something dawned on me: all the rock singers were younger than me! I guess this has been the case for at least the last 3 years, but up until recently MTV UK&Eire was pretty much dominated by r&b and hip-hop artists. As I'd never really been into these genres growing up, I hardly paid attention enough to care what age these singing starlets were. But rock was my thing when I was growing up. In fact, the rise of dance music and demise of rock in the 90s seemed appropriate to me at the time. I was growing up. Music was changing. Just as rock 'n' roll had taken the world by storm in the '50s and alienated an older generation, a new genre, aided by technology advances once again, was asserting itself and it fell to me and to rock heads everywhere to accept the inevitable passing of time.

So rock's resurgence in the last few years and its return to stake a claim on airplay has come as a bit of a shock to me. It's like you got off the bus because they told you it was the terminus and then they all went off without you!

As a teenager I tended, like many, to listen to the old rock classics. So not only did the average age of a dead rock star (27) seem very old, but the fact that they'd all died before I was born made them seem even older. I guess Kurt Cobain's death in '93 should have set my alarm bells ringing, but I had always eschewed Nirvana and so wasn't that moved by their singer's demise.

Watching one fresh-faced rock wannabe after another shuffle on and off MTV's immortal coils over Christmas made me come face to face with my own mortality. You see, when I hit 27 rock had more or less disappeared so I didn't have to deal with that rite of passage. Now I'm being made confront it three years after the fact! Flicking through the pages of the Sunday El País magazine in a friend's house a couple of weeks ago, I came across an article on The Strokes. They're all about 5 years younger than me!!!!!

I hope there isn't a huge religious revival in 3 years'time. Jesus died at 33, but given that it happened 2,000 years ago,it's pretty much buried for me. If everybody goes Jesus-crazy in 2008, I'm not sure I'll be able to deal.........

For those of you with way too much time on your hands, a brief and selective history of my musical interests follows:

My interest in music goes way back. The first songs I remember singing along to were Tom Robinson's War Baby and Elton John's I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues. I was 7 going on 8. I don't know if it's significant that these two songs were by gay artists but it certainly strikes me as interesting in retrospect. Anyway, from that point I was hooked on pop music. I got a Topaz AM/FM radio with my communion money that same year and started listening religiously to Gerry Ryan from 10 to midnight Mondays through Thursdays. Obviously Mark Cagney's Night Train was too late for a 7/8 year old, and I have to say that Dave Fanning's playlist was lost on me back then. We sent away for all the 7" records with the Rice Krispie tokens. Then I bought my first 7" with a Christmas Golden Discs voucher from my aunt. I chose Talking Heads' Road To Nowhere. My older brother got Bruce Springsteen's double A-Side My Hometown/Santa Claus is coming to town, and my yonger brother got Shakin' Stevens' latest release!!! Sunday's pocket money went more often than not on a copy of Smash Hits. A fascination with Prince ensued and 5 years later I had all of his albums on cassette (or double cassette!!) except 1999. I was 13 then and and making the new boys in the secondary school stare at me as I delicately tried to reproduce New Power Generation on my pencil case and on brown paper-covered school books.

Then I decided to change direction. I'd been going through my cool uncle's record collection and had borrowed Blondie's Parallel Lines and a Best of Cream 2 on vinyl. There was something raw in this music which made me decide I wanted to explore it more. Apart from that, saying to your classmates that you were into Blondie and Cream allowed you to build up the image of a beyond-your-years-sophisticate far better than saying you were into Prince. And for a boy already deeply troubled by his sexual awakening, being able to introduce people to the beautiful Debbie Harry was reassuring in its vicariousness.

So the Prince cassettes were given away and a record collection was started on, along with an archive of taped records (nothing inferior to TDK SA90s and sometimes MAs if the album was a particular favourite). At first I maintained my interest in what was current: Eric Clapton's Journey Man (Bad Love had a great riff) and Queen's The Miracle (I Want It All was very inspiring) were two purchases then. Quickly I started listening more and more to '60s and '70s rock. I collected all of Cream's albums before moving on to Derek & the Dominos and then farther afield. Myself and two friends blagged our way into the Doors movie in the Savoy when it came out. We were 15. It shouldn't have been any surprise to get past the usher given that I was already buying my friends naggens (don't know how to spell that) in Sean O'Casey's off-licence in Marlborough Street.

By the age of 18 I had a large collection of second-hand records that more or less comprised all the major rock-bands of the past: Led Zep, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Doors, Velvet Underground, Joy Division. Thanks to a friend I was listening to some new stuff too (Madder Rose) and lots of other singer-songwriter types (Nick Drake,Lou Reed, Bob Dylan)as well as some '80s stuff. Of course commercially successful automatically meant crap so alas Red Hot Chilli Peppers were lost on me.

As I moved into university, I began to shed a lot of the rock. Actually this had started happening around two years earlier. Nick Drake, Lou Reed, Joy Division and Fugazi were a new departure for me (I was listening to Magic & Loss heavily) and it was very hard to alternate between these and Cream and The Doors et al. I became a Smiths devotee, started listening to Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, was introduced to Belle & Sebastian. At that stage inevitable distance grew between myself and a friend on whom I'd relied for new musical experiences and this was very much reflected in my listening habits. By the end of college I'd more or less turned my back on everything I'd listened to till then. Jazz was my new interest and I was busy finding worthy recordings of Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. After overloading on jazz for a while I started listening to Johnny Cash. He and Nina Simone are probably my most recent interests - the kind which sit in your cd player for weeks and weeks and get listened to endlessly. I have left out lots of artists who I listen to (or used to listen to) religiously: Nick Cave, Neil Young, Serge Gainsbourg. But these days, try as I might, I can't find musicians and groups that inspire me and transport me the way those of older generations do. Scissors Sisters are fun, N.E.R.D. are jaunty, the Strokes and Goldfrapp are ranuchy, Antony & the Johnsons are melancholical, but, for me, they can't hold a candle to David Bowie, Johnny Cash, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Joy Division, Nick Cave, Morrissey, Will Oldham,Fugazi and others who've accompanied me in and moved me to innumerable moments of joy.

Hugo Chávez: The Revolution Will Not be Mediated

I wrote the following piece for Honky, a friend's web magazine, back in March/April 2005. I'm posting it here now in response to some blogging on Chávez that's been taking place at backseatdrivers. I can't recommend strongly enough that people go to Venezuelan blogs to inform themselves on Chávez instead of relying on mainstream media such as the Guardian. I think lots of Irish people feel better informed than most because they got to see the Irish documentary (or was that romcom?) "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". I haven't been in Ireland since 2000 and I can't say that I've followed public reaction there to that production but I think I'm right in saying that it was discredited. To what extent that discreditation has been perceived as a right-wing conspiracy, I don't know, but there are serious critiques of it out there and they're worth looking at. For anybody looking to read Venezuelan political blogs, I recommend Caracas Chronicles. There you'll find links to both pro- and anti-Chávez websites.




Here in Ireland we have often laughed at the characterisation of the Irish that Hollywood has presented time and again over the years. The leprechaun voices and the invariably tipsy police captains notwithstanding, we could never argue that these mischaracterisations were insulting or serious enough for us to take more than slight umbrage at them. And anyway we’ve always had recourse to our European sense of cultural superiority over those dumb Yanks. Yet our own Eurocentrism, and that very sense of cultural superiority, leave us prone to impose, on issues that really are serious, the same simplifications when dealing with countries and continents that normally lie beyond the range of our comfortable 1st world vantage point.
Thus it is with Venezuela, the oil-rich Latin American country that was the birthplace of Simon Bolívar, the 19th century liberator of that whole continent from the yolk of Spanish colonial rule.

The first real ideological war between right and left could be said to have taken place right here in Europe. The Spanish civil war caught the imagination of many young idealists who came running from both the right and the left to fight for their cause. It is interesting that over the last 50 years that ideological war has seen itself transplanted to Spain’s old colonies in Latin American. Western Europe has lived in peace since the 2nd world war and so new generations of ideologues have been more sedentary in their participation in the good fight. Thanks in no small part to our media we’ve come to view Latin American politics as an eternal struggle between leftist saviours of the people and rightwing CIA-backed military and oligarchist coupsters. But maybe we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the media are failing to give us an accurate picture of what’s going on in that distant continent. After all, the media treatment of that original ideological battle, theSpanish civil war, was not exactly an exercise in non-bias and objectivity. George Orwell, one of many literary figures who went to fight on behalf of the country’s Republican government, wrote afterwards in Homage to Catalonia: “One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right.” He singled out the then Manchester Guardian as an honorable exception which of the larger British papers was the only one that left him “with an increased respect for its honesty.”

I wonder then what Orwell would make of the Guardian’s coverage of the contemporary situation in Venezuela. The British quality daily has been publishing articles by Richard Gott under the headlines “Racist Rage of the Caracas Elite” and “Loathed by the Rich”. Gott is clearly a subscriber to the conventional right-bad, left- good Lat-Am dichotomy, and wants to convince us that the recent history of Venezuela is a tale of the clash between a heroic champion of the non-white poor masses on one side and a white upperclass minority on the other, who up until Chávez’ arrival had been able to pocket all the wealth produced by this oil-rich nation while scornfully leaving the poor huddled masses to make do in their squalor. His analysis of the situation would appear to be backed up by the Irish-made documentary “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, which presents the current situation as Chávez’ David to the Goliath of the all- powerful “oligarchs” and private media corporations.

But the story of Venezuela under Chávez doesn’t lend itself so easily to the Eurocentric blueprint of Latin American politics. In the years when most of Latin America’s nations were under the yoke of some dicator or other Venezuela largely avoided succumbing to political extremism. It had managed to overthrow the second of its US-endorsed dicators of that century, Marco Perez Jiménez, in 1958 and up until the 1980s lived in relative peace and prosperity. The last 6 years, during which the country has found itself divided by exactly the same kind of political extremism that for so long affected its neighbours and which it had always considered itself immune to, come on the back of almost 20 years of debilitating corruption on the part of various administrations. The incumbent president, Hugo Chávez Frias, elected on an anti-corruption ticket in 1998, is the divisive figure that is responsible for the precarious political situation that Venezuelans fnd themselves in. But the over-simplification of the country’s political crisis by the anti-neoliberal, anti-globalization international left, who have been able to mine a remarkably rich seam in the anti-US, anti-Bush rhetoric of the Venezuelan president, does nothing to help us get a real understanding of what’s happening in Venezuela.

Certainly it is true to say that the military in Latin America are traditionally right-wing. History shows that the Latin American military have never been shy about trying to influence politics. Therefore it should come as no surprise to us to learn that Chávez, who received his complete formal education in the military,
was himself involved in a failed coup attempt to overthrow the government of Carlos Andres Perez in 1992. Today as president of Venezuela he and his supporters celebrate the anniversary of his coup-attempt. At the same time, they loudly dismiss the president’s critics as coup-plotters. In 1994 the imprisoned Chávez was pardoned by Perez’ successor, Rafale Caldera. During his spell in military prison he had been persuaded by supporters to embrace the democratic process and so his party, the MVR (Movement for the 5th Republic), was founded. On emerging from prison Chávez set about looking for a spiritual leader, an experienced political figure who might give him guidance. He found two: Fidel Castro and the by then long-exiled ex-dicator of his own country, Marcos Perez Jimenez. In terms of right- and left-wing politics it would have been hard to find two leaders further apart on the politcal spectrum. If you were forced to explain what they had in common, you’d be hard pressed to say anything other than autocratic tendencies. Indeed Chávez’ embrace of undemocratic figures has been a feature of his presidency. After becoming president he paid a state visit to Saddam Hussein and more recently he bestowed on Robert Mugabe the gift of the Liberator’s sword, the highest honour a non-Venezuelan can receive.

A more than cursory glance at the opposition movement in Venezuela will also cause problems for those who do not wish to see beyond the left-good, right-bad analysis. The Democratic Coordinator is the large coalition of political parties, trades unions and civic groups that have united to oppose Chávez. It is indeed dominated by Venezuela’s 3 traditional political parties and as a result suffers in prestige as these parties will forever be associated by Venezuelans with the rampant corruption of the ‘80s and ‘90s. However the rest of the parties that compose this vast umbrella group are representative of the whole political spectrum. It even counts on the support of the leftist guerrilla organization, Bandera Roja, who in the ‘60s waged war on Venezuela’s governments with the aid of Fidel Castro. And lest we think it safe to try to apply a class-war analysis to the Venezuelan situation, it is important to know that the Venezuelan Communist party was founded in the 1920s by one of the richest families of Caracas, the Machado Zuloaga. Up until recently they owned the electricity grids that supply the capital city with most of its power. Today Chávez is supported by many well-to-do Venezuelans who, it might be said, have a lite approach to left-wing politics.

The image of the Democratic Coordinator will forever be tarnished in international eyes by its involvement in the April 2002 abortive coup against Chávez. Certainly it was opportunistic and rightly should be condemned for its role. That said, the coup was not a well planned and orchestrated conspiracy hatched by the CIA and the old political elite and wildy backed by the private media groups. Rather it came about as a result of the refusal by two high-ranking generals to activate Plan Avilas, a military contingency plan to deal with excessive public disorder. This plan has only been activated once in Venezuela and that was in 1989 when looters ransacked Caracas. The order to shoot looters on sight resulted in the deaths of 277 people. Negotations between the military and the Democratic Coordinator resulted in the head of a business federation, Pedro Carmona, being instated as interim president. Carmona, however, acted foolishly and undemocratically in the immediate 24 hours after his instatement. The military men who had deposed their commander-in-chief in the interests of protecting the constitution were not prepared to go along with the establishment of a right wing regime determined to purge the country’s democratic institutions of all vestiges of Chavismo - especially if that meant shutting down the national assembly. Chávez was swiftly returned to power.

The much vilified private media corporations played a dispicable roll in all this when, in the hours when the coup began to fall apart, they imposed a news blackout on the country. This was an unpardonable attempt to influence events on their part. At the same time questions must be asked about the role played by the state-owned media. There is a media regulation in Venezuela that obliges all channels, private and state-owned alike, to carry broadcasts by the president. Such broadcasts are known as cadenas, or “chains”. Chávez’ cadenas can go on for as long as 8 hours! When shots were fired on opposition protestors outside the presidential palace on the day that Chávez was temporarily ousted, a cadena was taking place. Chávez continued to speak while the shooting went on outside his office The private media corporations, prohibited from interrupting the president’s broadcast, split their signals so as to broadcast simultaneously the shooting event outside the presidential palace and the president’s speech inside. The state-owned channels simply continued with the president’s speech.

A more successful analysis of Hugo Chávez’ administration made be made if one were to look at it in terms of Latin America’s long history of populist leaders. Thanks to its oil, Venezuela is a relatively rich state. The proceeds from the oil have traditionally been distributed by the state. Corruption amongst politicians has been rampant. There is no evidence to point to any combating of this corruption on the part of Chávez’ administration. Chávez is fond of blaming business leaders, the so-called oligarchs, for the state of corruption in Venezuela. Yet it is the Venezuelan government which has access to the vast state funds, not the oligarchs. It’s a bit like tryiing to blame Larry Goodman for all the corruption in Irish politics in the 1980s and 1990s. Chávez’ populist solutions to the problem of poverty in Venezuela have gotten welcome funding from the recent record-high world oil-prices. It remains to be seen if he will be able to sustain this funding in the event of a downturn in the oil market.

Final proof of our 1st world-centric attitude to Latin American and our inherent inability to accord to it the kind of respect that we accord to ourselves comes in the shape of a recent editorial in the Washington Post written by ex-US president, Jimmy Carter. Carter’s Center has been mediating between Chávez and the opposition for more than two years. It gave its blessing to the results of the recent referendum to recall Chávez. The Venezuelan opposition has long argued that the body that oversees electoral affairs in Venezuela is controlled by Chávez and that a politically unaffiliated body is required. The members of this council were chosen by the Venezuelan supreme court, its members in turn having been appointed by Chávez. Carter, writing in the Washington Post about the upcoming US Presidential elections expressed concern along exactly the same lines about the Florida electoral body. Arguing that some basic international conditions for a fair vote were absent in Florida, he went on to say:

“A nonpartisan electoral commission or a trusted and nonpartisan official who will be responsible for organizing and conducting the electoral process before, during and after the actual voting takes place [is essential] . Although rarely perfect in their objectivity, such top administrators are at least subject to public scrutiny and responsible for the integrity of their decisions. Florida voting officials have proved to be highly partisan, brazenly violating a basic need for an unbiased and universally trusted authority to manage all elements of the electoral process.”

The kind of simplification of politics that we insist on using to analyse Latin-America would never be taken seriously if we were to apply it to our own 1st world countries. Similarly, we should not endorse any form of democracy there, which we would not be willing to endorse here. To its credit, the European Union, refused to send obervers to the Venezuelan recall referendum in August because it said that it could not accept the conditions being imposed by the electoral council. Only by confronting our own cultural ideologies and thus treating Latin-Americans equally will we achieve an understanding of the realities of those nations.

Reciprocating Loyalty in Motor Racing

"The obstacles we found ourselves up against were various, decisive and, in a sense, inexplicable. It seems that the sporting spirit, which has always been part of motorcycle racing and which has given the public its great passion for this sport, had suddenly disappeared."


Those are the words of Roberto Zanni, president of Japan Tobacco International, Europe, makers of Camel cigarretes. Mr Zanni was commenting on his company's failed efforts to get Max Biaggi a ride in Motogp in 2006. As I posted earlier, Biaggi has been vetoed by HRC. It would now appear that his inexplicably loyal backer's efforts to get him on a bike with the other major teams in motogp have come to nothing. For a while, a ride with the Kawasaki factory team seemed a sure thing. In the end a deal wasn't possible and Zanni is vague, to say the least, about why.

The upshot of it all is that Biaggi will not be a member of the most exclusive paddock in motorcycle racing next season, and Camel are cutting their links both with HRC and the satellite team run by Spaniard, Sito Pons, which they sponsored for the last 3 years.

HRC will not be too miffed about the loss. They must have been counting on it, so adamant were they about keeping Biaggi off an RC211V next year. The situation for Sito Pons, on the other hand, is a little different. Satellite Teams are used to having their riders picked for them either by their factory or their sponsor. It was hardly a secret that Pons' team dreaded the return of Biaggi to its fold but, faced with either that or no sponsorship, I'm sure Sito Pons would have just resigned himself to working with the difficult Roman. He had lined up Spaniard, Carlos Checa, and Australian rookie and 250cc runner-up, Casey Stoner, for next season. Stoner, smelling trouble, jumped ship and returned to the fold of LCR, the Italian team that he has worked with for 4 of his 5 years in Motogp. So now Pons is a one man team with no sponsor. It remains to be seen if he will bail himself out of this pickle like he has bailed himself out of many others in the past. The Spanish motorbike press is fond of observing that he has the 7 lives of the proverbial cat (in Spain cats would appear not to be as lucky as in the Anglo-Saxon world!). Stoner, meanwhile, is sitting pretty on a HRC ride for next season.

What I'd like to know is what Zanni meant by a lack of "sporting spirit" on the part of motogp teams in not giving Biaggi a seat. Camel's loyalty to the Italian, to me, is inexplicable. Biaggi had no problem leaving them behind in 2004 to join the Repsol HRC factory team. As Sete Gibernau will tell anyone, sponsors are only as loyal as their latest marketing reports recommend them to be. It was his rejection of the Repsol seat last season which resulted in it going to Biaggi. At the time, the two times Motogp runner-up, and the only rider to give Valentino Rossi a run for his money, cited loyalties to his sponsors, Telefonica, as reasons for his not making the move. After a poor season this year for Gibernau, and with Dani Pedrosa abandoning Telefonica to join Repsol HRC in his first year in the queen class, Telefonica had no qualms in announcing its departure from Motogp racing and made no secret of its opinion that Pedrosa has been both ungrateful and disloyal in making the switch to the factory team. Gibernau, meanwhile, has been obliged to switch to the factory Ducati team.

All the above shows sponsors getting a well-deserved reality check in Motogp. As one would expect, they are liable to try to exert their influence to put their interests over those of the sport. I've already commented on the aging paddock with riders holding onto good team seats in spite of poor race performances. Some commentators argue for the sponsors to be treated with more respect by both the manufacturers and certain riders because of the amount of money they invest in the sport. But, as Telefonica have clearly shown us that their investments are only made when the return is guaranteed, I am very much in favour of their influence being checked. Of course, no official efforts will be made to do that. The sport's survival depends on its big sponsors. But at least we can applaud riders like Pedrosa, who make decisions based on their own competitive interests and not on the amount of money being offered to them or - as in Gibernau's supposed case - something so stupid as "loyalty".

Valentino Rossi, too, has come under fire from some quarters for provoking a dispute between Yamaha and Altadis, the French company that own Gauloise and Fortuna, among other tobacco brands. Rossi signed for a third season with Yamaha earlier this year, but he stipulated that he could not be sponsored by a tobacco firm - Gauloise and Fortuna have sponsored Yamaha for the last few years. This move by the Italian champion probably has less to do with any high-minded stance against tobacco than his plans to test extensively for Formula 1 with Ferrari next season. The Italian firm is sponsored by Marlboro, an Altadis competitor. The result has been a battle between the latter and Yamaha which has ended up in the courts. Yamaha has officially announced that its relationship with Altadis has come to an end. Altadis has countered with a press statement warning Yamaha that until their dispute is resolved by the courts, they are prohibited by their contract from using any advertising that is a direct competitor of the French tobacco firm.

What galls is the sponsors' attempts to potray themselves as a wronged party. In fairness, Altadis have more of a case than Telefonica, as they had a contract to sponsor Yamaha's factory team till 2007. That said, I don't think they had any grounds to reject Yamaha's plans to field a two-man Gauloise factory team and a one-man Rossi team. To me, that is another example of a sponsor abusing its position as paymaster to the detriment of the sport.

Anyway, I'm glad to see that Telefonica's plans to concentrate their sponsorship investment on Formula 1 have been dealt a severe blow by Fernando Alonso's signing with soon to be Vodafone-sponsored Mercedes McLaren for 2007. There have been reports (in Spanish)that Alonso wanted to take revenge on Telefonica for stalling his F1 career jump in 1999. The Spanish telephone giant was trying to expand its Latin American market at the time, and so chose Argentine driver Gaston Mazzacane over Alonso for the Minardi Team. Loyalty indeed!

Madrid, ¡te quiero!

Happy new year!!!!

In typical fashion I avoided all alcohol last night. I make a point of starting the new year with a fresh head. Actually it isn´t too fresh on account of me going to bed at around 2am and getting up again at 4.30 to catch a flight to Madrid. I´ll sleep later. I´m here to catch up with two girlfriends from my August CELTA course. I know they´ve been out all night so I´m gonna wait till early evening to get in touch.

Touched down around 9.30, left my gear in Left Luggage and got the metro into the center. I wandered around Chueca, which was deserted, and then made my way down to the Puerta del Sol where everything was quite busy and bustly. Great to see people out enjoying the first day of the new year. It´s a little cold but there isn´t much wind and there´s a beautiful blue cloudless sky. It´s so therapeutic to have those skies above your head all day. Until you´ve moved out of Ireland and enjoyed them, you can´t really appreciate the difference weather makes to your life!

Was sitting waiting for the metro at Barajas airport today and reading the notices. I guess Spanish must be a bit of a headfuck for people who don´t speak it because so many words seem similar to ours. Take for example the following notice:

Metro le recuerda que existen asientos reservados en el vagón. Se recomienda cederlos a ancianos, embarazadas y discapacitados.

You could forgive somebody for thinking that meant: "Metro reminds you that there are seats in the carriages which are reserved for ancient, embarrassed and decapitated people."

Had to do the old sock and trouser fit check in Dublin airport. You take off your belt so they can see if your trousers are a good fit and you take off your shoes so they can make you feel ashamed of wearing socks with holes. The smell at the security check area was gross. What is wrong with my fellow Irish people? Where is their dignity? First on Friday, in the Long Hall with two friends, there was an awful smell of farts hanging in the air, and I swear I didn´t contribute even once to it. Then the pong of smelly feet at Dublin airport security check made me feel grateful I was heading back to sunny, personally hygienic Spain! Well, I´m off to stroll the city again. More later.