• The Author - Bart Busschots

  
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I’ve never broadcast details of my love life on this blog or on the many podcasts I contribute to because frankly, my personal life is, well, personal. In this case though, I’m going to make an exception. Why? Because of the relevance to the tragedy I want to draw your attention to. I’m in a committed loving relationship with another man. We’ve been together for over 5 years now, and we’re building a life together. We just want what every couple want, some basic recognition of the fact that we are a family. This is what the fight for marriage equality is all about. It’s about the simple things like hospital visitation rights, inheritance rights, and so on. It’s inevitable that one day one of us will get sick, and when that day comes, we’ll want the right to visit each other, and to make medical decisions for each other should one of us not be capable of making those decisions for ourselves anymore. Should one of us die before the other we want our worldly possessions to go to the remaining partner without question or taxation, just like it happens for regular couples. These are very simple things, but very important things.

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I may have stumbled in to Catholicism as an accident of birth, but I’ve since picked myself up, dusted myself off, and decided that I want nothing to do with such a profoundly corrupt and power-hungry organisation. Nothing about the RCC gels with the person I am. I believe there is nothing more dangerous than blind faith, while the RCC literally preaches it as a virtue. I believe each person should be free to explore their own spirituality, while the RCC believes it and it’s priests are there to tell the people how to interpret the bible, because ordinary people are too dumb to do it themselves.

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Before I explain my thinking on all this, I want to set the scene. I do work in the public sector, but I’m not a civil servant. I work in a university. I am on strike today, but I’m not out on the picket line. I voted against strike action, but I believe in democracy, so I’m respecting the strike, though not actively supporting it. It is true that people at the top of the public sector earn very high wages, but that is not true of people all the way down. To be honest, it’s just like the private sector. The plebs at the bottom struggling to pay their bills, and the fat-cats at the top compensating themselves generously. It’s also true that I get a good pension, but, it’s not a free pension. I pay for it each month, and on top of actually paying for my pension, I have to pay the pension levy too.

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I imagine there are very few people reading this blog who don’t know that the Allies won the second world war. I also imagine that many, if not most, of you have heard of Enigma machines, and that a significant number of you know that the British managed to crack the Enigma codes as well as other German and Axis codes. This was a massive advantage for the Allies, and in no small way, helped to turn the tide of war against the Axis powers.

However, I imagine that there are not too many of you who have heard of Alan Turing. Academically he laid the very foundations upon which computer science, and hence our entire digital world, are built. His 1936 paper entitled “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” doesn’t sound very relevant to Twitter or FaceBook, but it’s one of the foundation stones on which all these things rest. You’ll note that Turing’s work on the theory of computation pre-dates the existence of any actual computers!

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So when atheists applied to have the slogan “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” put on buses, the Christian right responded by insisting that this was false advertising because it asserts a claim that cannot be substantiated. You’ll note that the atheists chose to use the qualifier “probably”. The Advertising standards authority thankfully agreed that with the probably in there the atheist ad is just fine. So how do the Christian right respond? Why, with adverts of their own. How do these ads stand up to the yardstick they insisted be applied to the atheist ads? They don’t. You’ll see no “probably” in the Christian ad. They make no bones about making a direct statement that is physically impossible to back up. If you believe that there is no evidence to say that there is “probably no God”, you can’t possibly also believe there is evidence that there is “definitely a God”, yet that’s exactly what the Christian ads say:

There definitely is a God. So join the Christian Party and enjoy your life.

Now, it’s important to stress that the organisation which filed the complaint against the atheist bus slogan is not the same organisation that is paying to have the above ad put on buses. It was Christian Voice which objected to the atheist add, and it’s the Christian Party which is paying for the above ad. Now, the question has to be, will Christian Voice lodge a complaint against the Christian Party ad? Or are they happy with a double-standard if it’s a pro-Christian double-standard?

Mind you, I have a feeling this could turn into a fantastic own goal! With this ad out there, there is no no way an appeal can be lodged against an atheist ad that omits the word “probably”. If I were running the Atheist Bus campaign, I know what I’d be doing next

If you’re not in the mood to “hear” me rant, best move along to another part of the blogo-web now because ranting is certainly something I’m going to do. The incompetent morons we are unfortunate enough to call a government have decided that the solution to their incompetence is to steal money from nurses, teachers, Gardai (Irish Policemen) and other government workers on the pretence of paying for the pension we already pay for! No one can deny that the government finances are a mess, or that the books needed balancing, but this is a dishonest and down-right unfair way of doing it. As is typical for our government, they haven’t got the balls to do things the honest way, so it’s done through stealth taxes. We have a taxation system for a reason, to bring in money for the government in a fair and equitable way. It’s full of safe-guards to ensure that those on the lowest incomes pay the least. With the 1-2% income levy on everyone in the countries gross income and now this 7-9% levy on public servants gross income the government are by-passing all the safeguards in a mad dash to make up for their incompetence.

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Given how historic a day today was, I’m hoping you’ll humour me and forgive a rare political post. Like millions of people all around the world I watched the inauguration live on the internet. Not TV, but the internet, a sign of things to come perhaps? Anyhow, that’s not really what I want to write about here. I just want to make three observations about today’s events from the perspective of an outsider. Or, to be more precise, from the point of view of a European gay agnostic.

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Most of the world’s attention is focused on Barack Obama today. I can certainly understand why, but I’ve been pre-occupied with something else today, proposition 8 in California. The proposition was to add an article to the Californian Constitution to revoke civil rights for gay people. It passed, not by much, but it passed. The Californian constitution now discriminates against gay people. In the US that’s not a first. But there is something very different about the vote on proposition 8, in CA gay people COULD marry. They HAD rights. They fought long and hard, but they had won the basic civil rights that regular people take for granted. And today, over half of the voters in California choose to revoke those rights, to take basic civil rights away from their fellow Californians, their fellow Americans and their fellow human beings. To make an effort to actively take away rights from your fellow human beings is a hell of a lot different to failing to grant rights in the first place, or even to taking steps to make it harder to grant them in future. Failing to move forwards is sad, but moving backwards is tragic.

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Every few years this old chestnut comes up for debate again. With particularly suspicious timing the debate on third level fees is back on the agenda again. What I can say for sure is that the system we have now is fundamentally flawed, and that change is badly needed. Re-introducing fees could either make things better or worse, depending on how it was done. It is certainly no silver bullet to just make everything better.

Lets start by looking at the system we have now. The government decide how much money a student’s tuition is worth, and pay the Universities depending on their registration numbers. There is a registration fee which the student has to pay which theoretically covers administration costs. The amount paid per undergraduate student is the same in all universities as it’s set by the government. None of this applies to post-graduate courses where the universities each set their own fees.

This may have worked well for a while, but some serious cracks are now showing themselves. At the root of the problems is that fact that the government is not paying the universities enough per student, so they’ve had to start making up the balance in other ways. All they can do is jack up the registration fee, and the fees for postgraduates, so that’s what they’ve done.

The registration fee started off as insignificant, I believe it was about £40 when I was in first year, perhaps a little more but certainly less than £100. It is now well over €800! All students pay it, regardless of means or whether or not they are in receipt of a grant. Before “free” third-level education students on grants didn’t have to worry about fees, now they have a huge “registration fee” to pay which causes real problems for the poorer segments of society, erecting a barrier to entry that wasn’t there before. Pretty ironic really, considering the whole point was to lower the barrier to entry! This is bad for the country as a whole, which is totally dependent on our education system. Our only natural resource is our educated work force, and the government in it’s ever-shorter-sightedness is jeopardising that.

The same goes for postgraduate fees. When I started the fees were about £1,250 or there-abouts. Now they are well over €6,000. The reasons are the same, because the government are not paying enough per undergraduate student, the universities have to get their money in other ways, and in this case postgraduate students are it! Many postgraduate students get their fees paid by funding agencies, but for those who don’t get that very scarce money are totally shafted. Again, badly harming our knowledge economy.

So, under the current system the universities are underfunded, the poorest students are forced to pay an extortionary “registration fee”, and postgraduate studies are prohibitively expensive for all but the very best at sitting exams. The system is clearly broken! A very persuasive argument can be made that it is wrong for the government to pay for the education of the sons and daughters of millionaires. Hence the argument for bringing back fees, but only for the very rich.

If this is done right it could work, but if it’s done wrong it won’t make any difference at all, or even make things worse! Lets start by looking at how it could be done badly. Fees never left, they are just currently paid by the government (who set the price), rather than by the parents. As long as the government are paying fees for anyone, they are hardly likely to surrender that control. The problem is the fee is too low, so changing who pays it won’t help the universities at all, it will just save the government money. There would be no extra money in the actual universities and the registration fee and the postgraduate fees would continue to rise. This is what I expect our incompetent government to try to. It’s an attractive idea to a government in panic over public expenditure. In the short-term it lets them save public money and claim a victory in aid of helping save the economy. The long-term results will be disastrous, but in the short term it will look good, and governments are insanely short-term thinkers unfortunately.

So how could it be done right? I see three things being needed:
1) The abolition of the registration fee
2) A dramatic increase in the amount universities get per-student
3) only high income families should have to pay fees
4) government expenditure on third level education should not be reduced in real terms, the money coming from the rich families should be EXTRA money for third level, money which is desperately needs!

I believe it’s important for our country that we have a strong education system. An investment in education is an investment in the very future of our economy and our nation. It is not a waste of money, and, like healthcare, not an area that should suffer cutbacks or be neglected. What really matters is that universities are properly funded, and that they are easily accessible to every young person in our society, regardless of the wealth of their parents. I don’t care how that goal is achieved, I just care that it is achieved!

Lets start with a word of warning, if you don’t want to hear any criticism of fundamentalist religion, skip this post. It will only upset you!

Anyway, I was reading this news article yesterday and it got me thinking. My first reaction was to laugh. The whole idea of people getting into a flap because a picture of a cute police dog was used on a police poster is hilarious. However, it got me thinking. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is just another symptom of a bigger problem, the bastardisation of the concepts of tolerance and respect by right-wing religious groups. These groups interpret tolerance and respect to mean that everyone must do things their way.

It seems to be a common thread among the more fundamentalist branches of the major world religions to show a total and utter lack of any tolerance what so ever, while simultaneously demanding that the whole world “tolerate” and “respect” their beliefs. We must all respect their beliefs and refrain from anything they don’t like, while at the same time they refuse to tolerate anything they disagree with.

Although this particular news article was about Muslims, the problem is much more wide-spread. It could just as well have been about fundamentalist Christians or fundamentalist Jews or indeed any fundamentalists. When you stop and think you see it all the time.

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