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Updated July 30th
CALLS HAVE BEEN made by the Irish Council Against Blood Sports (ICABS) for hare netting licences to be refused for the coming season.
The group are currently seeking a meeting with Arts and Culture Minister Heather Humphreys, whose department have responsibility for granting a licence for the season to clubs around the country.
This comes in the wake of new information about the number of hares killed or injured over the coursing season last year.
The figures were revealed by a Freedom of Information request made by ICABS on the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), the State body involved in natural conservation.
During the 2013 coursing season, the NPWS oversaw 23 meetings. This was a significant reduction on previous years. Throughout the season, over 100 hares “required assistance” after being struck during races, leading to over 20 of them dying of natural causes or having to be put down.
The coursing season runs from September to February. Estimates are that there will be around 80 meetings this year.
Speaking to TheJournal.ie, spokesperson for the ICABS Aideen Yourell said: “These are wild animals. It is positively medieval, barbaric. The idea of it in a modern society. Every hare is traumatised.”
On whether the coursing clubs had regard for the safety of the hares, Yourell went on:
How can they have regard when they are using them as live lures. they just treat them as things to be used. They come under pressure to make sure that hares aren’t killed, but what can they do, they can’t avoid it. It is a 60 pound greyhound chasing after a six pound hare.
At one meeting in Liscannor, County Clare on the 28 and 29 of September last year, an inspector from the NPWS “wished to check the paddock on the morning of the releases but was unable to due to lack of co-operation and intimidation”. At the same event, 14 hares were hit by dogs, with one being injured and three being mauled.
On the issue of lack of cooperation with staff, Treasa Seoighe, a spokesperson for NPWS said:
“The Department is in communication with the Irish Coursing Club on a number of matters arising from the contents of some of the NPWS monitoring reports relating to the operation of the meetings during the 2013/14 season and compliance with the conditions attached to the licences including issues concerning lack of co-operation with NPWS staff.”
The Irish hare is a protected species under the Wildlife (Amendment) Act 2000. Hare coursing is illegal in Scotland, Wales and England and became illegal in Northern Ireland in 2011.
The Irish Coursing Club were contacted but is yet to respond.
So will the families of Saville and Harris apply for this ‘right to be forgotten’ in 10 years time I wonder? Absolute rubbish. If you break the law while in the public eye, tough
@ÉiRed
Nonsense. Knowing the identities of sex offenders is in the public interest. Therefore, the Savile and Harris families would be unsuccessful if they applied for it.
“Knowing the identities of sex offenders is in the public interest.”
Everything mentioned in the article above is in the public’s interest, otherwise they (BBC) wouldn’t have published the articles.
@Cpm
No information about sex offenders or others convicted of serious criminal offences has been removed from the Google search engine.
So basically this is just a form of censorship dressed up as an ” internet janitor ” Down with this sort of thing.
This is absolutely disgusting. The Mail Online is that popular? Outrageous.
Should be able to get them on http://www.duckduckgo.com as Google doesn’t own the internet.
And that’s exactly why Google should not be forced to carry out this ‘Right to be Forgotten’ lark. Google is not the internet and it should not be their responsibility to remove these links. What about Bing, Yahoo and all the other search engines? Are they being forced to do this?
Ridiculous. How often do you say you binged something or yahooed it? Never, you google it. What is the first page when you open the internet browser? What is it called, Yahoo Chrome or Google Chrome.
Therefore Google is the internet. Why are the internet generation so stupid???
Bing actually
You can always just use the US Google site where the information isn’t removed from their searches; by putting /ncr after the address http://www.google.com/ncr likewise for any country specific site outside of the EU.
Oh good. I have a few things online I don’t want the general public to know about.
Too late and you should be ashamed of yourself. But how do you get your legs that high at your age?
Oh stop judging me, I’m an old woman. And to answer your question, I get a lot of practise. ;)
Was the referee Dougie McDonald?
What’s his story?
Just googled him….he tells lies….
I would say Google it, but….
This is all about control and we should drmand that it is stopped immediately.
So any decent alternative search engine to google? Stupid eu censorship!
As mentioned in the article, the results are still available from google.com
Other alternative search engines are http://www.duckduckgo.com and http://www.bing.com
I’ve found recently that in some areas Bing provides better results than Google, so the gap isn’t what it used to be.
That said, if you’re generally worried about your internet privacy, you should be using duckduckgo.com for that reason alone.
There is some suggestion that Google has been deliberately over-aggressive in the way the have implemented the right to be forgotten in an attempt to turn it into an issue so that it might be overturned.
“I’ve found recently that in some areas Bing provides better results than Google”
They’re still nowhere good as Google. Only a while back, they were caught using Google’s results to reorder their own rankings.
I searched for this article on Google and it is not there as dougie mcdougle is mentioned.
have your say