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THE RESTAURANTS LOBBY claims Ireland’s Good Friday alcohol bans hurt the country’s image abroad – as well as harming its industry.
Restaurants Association of Ireland chief executive Adrian Cummins said it was “archaic” to have the restrictions in place on religious grounds in the “multi-cultural and multi-religious society that Ireland has become”.
“This law affects more than just the diners who want a drink, it affects thousands of restaurant employees on a busy weekend when restaurants simply won’t open,” he said.
Aside from the law showing a 19th-century image of Ireland to incoming tourists, many restaurants decide to close their doors on Good Friday.”
According to the last census, just over 84% of Irish people still defined themselves as Roman Catholic – although this figure had dropped from 87% five years earlier.
Meanwhile several other countries, including Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, have some restrictions on the sale of alcohol at certain times of the day or to those not eating in pubs or restaurants.
But Cummins said Ireland had to be the only country which chose to close some of its best-known tourist attractions – pubs and restaurants – on a bank holiday weekend.
The Good Friday restrictions include some exemptions for those travelling on planes, trains and ferries, people attending certain events, theatres and hotel guests – as long as they are only given alcohol with a meal.
Some 58% of the respondents to today’s TheJournal.ie poll (so far) said they didn’t agree with banning alcohol on Good Friday.
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While an argument for some animal testing can be put forward there is no excuse for testing on animals for cosmetic purposes. It should be banned immediately in Ireland.
Mice look silly with lipstick on anyway.
Yes mice do look silly but the same can’t be said for a Donkey..
As far as I am aware, the only animal testing that is allowed to take place in this country is for medical purposes. However, most products are tested on animals in other jurisdictions. If you tried to ban every product that was tested on animals our supermarkets would be pretty empty. It would simply never happen. You can buy lots of products that are cruelty free though, check out the leapingbunny.org for info on these products. It’s pretty difficult to swap everything completely though.
I haven’t seen Berties name mentioned in this article. Uhmmm
Testing cosmetic products on animals in banned in the EU, and any cosmetic that has been testing on an animal elsewhere cannot be sold in the EU.
http://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/cosmetics/animal-testing/index_en.htm
@JayK that is somewhat misleading. Almost all large cosmetic companies test on animals. They might not directly test the final product on animals, but that’s just a technicality really. Also, any company that sells its products in China, is required by Chinese law to test on animals. Lancome, loreal, MAC, Pantene, Proctor and Gamble, unilever, they all do it. Even companies like Urban Decay and The Body shop who pride themselves on not testing on animals, are owned by larger companies that do test on animals.
It already is banned on cosmetics
Thank frik for a HUGE Asian market.
Animal testing for medicine is necessary. Animal testing for cosmetics is abhorrent.
Animal testing of finished cosmetic products is banned within the EU, as is the marketing of such products as far as I know.
Yet the ingredients for many of those cruelty free products were tested on animals, so “cruelty free” can be misleading :(
I know some humans I’d rather see tested on “severely” rather than some loyal pets!! Woof!!
Would rather see the testing facility operate in MountJoy then innocent animals
Hmmm, remember the last set of people who decided to test on prisoners? It did not end well…not well at all at all.
I’d rather see people who mistake the word “then” for “than” used for vivisection without anaesthesia, but to each his own
Cannot understand the mindset of someone who could test anything on animals. It’s wrong. Full stop. I’d sooner test on people who have committed heinous crimes..at least they deserve some pain .
Have u ever taken a paracetamol? Or antibiotics? Are u vaccinated? Are your kids? Pain relief. Blood thinners. Chemotherapy. Diabetic medication. Heart meds. Inhalers. Steroids. The list goes on and on and on and on.
I love animals. I am an empath and believe they are sentiment beings – HOWEVER, I can’t say it is wrong having been a recipient of many life saving medications and procedures. As have ppl I care deeply about. It would be utterly hypocritical.
I am also a scientist and have worked with animals. And they live in the best conditions with high standards of food, water & care. They also die in a quick and painless method as possible and my colleagues who work with them (actually in all areas Iv worked) handle the animals with respect & kindness, knowing the sacrifice these animals make for us (whether choosing to or not).
I somewhat understand ur position – but unless u can stand over and say uv never benefitted from something that has been tested on animals – then ur talking out ur bum…
Then stop taking all forms of medication right now if you are so opposed to it. You are either totally opposed, or you are complicit in it. Do you buy all your cosmetics/household cleaning products/ toiletries from companies that are certified cruelty free? If not, then got off your high horse and stop deluding yourself.
@mary carey. I am not against animal testing for the purpose of medicine but I am concerned that ‘a Scientist’ such as yourself that uses ‘ppl’ instead of people, ‘Iv’ instead of I’ve and ‘uv’ instead of you’ve might have access to these animals.
I’m at work and I’m on a phone…. Get over it grammar police.
As I read your message a second time I see the ” around scientist. For the record – I worked my arse off for my degree and MSc. Having been unwell for a good chunk of it – it took 10 years rather than the standard 4 for the BSc and 1 for the research MSc. But il thank u not to question my qualifications! I worked hard enough for them.
@ mrs b. Would you be willing therefore to put yourself forward to test the safety of new drugs or perhaps stem cell therapies that had no prior in vivo testing performed on them? Or do you think medical research should cease altogether? Because unfortunately without the use of animals, medical research would cease immediately!
some people are not worth wasting your time on Mary , fair play !
@Mary. An “empath ” who loves animals? I see :-)
I don’t think it’s a case of *believing* that they are sentient. They are sentient, it’s us who fail to recognise it.
Mice sing love songs to one another that become more complex over time. Rats laugh when you tickle them and come back for more, they also feel so bad about their friends being trapped that they will set them free to share their treats with them, and as anyone who has spent time with an animal will know, sometimes they are better at picking up on our emotions than other people.
If crows can solve problems (like working out the sequence on traffic lights to use cars as nut crackers, or using hooks to fish things out of where they cannot reach) and a rat can figure out what an arrow is for having seen them pointing in the direction they discovered was “out” – then even these tiny creatures that people rarely give much thought to are far more intelligent than most will give them credit for.
Personally I think it’s quite arrogant of humans to assume that other animals lack intelligence simply because we haven’t managed to see it yet.
Mrs.B you talking here to fools unfortunately…..red thumbs for empathy….your heads must be fcked up
Mary Carey buuuuuuuhhhhhhhaaaaaahhhaaaaaaa
They have water and care??!??!?!?????!????!!?? They die quick and pain free!?!?!?? Maybe testing is pain free and quick too?!?!?!? And maybe they send them animals on holidays later???I suggest to change dealer or get brain transplant! Maybe in clinic you worked for
I never questioned the qualifications. I was questioning your grammar.
You’re no better now Suzie. Please start your sentences with a capital letter. Do not put a space after ‘Mary’ if you are using a comma. Your sentence should have been: “Some people are not worth wasting your time on Mary, fair play!”.
You have to be a bit of a heartless so and so for injecting Botox into mice with the sole aim of killing 50% of them. And to do this to 100 mice for every batch produced while there are alternative non lethal methods.
the mice are genetically bred to be sterile and for seientific use, most are probably used for gene expression. These little mice help solve some important questions and are vital in the development of new therapies
You would have thought Guinea Pigs would be used the most.
Well of the lot of the animals mentioned, they, like us, are the only ones who don’t produce their own vitamin C.
Money is the primary reason this is prevalent.
Animals can’t sue big pharmaceutical or cosmetic companies.
Disease and the insurance of drug safety in humans is the primary reason this is prevalent. We simply can’t bring a drug/therapy straight from in vitro testing into humans. I am against animal testing for cosmetics, however, that bad cop ‘big pharma’ are simply adhering to the regulatory and ethical legislative guidelines by conducting pre-clinical in vivo safety testing. How would you feel if someone you know had a adverse reaction to a drug or therapy and then found out that no pre-clinical safety testing was conducted by the institute or pharmaceutical company? Can you imagine the public outrage.
Do pharmaceutical companies make money? Yes! They also are the ones who cough up the 20-40 million euros we need to progress to stage 2 & 3 clinical trials. Their investments are huge and can take 10-20 years to show return. In some cases, after all this investment, their drug is found not to be efficacious and never makes it to market. Animal testing is pricey for them, if it wasn’t necessary, they wouldn’t do it. They are the largest investors into the development of alternative safety testing methods, such stem cell lines for safety testing. While, they certainly are not perfect, they are necessary.
Alan animal experimentation is not reliable, it has been proved a vaccine that is safe in animals can kill people and it has in human trials.
Animal models are not perfect replicas of how a therapy/drug with react in a human and how the human will react to the therapy/drug. They are however a hell of a lot more accurate at predicting safety than plastic petri dishes. I know the examples where drugs found to be safe at a particular dose in animals turned out to be toxic in humans. Saying that, you fail to mention all of the examples where animal models have proven to be good predictors of human toxicity. You can’t take a drug/vaccine/cellular therapy etc that you have developed in a lab and just throw it into humans at random doses, via random administration methods and see what the responses are. If you had a condition such as cardiomyopathy, would you be happy for a doctor to inject a random dose of untested stem cells, into a random location in your heart, by a random delivery method?
All of the work we do as scientists is guided by results from in vitro and in vivo models. They provide an indication of lethal and toxic doses, whether a therapy shows any positive results, what the best route of administration might be or if a drug is perhaps appears completely unsafe.
We cannot work on developing new therapies or advance our understand of developmental biology and disease, primarily based on in vitro work. We have to have to be able to prove to regulators that we have used all the scientific arsenal available to show that our therapies look to be safe, that they have provided promising pre-clinical results and that we used the results to optimise our therapy.
We know animal models are not perfect, but they are incredibly useful and have an important place. Without the use of mice for example, our understanding of blood cell development (haematopoiesis) would minimal, making it much more difficult to study abnormal haematopoiesis, such as in leukaemia.
Without animal models we are shooting blind folded and medicine will not advance. You may as well shut down all of the major research centres in the world.
Perhaps you were jesting with your flippant, “pets are going missing” comment. If not, it certainly highlights your ignorance of how animal research is conducted.
Where do you think that the animals come from but from third party providers, have they the morals to choose a third party that looks after their animals or just a cheap one… Have you not noticed how many pets go missing these days as it is massive amount.
I understand mice and rats but cats etc being used in order to use up their grant in order to make sure that they get the same grant for the next year is cruelty.
Animal lives are wasted in order to make sure the number of animals and or grants remain the same is barbaric at least.
How similar is a cat to a human or a dog, a horse, the nearest thing to a human is a chimp, why not use chimps instead?
Yes it is very important to test make up on rabbits etc, there is make up out there now that has been shown to effect foetuses and that past animals trials on shower gels that have been shown now to get into the bloodstream and effect hormones, they past animal trials too.
As have pesticides and herbicides tested on animals and the results differ to whom is doing the tests in other words who is paying the universities for these tests. At one time tests were done to see if tobacco caused cancer by the tobacco industry and their tests showed it didn’t.
Results of tests on animals are not based on anything but only on who is paying for the research. So animal lives are wasted and for what the greed and cruelty of publicity?
Animal tests are not that reliable and that is why the following happened…
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/republic-of-ireland/irelands-hidden-scandal-child-vaccine-trials-28553907.html
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/apr/04/usa.highereducation
http://www.naturalnews.com/019187_human_medical_experimentation_ethics.html
And with all there knowledge they use…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylmercury
Michael, these articles relate to vaccine trials being carried out on children, not on animals. How do these abhorrent acts show that medical testing on animals is ineffective/unreliable? There are thousands of pharmaceutical products out there that are keeping people alive and making their lives less of a living hell because we’ve tested them on animals beforehand. It’s a necessary evil, unfortunately.
I did go off the mark to show that when it comes to morals and ethics, animals used in experimentation are used and then destroyed, that animals do not matter, you think they let them go after using them, no. They are probably destroyed in the cheapest way possible.
I did ethics in UCG PART OF PHILOSOPHY at the time and my test was done on vivisection, first year but it annoyed me what these researchers do to animals, so I get passionate about it…
It is human trials that allow these products to be on the market as not all animal trials work in the same way on animals as on people and vice versa.
I have shown that in the past humans were used for trials because animals trials are not as reliable as many try to make out that they are and yet they still use animals knowing that the results will not be the same…
Alan, I was having a go at the ethnicity of those who are involved in using animals, do you know where the animals like cats and dogs come from as well as other larger animals? In China they steal pets the whole time for research as well as for food?
My point is how the administration of animal research happens and the waste of money involved that can cause the waste of animal lives and how the money for next year can be based on what you do this year as that would effect universities etc…
Take rats, if rats eat pepper it will cause colon cancer in them and a lack of vitamin e in rats I believe causes sterility but the same is not true with humans. St. John’s wort in humans has a benefit with depression but in hoofed animals it will kill them. In cats onions will cause kidney damage by destroying the red blood corpuscles, raisins are bad for cats as well, avocadoes are toxic to cats. So if simple food can have toxic effects between humans and animals then how reliable is animal research?
Cats can survive the red back spider but humans can’t… etc etc… Rats are more resistant to diseases, therefore there immune system would be different to humans when it comes to vaccines then?
Michael, are painting all animal researchers with the same brush in terms of how they treat the animals, including those I work with. You have shown no understanding of the oversight that exists when conducting animal research, including an ethics committee, on site animal welfare officer and visiting veterinary surgeon etc. The animals are scarified humanely and every effort is made to maximise the amount of data obtained. Any animal cruelty by researchers in places like china is to be condemned, but your generalised statements are unfair to the the PhDs, post docs and other researchers around the world who take great care of the animals they are working with, and work their butts off to build on our understanding of biology and disease, in addition to developing new medical therapies which we all benefit from.
You are simply wrong with your generalisation that animal research is not of any benefit. Phase 1 trials are conducted on humans for safety testing, but after animal testing. If the animal safety testing wasn’t done, you would get a lot more people in phase 1 trials having adverse reactions or dying.
We’re scientists, we base everything we do on evidence, if animal research was not of benefit it wouldn’t be done. Do you honestly think we would not have coped on. It’s a pain in the as to do, scientists would love not to have to do it, it’s not always a perfect model, but it’s currently the best tool available.
Michael, there are many differences between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. You listed a few examples. While these may be valid, animal trials are actually extremely useful, because they could red flag something that would otherwise come up in human trials and possibly injure or kill people.
There are differences between Humans and lab rats, for instance, but there are also a lot of similarities. We are both mammals and we will respond in similar ways to certain stimuli. It is just another safety precaution that will stop a lot of the potentially dangerous products from ever reaching the shelves.
http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2007/09/scientific-alternatives-to-animal-testing-a-progress-report/
“The authors argue convincingly that the billions of dollars spent annually on biomedical research in the U.S. should be redirected away from scientifically pointless animal experimentation and toward sounder forms of human-based research.”
Kara Rogers, Ph.D. in pharmacology and toxicology from the University of Arizona.
But Malachi, there has been some dreadful mistakes done on human trials of vaccines with people and that was after passing the animal trials…
Animal experimentation has always went too far and sometimes cruelty has led the way in the usage of animals. Some scientist have wasted animals sometimes in the most cruellest of fashion but why?
I understand rats and mice but why cats and dogs???
“But Malachi, there has been some dreadful mistakes done on human trials of vaccines with people and that was after passing the animal trials…”
Apart from unauthorised distribution and testing (like in the link you posted earlier), what dreadful mistakes are your referring to? Officially distributed vaccines are extremely well tested and stupidly safe, a minority of people are allergic to the ingredients and that’s the only exception I can think of.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-22556736
Northwick Park drug trial disaster – “In what became known as the Elephant Man trial, six healthy young men were treated for organ failure after experiencing a serious reaction within hours of taking the drug TGN1412 in a clinical trial.
After they were all admitted to intensive care, two became critically ill, the worst affected lost his fingers and toes, and all the men were subsequently told they would be likely to develop cancers or auto-immune diseases as a result of their exposure to the drug.
In follow-up interviews, the men described feeling like their brains were “on fire” and their “eyeballs were going to pop out”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/11089564/Would-you-accept-3750-to-trial-one-drug.html
“In what has become known as the Elephant Man trial, in 2006 six young men almost died after being paid £2,000 to take an experimental drug.
One man lost his fingers and toes as a result. Another participant, aged just 24, said that he felt his “head swelling up like an elephant’s” and “thought my eyeballs were going to pop out.”
A banana and a human share 60% of the same DNA, Does that mean 60% of drugs used on a banana will work? Just a pithy statement about difference when it comes to testing…
The female pursuit of vanity knows has no ethical boundaries.
Ever used a condom!?? Or maybe a Viagra!
Condoms – yes.
Viagra?
Please.
I’m designed to achieve arousal by most naturally occurring phenomena.
I was walking down the road the other day and saw a piece of masonry falling off a building site and had an erection for two hours afterwards.
Well, a nice spot of casual misogyny there,Jack, but how your comment relates to the testing of genetic/pharmaceutical therapies is unclear. Testing of finished cosmetic products on animals is banned within the EU.
You can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig
You leave Joan Burton out of this EC.
What gets me is that it is proven that animal experimentation doesn’t work and that animal lives are wasted. Humans can eat things that can kill animals and vice versa, the same with drugs and medical experimentation.
When is this government going to investigate the process of using babies and children to experiment on here in orphanages especially with brain vivisectioning on healthy children.
RTE’s Would You Believe programme had it but silence ever since? Why and how far up did it go in the government of the day?
you probably need to change that comment to SOME animal experimentation doesn’t work. A lot of it is very important in making sure a therapy is safe
But it has been shown that what is safe in animals is not always safe for humans and vice versa.
It depends on what your testing. Drugs are one thing, but medical devices and procedures are other areas for testing. If there was no value in doing these tests then the companies wouldnt spend the huge amounts of money it costs to do them.
Animal welfare is low compared to cost with these companies…
Im not quite sure what you mean by that but the animals get the best of care and treatment. If for no other reason than they need to be in good health to make sure it wouldnt interfere with the experiment! Those animals have the best of everything when they are being rared.
I have seen plenty of articles and news stories that would make you sick about experimentation on cats and dogs, even using cattle as living examples of how their intestines work and that was here in Ireland not that long ago. Putting animals through pain and some seem to enjoy doing this. So the whole thing has turned me against animal testing especially with cats, dogs and larger animals. A good example is genetically trying to mutate chickens to grow teeth, but why?
Science is fun and all that but scientists get to curious and they loose control over what they do and sometimes their curiosity outweighs respect for the animal or care about its welfare?
Apparently most medical knowledge that we use today was obtained from the Nazi files, where they used humans for experiments in the concentration camps. Nazi’s also created the poison that is used as lethal injection in the United States. They also invented crystal meth!
Yeah, sorry. None of that is true.
Malachi, Nazis experimentation is famous or infamous, everything the Nazis did ended up in saving lives now, especially with the work of the lifeguard and hyperthermia.
Operation Paperclip…
Is that why so many pets are going missing?
read the report
You think reports tell the truth, most are for damage limitation exercises.
so you didn’t even bother to read it, not even the last paragraph of page 4, or table 3
no damage limitation just stating fact
There was a report once that said tobacco didn’t cause cancer, please read what I write thanks.
Here is another vaccines do not cause autism… Then…
http://vaccine-injury.info/
Eh, has anyone seen Centipede 3 yet?
Cruelty to animals. They’ve no choice didn’t know the numbers were that high in Ireland.
The Ucc do enough animal testing out in Wilton
I heard they strapped two cats back to back to test out a theory on anti gravity. Didn’t work but the music was great.
Red thumbs for empathy nad truth :) washed faking brains! Hope you children will go through the same agony and pain as animals you have no heart for
The testing should be done one some of our worst criminals in prison.
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