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THE COURT OF Appeal in Northern Ireland has paved the way for gay and lesbian couples to adopt children, after it dismissed a challenge by Health Minister Edwin Poots.
Poots’ Department had launched the bid after an earlier decision by Belfast High Court, which ruled that a ban on same sex couples adopting introduced in 1987 was unlawful.
Current laws in NI mean a single gay or lesbian person can be allowed to adopt children, but couples in civil partnerships are not allowed to do so.
The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission has welcomed the ruling, with Chief Commissioner Professor Michael O’Flaherty stating:
Through this case the Commission has protected basic human rights and the best interests of the child.For children who are in need of a family in Northern Ireland, the importance of this case in widening the pool of prospective parents cannot be overstated.
The Court ruled that preventing someone from even being considered to adopt because of their relationship status amounted to “a discriminatory practice”.
Today’s decision brings the law in Northern Ireland in line with the rest of the UK. Moves to allow same sex couples to adopt had been on hold in Stormont as the court action took place.
Northern Ireland Health Minister Edwin Poots (Image: Paul Faith/PA Archive/Press Association Images)
Speaking last year as he launched the appeal, Minister Poots – an evangelical Protestant opposed to gay partnerships – said he was doing so with a “heavy heart” as the ruling was against the “best interests of children”.
According to the Belfast Telegraph, the NI Department of Health may launch a further legal challenge, with a barrister for the department indicating an appeal to the Supreme Court could be on the cards.
We could just keep digging up Tom Mc Feely’s house until we’re out of debt
fair play to the plumber…dont know if I would have been as honest !
Mortage cleared in a bag…tempting.
Yeah you gotten wonder did anybody else find anything and keep quite. Did he forget he had it under there or what?
Maybe bertie set the precedent in memory loss..28k winnings and couldnt remember its name…dunno about you steve..but I,d know what it had for breakfast that morning..
The 60 k was only resting under my floorboards, doesn’t all this money mean he basically lied at his bankruptcy hearing?
Nigel the fact that Feely was an ex-PIRA hunger striker may have had some bearing on his conscience.
Lied his arse off.
Maybe the plumber knew who he wad dealing with.
It is great the way they say its government debt when its the little people and children who are not even born yet debt .shame on the politicians
You’d be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life..
Brian
you think he has a concience? Maybe he hid that as well!
Those charts should be sandblasted into Bertie Aherne’s face.
Er has anyone noticed we’ve quadrupled our debt in 5 years
“Why Ireland is Buried under Debt”
The ECB is responsible for the Eurozone area and banking regulation. The ECB failed to regulate banks. The Commodities Futures Modernization Act 2000 (USA) and the repeal of the Glas Stegall Act 1999 (USA) legalized dodgy banking practices. Larry Summers & Timothy Geithner (USA) ensured these practices were exported to other regions including the Eurozone via the W.T.O. Financial Services Negotiations 1). Result: an inter-connected world of dodgy banker paper, seruritization of people’s homes, re-selling of mortgages many times over (re-hypothecation), CDO’s etc etc. A race between banks for short term profit exposing home owners to risk as the banks took more and more risk driving up house prices creating the property bubble which burst. Result: negative equity & complete collapse in the construction industry-which is needed.
2 Problems: a) unemployment & tax collapse and b) bailout of the banks. Both a) & b) caused the figures above along with c) no spending by people in massive negative equity just about ‘hanging on’.
The ECB (Trichet) forced Ireland to bail out Anglo Irish Bank which was not systemically important in order to get Deutche Bank’s & BNP Paribas money back.
The ECB did not ask Latvia to bail out “Latvijas KrajBanka” (LKB) which was allowed to go bankrupt in 2011 because there was no German money in it. The ECB still allowed Latvia to join the Euro (JAN2014) commending their low debt rate.
The massive debt spiral then increased as taxes are increased to fund the debt but because of a collapse in disposable income spending collapses, tax revenues decline, and unemployment costs increase.
1) http://m.vice.com/en_uk/read/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo
All of those banking deregulations are still in place, most of the too big to fails have gotten bigger and are taking worse risks than before.
This disasterous level of debt is the result of policies persued by Fianna Fail while in government,they then rewarded themselves with massive pensions that they themselves approved under the benchmarking scam of public funds,150.000 euro per year pension for the rest of his life,thats the bill that Berti has left the Irish taxpayers for ruining this country.
Did it forget the huge Pension Liability that the State has? (And I presume on the assets side, it ignored the state’s oil resources since it intends to just give it away).
But the graph says Mmm – pie! It has to be good, right? Pie is ALWAYS good!?
Pye. 3.14192839444444 etc
Any chance of a quid pro quo with the troika for sticking to their 3.1bn target?
Yes. The quid pro quo is the government gets e700;000;00.00 so that the public section pension stream is not interrupted by , perish the thought!, shortage of funds. It’s all good fir those on the government teat, bad for everybody else, particularly those not even born yet.
Yes Margaret the state only looks after itself and its employees , forgets the rest ,,
So after 5 years of Austerity – we are worse off , and the govt still do as they are told – to get the rotten German and Irish capitalists their money back
”While in 2007 our liabilities were made up primarily of short-term debt and bonds, that type of liability is much less of the overall pie now as we can’t access funding from the normal lending markets in the way we used to.”
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- Is this because of the rating agencies who have no credibility anyway
”the American corporate ratings agencies, which “downgraded” Greece to “junk”. These same agencies gave triple-A ratings to billions of dollars in so-called sub-prime mortgage securities and so precipitated the economic collapse in 2008.”
the whole thing is a monopoly game played by the big capitalists and the Plebs put up with it .
But there is no getting away from fact – that Germany rules this country .
.
who rates the rating agencies?
We do, we do.
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do, we do….
“government’s liabilities ” you mean the ‘Irish people’s liabilities’ since the last government turned the banks debts into sovereign debts that landed the people of Ireland with the debts. Governments come and go, the current instalment of chancers will give way to another bunch in a couple of years and the merry-go-round will continue, one thing that won’t change is the fact that, unlike the parasite politicians, the debts are not going to go away with big fat tax payer funded pensions. Those debts are there for your kids and your grandkids to pay for long into the future. They will be paying back debts that they had nothing to do with whilst the ones who actually caused the disaster in the first place are sat back laughing their heads off as the quaff champagne in sunnier climes and safe in the knowledge that in the republic of no accountability they are untouchable.
Just wondering what we are supposed to do with this information, other than cry that is?
ps: Ireland Debt Clock is way behind (http://www.financedublin.com/debtclock.php)!!
€208 billion in debt quick someone send the government a PIP number. They need it.
Yet people still shout for no more austerity,staggering level of debt for such a small country and we don’t even have military spending to blame this on.
Now this is very good info for the shiners The other shower f’cd the country & the present shower have just added more debt & put us. In the biggest rescission 20 years .
Who in gods name is going to save us .
“The Council wants the government to perform a €3.1 billion adjustment in the Budget next month but as we know that is the subject of much wrangling among the coalition partners.”
Surely this is the main part of the story rather than the graph.
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