The Abusive Teller Machine
On April 29 2019, AIB in conjunction with Women’s Aid released the Abusive Teller Machine video purporting to highlight the scandal of financial abuse in Irish society. We covered the story elsewhere on our website. AIB following the lead of other corporations sought to ingratiate itself with a section of Irish society by showing how much it cared in delivering a community service to an abused segment of society. However the service was provided to female customers only, the males were neglected.
In its eagerness to show its caring face, AIB relied entirely on the figures provided by Women’s Aid for the numbers of women suffering financial abuse and gave a figure of 198,000. This was a gross falsehood; there is no evidence to support this figure.
AIB and Women’s Aid gave a grossly false figure for financial abuse victims
As so often happens when a group is given a free ride by a craven media, Women’s Aid took a chance but were caught out. A member of MVI took a case to the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, against AIB on the grounds that it was providing a service to women only and was discriminating against men, a practice outlawed by the Equal Status Act. The case was dismissed and though AIB accepted that the figure given was utterly wrong they did nothing to correct it. The video still lives on the Women’s Aid website. We have now learnt that a second case is being taken to the WRC against AIB. This will be heard on Oct 22 precisely one year after the first hearing. It is heartening that AIB will have to send a legal team to bat once more.
The Troubling Case of Barbie
In September last year word filtered out that a serial male sex offender who claimed to be a woman had been transferred to a women’s prison in Limerick. The Irish Examiner reported that: ”The inmate was born male but is now recognised as female under the Gender Recognition Act 2015. It is understood that she has not undergone any transgender surgery, nor is she receiving hormonal therapy.”
It is permissible to legally changer gender in Ireland by simply signing a sworn statement.
The Law Society Gazette next reported on the matter some weeks later. The person was previously convicted of ten counts of sexual assault.
Criminal defence lawyer Robert Purcell told the Gazette that the 2015 Gender Recognition Act has created “an impossible position” with regard to transgender prisoners.
In a very telling even shameless evasion the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission told the Gazette they had no comment to make on the matter. IHREC has had much to say in the past on the rights of women and was a strong supporter of the Istanbul Convention.
Likewise another great defender of liberties, the ICCL has not commented either.
The Gender Recognition Act has created “an impossible position” with regard to transgender prisoners
It turns out that this is a major and growing phenomenon in countries afflicted with the new “woke dogma”, Canada is a good example. An article in Quillette gives more details. Sex offenders such as Patrick Pearsall and Matthew Harks have been housed in Canadian women’s prisons. As has contract killer Fallon Aubee, the first male offender transferred federally as a result of self-ID. Dangerous offender Adam Laboucan is currently housed in the Fraser Valley Institution for Women in British Columbia. In England there is the shocking case of Karen White a biological man who was sentenced to life in a British prison for sexually assaulting and raping several prisoners while serving time for a previous crime.
White was admitted into a women’s prison in Wakefield, England in 2017.
In all cases all that was required was a declaration of self-identity. In the UK, currently 1 in 50 male prisoners are now claiming to be a woman.
This brings us to the latest case, that of Barbie Kardashian born male but who now self-identifies as a woman.
An item from the RTE website on 29 Sept. says Barbie Kardashian, 18, of no fixed abode, appeared before Limerick District Court via video-link from the women’s section of Limerick Prison.
The Limerick Leader was accused of being transphobic on Twitter for reporting this. The Leader subsequently deleted their tweet linking to the story. When examined by experts at the Tavistock clinic, they thought s/he was faking gender dysphoria.
This person whose mother has fled her home in fear has repeatedly expressed a desire to rape and kill women, and a desire to be locked up in a prison with women.
None of the state funded women’s groups had a word to say, only an unknown new group had
In another telling comment on the times, a new women’s group Radicailíni – Radical Feminists, was the only women’s group to make a statement on the matter. It said: “in no circumstances should a male-bodied person ever have access to women’s services such as prisons”.
What are the views of Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, of RCNI, of Women’s Aid and the NWC?
Poland and the Istanbul Convention
In July front page news was created across the world by an announcement that the Polish government was considering exiting from the Istanbul Convention. On July 25 a comment on BBC said: Poland is to withdraw from a European treaty aimed at preventing violence against women, the country’s justice minister announced on Saturday. Zbigniew Ziobro said the document, known as the Istanbul Convention, was “harmful” because it required schools to teach children about gender.
He added that reforms introduced in the country in recent years provided sufficient protection for women.
An article in the New York Times on July 30 brought more clarity: Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Thursday he is asking his country’s top constitutional court to study Europe’s Istanbul Convention against domestic violence before his right-wing government decides whether to exit the pact.
Poland’s government has described the treaty as “ideologically tainted” and Morawiecki has said the convention raised “serious doubts,” indicating he was leaning toward exiting the convention.
This is the first time a European government has expressed serious doubts and an intention of scrapping the convention. This infamous document has been discussed at great length elsewhere on this site. MVI campaigned fiercely against it but there was no support from any side. The UK is not a signatory.
Predictably Fine Gael MEP Frances Fitzgerald one of the prime instigators of the Convention here, said it was now essential for the whole of the EU to ratify the convention “so that no woman is left unprotected and vulnerable to violence”.
We wonder what her views are on the protection of women from violence in prisons here given that she was Minister when the Gender Recognition Act was signed.
