And There Went Hunting

[liadnan]

Well, so comes the ban. I'm glad the government are concentrating on the important things.

It makes no real difference to my life (I don't hunt, though family, a few friends, and people I know from where I grew up do), but I am quite strongly opposed to a ban*. One wonders whether it'll end up as Scotland has, where the only real difference is that the foxes, having been flushed with dogs, are now shot. And just how expensive and effective it'll turn out to be in policing terms. I'm also rather interested, technically as it were, to see whether the argument that the 1949 Parliament Act is void because it was passed under the provisions of its predecessor, the 1911 Parliament Act, actually stands up. Lord Donaldson, former Master of the Rolls, has been banging on about this for some years now (entirely independent of the hunting debate) and it's certainly true that the way the Parliament Acts fit with traditional constitutional theory has never been properly examined. I think the 1949 Act has only been used two or three times before now (the War Crimes Act, which the Lords rejected on the grounds of poor drafting and it being retrospective legislation; the age of consent; and possibly something else). I think the 1911 Act was only ever used, as opposed to threatened, to pass the 1949 Act.

The human rights argument will, I am fairly sure, fail, both in the High Court and in Strasbourg if it gets there: see Whaley.

*I take it as read that all but a handful of you, and all but a handful of my friends in general, disagree with me.

Comments

[liadnan]

I suspect the Irish rural working class is in any event a much louder voice than the UK rural working class.

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

It's also that a lot more of Ireland is related to the rural working class - look at the difference in how foot and mouth was handled, and also how the public reacted to it.

There was a farmer in Carlow who tried to prevent his (dubiously acquired stock) from being slaughtered on the grounds that they didn't have foot and mouth - he lost the case. I asked my father what would have happened if he'd won, and Dad's reply was that he would have come out the next morning and found his stock dead anyway.

When there was a foot and mouth outbreak (something that did touch my family directly as the affected farmer is married to my mother's second cousin and I think I used to play with his kids when I was a child, not to mention that half the farmers affected in the cull were related to me, the closest being my uncle), the border at that point was effectively shut. It was a two-hour wait to get through the checkpoints and DJs on TwoFM (the equivalent of Radio One for UK readers!) were warning people not to go to Belfast that way but to detour through Monaghan.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_hypatia_/]

Most likely its bigger as a percentage of the population, including that which actually lives in the countryside.

I see an awful lot of comment from the CLA and others in the pro lobby about the impact on employment in the countryside, I can't help but wonder where they were through the 80s when farms were laying off workers like nobody's business to outsource farmwork to contractors (or more often using the same people as contractors on vastly reduced terms and conditions) and sell off the properties which would have gone to be staff housing or let them to holiday makers.

My brother's village can count the employed farmworkers on one hand these days where it used to be the main source of employment. There is a divide (and no small resentment) between people which was not so great when there was more of a 'shared interest' in the land around the area.