Worse Than Stormfront

there is a world of difference between saying “we will be a minority” and “we could be a minority”.

You’re right, there is a world of difference. What is your point?

To say the first requires evidence and proper data to support your case. To say the second requires no evidence whatsoever.

I’ve already stated explicitly that there is nothing inevitable about Irish people becoming an ethnic minority by 2050. If we take action to reduce the number of people entering the country it’s very unlikely we’ll ever become a minority.

I recognise that the possibility exists that we could be a minority by 2053, while thinking it highly unlikely.

What makes you think it’s unlikely? The indigenous Irish population is already down to 86% of the total after only a few years. If we get another five or six years of this it’s very possible we’ll fall below 80%.

And regardless of how low the probability might be (and I don’t believe that it is low) that the Irish people become a minority by the end of this century, the probability would be much lower if we took action to reduce the number of immigrants entering the country.

And it’s worth noting again, the DCU President wasn’t expressing his own opinion here. He was quoting unpublished UK-based research and using it as a starting point for a speech he was making.

Which is all the better, it means that he was relying on a source for his claim. If he was merely expressing his opinion I’m sure you would just brush it aside as the opinion of someone who was unqualified to comment on the issue. The fact that he chose to repeat the prediction just shows that he though worthy of discussion.

It is inaccurate to say that he “made a prediction about the ethnic make-up of the Irish population.” He didn’t. He quoted a prediction (from an unspecified source), which is an entirely different thing.

The professor did make a prediction. He predicted that we could be a minority by the the year 2050.

I’m not sure what your point is with regard to the Irish Independent article, the Twice the Size project and your claim that our population is expected to rise to 12 million by 2058.

My point is that you were wrong when you said that the report rules out the possibility of the Irish population reaching 12 million by 2058. The report says no such thing.

As far as I can see the journalist made a hames of reading the Project – as we agree, it says nothing about 12 million people by 2058.

So why did you try to use it to try to disprove my prediction about the population reaching 12 million by 2058?

Where then does this figure come from? Did the reporter pluck it out of mid-air?

I don’t know where it came from. It didn’t come from the published report that I read but I don’t think either of us believe that it was plucked out of mid-air either.

Who expects that the Republic’s population will be 12 million in fifty years, and on what basis is their expectation founded?

I believe it’s based on the assumption that the population will continue to grow at the same rate for the next few decades. The current growth rate of the population is 2.5%. If that rate continued for the next fifty years, the population of the republic of Ireland would reach 14 million by 2058

If you can’t answer these questions you have no source for your claim.

I do have a source. My source is the article in the Irish independent.

The fact that a reporter reports it, won’t do.

Why not? What if the prediction made by that reporter can be supported with the help of Excel?

I didn’t say that “the population would never reach that high because it would take a ‘deliberate concerted government effort’”.

No, you didn’t use the words ‘deliberate concerted government effort’. I made a mistake when I used the words ‘concerted deliberate Governement effort’. You used the words ‘concerted deliberate Governement strategy’ instead.

That’s another one of my factual innacuracies you can take credit for exposing. You’re really making me look bad.

I said that you couldn’t conclude that the population is “expected” to reach that figure based on what is in the report. Once again we are dealing with the difference between “will be” and “could be”.

We both know you said more than that. You also said that the report claims that it would take a concerted deliberate government strategy for the population to reach 12 million by 2058.

“Secondly, with regard to the article you cited, you say “the population of the republic of Ireland is expected to reach 12 million by 2058″. I think my post below is clear enough but I’ll repeat myself. The study on which the article is based says no such thing. The line I quoted (from that study) demonstrates this, saying that it would take a concerted deliberate Governement strategy to bring such an increase about.”

Do you stand by that comment? Do you still believe it would take a concerted deliberate government strategy for the population to reach 12 million by 2058?

To say that the population is “expected” to reach 12 million by 2058 based on this report, is simply not true.

Can you please read what I’ve written already. I’ve stated very clearly already that I didn’t use the report to get the prediction that the population would reach 12 million by 2058. It was you who first brought up the report to try to use it to show that the population could not reach that without the concerted strategy by the government.

Recognising that the report does not specifically exclude the prospect is not a capitulation. I made no mistake.

You did make a mistake. You referred to the report as saying that it would take a deliberate government strategy for the population to reach 12 million by 2058.

“Secondly, with regard to the article you cited, you say “the population of the republic of Ireland is expected to reach 12 million by 2058″. I think my post below is clear enough but I’ll repeat myself. The study on which the article is based says no such thing. The line I quoted (from that study) demonstrates this, saying that it would take a concerted deliberate Governement strategy to bring such an increase about.”

That statement is simply incorrect. The report at no point says that it would take a deliberate conserted government strategy for the population to reach 12 million by 2058. When you made that comment above you were clearly mistaken. Either that or you were being deliberately misleading.

I can assure you that I too am a democrat. Indeed, according to the material posted here I’m a better democrat than you, being quite fond of the one man (or woman), one vote system. I voted last year and have lived happily enough with the result.

So as a democrat would you support the idea of a referendum on the issue of immigration so that people can vote on whether they think that immigration is too high?

With regard to your inability to believe that I think of a person who grows up in Ireland as Irish, I’m not sure what to tell you.

Tell me that you honestly consider the Irish-born offspring of two Nigerians to be just as Irish as the Irish-born offspring of two native Irish people. Tell me as well that you could honestly consider the Japanese-born offspring of two Norwegians living in Japan to be just as Japanese as the offspring of two indigenous Japanese people.

I know what I think and I’ve been honest with you about that. It seems like a failure of imagination on your part not to recognise that I’m not you and therefore I think differently.

It’s called naive realism. I just can’t understand why people don’t see the world the way I see it.

You have been consistently factually incorrect throughout this discussion.

I realise that and I’m determined to change my ways.

Just to make sure I don’t repeat some of them again, would you mind listing all the factual inaccuracies I’ve made so far? I know I made one factually inaccurate statement about the non-Irish population being 2% back in 1998 and I incorrectly quoted you as using the word ‘effort’ when you actually wrote ’strategy’, but I’m having a hard time remembering the others.

Your inability to guess what I’m thinking (despite me telling you what that is in precise terms) suggests that your instincts are similarly unreliable.

My instincts are unreliable? What the hell does that mean?

Between speculation about what I REALLY think and stupid comparisons it seems like your willingness to engage in an actual argument is fading.

I think you know that I’m more than capable of engaging in an actual argument.

No matter how hard they try nobody has yet been able to get the better of old Mac. Wicknight gave up, OscarBravo gave up, Harvey gave up, allthedavids gave up, those fat bastards over on boards.ie gave up and had me banned…the list goes on. I’m a legend.

If you’re handed a photo of a person, can you tell me what language they speak, what accent they have, where their parents came from, where their life has been lived, what passport they carry, what their nationality is?

Show me a picture of a person and I think I can could do a very good job of determining what part of the world their ancestors came from. Show me a picture of an Irish man and an Indonesian without identifying which is which and I can guarantee 100% that I can correctly tell from looking at them which one is the Irish man and which one isn’t.

A person’s nationality is not something that can be taken off like a dress. It is an important and defining part of who they are.

Exactly. My nationality is an important and defining part of who I am and it’s not something that I could easily take off like a dress. I’m sure it’s also an important and defining part of the people entering this country and I wouldn’t expect them to to take it off like a dress either.

Do you really believe that someone with Norman blood is not ethnically Irish?

When did I say that I believed someone with Norman blood isn’t ethnically Irish? The normans assimilated into the native Irish population centuries ago.

Someone whose antecedents came to this country four hundred years ago?

If their ancestors intermarried into the native population, if they adopted their culture and were genetically and culturally not that different from the native population, then it’s fair to say that they have become part of the ethnic Irish population.

Or one hundred? Or fifty?

Yes, it’s possible. There have been several prominent Irish people who have had recent non-Irish ancestry. Eamon De Valera and Padraig Pearse both had non-Irish fathers.

If you accept the principle that non-Irish people have become Irish through a process of intermarrying and the passage of time, why should that stop now?

Because the circumstances are different. It was easy for previous waves of immigrants to assimilate because becaues they were so few in number and because they were culturally and genetically not all that different from the native Irish among whom they settled. The exception in the north-east of the island only proves the rule.

If you want to draw a line in the sand and say that only pureblood Irish people (checkable through DNA) should be part of the Irish nation, then good luck to you.

I don’t think it’s necessary to go to the trouble of checking people’s DNA. Just putting a stop to this massive, unprecedented influx of foreigners into our population should be enough.

If you’re being strict neither you nor I will make the grade though.

I think I would make the grade. I don’t think I’m different genetically from the rest of the indigenous population. The overwhelming majority of my ancestors were indigenous gaelic Irish people and even though I have English ancestry, I share those exact same English ancestors with thousands of other people in the west of Ireland and so I don’t think I’m in any way unique. English people are genetically similar to the Irish anyway so they didn’t leave much of a mark on the gene-pool.

Your concept of what Irishness is, seems absurdly narrow and impractical and ungenerous and unrealistic.

I think my concept of Irisness is much more realistic and much more in line with what happens in the real world.

People move around.

Not in Ireland they haven’t. The evidence from genetics seems to show that the current indigenous population of Ireland are mostly descended from the original settlers of Ireland who came here 9,000 years ago.

Some go home. Some get settled and fall in love and have children. Sometimes this even happens across races. To view this as a dilution of our nation and a terrifying prospect that will make the place less Irish, is a little hysterical.

I think the problem is in the use of the word ’some’. Which word would be more accurate, ’some’ or ‘many’?

Ireland in 1500 was a very different place to the Ireland of 1800.

You’re right, it was a different place. What’s your point?

The differences between Dublin in 1914 and 2008 or even 1970 and 1999 are very clear. You can view these changes as a downward slide, a rollercoaster or as a general improvement.

And what exactly is your point?

Ireland is still Ireland, a distinct place with its own identity.

Australia in 1500 was a distinct place with its own identity. It was still a distinct place with its own identity in 1900.

The scare-mongering stories that you originally presented about our becoming a minority have turned out to have little basis in fact.

Not at all. The factual basis of my scare-mongering stories are as firm as they have always been. It’s still a fact that the president of Dublin City University predicted that the indigenous Irish people could be an ethnic minority by the year 2050. And it’s still a fact that the the indigenous Irish population fell from 91% to 87% of the total in the space of just four years between 2002 and 2006, a rate that if allowed to continue would see us becoming a minority by 2043.

The definition of what it is to be Irish has changed in parallel with how our society has altered and will continue to do so.

I don’t know what you mean by this. Can you give an example of how the definition of what it is to be Irish has changed in the past?

It’s nothing to be afraid of.

If it’s nothing to be afraid of why do you continually label everything I say as ’scare-mongering’. Why call it scare-mongering if it’s nothing to be afraid of?