Reply to Aspergers boy
I was about to reply to your comments but having read them carefully I realise there’s nothing I can say in response. Everything you wrote is correct. There isn’t a single one of those eleven examples that you’ve listed below that I could disagree with. It really hurts me to say it but you’ve succeeded in showing me to be a mistake-making, egregious-error making, scare-mongering purveyor of misquoted and unsusbtantiated, hysterical, over-the-top half-truths.
This is really going to do alot of damage to my reputation and so when I first read what you had written I had seriously considered deleting that list of errors to prevent other people seeing them. Then I realised that you would probably have a copy of them and that you could easily post them over on eirenet.
Then I thought about retaliating by compiling a list of factual errors and inaccuracies that you’ve made. I thought that might make me a look a bit immature and a bit Un-British though and I would hate for this to drag on for longer than necessary. The shame is bad enough as it is that I just want this to come to a quick end. I decided I’d just take the beating like a muslim woman is supposed to take it from her muslim husband. Anyway, it’s not the first beating old Mac has had to take and I’m sure it won’t be the last. There’s life in the old boy yet.
There is one thing I disagree with you about though. It’s not in the list of examples, it’s something you said afterwards. It’s the point you made about how the facts underlying my argument have been been shown to be nearly all wrong. I don’t think the facts underlying my argument have been shown to be nearly all wrong. I may have misquoted or misrepresented those facts but I don’t think the facts themselves when they are presented accurately in any way weakens my argument that immigration into Ireland is at a worryingly high level.
Ta ceist amhain agam duit chomh maith. I’m sure you’re probably sick of me constantly bringing this up but can you take a quick look ar seo.
“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?
Agus ma sheasain tu faoin e, ta ceist amhain eile faoi. You claimed that you quoted from a line demonstrating that it would take a concerted deliberate government strategy for the population to reach 12 million by 2058. You subsequently admitted that the report doesn’t contain any mention of the 12 million figure so I’m assuming you must have taken that quote from somewhere else. Where did you get that line you quoted from?
Over to you Aspergers boy
You say “This is really going to do alot of damage to my reputation “
Ah mac, I think you have to have a good reputation in the first place for any damage to be done to it you wally
While I appreciate your straightness, I had hoped that we could get through this entire debate without calling each other names. Are you suggesting that my debunking of your entirely spurious facts and figures makes you think I’m autistic? I don’t buy it. If I wanted to call you a lying dishonest scare-mongering racist I would at least have some evidence to support my position. But I chose not to. I think this exchange of views has, for the most part, been refreshingly civil. Indulging yourself in name-calling and racist stereotyping after the argument has been lost seems like bad form to me.
Notwithstanding that, I am happy to deal with your question. The starting point for this was an erroneous report in the Irish Independent, where the reporter half-read a press release by Henk Van der Kamp (relating to the “Twice the Size?” project) that mentioned future population projections of 8 million in 2030 and 12 million in 2058. The journalist then wrote that Ireland was “expected to reach a population of eight million by 2033 and 12 million by 2058”. This was simply not the case – if the reporter had read the document properly he would have understood that the purpose of this project was to start a discussion based on an imagined significant increase of the population (which could only be brought about by a deliberate Government policy) and not that the population was EXPECTED to reach that figure. You then quoted this article and that’s where I came in. The 12 million figure mentioned by Van der Kamp in his press release, as we know, was not in the actual “Twice the Size?” document.
What I wrote in response to your claim was this: … you’re simply wrong when you say that our population is expected to rise to 12 million by 2058. When I look at the Independent article you linked to, I can understand your mistake. The journalist fundamentally seems to have misunderstood what was being said. You should read the actual report, which suggests that Government policy should be to make efforts to double the population by 2030. (Quoting from the report) “At national level, it would not be realistic to assume a doubling of population by 2030….such a doubling of population over a similar time-frame would require a specific, targeted Government growth strategy in favour of Ireland’s Gateway and Hub settlements.”
I subsequently wrote … 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 Government strategy to bring such an increase about.
Now while the figure of 12 million is not specifically mentioned, it is nevertheless entirely true to say that, based on the figures in this document, it would take a “concerted deliberate Government strategy to bring such an increase about”. An increase in population of 4 million people in twenty-five years or of 8 million in fifty years is just not realistically going to happen without such an intervention. Using the figures in the report, we discover that “during the period of most rapid growth - the decade preceding April 2006 – Ireland’s population grew by just under 17%, which is 1.6% per annum compound”. In order to achieve a population of 12 million by 2058, we would need to increase that rate by 33% to 2.13% and maintain it there for the next fifty years. I’ll repeat that – we would need to increase the rate of population growth from its highest ever rate by one third and maintain it at that level over the next fifty years.
Given that the growth rate of the period 1996-2006 occurred with a backdrop of unprecedented economic growth and immigration from the accession States of the EU and that both of these are now falling (which is where the whole debate started), that the CSO’s projected rates of population growth for the period 2006-2041 vary between roughly 0.42% and 1.48% and that Eurostat’s for the period 2004-2050 is 0.62%, I think it’s fair to say that, barring a very active and unforeseen Government policy, there is no way that our population will hit the magic number of 12 million people by 2058. To say that it is EXPECTED to reach that figure is, I hope you can agree, laughably wrong.
And I don’t accept that your argument has not been weakened by your misquoting and misrepresentation of the facts. What a bizarre position to take! You stated as fact that we just have too many immigrants coming here and used a whole load of wrong numbers to support that position, building a case on foundations that were simply not true. We are not likely to be a minority by 2050 and the President of DCU never said that we would be. Our population is not expected to be 12 million by 2058. The percentage of Irish people in our population has not dropped from 98% to 86% in a few short years. Your fundamental belief may not have changed despite all that I’ve told you, but your argument had no factual support and so collapsed. I would be happy to continue a discussion about immigration with you and to hear your opinions. We have managed to have a polite calm debate (ignoring your recent act of name-calling) about a topic that generates more heat than light. If you can be less flippant, more accurate and support your argument with properly sourced facts there’s no reason why that dialogue should not continue.
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