Preferred Parties- Worldwide

[Colin]

Ireland: Progressive Democrats
Netherlands: People's Party for Freedom and Democracy
Germany: Free Democrats
Switzerland: Free Democrats
Estonia: Reform Party
Poland: Civic Platform
Czech Republic: Civic Democratic Party
Denmark: Venstre
Norway: Progress Party
Belgium: Flemish Liberals and Democrats
South Africa: Democratic Alternative
Costa Rica: Movimentio Libertario
Sweden: Centre Party, Liberal People's Party
Australia: Liberal Party

[Colin]

7. What's wrong with Ireland?

I'm sure you know what the Magdalene Laundries were, right?

I've read up on them. Mostly they were part of a much larger phenomenon in the British Isles as a whole. There were many such asylums in England and Scotland as well that had mostly the same sort of abuses and same "standards" as these asylums and by the second half of the 20th century they were already in decline, though the true villainy of these institutions wasn't found out until unmarked graves were found at the sight of one of these "laundries" in 1993.

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Oh good heavens! You heard from some drinking buddy of yours that condoms were illegal in Ireland over 25 years ago. Wow. Don't you consider that places can change, as they have done in Ireland very quickly. It would be as uninformed as to basically consider the culture, politics and social mores of the early Reagan administration the currently accepted norms in America.

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Ireland has a general fertility rate of 1.86 children per woman. The United States has a general fertility rate of 2.17 children per woman. Australia is 1.81, New Zealand 1.78, Norway is 1.78, Denmark is 1.76, there really isn't a whole lot of difference between fertility rates in Ireland and those in the rest of the first world, they are actually lower than in the United States.

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What a dumb and absolutely bigoted remark. I'm an agnostic of Catholic descent and I think that's pretty damn insulting. You seem to love your sweeping generalizations and your bigoted remarks. Suburbs, Muslims, now Catholics, you hate as many different groups of people as the KKK.

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Oh Jesus tapdancing Christ.

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Thank you Irish people for at least not giving into that sh**t.

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They do have car ferries to England and possibly to France from Ireland so it is possible to road trip to those places.

[Colin]

Alright I wont try to sway you. The only thing that I would like to point out is that total fertility rate is the most commonly used measure of the "birth rate" of a country. The numbers are high in Ireland because, compared to many other European countries, Ireland has more people of child bearing age and thus more births. Wikipedia says it best:

The TFR (or TPFR) is a better index of fertility than the Crude birth rate (annual number of births per thousand population) because it is independent of the age structure of the population, but it is a poorer estimate of actual completed family size than the total cohort fertility rate, which is obtained by summing the age-specific fertility rates that actually applied to each cohort as they aged through time. In particular, the TFR does not necessarily predict how many children young women now will eventually have, as their fertility rates in years to come may change from those of older women now. However, the TFR is a reasonable summary of current fertility levels.

[Colin]

Since 2003 we have had a new Film Censor and films are rarely banned here anymore - I think only "Spun" was banned out of the films released to the censor since his appointment.

You shouldn't have a Film Censor at all though.

The title of Film Cencor is increasingly a misnomer insofar as the job really entails the certification of films much more than the censoring thereof which is a very rare and increasingly pointless activity (this is the age of the internet after all).

Though, I also think that for all you can try and slam Ireland in this area, it's not as if the U.S. doesn't have it's own issues in this regard. TPTB's attitudes (in the U.S.) to swearing and to things like whats-her-name's 'wardrobe malfunction' at the Superbowl a few years back come to mind.

Swearing? No one cares about swearing. They show the South Park movie on TV unedited all the time.

Yes at one in the morning on basic cable which is hardly what I would consider primetime.