The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Eimear Ní Mhéalóid:

Mary Kay, in re that Octocon panel:

Probably something near the same percentage of people in Ireland believe in God, although fewer would pray regularly or go to Mass. That statistic about US religious observance is usually trotted out to counterpoint the popular culture image of the USA as largely secular and hedonistic.

The members of Octocon would be less religiously inclined than non-fans and more likely to be among the group of Irish people scornful about religion. We've had our own version of the cruelty masquerading as religion that Sylvia talks about.

There's a debate at the moment as to whether there should be a reference to God in the preamble to the proposed EU constitution.

We've also been here: scroll down to the second part of the entry.

Just to be polite ... in Ireland at present only graduates of Trinity College and NUI colleges have Seanad votes. There is a long-standing campaign for reform to give other graduates voting rights and indeed a Constitutional amendment to make this possible was passed back in 1979. The Trinity and NUI constituencies elect three Senators each.

The remainder of the Senate is elected under a peculiar vocational panel system. (Apparently this was partly inspired by a series of papal encyclicals in the 1930s, which Mussolini also claimed to be implementing in the fascist/corporatist system.) The elections take place just after every general election with the electorate being the outgoing TDs, Senators and sitting county councillors. The Taoiseach also gets to nominate 11 members. Sometimes this mechanism is used to nominate a notable person from NI (e.g. Gordon Wilson) but usually it's a consolation prize for party politicians who failed to get a Dail seat.

Irish Senators love going on junkets to the US where they are treated as persons of much greater importance than they are at home.

In Ireland we replaced the title Ulster King of Arms with that of Chief Herald, in charge of the Genealogical Office. Some did think the whole apparatus should be demolished as unsuitable to a republic, as far as I recall from reading Changing Times, the autobiography of Edward MacLysaght who was the first Chief Herald.

According to the Genealogical Office most of the Gaelic chieftains adopted their own arms, sometimes with pre-Norman or even pre-Christian features. I love a site that has sentences like "Some of the settlers of the Tudor and Cromwellian periods were already armigerous before coming to Ireland. "

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