Idle Talk
Over Easter 8 people died in road traffic accidents in Northern Ireland, since the beginning of the year 47 people have died in total, the breakdown is 7 pedestrians, 21 drivers, 14 passengers, 1 cyclist and 4 motorcyclists. Since posting only a few hours ago these figures have actually increased.
In the year April 2002 - March 2003 Northern Ireland has had 7,961 cases of domestic violence, 3593 of those classed as Common Assault, the large majority of these cases had female victims. West Belfast had the worst record of domestic violence with 892 incidents, Moyle was at the other end with 37.
2001/2002 saw 185 racial incidents, the majority against Indians. 39 of the incidents were physical violence, 38 an attack on a person's home, 33 an attack on a person's property. (Statistics source PSNI Statistics Branch)
Do I have a point? Not really, just that it would be nice if we could stop gassing on about 'securocrats' and 'separatists' and think about the more mundane things in NI life. I'm sure it's very glamourous to think of yourself as some sort of freedom fighter and what have you, arguing your case on bulletin boards and so on but, well, we are free - free to waste politicians time, free to let people get the shit kicked out of them while we argue about what flag flies where, free to drive over an old man on a bike then support blowing up a speed camera. Ah, what's the point...
On the plus side we got our new trains today!
«4 CommentsApril 20, MMIV»
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And those are only the incidents that are reported…Women’s Aid get tens of thousands of calls each year. Though I think (most of) the politicians waste our time as much as we waste theirs.
Politicians respond to what we lead them to believe is important to us, so when they see the only thing that gets out attention is sectarian related, that’s what they focus on. Politicians are not some wholey separate bunch, they think the way we do, move with the herd, do what’s popular. So when all we want to see is Gerry and Ian scoring sectarian points off each other by having a flag removed from here or there or whatever, then that’s all they’ll do. We waste their time by leading them to believe that we don’t want politics, we want point scoring. Both are far better politicians that point scorers in my opinion.
But sectarian politicians want to score points off each other anyway, they don’t need us to “make” them do it. They have their own agenda and they’ll do their own thing with complete disregard to what the people want. I don’t think that most people in NI want to see Gerry and Ian bitch-fighting, but the minority of people who do want that are generally the ones with the loudest voices.
52 people killed in road accidents? I had to put this number into context.
I just checked, and Canada wide in 2000, we had 2900 traffic related fatalities, for 33 million people, or one for every 11,000 people. Extrapolating the 53 people killed in four months to a year round figure, that’s 159/1.68 million or 1 fatality for every 10,600 people, the same ratio.
In terms of pedestrians and cyclists, 14% of our fatalities are pedestrians and cyclists and it looks like you have 19%. Scary numbers. Maybe I’ll stay home today.