Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ireland Collaboration/statementbyBrownHairedGirl

Very good approach. Kittybrewster ☎ 13:09, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I dunno where this will take us, but if we start by trying to find out what we agree on, we may have a base on which to build agreement on some of the more contentious points.

If there is disagreement on some basic points like this, then it seems to me that the rest of the process needs to start at a lower level than we had thought. So let's see how it goes. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:58, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes. My fear was that this process might be hussled through without basic principles such as these being properly considered. Kittybrewster ☎ 19:21, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Republic of Ireland Act and description of the state

As per this diff I have been asked why I am abstaining from the proposition that says that the Republic of Ireland act says ROI is the official description of the state.

My reason for abstaining is that the act does not say it is the "official" description just "A" or "the" description. Also as an act I don't feel that it makes it official in the eyes of international law even if it said "official" as it was not carried into the constitution of the country. The constitution is ultimately the most important and most relevant document in this case and not an act which we can pick and choose how we want to use it. In my opinion the act merely states that the country officially known as Ireland was declared a republic. I am not however, denying that the it says the description of the State shall be the Republic of Ireland, I am however doubting how people are using it to suit their own personal interpretation that it is the "official" description. I hope I made some sort of sense.MusicInTheHouse (talk) 00:45, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Sense?? I'm afraid that I find this utterly mind-boggling. :(

This is an Act of the Oireachtas, which is entitled under the constitution to legislate insofar as the constitution permits. The preamble to the 1948 Act says that it is:

“ IN ACT TO REPEAL THE EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY (EXTERNAL RELATIONS) ACT, 1936, TO DECLARE THAT THE DESCRIPTION OF THE STATE SHALL BE THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND, AND TO ENABLE THE PRESIDENT TO EXERCISE THE EXECUTIVE POWER OR ANY EXECUTIVE FUNCTION OF THE STATE IN OR IN CONNECTION WITH ITS EXTERNAL RELATIONS. ” — Republic of Ireland Act, 1948

The Oireachtas passed the Republic of Ireland Act more than sixty years ago, and if it was repugnant to the constitution it could have been struck down by the Supreme Court. In 60 years, that has not happened.

So why the doubt that it is the "official" description? Are you trying to tell us that an Act of the Oireachtas has no official status?

Your comment that "people are using it to suit their own personal interpretation that it is the "official" description" seems to me a terrible bit of bad faith. Do you have any references to support either your view that an Act of the Oireachtas has no official status, or that anyone who reads that Act in its plain English meaning as conferring an official description is somehow making a "personal interpretation"?

Do you view the clearly stated intent of other Acts of the Oireachtas in the same way, as being some sort of unofficial document? What about the Passport Act 2008 or the Turf Development Act, 1990 or the Coroners Act, 1962? Is it purely a matter of "personal opinion" to state that Passports Act 2008 "provides for the processing personal data, including biometric data" when that's what it says in the preamble?

I'm afraid that it's this sort of argument that made me hold back from getting involved in this process. :( There's plenty of scope for reasoned debate on the significance and relevance of the word "description", but if this process is going to involve people arguing that an Act of the Oireachtas has no official status, we'll be here forever. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:30, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

It's just an opinion. I feel the amount of weight being put on this act which has zero relevance to what is said in the all important constitution is wrong. Why have the Irish government tried to avoid using the term ROI since the acts inception anyway? Yo don't have to agree with my opinion, ultimately it doesn't matter; it won't affect the decision making process.MusicInTheHouse (talk) 11:55, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

I hesitated over this one. To disagree with it would have been wrong, but to agree would be to ignore the history of the use of that term which developed before and during the troubles which resulted in its non use as a "name" becoming a part of the GFA. As a legal statement it is correct. --Snowded (talk) 05:49, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Snowded, this is still bizarre.

We can disagree about the wider significance of the Act, about the uses made of it, but that's not my point here, and it's not the point made in that very narrow proposition.

My concern is simply that you and Musicman describe as a "opinion" or "personal opinion" the clear provision of an Act of the Oireachtas, without any references at all to back up the bizarre proposition that the Act has no official status.

This does have an important bearing on the outcome of this process, because if participants dismiss statue law as "opinion" (without any evidence to support that dismissal), then we are ignoring WP:V. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:35, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

"in" versus "on"

When talking about an island, we talk about things being on it. When talking about a country, we talk about things being in it. So "x happened/was born/(etc.) in Ireland" are all things that talk about a political entity called Ireland, not a physical geographical one. Despite the two being the same thing at certain points in history, they should not be confused in a modern encyclopaedia. It seems to me, rightly or wrongly (and I'm not suggesting it's deliberate) that many of the statements listed are potentially misleading because of this. waggers (talk) 23:06, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Oh dang, I was just about to post a "Dumb question" section on that exact point. When I read that "Gordie Howe holds the record for the biggest trout caught in Ireland", is that the record for the biggest fish in the [Republic of] Ireland, or the biggest fish caught on the island called Ireland? Franamax (talk) 23:17, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Waggers, are you really serious about this?

Until you mentioned this, I had never heard anyone say "on Ireland" when referring to geography, nor had I seen it written. I have heard and read plenty of times the phrases "on Arranmore", "on Sherkin", "on Clare Island" etc, but never that they have been "on Ireland", or that a place is "on Ireland", or that something happened "on Ireland". Thinking about this usage, the "on" preposition seems to me to be applied only to little islands, unless accompanied by the words "island of" -- e.g. "in Tasmania" or "on the island of Tasmania". (Take a look at that article about Tasmania: lots of uses of "in Tasmania", none of "on Tasmania", and Tasmania is not an independent state).

In all the articles relating to Ireland on wikipedia, I have never seen that usage, nor is it mentioned at WP:IMOS or discussed at WT:IMOS. A google search of wikipedia for "on Ireland" throws up about 459 hits. So far as I can see most of them are variant's usages such as "intelligence on Ireland", "effects on Ireland" (in Republic_of_Ireland), "pressure on Ireland", or if geographic are phrases such as "on Ireland's south coast" or "situated on Ireland's eastern coast" (e.g. Belfast). I have not yet found any articles which says that someone was "born on Ireland", and the only example that a google search of Wikipedia throws up is on the user page of a 14-year old. A search of the whole web for "born in Ireland" throws up 15 hits, 3 of them for usages such as "born on Ireland national holiday", the remainder apparently all on user-generated genealogicial sites.

Do you have any references to support the claim that novel idea is the correct usage? And if it applies to Ireland, then presumably you also have references to show that it also applies to Great Britain, which is also an island but has not been a county for over 200 years.

Even if your very surprising point turned out to be correct, you are still asking us to accept that a difference on letter in a preposition should be an unambiguous indication to a reader that we are referring to a different meaning of a word which they may not have known has two meanings. (I was astonished in the middle east to find how many people were unaware that the state of Ireland did not cover the whole island).

That's not a plausible proposition. This an encyclopaedia, not a cryptic crossword, and the guidelines repeatedly stress that wikipedia is written for a general audience, not for specialists (see for example WP:TITLE).

I find it very hard to assume good faith here, because this is so implausible that it looks more like some sort of gaming technique to bog the IECOLL process down in as much bizarre trivia as possible. :(

Between an editor who doesn't want to acknowledge that "Ireland" is the name of both the island and the state, two who are apparently claiming that the Republic of Ireland Act 1948 has somehow ceased to have any official status, and now this prepositional novelty, it all looks a bit silly. :( --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:08, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

First, I agree wholeheartedly that we should not rely on readers spotting "in" or "on" to work out which of the two entities we're talking about. But indeed "on" is the correct grammar when talking about an island, no matter how big. "Dublin is the largest city in Ireland" and "Dublin is the largest city on Ireland" have two separate meanings - the first refers to the country and the latter to the island. The reason you don't hear/read "on Ireland" much is because anything "in Ireland" or "in Northern Ireland" is usually, by extension, "on Ireland" - if not, that's usually mentioned in the text. waggers (talk) 14:25, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

In case it's not clear, the point I'm really trying to make is that all of the "in Ireland" statements listed should make it really clear which they're talking about. As they stand, the default is to assume the grammar is correct and that they're talking about the state, not the island. waggers (talk) 14:28, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm, there is something dubious about this argument, waggers. BTW, is there a way to prove that Ireland (all of it) doesn't still constitute a country? That's not a political question, but you seem to be making a "lump of rock" argument in relation to the trans-jurisdictional concept of Ireland, and I think there is a reason why even some people with no politics at play find "Ireland (country)" for the state problematic. But if you do truly believe that "in Ireland" is incorrect for any use of Ireland referring to all of Ireland during a time when there is/was no one unified Irish state/country, than there is a great deal of work to be done on Wiki correcting all those grammatically incorrect "in Ireland"s (BTW, can you give us a precise date in Irish history when it became acceptable to refer to Ireland as "in Ireland"? In other words, can you tell us when Ireland became a country?) For example--seeing as it's the 17th of March--Ireland was no more unified as a state when a certain Saint was about than it is today (in fact, it was problably *less* unified then.) So at St. Patrick, I'm seeing about a dozen "in Ireland"s used. I take it those are all grammatically incorrect? Since there was no state called Ireland between 1921 and 1937, would all references to "in Ireland" referring to that time period be incorrect? Nuclare (talk) 04:03, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

All I'm saying is that it's unclear which Ireland the statements BrownHairedGirl has made are talking about, and in order for us to make an informed decision on whether or not we agree with them, we need to know which entity she's referring to. The default for "in Ireland", without any additional context, is the (modern) state. What's dubious about that? waggers (talk) 12:16, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Waggers, perhaps you could clarify that you are not proposing actually using "on Ireland" all through the 'pedia? For myself, I see the same problem as I think you see: when "Ireland" appears, is it the political entity or the geographic one? For anything right up to the partition, it's fairly clear the two are synonymous. Post-partition though, what is the northernmost village in Ireland? What is the deepest lake in Ireland? Where is the largest shopping centre? Each of these questions could have two different answers, so how are they to be distinguished? Franamax (talk) 18:17, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Absolutely right - I'm not proposing any Wikipedia-wide change (although I do maintain that "on" is the correct word for the island: the northernmost village in the state of Ireland / the northernmost village on the island of Ireland; the deepest lake in the state of Ireland / the deepest lake on the island of Ireland; the largest shopping centre in the country of Ireland / the largest shopping centre on the island of Ireland, etc. etc.) waggers (talk) 21:09, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

That's fine, but that's no reason to vote oppose on BHG's statements. Yes, in some contexts people will say "on the island of island" and in many cases that is a good way to word things texually on Wiki, but titles such as "Sport on the island of Ireland" probably aren't going to go over well. I suppose we could debate whether they should. And in real world usage, all of Ireland is more often just "in Ireland" not "on the island of Ireland," so unless you are trying to singlehandedly rewrite the language, what was there to oppose (and support in the case of the last one) in BHG's statements? I called your comments dubious on the basis of this notion of a default to the state. In real world usage there is no default to the state, which is precisely why we are in this mess. I don't think BHG was proposing text for a Wiki article; I think she was asking simple true or false questions. Nuclare (talk) 00:52, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Waggers wrote: "unclear which Ireland the statements BrownHairedGirl has made are talking about, and in order for us to make an informed decision on whether or not we agree with them, we need to know which entity she's referring to".

So Waggers has got it in one. That's precisely the reason I made those statements about something being "in Ireland": several of those statements contain an ambiguity, because the word "Ireland" is ambiguous. However, most of them are chosen to be true if you accept either meaning of "Ireland", and false only if you reject the notion that "Ireland" can mean the whole island.

As to this in/on notion that Waggers has introduced, I await any evidence for Waggers's assertion that "'on' is the correct word for the island". As outline above, I can find no evidence that it is used either on or off wikipedia other than in a miniscule minority of cases. This really does seem to me to be a red-herring of a deeply glowing variety. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:35, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Well, this is a nice example of Wikipedia's Ivory Tower approach to knowledge, isn't it? First we define "Ireland" as being the name of a country and then we define the name of the island as being the same as the country, and then after that we can just ignore the existance of Northern Ireland. Catch a grip, folks; you can't have it both ways.

An event that happened in 2008 in Beflast happened "on the island of Ireland". It did not "happen in Ireland" as Ireland (without qualification) is the name of a different country. The event happened "in Britain" or, if that offends your sense of political correctness too much, "in Northern Ireland".

Most of this page is simply a bunch of people trying to vote out of existance a fact that they don't seem to like: that "Ireland" is not an unambiguous word which can be used to label the whole of the island of Ireland.

"An event which happened in Toronto in 2008 can be accurately be described as having happened in America".213.78.235.176 (talk) 10:11, 7 June 2009 (UTC)