It was a civil offence, not a criminal offence. He will therefore have a civil record, but not a criminal one. His travel to the US will be unaffected.

Only if he’s driving ;)

bernadette@ …that would be the right way to do it .but what of the rip off for the legal profession .Ireland is a sick and sad country run by these leeches

No Brian-it’s not a criminal offence-he answered that question on newstalk today,in an interview with George hook..if it did he would let the whole know!!..

No.. He is one of the elite.

Liam…..so is that only when your caught. I expect that if you put in an hours fee and come back 2 hours later that your going to drive off if you dont have a notice on your car???? or maybe your that honest ?

@ Adrian – Firstly I put all of the coins I had in my wallet, which was €1.20 into the machine, secondly the machine doesn’t take any notes so I had no more money to put in the machine, third I was getting my hair cut and the queue was very long, by the time I got back the ticket was on my car, so when you say “You need to take responsibility for your time”, if you could actually predict the future then your comment would have merit but you can’t so it doesn’t.

And lastly yes I could of spent that €200 locally, but I did It out of spite not to, so maybe when town councils see that local businesses are suffering they will rethink this stupid policy.

It is adherence to laws like these that create a sense of law & order within a working society – it all filters up.

Listen to yourself. Your excuses are lame. Do you take any responsibility here. Is the traffic warden a mind reader ? – ‘shur I’ll let this lad go – he is getting his haircut’

@Liam hahah are you for real?? Grow up and welcome to the world.
If your ticket says your time expires at 1.30..that means either you are leaving by then or you go put an extra euro in to have the time to get your haircut..it’s called being organised thinking ahead..hate moaners like you making excuses.

@Liam. Same crazy stuff from ‘the city of Westminster’ once over there with a reserved entrance ticket at a fixed time to visit Buckingham Palace visitors area. Paid for 2 hrs parking on the street (some crazy amount like 6 pnds etc) because of the rush to be there as the tour started and being with a baby etc I turned the stupid ticket the wrong way around on the dash. No amount of explaining could save me from a fine of 50 pnds for supposedly having no ticket purchased. Those little henchmen/women whether in an office or on the streets are part of a crying disorder, a mental one, and not part of any attempt to enforce order. A towns parking officers should be taking orders from people who are in sympathy with the idea that the area be attractive for people to spend time in, and not threatening them with extreme consequences for every little mistake. The Germans mentioned above (although very punctual) already know this and there is always a grace period on condition of course that you bother to buy a ticket in the first place.

@ FDL, Ordinary Lad and Adrian. Being organised doesn’t always work. Let’s say someone who is ultra organised gets caught short, (now use your imagination lads) and, in spite of being organised, goes over their parking limit by eight minutes, and gets a fine. I wonder how any of you three self righteous knowalls would feel then. Oh by the way, it did happen!!!

Let me role play the mind reading meter warden here ….: ‘shur that Mick’s car, he is always ultra organised, something unforeseen must have happened – I’m going to let him slide too’. Get real lads – overstay your time and you get a ticket – suck it up, I would.

I recently had to pay a €120 clamping fee to Dublin City clampers – my ticket had flipped over when I closed the car door. I was able to show the clamper that I had a valid ticket when I was clamped. I appealed but they rejected my appeal. I then sent a solicitors letter. They gave me half the money back eventually. Disgraceful

Ditto,stopped buying in the main street 4 years ago. Safe on time,transport but mostly on blood pressure

Listening to the responses on here would make me despair. Rules are great and all in principle but blindly following rules without any amount of common sense or leeway is not a society that I want to live in. Plenty of things were against the rules, women voting and homosexuality as two quick examples.

I’m not comparing a parking ticket to these examples but I’m rather using it to apply a principle of common sense to the world. A parking warden should not be unreasonable in her application of the rules, and absolutely should use common sense… is applying a ticket for a customer using a local business that is a couple of minutes late back a good idea in the bigger picture? Of course it isn’t.

I recently commented after a few work trips abroad that the reason the Irish do so well in other countries is a natural ability to not allow the status quo define their expectations. Perhaps I was too kind.

Pity they couldn’t abort him when he went in there.

Does he have a tv license? Coppers should grill him now they have the chance

I am confused, he refused to pay the fine because he ran over time by a few min or he does not agree with local conceal protocol or he is up his own arse

He is up his own arse ,never a more self centered pr1€k have I ever had the displeasure to know

And cut ur hair !!!

It’s a pity they didn’t keep him there for crimes against the paper reader. Some of his writing is woeful. Actually, most of his writing is.

You dislike him because you are an atheist, your belief(and therefore everything the man does will be wrong to you) while criticising him for arguing for his beliefs.
He argues against feminism because it advocates a raw brand of sexism with nobody calling them out.
You say he is ‘full of his own self importance’ a phrase used by losers, who tend to have a crippling inferiority complex and have achieved nothing in life. I am sure you are different.

Were you crying while writing that?

So, it’s spot on, then

Somebody else, always to blame. Right buddy.

I’ve tried 8 or 9 times to respond but it won’t post. Giving up now.

Blame for what exactly? What on earth are you on about? At least waters chooses a coherent topic to spew his incoherent pseudointellectual bile over. You just seem to string random sentences together and pretend it all makes sense.

I give up too.

I never EVER agree with Waters but this is an exception. Congratulations Mr Waters all is forgiven, …………….until you write your next bleedin’ article. (That sounds like Catholicism)

Your life, you silly boy.
The world does not slow down for your comprehension….difficulties.

You need to learn to bylass the Journal PC Police

Let’s tone down the language here Adrian.

“He argues against feminism because it advocates a raw brand of sexism with nobody calling them out.

I fully agree with that.

Oh come on, Niall.
Having fun with fundamental religious nuts and fundamental atheist nuts is always worthwhile. They tend to take themselves way too seriously when in fact they are a mirror image of each other.

As a side note, I think the comment posting difficulties is a technical fault rather than big brother.

What’s a “fundamental atheist nut”?

Is that an Atheist that doesn’t fly planes into skyscrapers, or doesn’t believe in fairies, or doesn’t believe in brainwashing children into their grandparents religion, or thinks the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, or that the Universe is nearly 14 billion years old, or that all religion is superstitious nonsense, or that a “soul” is something on the bottom of your shoe, or that all claims need evidence, or that Science works?

People who purport the false choice that belief in a higher power, be it God, Gods or my personal deity, Thundercats, don’t believe in the scientific method(that would rule out the bulk of the greatest minds in human history)
People who believe that atrocities are only carried out by and in the name of their current chosen deity. Atheist Russia wiped out 10% of their population. Hitler(at the risk of Godwin) believed in Survival of the fittest(in a gross distortion of Darwin) to be the only Law and justification.
People who lump religion and agnostics together.
People who foam at the mouth when you express an opinion that falls outside their own paradigm.

The separation needs to be made between the vast majority of people who are simply atheists and their fundamentalist minority who give the rest a bad name. Bit like religion, actually

Which god comes in under “the Scientific Method”?

and a straw man for good measure, Billy.
Who is trying to put God into the scientific method except fundamentalist religious types and the fundamentalist atheists who are desperately trying to lump everyone else, in with them.
Do you even know what the, open inverted commas, scientific method, close inverted commas, is?
You lack of belief in a God is a guess.
You can wiggle all you like, it is no more than a guess.
No more valid than the one true faith.
Lion-o, All Power to him

Wow 90% of members of the national and royal academies of sciences; and 60% of scientists in general don’t believe in the scientific method. That’s quite a claim there brainiac.

Yeah lets completely ignore marxism and blame a tiny component of that political ideology on everything that went wrong. And why is hitler even in the list. He was not an atheist and even if he was, the majority of nazis were religious. Gott mitt uns (god with us) was on every nazi belt buckle. Irrational dogma is the cause of all the atrocities you named. Irrational dogma is dangerous whether it is religious in nature or political. These arguments have been refuted a million times. The only reason they’re still out there is that people like you have nothing better to fall back on. You are not arguing from a reasonable position.

So your idea of an atheist fundanentalist is the atheist who looks at all the damage caused by irrational dogma and has the courage to speak out against it, regardless of all the people around him telling him he has to shut up.

People like you protect religion from the scrutiny it deserves. People like you are the reason that as recently as 2004 a victim of sexual abuse who attempted to report it at a Garda station, was told it was a matter for the bishop. That can only happen in an environment where religion gets special protection.

You should try to gain some critical thinking skills. It will help you purge some of the lies you were taught as fact in your religion controlled school.

An atheist fundamentalist is an figment of the religious imagination, it is their way of saying Atheists are as fanatical and deluded as the religious fundamentalists. The question is how does one become a real mean kick-ass atheist fundamentalist?
All you have to do is tell the truth about superstitions, point out how ridiculous these superstitions are, last but not least be really mean and ask for proof of a god or gods…….

“All you have to do is tell the truth about superstitions, point out how ridiculous these superstitions are, last but not least be really mean and ask for proof of a god or gods”

All you have to do is treat the topic of religion like any other topic of discussion and engage it critically.

We need as many people as possible engaged in critical discussion of religion, if for no other reason, to remove the special privilege the topic has been traditionally granted. People like Adrian are aiding the continuance of that dangerous tradition.

Sir, you are your own comment

@angry40yrold Good Flying spaghetti Gods. 4 posts across two days. A nerve, exposed.
Early forties, as your kind of bitterness and anger is not that of a young man who wants to turn his anger into something positive but that of a misanthropic man. A man that uses the honourable and arguable belief in Atheism as a crutch for these failings.

‘irrational dogma, ignorance, unreasonable position, lack of critical thinking etc.’
Since time immemorial, people who have a different opinion than me and think differently than me.

“Wow 90% of members of the national and royal academies of sciences; and 60% of scientists in general don’t believe in the scientific method.”
This is in response to what? or do you have that fact, on a hair-trigger, ready to be used regardless of the situation. There once was a man, made of a strange farm like material.
As a side note, do you honestly believe the best and brightest end up in Academia? Seriously? Again, that rules out a lot of people. You think there is anyone in academia smarter than Jamie Dimon, Zuckerberg, Gates, Jobs.

I have never heard anyone disputing Hitlers fundamental belief(hideous misinterpretation) in natural selection as the justification of everything and a belief in a Wagnerian paganism. The Church was only useful as a stepping stone to his brand of hatred and seen as too powerful to initially usurp. He was an avid reader and misinterpreter of Nietsche “God is dead”. Again, Hitler decided to take what he wanted from the book as is his horrible and deliberate misinterpretation of Darwin.
““The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle, by allowing the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.”
but……… you have a belt buckle.
A stronger argument would be his speeches regarding the church. Too ingrained to take on directly.
Himmler had no such qualms.

All Communism is Atheist. It’s a fact. Atrocities carried out under that banner. Irrational dogma is the cause of all atrocities but is perfectly rational to the people carrying out, said atrocities. People who cannot see past their own beliefs or lack of beliefs. Right buddy.

All atrocities are caused by man(and women). There will be Corruption and horrors done because man is an evolved ape. These horrors will be done under the banner of Christianity, Islam, Atheism or Voodoo and fools will fail to see the link, the true underlying cause, Man himself.

Joe, you ask for proof of God.(Surely, Brian O’Driscoll and McNuggets) Show me proof that Thundercats do not rule the universe. You can’t therefore it is irrelevant to Science. I cannot claim it as fact. No religion can claim anything as fact unless it is falsifiable. Science is not how much evidence you have to back something up, it’s how much effort you have put into falsifying it. Belief in a higher power or lack of belief in a higher power has nothing to do with Science. They are mere guesses. As long as you keep your beliefs out of the Lab, there will be no trouble.
All you fundamentalists can wiggle, you can squirm but there is no way around it. A guess coated in a philosophy.
Unfortunately, whenever people think of Atheists, they think of bitter, angry simpletons such as yourself, as opposed to the Atheists who are in the vast majority, who have simply not seen enough evidence to justify a belief in a higher power. Worse, people link Secularism with you. A gross violation of the only acceptable form of relationship between State and Religion.

I can’t help you anymore.

@alan : )
Brendan, do you realise what an image, a misreading of your comment, creates!
What will be seen cannot be unseen.

Wiktionary: Twerk, a puny insignificant person, generally male, a twerp
:-)

In fairness, if the state deems trying to imprison people the appropriate response to overstaying on a parking meter, I don’t think you can entirely blame John Waters for the extra expense.

It’s not quite a harrowing banged up abroad and I know he can irritate many , but I’m with him on this one 100% , what kind of securicrats are ruining place like DL with bullshit threats of prison for overstaying a parking meter , have we lost the complete run of the country altogether , he was making valid points on NT earlier , it’s not as if the prison system isn’t already stretched and we have the money and resources to be wasting on this crap , it’s obviously not about the 49 euro it’s the principle ,and as many have said jailing people for tv licences , parking etc , in a country where banksters , questionable developers and tribunals into corruption seemed to leave very few seeing inside a jail the country has a lot to fix before putting people in jails here for such relatively minor offences.

This was a STUNT – just to be interviewed , getting his 5 minutes of fame, and no doubt will bore us with trash about his prison stay that lasted a cuple of minute. Police state I think is when the Police make all the rules Mr Merinov, Ireland is a country that the Courts either convict or free the citizens and elected Governments pass laws.
Waters give us a break

Ha ha – a secularist atheist conspiracy no doubt. It would not have happened in the 50s blah blah. They should have given him the chair for crimes against language.

Well Adrian, I guess somebody’s got to like him.

Can’t stand him, Jane but carry on.

Oh! @Adrian, I misunderstood you :)

@jane
He is a piece of work!

I can’t believe I didn’t know there was a word for misandry. Had to look it up. My vocab. is almost complete. Well nearly almost :-)

Jane, it is no coincidence that it was a woman who placed the parking ticket on his car, a female Garda who decided that he should be brought to jail and a female prison officer who checked him into prison.

It is according to dear oppressed John the conspiracy of the monstrous regimen of women or, as John calls the, the regimen of monstrous women.

Poor John. The women have it in for him.

He has appealed to the Vatican for asylum. A true political prisoner. A prisoner of conscience.

Brendan, you have John Waters to thank for that :)

Green thumbs, Peter :)

Sorry Jane, nothing that he has ever written has added to my pool of knowledge, I prefer to lay the thanks at your feet :-)

I like some of the points you make Adrian, but not the venom. You can make a point – a strong point – without the venom and dismissiveness too. Try it fella, the point will stand on its own :}

Alright Jane/Peter. Read up on the term ‘social contract’. Likely you’ll find that women get imprisoned 40% less for the exact same crimes in most of the western world. Keep it civil folks because personally, when I see the term misandry, I’m like a fly to shit – and guess what? I ddn’t spend years in college studying misogyny. No folks – humour is fine – anything other than that in a country where 500 young fella’s kill themselves a year isn’t.

Dear Niall, I have been nothing but civil. In using the term “misandry” I was quoting Waters himself in one of his more tedious articles – can’t remember which one.

And what, pray, does a privileged middle-aged man refusing to pay a justly-earned parking fine have to do with the tragedy of young Irish men committing suicide?

Niall, please cite authority for those figures of 40 % less imprisonment. Is this for comparable crimes. Is this based on Irish statistics. Please enlighten us. Criminologists would differ. The complaint in Ireland is about disproportionately severe sentencing of female perpetrators compared to male. So, yiu quote 40% needs to be supported by citation.

Is it your case that Waters was punished more severely fior his optional prison period of 2 hors compared to a male comparator?

Yes, I agree that you are like a fly to sh*t, not exactly a civil term but I will use it.

500 young fellas kill themselves. I would have thought that the real figure is higher. I suspect that the figure would be vastly higher were it not for the sympathy, support, communication skills of many female therapists, clinicians, social workers and teachers.

Thank you for permitting us to be humorous. I greatly appreciate that.

Dear Jane. Nice try. But it’s bogus. Here’s why:

1. ” In using the term “misandry” I was quoting Waters himself”. So what’s your point Jane? He also uses terms like cat, fish, feminism, Catholicism, suicide, men,……..What’s your point?

2: “And what, pray, does a privileged middle-aged man refusing to pay a justly-earned parking fine have to do with the tragedy of young Irish men committing suicide?” There you go Jane. Figure out the parallels between prison and suicide and we can discuss this further.

Optional or voluntary imprisonment based on a misguided sense of misdirected principle will not lead to suicideal ideation or action.

John Waters is a bit obsessional about his perception of misandry in Irish society. He has a profound and over eager sense of grievance.

Going to prison over non payment of a legally valid and modest fine, compared to Mr Water’s income, seems self indulgent at best and silly.

John Waters invites derision and we should respond generously to his invitation.

One could broaden out this discussion to address the place of men in Irish society but ultimately foolishness is foolishness and is gender neutral despite John Waters attempt to imbue every social issue with a gender dimension in which women prevail at the expense of men.

John Waters needs to get his sh*t together, I think, and desist from his grandiose gestures.

I now see John as a jailbird. He has earned his stripes or is that his dots or arrows?

The power of prayer and divine devotion shall redeem John and restore him to the path of righteousness. He has lived too long amongst the heathen and the unholy.

First up Peter I said western world. Not Ireland – as you know such figures don’t exist. O fcourse in Ireland we know very little when it comes to breaches in the family law courts as stats are not kept.

(Oaxaca, Sarnikar, & Sorensen, 2007).]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/11/men-women-prison-sentence-length-gender-gap_n_1874742.html

Don’t make me dig out my Anthony Giddens 1st or 2nd edition 1995 sociology book there Peter. That’ll really kill my spirit!

“500 young fellas kill themselves. I would have thought that the real figure is higher. I suspect that the figure would be vastly higher were it not for the sympathy, support, communication skills of many female therapists, clinicians, social workers and teachers”

It would be vastly less if people like you got out of the way Peter. Lt me give you an example. I’ve been saying for year that boys and men have been marginalised in the media and wider society. But there are 2 problems. But let me give you a recent example.

The marginalisation of boys in the media is a big problem Peter.
It’s online media coverage of leaving cert results. It may be of interest to you for an article. These are from this years leaving cert results day.

The IT’s video – all girls shown and vox popped – not a single boy appears anywhere in clip.
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/video?vid=1.1494042

Journal.ie’s coverage 18 pictures. 16 of girls only, 2 of boys and even then they are mixed photo’s of boys and girls. 1 of the only 2 photo’s of boys is of black boys.
http://www.thejournal.ie/leaving-cert-in-pictures-…;

The Independent. 19 photo’s – 17 of girls and 2 of boys. One of the only 2 photo’s of boys is of black boys.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/education/meet…;

RTE 6:1 news coverage. Same thing. All girls. Only interview with boys is of, you guessed it, a black lad. http://www.rte.ie/news/2013/0814/468007-leaving-ce…; No other boys appear.

So it seems national media is unaware that boys too sit exams. But, even when it does notice it uses the opportunity to tick the “ethnic or minority box” at that juncture. And you’ll also find that in the handful of photo’s of boys that do appear, even then at times, the girls are central in the photo’s and the boys are on either side of her/them.

TV3′s news coverage of the day in question was marginally more balanced. But not balanced enough by a long shot. It was of a similar vein to the above coverage.

So it’s seems the marginalisation of boys and men is now so embedded it goes unnoticed and all major media outlets partake. I’ve been following the exclusion of boys on leaving cert results day for nearly 20 years {and a lot of other areas too}. I can say with certainty the above scenario in the links I’ve given have been repeated year on year for nearly 15 years now.

If the links don’t appear let me know. But Jane and Peter – get out of the way please.

Peter/Jane. I’ve been trying for nearly a half hour to respond to you – but it won’t post no matter what I do. It’s along post, but it won’t post. But Peter, I’m the guy that posted in the last Mickey mouse argument you were trying to have about alcoholism and I posted a reference to Professor George E. Vaillant of Harvard on a book called the natural history of alcoholism revisited. You, sir, are full of shite.

I’m getting the knack of this. It seems I’ve got a short word count tonight Peter. But, you know nothing addiction, nothing about misandry, nothing about the economy either judging on your posts. Nothing. But I have been trying to respond to you with research in between my screen melting from your arrogance – end of word count.

Niall, your further comments (which I only read this morning via email from the Journal) seem to have been deleted.
What a crying shame. I particularly enjoyed the contrast of you asking us to be civil, then telling Peter that he is “full of shite”. Thanks for that, I enjoyed the laugh :)

Niall, do you recognise the irony in your posting comments asking others to be civil, to tone down their language when you engage in pure invective, adopt a highly adversarial approach are are incapable of maintaining a logical stream of argument, not just in response to me, but in response to others.

You appear to share John Waters sense of grievance over imagined misandry.

Yes, it is true. My arrogance has put a hex on your posting comments.

By the way, I love the way that you try to tie in unrelated issues and seek to draw parallels but when challenged are unable to explain what connections there are. I look forward to reading whatever further irrelevancies you can conjure up. It’s a pity that your Comments did not fully post. I will concede you this. They have great entertainment value.

OK Peter I concede I was tetchy last night and shouldn’t have said you were full of shite. I’d spent a long time trying to post a response and it would disappear into the ether.

“You appear to share John Waters sense of grievance over imagined misandry”

No, I share his views on unmarried fathers, the marginalisation of men and boys in the media, suicide, the media itself, the family courts, battered men and others. And though I don’t share his views on most other topics, he’s the only that takes up these issues in national media. These are real issues Peter, and riddled with misandry in themselves often.

You seem to think misandry doesn’t exist and is a figment of his imagination?

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2144002

(Oaxaca, Sarnikar, & Sorensen, 2007)

Links above on disparity in sentencing, conviction, and incarceration rates between the genders. Again I’ve been trying to post a more comprehensive response but it’s not happening.

“One could broaden out this discussion to address the place of men in Irish society but ultimately foolishness is foolishness and is gender neutral despite John Waters attempt to imbue every social issue with a gender dimension in which women prevail at the expense of men”

Where does he claim this had anything to do with gender?

“500 young fellas kill themselves. I would have thought that the real figure is higher. I suspect that the figure would be vastly higher were it not for the sympathy, support, communication skills of many female therapists, clinicians, social workers and teachers”

Or would it be lower if they weren’t marginalised in the first place Peter? A marginalisation that Water’s refers to regularly.

You should of read the ones that wouldn’t post! I do apologise for lashing out a bit. I’d spent hours trying to respond and it wouldn’t post. Was annoyed.

Force them to watch RTE or better still G na T only!

Yes Jason, and then use that very same household tax and charges to pay for ‘local services’ like the warden that gave Water’ the ticket in the first place. Round and round we go.

Anyone else constantly getting a “logged in as undefined” message on the site today and having to post the same thing 3 or 4 times before it appears? Driving me insane.

Yes Niall, every time!

Oh. Except that time, typically.

I think Journak.ie need to put more coins in the meter. Site has been hopeless all day.

Is thejournal.ie not going to do an article about Paul Allen, one of the opinion piece writers on here: http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/pr-guru-gets-twoyear-ban-for-drink-driving-29546548.html <