Blogs

In this blog Robin Hanan responds to the current debate on the abolition of the Seanad. He suggests that the Seanad is an easy target in its current elitist form, but that does not necessarily mean its abolition is the best thing for democracy.

The Taoiseach’s main argument for abolishing Seanad Éireann is that ‘we have too many politicians’. This is a crude appeal to public cynicism about politics and politicians, or at least to try to deflect this hostility away from the Government parties.

He examines the issues raised in a new study ‘In Other Words’ on the perceptions of policy makers to social justice advocacy due to be launched by The Advocacy Initiative on Friday, June 14 ^th for the C&V sector and his work.

In this blog David Crosbie unveils the rationale for the introduction of a new Bill into the Australian Senate looking to ban gag clauses in government contracts with the non-for-profit sector. He examines what this means for the sector and the communities its represents.

In preparing a recent presentation for the Fundraising Ireland national conference , we conducted a mini survey on the links between fundraising and advocacy in Ireland today.

This question was asked at a recent briefing we organised to discuss the outcomes of our public opinion poll on social justice advocacy. But to have an image problem, don’t you need to have an image in the first place?

In this blog Anna Visser, Director of The Advocacy Initiative tackles that question.

In this blog Brian Harvey introduces some of the key questions being addressed in research he is conducting for The Advocacy Initiative on the link between public funding and advocacy.

He will present the first phase of this work on 11^th February, click here to registerfor this lunchtime seminar.

Following the Government's recently announced local government reforms Senan Turnbull assesses the broad potential of the proposals and more specifically their potential impact on social justice advocacy at local level. According to our forthcoming mapping study of social justice advocacy, the majority of that advocacy happens at local level; hence these developments are very significant for the future of this work.

If the Government's recently announced reform of Local Government under 'Putting People First' is the most radical shake up of the system in 120 years, then it is a missed opportunity in a whole range of respects.

On October 14th The Sunday Times published an editorial questioning the need for state funding of advocacy in the community and voluntary sector. The newspaper argued that "public money is scarce, and criticism of the government is plentiful, so why should taxpayers fund more of it?"