Ulster Rugby trial -continued

Yes, Tringley, the difference is that when that girl with the t-shirt is old enough to have an informed independent opinion, she may feel used, whereas your son will already have some foundations of understanding of how women and men are valued differently by society. Hopefully by the time he is older things will have changed significantly and this societal and usually unconscious bias will be part of school education.

So pure assumption, yes?

Decently accurate educated guessing.

I'm sensing you're not from NI yourself given that you wouldn't know that?

tringley you aren't using him you are educating him. You sound great.

LaurieMarlow So pure assumption, yes?

The "Let's use all the tools in the box including our children" desperation approach.

I feel like that but then I wonder if I'm a hypocrite. I brought my 5 year old son to an I Believe Her rally the day after the verdict. Quite a few people brought children to the one I was at and I'd say about 2/3s of them were little boys. I took him because I believe that it's so, so important for boys to grow up understanding the impact of this type of violence.

Obviously I didn't go into details with such a young child but I did talk to him about how he might have noticed I was angry that day. And it was because some men hurt a woman but they wouldn't go to jail because women aren't always believed as much as men are. I told him I was going to a rally the next day to send her the message that I believed her and he decided wanted to go and tell her that he believed her too. Which sounds good in that context but of course he was going to believe me and the version I told him and I hate the thought of using him.

This is something. It's not a conviction, but it isn't nothing either. I hope the woman they had sex that doesn't meet the criminal standard of proof for rape with is pleased.

Ok, I’m happy to be educated here. How does one identify from a, for example Facebook comment, what class and religion a poster is?

It's Northern Ireland. It's pretty easy to identify religious affiliation from someone's name. Class would be less straightforward, but the name would offer some clues as would the grammar and vocabulary of the comment.

The father making the daughter wear the "I support Paddy Jackson" t-shirt reminds me of John S Gummer making his young daughter eat a hamburger at the time of the BSE transmission to show it was "safe". The "Let's use all the tools in the box including our children" desperation approach.

There's so much distress and shared experiences on this thread. So sorry to hear about your daughter Bumblefuddle and about you Zibbidoo.

It's dreadful to think these people, like disgraced politicians, can return as if nothing has happened after a bit of time has elapsed. I hope more is done than putting up a temporary public relations facade, but that would take an inspirational leader.

I don’t think they’ll ever be selected for Ireland again. Olding due to ability and Jackson due to the prospective number tens at the moment, Jackson is much better than them currently but probably not so much better that the irfu will take on the headache etc.

For some reason I wouldn’t be overly surprised to see them back at ulster in years to come after a few years away, but logically that doesn’t make sense given the way in which the irfu centralised contracts operate.

Shall we all on here ask UR for a copy of their code of conduct for players.
That would p them off.

Not saying it’s right one way or the other, but I think the financials etc will mean he won’t walk away and he’s good enough that there’ll be a club willing to sign him

There’s no way olding just quits rugby
There’s too much money and he’s too good a player for that to happen

He’ll be at an English club next year barring any protest/public campaign, the deal is said to be done.
If it does fall through he’d go to France or Japan

I’d be amazed if there wasn’t a pay off tbh.

DH works in employment law and has had to defend many a ne’er-do-well at disciplinary. We were chatting about this case and I pointed out that with any employer, they’d be held to a standard of behaviour that wouldn’t defame the company. The fact that this is a sports contract wouldn’t make any difference, it would be the same if they worked for a bank, NHS, private company etc.

He agreed, but pointed out in his experience that things can be nicey-nicey during the investigation, but when it comes to crunch time and the employee is realising the potential consequences (ie sacking), that’s when things become interesting. He theorised that based on commentary saying how ingrained this culture is in Irish Rugby, that similar things have been said in group WhatsApp’s with other members of the Irish or Ulster team before, and a threat to release those messages would be enough to make UR and IRFU look at them more favourably when it came to releasing them of their duties.

Jackson might go to France, but I could see Olding keeping the head down and trying to start a new career in a new profession