In January, the GAA introduced the black card for cynical fouls in football. It has eliminated much of the pulling and dragging that blighted the game. Not counting replays or extra-time, the average score in games played in this year’s All-Ireland senior football championship is 35 points.

The report “Decaying Guantánamo Defies Closing Plans” (New York Times, Sept 1) makes depressing reading. Not only is the prison camp decaying, so are its prisoners. 

Gerard Howlin’s column in yesterday’s Irish Examiner was very well-written and welcome in exposing the hypocrisy of the rent-a-crowd Left (“the habitually protesting Left”). It has astonished me to hear and read the diatribes in Ireland about Israel, from people who have never been anywhere near an indiscriminately fired Hamas rocket.

In his letter to this paper Fr. Con McGillicuddy (September 2) lists story’s which he believes RTÉ has in some way been negative in their reporting towards the Catholic Church.

The report by Ed Carty (Irish Examiner, September 2) under the heading “2,400 reports of elderly abuse last year” makes very sad reading but I hope those responsible will be apprehended and brought to justice. Two-thirds ofelderly people feel unwanted, and many of them are right.

Although I share Clive Hyman’s concern at Professor Ray Kinsella’s objectivity (Letters, September 2) in calling on Irish universities to offer scholarships to young people who have suffered in Gaza, I find his denigration of the twin Irish tragedies of emigration and terrorism, distasteful and offensive.

I nominate the Minister for Arts and Heritage, Heather Humphreys, to undertake the ice-bucket challenge and get a drenching.

Why are State schools still saying prayers at the beginning of each day? In a secular society, this should be prohibited, considering the huge ethnic changes in population over the last 20 years.

I refer to a letter by Cllr Noel Collins on the ills of unemployment (Letters, September 1). Cllr Collins is correct, but his aspiration for job creation is sadly out of date. The present is personified by the genius of technology, and one of the by-products of such genius is the elimination of work.

Between March 30, 1883 and May 30, 1884, a Quaker named James Hack Tuke organised 11 ships to go on 15 sailings: nine to Boston and six to Québec, to transport 3,300 men, women and children from dirt-poor — (literally) — families from Elly Bay, a small inlet of Blacksod Bay in north-west Mayo, to make a better life for themselves in the ‘New World’.