Jan 1 was the first official day of the new Child and Family Agency. The Children’s Rights Alliance welcomes the agency — the centrepiece of Children’s Minister Frances Fitzgerald’s legislative agenda.

The recent announcement that Dublin is to have an Independence Trail is most welcome to those still campaigning to save the GPO/ Moore Street 1916 battleground — the only extant battleground in 20th century British and Irish history.

The most likely reason we are witnessing so much turmoil and strife around the globe, is that we continue to live in a world divided by objected facts and subjected human values that comes under the term “progress and democracy”.

Now that the furore about top up payments in the public service, especially in the voluntary hospitals, has abated, it is perhaps time to look at the bigger picture and examine the voluntary hospitals in greater detail.

The shocking revelation that a charity-funded cystic fibrosis clinic in Cork University Hospital, which only opened in 2011, is to be demolished within 24 months, and the arrogant response to this appalling situation says a lot about the management of CUH.

Enda Kenny’s recent visit accompanied with British Prime Minister David Cameron to memorials of the Great War is welcome, emotional, poignant and much more ironic than either man realises.

We are writing to express our utter disappointment and heartbreak at the developing crisis regarding cystic fibrosis beds in CUH.

You say “the question people around the world are asking is... ‘is the Pope a socialist’?”

In Sean O’Riordan’s uncritical “ethnic cleansing” article (Dec 30), it’s instructive that when Irish clans engaged in murder and pillage to reclaim Irish lands, this is described as “bloodthirsty ethnic cleansing” and the clans dismissed as “disaffected vicious renegades”.

The Irish history I was taught in school differs considerably from Professor Paul MacCotter’s version (Irish Examiner, Dec 30).