We dump our values and our children in mad dash that ends in Monageer

AS we reel in shock at the enormous tragedy of Monageer, we wonder if we are listening or is anybody out there?

This has happened before. Sadly, it will happen again. A society driven by greed and obsessed with materialism is more concerned with a possible crash in the housing market than the plight of vulnerable families.

Soon the Dunne family will be yesterday’s news. Young mothers will still be dragging their children from their beds at or before first light, dumping them in the creche before heading off on the two-hour commute to work in Dublin just to pay the mortgage on a house they will never own and scarcely live in, and those precious children will not see their mothers again until night-fall.

The insatiable hunger of the banks for ever-greater profits, combined with tax individualisation, has ensured the destruction of the traditional family unit, the basic building-block of society. A stable, caring society is dependent on many factors and, once destabilised or destroyed, is not easily restored.

Estates of fine new houses, empty for most of the day, offer little comfort to the vulnerable person or family unable to measure up to the hollow and false values of the Celtic Tiger.

Blaming the gardaí or the HSE for some obvious failures is not enough.

We, as a society, need to change and try to rebuild the values we once took for granted.

We pour billions into infrastructure while sick people still spend their final days lying in the corridors of our filthy hospitals with striking nurses turning their backs on their patients, using them as pawns in a grubby dispute about a pay increase.

A society can be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable sections. The abuse of the elderly in nursing homes — physical by staff, financial by a greedy Government — is a fair indicator of our value system while, at the other end of the scale, a health service that has no qualms about sneaking children in their care to England for abortions fails miserably to provide adequate support for a family clearly in distress.

We have blood on our hands, all of us.

John Murray

Spokesperson

Justice and Peace

Secular Franciscan Order

San Damiano

101 Harolds Cross Road

Dublin 6W