Dear Sir....Readers' views (03/6/2016)
Church predicted sex debauchery
TP O’Mahony’s article on contraception (Irish Examiner, May 30) failed to acknowledge the prophetic ‘Humanae Vitae’.
Pope Paul VI outlined, 48 years ago, the trouble with contraceptive use. He said that it would “lead to conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality.”
That there has been a widespread decline in sexual morality, in the last 48 years, is undeniable.
The increase in the number of divorces, abortions, teenage pregnancies, rapes, and STDs should convince anyone of the steep sexual moral decline in western society. ‘Humanae Vitae’ was not written as exposition of natural law, but as a clarifying statement, to explain what the Church teaches about contraception.
But this teaching has been little heeded during the last 48 years.
Christians understand marriage as a noble calling, whereby God enlists the co-operation of husbands and wives in bringing forth new human life.
The Church explains that to artificially contracept the conjugal act is to reject God, his law, and life-giving blessings.
But the moral teaching further states that because artificial contraception is wrong, it will have bad familial and societal consequences.
Contraception has made sexual activity a more popular lifestyle choice than it was when the fear of pregnancy was a premarital deterrent.
The availability of contraception has led many to believe that they ‘recreationally’ and ‘responsibly’ engage in premarital sexual intercourse. But young people are as ‘responsible’ in their use of contraception as they are in other aspects of their lives e.g. making their beds, cleaning their rooms and doing their homework.
Finally, Pope Paul VI also argued that men will lose respect for women and “no longer (care) for her physical and psychological equilibrium” and will come to “the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish pleasure”.
He said that she will no longer be respected as a beloved companion. The Pope realised that the Church’s teaching on contraception protected married conjugal love and family life.
When spouses violate this good, they do not act in accord with their innate dignity and high destiny, and thus they endanger their own happiness and the happiness of their children.
Zoo should have shot the parents
Concerning the story about the gorilla that was killed after a boy fell into a Cincinnati zoo exhibit. Shouldn’t the zoo people have shot the parents, instead of the gorilla?
€3.7m write-off is waste of money
It has been confirmed that €3.7m erroneously paid out in SUSI grants will be ‘written-off’. The excuse offered is “inadequate staffing and poor planning”.
This loss of tax payers’ money is unacceptable and is a lack of care by civil servants.
People responsible for tax payers’ funds are not being held responsible or accountable.
Tax payers need to wake up to the ‘waste’ of their hard-earned money.
1916 celebrations were mindless
Easter 2016 has come and gone. And Ireland has trampled all over it. Snappily dressed in its bespoke best, Official Ireland hollowed out the Christian feast and gave us not an acceptable secular version, but 1916 Republican revisionism meant to bury what’s left of our rich Christian heritage.
The braggadocio was beyond belief. In case we didn’t get the message, Official Ireland had its own beatification ceremonies. We listened in North Korean-type admiration as speaker after speaker admonished us for not ‘appreciating’ the men of 1916, their reverence for the cause, their right to mandate themselves and their right to canonise themselves.
Without benefit of Devil’s Advocate or any real historical exegesis, we were led by the nose to the shrine of Republican hagiography and told how to respond to such selfless sacrifice.
And would we, under other, plausibly similar circumstances, have just as willingly celebrated and glorified the heroism of Mohamed Atta and his allies — the men who brought down the Twin Towers in Manhattan (on September 11, 2001) and who gave their own lives in the process?
I fear we might have. For the forces unleashed in 1916 were not as benign as we might have been led to believe.
The men of 1916 were, I’m sorry to say, determined to impose THEIR will on us. And most of the freedom we enjoy today is in spite of them, not because of them. Official Ireland wants us to believe otherwise. But they would, wouldn’t they? The rest of us can’t afford to be so gullible
EU has chosen to protect wealthy
A Leavy (Irish Examiner, May 30) repeats a familiar error in claiming the Greek national debt is a result of the dysfunctionality of the Greek state and that we are lucky we are not Greece.
The Greek national debt is so high because, when financial markets froze and Greece couldn’t borrow money in the normal way (long before Greece’s recklessness in running its accounts was known), the ECB stepped in.
But the ECB and the EU Council of Ministers made it a condition of the loan that the Greek public also take over the debts of the private-sector Greek banks to protect the profits of German and French banks.
No-one is disputing that Greece remains completely dysfunctional. It is riddled with tax evasion and corruption, especially among the professional class and the rich, but if we are going to judge ourselves against it, then we should use proper facts.
Greek national debt is now about €356bn and it costs €19bn a year in interest payments alone. Ireland’s national debt is about €205bn and our interest payment is €10bn a year, yet those payments aren’t even reducing the debt itself. Just think how many problems could be solved with that money.
Of the €252bn lent to Greece, only 10% went to providing services and the rest went directly into Greek banks, and, even then, not one cent of that made its way back to the Greek economy.
A similar story applies to our national debt. The Greek current account is now in surplus, which means the cost of running Greece is less than it raises in tax, even with the debt repayment, yet Ireland still costs more to run than we generate in tax, even with all the cuts.
But this debt problem did not happen by accident. It happened because the EU, specifically the ECB and the Council of Ministers, chose it to happen.
This is why the EU democratic deficit is the largest it has ever been and why people across Europe are losing their faith in the EU’s will to protect them, because, in the first test it faced, the EU chose to protect the wealth of the rich, instead of protecting the quality of life of the less-well-off.
This was a test of whose interests the EU safeguards and it failed.
Enda Kenny should be judged on what his government has done that its predecessor would not have. It is a fantasy to believe that if Kenny had formed a government in 2007 it wouldn’t have made the exact same choices as the Brian Cowen government. It would have led us to the same place in 2011.
The Kenny government didn’t even try to get a debt write-down. Worse, it didn’t even try to get the debt converted into ECB fixed bonds, so that the €10bn we pay each year could actually reduce the debt over a set period of about 20-plus years and, that way, we could reduce the debt itself and any economic growth could be used to provide the services people need in a modern state.
Kenny hasn’t done that, because he has no concept of the challenges people live with. His pension is paid for by the taxpayer, he gets tax-free expenses, and gets a tax-free top-up to his already obscene salary. His private healthcare cover is paid for by the taxpayer.
Even the most partisan assessment of Kenny in government could not conclude he has done anything but dishonour the mandate he received, and that he has not delivered on any of the ‘five-point’ plan from 2011.
Ireland is not the best country in the world to grow old, raise a family, start a small business, be ill, or be poor. But Enda Kenny is far richer, personally, than he was in 2011, so the recession has been good to him.
If Enda Kenny really is a great leader, the first thing he would have done, on taking office in 2011, would have been to refuse a pay rise, given that every cent extra paid to him was a cent someone else was deprived of.
Name Tusla staff who removed boy
It is rather strange that the newspapers have not published the names of the members of the board of Tusla who were present when the 12-year-old boy was taken away from his grandparents.
It would be interesting to see how brave these people are, now that the vast majority of the public have expressed their abhorrence at this gross interference by another State agency in the lives of decent people.
Please publish photos and names.
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