Dear Sir... Readers' Views (12/01/17)
Park your Sunday charges
Galway City Council has moved to have parking charges on Sunday afternoons start in January to supplement the shortage in the city budget funds.
There was no public consultation on the matter.
But when the figures don’t add up, put your hand in Joe Public’s pocket!
We all know that staff working on Sundays get double pay so it does not make economic sense.
You also have to take into consideration too that all the parking signs around the city will have to be changed — and probably the parking meters too.
So it is doubtful there will be any change out of the €170,000 they are predicted to make on this move, given also that many city parking fines have been thrown out lately by the district court judges.
Most “old Galway stock” are very loyal to the city centre churches; they come into the city for Mass or Sunday church services, then they go for something to eat or do a bit of shopping.
It is a day, too, when many parents with young families come into the city for a day out or Sunday lunch.
They don’t need the extra expense of parking charges.
It is a relaxed day without parents having to run back to the cars to top up the meter.
Having parking charges on a Sunday does not make sense either on a day when the local bus routes have been cut down to a skeleton service.
Sunday is a busy day for small shops, who benefit most from the extra business giving them the ability to pay their rates.
So impose this extra burden on the hard-pressed motorist who needs a break.
Motorists pay increasing charges with car insurance, tax, NCT, car maintenance, and VRT.
This decision should be repealed straight away.
Local authorities in the rest of Ireland — don’t copy.
Maybe Dáil bar should be banned
On TV3 on Friday, Shane Ross said that “one drink impairs judgment”, and also seemed to imply that most people couldn’t stop at one.
The Dáil bar might explain most of the output of our legislators.
Maybe he might ban said establishment as part of his new campaign and save decent law-abiding citizens the consequences?
Or is he — like the rest of them — full of double-standards?
Time to end SeaWorld horrors
Tilikum, the world’s most famous killer whale, is dead.
After more than 24 years of enslavement at SeaWorld, he found the only way out of that miserable tank and is finally at peace.
From the day he was torn away from his ocean home as a baby, his life, which once involved exploring expansive open waters, was reduced to swimming in endless circles in a tiny concrete tank filled with chemically treated water — 0.0001% of the quantity of water he would have traversed in a single day in nature.
He was deprived of hope and driven insane by his depleted life, which consisted of performing meaningless tricks in exchange for dead fish.
Tilikum may be gone, but there’s still time for Katina, Kasatka, Ulises, and Corky — and all the other orcas at SeaWorld — to be transferred to seaside sanctuaries which can provide them with some semblance of the life that they’ve been robbed of for so long.
If we are to honour Tilikum’s memory, we must ensure his death is the last one to occur within SeaWorld’s walls.
That can be his legacy.
Going down to Boogie Street
Leonard Cohen that wonderful, soulful prophet, has a message to give on life and its meaning. A few amazing lines of wisdom: ”Boogie Street is that street of work and desire, the ordinary life and also the place we live in most of the time that is relieved by the embrace of our children, or the kiss of our beloved, or the peak experience in which we ourselves are dissolved, and there is no one to experience it so we feel the refreshment when we come back from those moments.
“We all hope for those heavenly moments, which we get in those embraces and those sudden perceptions of beauty and sensations of pleasure, but we’re immediately returned to Boogie Street.”
Citizens’ Assembly must be balanced
The Citizens’ Assembly is to hear personal testimonies of women who have had crisis pregnancies.
I assume this will be balanced with women who have decided to preserve their pregnancy and those who aborted theirs.
With the latter grouping, there needs to be a balance between those who regretted this decision and who didn’t.
Those women who delivered their baby, either keeping the baby or giving her/him over for adoption, should be heard also.
A full and balanced picture of crisis pregnancy and all its outcomes needs to be discussed.
It would also be appropriate to hear testimony from women who have survived abortion procedures to see how the dire circumstances of their time in the womb affected them.
Of course the overwhelming majority of people most directly involved in the circumstance of an abortion can never give testimony as they would be dead.
Railing against further funding
In 2015 Irish Rail got €308m and Bus Éireann €34m from public funds.
I think we citizens should aim to get the best value for public money.
Irish Rail, with support from the National Transport Authority, is now pitching for an extra €100m per annum.
I think that an allocation of this additional funding should not be entertained by the Government.
The maintenance cost of our 1,660km rail network is very expensive and because of this, most inter-city rail services are totally uneconomic.
Arguably, we do not need to maintain such an extensive rail network.
Effectively Irish Rail and Bus Éireann compete with each other on many inter-city routes, with the Irish Rail services highly subsidised by taxpayers, while the Bus Éireann Expressway services are unsubsidised.
Travel time by rail is only a little faster than by bus.
It seems to me the logical thing to do, instead of increasing the public funding to Irish Rail, would be to mothball a considerable part of the rail network.
Bus Éireann could provide services much more cost effectively on all routes that would no longer be provided by rail.
And with a transfer of some of the funds saved on the maintenance of the rail network, it would be able to provide an overall improved public transport service.
Flu jab isn’t the be-all and end-all
For the record, the flu injection is only an intelligent guess at what strain of flu causes an epidemic.
Recently my son was very sick with a different strain, and even though he wasn’t hospitalised it was a close call.
A lot of people who were hospitalised also contracted his strain of flu.
Lighting the way for Knock answers
I was intrigued by Gordon Cunningham’s letter regarding the Knock apparition (Irish Examiner, Jan 9).
I have of course come across the magic lantern hypothesis; I read somewhere that attempts were made to recreate the images using a magic lantern but that these were unsuccessful.
It is the first I have heard of the deathbed confession of an RUC police officer and, frankly, I would need far more detail before I could take it seriously.
I have done a trawl of the internet but have failed to come up with anything.
I wonder, Gordon, if you would be good enough to direct me to where I can satisfy my curiosity?
I have two main problems: Firstly, I don’t think a magic lantern could have produced the images as described; secondly, I consider it unlikely that an RUC officer would have had the level of theological sophistication required to produce such a symbolically rich tableau.
I look forward to hearing from you through the letters page of the Irish Examiner.
Time and place for ‘miracle of sorts’
In his letter (Jan 9) Gordon Cunningham expresses some reservations on the truth of the so-called apparition and miracle at Knock.
Whether or not the Madonna made a fleeting appearance in the rustic beauty of Mayo I do not know.
However, Mr Cunningham has created a miracle of sorts himself.
He tells us eloquently that the Knock miracle was a stunt carried out with the aid of a magic lantern by “an RUC police officer”.
That is fantastic as I thought the RUC police force was founded in 1922. Yet one of their members was in Knock in 1879.
Curiouser and curiouser.
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