Dear Sir... Readers' Views (14/01/17)
Citizens’ Assembly falls foul to faulty definitions
It’s very sad indeed to note that the Citizens’ Assembly, and the reportage of same, has already fallen foul of some fatal terminological faux-pas, with regard to one its core considerations.
The patently malignant, and blatantly maladaptive insinuation woven into the triad-term ‘fatal-foetal-abnormality’ both distort and contort the process, significantly unsettling the equilibrium of discourse
This is true on count of each word in this unfortunate and erroneous term.
Fatal: Such in-utero child-development scenarios under consideration are certainly all life-challenging, and some are life-limiting, for sure. To use the word fatal is as vague as saying life itself is fatal, since we all die at some stage. The attendant clinical projected accuracies vis-a-vis life-term span are, at best, an educated guess, with many surprising exceptions extant.
Foetal: This is indeed a much-used clinical term, but conveniently camouflages the fact that it actually means ‘prenatal hatching of young’. Thus this is an authentic human-being situation, rather than some blob of cellular aggregaton to be assessed as a pre-humanoid entity, and thus prone to dismissal.
Abnormality: Normality is of course a highly contentious and contrived concept. It is not a ‘given’ absolute spectrum, merely a social ‘Bell-Curve’ fabrication which may vary widely according to cultural taste, societal mores and manipulative machination. In the truest and fullest sense of the word, we could consider that if something exists it is normal within the wide-spectrum perspective.
To classify any developing human with this corrupted, descriptive triad, de-facto sets a loaded bias against the child, and establishes an automatic bias running counter to the much-vaunted claims of open, frank and neutral appraisal of these matters.
As the phrase is not even a medical term, one wonders how and why it has wormed its way into regular parlance.
It is now infecting the debate and commentary of the current assembly whose key challenge was to seek wide-spectrum transparency of opinion without inherent bias.
If there is to be any termination, this ‘triad-term’ should surely be the one to go.
Hospital staff doing a damn fine job
As a tax-paying citizen of this state I wish to compliment the staff of our many hospitals for their patience and dedication in the caring for us “Joe and Mary public”.
We the public are bombarded daily by media reports of all that is wrong in the system and when we have to call on your services we sometimes are, understandably, frustrated by delays and confused by the endless paper work.
Because we are being told by this report and that report in the media of the problems in the system we sometimes fail to recognise the huge amount of good work that is being done.
Every one of you who work in the system is someone’s son or daughter, sons and daughters who do care.
I had reason to become one of your patients recently due to an accident. I was stunned at how brilliant you all are, how brilliant and professional.
Yes I was on a trolley for a while but you didn’t choose to put me there.
If it was simple to fix the faults in the system it would have been done a long time ago, but we are a growing and aging nation which is trying hard to find the resources to cater.
But I can tell you that the smiles and the gentle words of the nursing staff to the discussions of procedures from medical teams on my situation punctuated with good humour on the then dismal position of my favourite soccer team to the biweekly arrival of members of various clergies with a kind word all the way to the porters and domestic staff who helped in so many other ways is something no money could ever buy.
There is a saying, “I once saw something that was wrong and thought someone should put that right. Then I remembered I am someone”.
I choose now to tell you the medical staff of our hospitals, the carers and everyone else you are doing a damn fine job.
Phil is an expert on messy messes
We should all sit up and take note when Phil Hogan tells us that Brexit is a ‘mess and getting messier’.
The man knows a lot about messes and things getting messy and even messier, having, not so long ago, been responsible for a mess of biblical proportions, unsurpassed even in an Irish political system so well practiced in the art of making a mess of things with monotonous regularity.
Perhaps it’s all water under the bridge for Phil by now.
UCC conference is deeply worrying
The University College Cork conference to take place in March 2017, discussing Israel’s right to exist at all, is deeply worrying.
Irish4Israel has called on UCC to ensure far more balance in this debate. Currently of the 47 speakers only two could be considered sympathetic to Israel.
Professor Bowen of UCC has championed this conference as a win for academic freedom.
Sadly Prof Bowen only seems to advocate academic freedom when it suits him and his cause.
Prof Bowen through his work with the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Academics for Palestine is happy to advocate boycotts of Israeli academics and universities.
Prof Bowen can not demand academic freedom for himself and deny it to others.
The Palestinian solidarity movement in Ireland is a movement based on hypocritical double standards.
We hope UCC president and management will see sense and ensure their excellent academic reputation is not hijacked by this biased one sided conference.
Mainstream media has a leftist bias
Barry Walsh’s letter of January 11 last launched some serious ad-hominem attacks such as “reactionary, xenophobic, anti science and elitist” to describe Trump’s proposed Cabinet.
Somehow I doubt he has researched the Cabinet appointees in any way other than reading the mainstream medias’ slanted and biased interpretation of them.
For someone to come out with such high-handed and insulting comments, they should at least have some evidence to back it up. I’ll wager Mr Walsh has none.
He then, without any hint of irony goes on to deride giving hate a platform?
Do any of these leftists see the irony of their positions?
You describe without any evidence, or spurious evidence at best, people as racist and xenophobia and then you go on to cry foul of hate speech.
Someone please hand Mr Walsh a mirror!
Mr Walsh should open his mind and take into account that the mainstream media across the western world is dominated by a left bias.
Leftist always point to Fox News, but for every Fox News I would match that and raise you CNN, MSNBC, CBS, The New York Times etc etc.
The media are anything but independent.
They have lost the trust of much of society, down to 32% of American in the latest Gallup pole, and whilst they are obsessed with race, gender and identity politics, maybe Trump and his cabinet will address the economy, the main interest of the vast bulk of ordinary people, or maybe the deplorables to Mr Walsh and his leftist friends.
Questionable generalisations
Gerard Howlin’s otherwise excellently crafted article of January 4 dealing with the reformation kicks off his analysis of this event and its aftermath with the questionable assertion that “today everyone preaches something but no one believes in anything”.
These generalisations, I suggest, are inherently fraught with anomalies because they fly in the face of the human condition which decrees that we are all different.
What I can do or indeed be allowed to do is to speak for myself and to allow others the privilege of doing likewise.
What follows, therefore, represents my personal position in relation to Mr Howlin’s all-embracing generalisations about countless numbers of people.
First and foremost I am not into the business of preaching to anyone.
It happens that I entertain quite a few beliefs of both the religious and secular variety, however, and I would be prepared to share these with anybody who might be interested but, of course, no one is obliged to agree with any of them.
Examples are as follows: I believe that the possibility of a God exists and that neither Jesus, Mohammed, the Dali Lama or anyone else knows what his purposes are which is just as well because if anyone really did we would be in even worse trouble with religiously inspired trouble and strife in the world.
I believe that Martin Luther saved Christianity 500 years ago from extinction and that the only reward he got for his trouble was to be excommunicated.
I believe that the issues of state including the abortion one cannot and will not be resolved if and for so long as people use the ballot box to impose their religious beliefs upon others and upon the affairs of state and that when this happens the concept of freedom and democracy goes out the window.
Further, I believe that if I make it to the pearly gates that God will be there to welcome me.
Taking notice of the billions paid to ECB
A recent Irish Examiner editorial pointed out that almost €7bn was paid in interest by our Government on the national debt last year. An earlier front-page article declared that around €40bn has been paid out over a five-year period.
It’s amazing how few columnists take any note of this, instead concentrating on public service pay, government spending etc.
In a pre-Christmas, Irish Examiner piece Joe Gill didn’t mention the massive interest bill at all, despite the fact that it is a huge drain on domestic consumer spending and is holding back vital infrastructure projects.
Just to put it in context the equivalent of seven Cork/Limerick motorways could be built every year with all this money instead of sending it over to Frankfurt.
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