Letters to the Editor: Vote for those who will protect all of society

"Ordinary people ought to vote for political parties which are fully concerned with doing the best that they can for every stage of their lives." Picture: Rui Vieira/PA Wire

It can be said, I believe, that all political parties in Ireland or Britain would not deny that they are principally pro-business parties. For example, the UK Conservative Party has for a long time been calling themselves "the business party". While in Ireland the slogan for Fine Gael under the leadership of former Taoiseach Ends Kenny was "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs".

It shouldn't be too surprising then to discover that people who don't have jobs like retired people and young children are not at the top of the real list of priorities of political parties. It's hardly surprising too that the deadly Covid-19 virus took the lives sadly of so many elderly people in nursing homes because was there was not much political get and go to make sure nursing homes 100% safe.

Neither should it be a surprise too that many children are losing out on their education now because they have no computers in their homes to help them to learn. As the bible says "by your words shall you be acquitted and by your words shall you be condemned."

Ordinary people ought to vote for political parties which are fully concerned with doing the best that they can for every stage of their lives and not to vote foolishly for parties who are chiefly concerned with the time when they are just only in the prime of their lives!

Sean O'Brien

Carnanes South

Kilrush

Co Clare

Great Reset for our politics is needed

Imagine if you will, a government that nobody actually voted for. A government with no opposition that legislates at the behest of a committee of unelected civil servants. A government that took over from a “caretaker” administration that had been voted out of office nearly five months previously yet still held full executive powers and introduced legislation resulting in civil restrictions unprecedented in the history of the State.

How did we get here? The last 12 months exposed the ill-health of Irish democracy. There exists a web of inherently unhealthy relationships, spanning the political class, a tamed, nodding media, and the pharmacological and technological industries. This incest is self-serving, but most certainly does not serve the public interest.

A pliant citizenry has, of course, played their role, and the ease with which the majority have surrendered their most fundamental rights has been truly shocking. 

The political situation mirrors a broader trend towards “Super-Stateism" in the western world and the European Union. Bleating about European militarism rings hollow. The days of Ireland opting out of aspects of the European Project that it finds unpalatable are long gone. It's all or nothing with the EU now, comrades. Are these people really so naïve that they don’t realise that once political and monetary union have been achieved, then military union must necessarily follow? 

Looking at the lie of the Irish political landscape, it is honestly hard at the moment to see where meaningful change will come from.

The Irish body politic needs a prescription for a Great Reset, alright – just not the type of Great Reset that the self-serving elitists who are pulling the strings are working towards.

Peter Keating

Newtownshandrum

Co. Cork

Traffickers should serve life in prison

Your second editorial [20th February] focuses attention on the discrimination inflicted on women in many countries throughout the world and it is right that you do so. 

However, the greatest of all wrongs that so many women universally endure is that of being trafficked for the purpose of prostitution. It is good to recently learn that a number of those women have been freed from their lives of slavery but we can rest assured that there are many more throughout Ireland and very likely in many of our own towns whose freedom has been stolen and whose bodies are daily abused.

Prostitution by its very nature robs a woman of all dignity and denies her the true freedom that is a human right. Those who so enslave a woman effectively steal her life and inflict on her a life of abuse and perversion. Many of the suffering women endure a fate that is worse than death. Those evil people who incarcerate the women should on conviction be sentenced to life imprisonment because they have so condemned their victims.

Cllr. Michael Gleeson

Clasheen

Killarney

Co Kerry

Losing by the numbers

Numbers 8,9,10,11 and 14.

Not losing lotto numbers, but they might as well be if Andy Farrell insists on keeping them unchanged for the Irish rugby team.

Liam Power

Seaview Drive

Blackrock

Dundalk

Co. Louth

Film review fails to address concerns

I was extremely disappointed to see a five-star movie review for “Music” by Sia. The reviewer has clearly not conducted any meaningful research. The whole project is completely tone-deaf and ableist. There are scenes of restraint that are dangerous and ill-informed. The Autism community has spoken loudly about the many issues they have with this movie. We the neurotypical should listen. The movie is also unwatchable by photo-sensitive epileptic people a condition that some people on the Autism spectrum suffer from. The community had called on Sia to cast an individual on the spectrum for this movie, she refused, they called on her to not use a very problematic US organisation advocating for “curing” Autism for advice, she refused, they asked her to put up a warning for the restraint used against the Autistic character in the movie, she said she would in her hollow apology but hasn’t. The character Music is portraying an individual with Autism in the most outrageously caricatured way, the movements are exaggerated grossly and are also employed by neurotypical people who engage in bullying people on the Spectrum.

Your movie reviewer needs to be aware of these difficulties and the enormous upset caused in the community of people on the Autism Spectrum.

Laura Fogarty-Beirne

Leitrim

Reality bites for young family man

A young man, with a growing family, has recently become unemployed. He is a prince of a man and willing to travel, first class.

Good luck in the real-world Harry, and Meghan, if you ever encounter it.

Dennis Fitzgerald

Landale St Box Hill

Vic Melbourne

Australia

Biomedical focus skews real needs

There are many well-being 'assessments and commentaries' abounding in the news these days. Inevitably, the nation's collective psyche and individual well-being has taken an understandable hit in the current maelstrom of Covid bereavements, anxieties, claustrophobic restrictions and what may be termed 'the new abnormal'. 

Socialisation is at a premium, and the general compacted frustration quotient is seriously heightened. Such life-distress levels are probably a natural commensurate with the swirling menace of the virus and its unpredictable spread and threatening challenge to body & soul. All are impacted at some level and, sadly, many are at the tragic end of the spectrum. It doesn't necessarily mean we are all suffering meltdown, simply grappling with a major challenge to our being, which with collective resilience and empathic 'communalism' we can weather, survive and eventually thrive again. Honest, selfless collective commitment can triumph.

As per usual, spokespeople for 'psychiatry.com' are quick out of the blocks on various media outlets to offer their stamp of 'authority' on all things related to life-distress., aka psychiatry. While their analysis on the historical vagaries of statutory systems appointed to respond to perceived life-distress scenarios is often sound and salient, they perennially avoid dabbling in any querying conjecture surrounding the biomedical primacy which has somehow managed to permanently 'inflict' itself into a domineering presence in this sociological zone. What they have, they will hold would seem to be their mantra position.

How is it that the statutory response to serious life-distress still remains under the dominant 'tutelage' of a biomedical psychiatric profession, when the underlying issues are essentially social, communal, familial and largely personal-emotional responses to same ? Why should biomedical management and their medical specialists be the assigned 'team-leaders' in this area ? Not that they should be automatically excluded from the fray, but why would they be deemed the main players who direct and manage all prescribed responses.

There has, of course, been so much written in recent years on this pernicious conundrum of care, with so many professionals, service users and informed researcher-commentators of varied hues casting sharp aspersions in that direction.

 Pulitzer prize-winning medical journalist Robert Whitaker, is only one of many such highly informed researchers who has blown the cover, albeit to little 'on-the-ground ' impact for real change. It seems the only significant development to date in this zone is a progressive penchant for psychiatrists to try their hand at vicarious therapeutic dabbling, while sustaining their firm grip on the 'tiller of treatment'. Guided by big-pharma machinations they construe and enact diagnostic templates to tally with the 'permafrost' of prescriptive medication, despite all the attendant debilitating drawbacks of same.

Life-distress is not primarily a biomedical issue period! Therefore it should never be viewed through that lens from the off. Not that there may be no attendant medical issues accompanying, but they're not the prime 'problem' pertaining. It's well nigh time for a fundamental recalibration of this therapeutic power complexion as the current version tends only to stymie and stall any authentic progress for those grappling with emotionally demanding and socially debilitating personal impasses.

There are a plethora of creative psychodynamic therapeutic models which can offer a wide-spectrum of choice for any person struggling with any variety of life-distress. A collective of democratically shared therapeutic oversight and varied intervention templates, rather than an overriding dominance of biomedical perspective, is the obvious & apposite approach.

Alas, the fists of power in this realm are clenched, and not for opening any time soon.

Jim Cosgrove

Senior music therapist

Chapel Street

Lismore

Co.Waterford