Letters to the Editor: All our businesses should reopen

Taoiseach Micheál Martin addressing the nation at Government Buildings in Dublin last Tuesday. 

I’m writing about the announcement of easing of restrictions.

Restrictions that never should have started in the first place. Honestly, it’s just not good enough.

Yes, it’s nice to be getting some semi-positive change here, but it’s nowhere near enough. For one thing, the movement being increased from 5km to 20km isn’t good enough; it should just be ended altogether.

I don’t see any logic or fairness in restricting people’s movements and it should just end now.

I also think all of the shops and businesses should reopen. If they want to limit the amount of people going in, fine, but hairdressers, restaurants, cafes, pubs, barbers, etc, should be allowed to reopen.

Not just for themselves, but for us, too. It’s madness to keep it as it is

Robbie Rowe

Wexford

Sweet pickings as lockdown eases

Easing of travel limitations will be welcome. From April 12 we can go anywhere in our own county and 20km from home if crossing county boundaries. I know a man who wants to cross county boundaries to buy an apple tart. Luckily it’s 19km from his home. How sweet is that?

John Williams

Clonmel

Co Tipperary

Breaching of the ring of steel

It is reassuring to know that the Department of Health, An Garda Siochána, The Defence Forces and a hotel security group (the latter equipped with the awesome power of citizen’s arrest) have thrown a ring of steel around Ireland’s quarantine hotels.

The Crowne Plaza Hotel in Santry where travellers are staying as part of the mandatory quarantine regime.

Of course, there was no reason to suppose anyway that anyone would dare test the ring of steel.

Unfortunately, they did and somehow managed to get through it. 

This prompts the wicked question: Was there nobody manning the door at the time?

 And, if there was, one assumes his/her/their job was to report to someone at operations centre who could actually do something about the completely unexpected, indeed unfair, breach in the ring of steel.

Bill O’Sullivan

Rochestown Road

Cork

Stomach-churning abuses of power

Fergus Finlay hit the nail on the head with his column this week — ‘There is no more putrefying smell than that of abused entitlement’ ( Irish Examiner, March 30).

Being self-employed for 40 years, and having my business closed for almost a year, it always angers and disgusts me to hear of such abuse and sense of entitlement by highly paid CEOs , politicians and senior civil servants.

Thank you Fergus Finlay for describing my thoughts and feelings so well in your article. It was 10 out of 10.

John Tynan

Publican

Dungarvan

Co Waterford

Outrageous sense of entitlement

Beacons of insidious entitlement or teachers behaving badly? Take your pick.

Did either enquire about a standby waiting list? Are there not innumerable establishments with elderly or vulnerable people or those deserving or even needing a vaccine within 13km of the Beacon Hospital?

The Beacon Hospital in Dublin.

Looks like the Beacon needs to go back to school and teachers need to have their education hospitalised.

Do we hear even a squawk from teacher unions proclaiming loudly anything but their own self-importance as key frontline workers while conveniently forgetting, neglecting or refusing to do just that, adopting instead: Ask not what I can do for my country but what my country can do for me?.

Time to call a halt to the insidious entitlement and replace it with something akin to serving country and customer first.

Kevin T Finn

Mitchelstown

Co Cork

Kerrymen reaching for Musk’s Starlink

It was said by John B Keane that a Kerryman has a head start on his fellow Irishman. This seems to be confirmed with the arrival of Elon Musk and his Starlink satellite system kit which is to be installed in Kerry.

 Tesla and SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk.

The government have all those plans for a rollout of strategic infrastructure to facilitate data centres, hundreds of them, and yet we have not and will not have a decent Internet system in place.

Danny and Michael Healy Rae mus be bursting their sides with laughter at the slowness of their friends in the Dáil. Any chance of them becoming taoiseach and tánaiste to fix a slow broken broadband system ... and the broken down government?

Ian Hester

Ballymacurley

Co Roscommon

Catholicism is a binary choice

To those who objected to Pope Francis’ recent comments on blessing same-sex unions: being a Catholic means accepting the entirety of Catholic Church ex cathedra teaching. Pretty much every person can find something difficult they will struggle with in Church teaching. Jesus himself faced this when many of his disciples walked away muttering “these are hard teachings, who can accept them?” (John 6:60). Jesus did not alter his teaching in response.

No one is obliged to be a Catholic. We use the expression “a la carte” to describe people who say they are Catholic but pick and choose what to accept. The reality is that they are simply not Catholics at all, anymore than a soccer player who decides to use a hurley is “playing soccer”; or an engineer who doesn’t accept teachings on gravity can be realistically called an engineer. If one is entitled to pick and choose one’s acceptance of Church teaching, why stop at all the usual favourites such as contraception, abortion and so on? Can one decide not to accept that Jesus was the Son of God and died on the Cross so that we could “have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10) and still call oneself a Catholic? Apparently, some people seem to think so.

Nick Folley

Carrigaline

Co Cork

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End suffering of animal transports

Cargo ships in the Suez Canal are on the move again, including more than 20 ships that are carrying tens of thousands of live animals. Three of these vessels were trapped in the canal. The prospect of a crisis, in which thousands of animals would either starve or die of thirst has been averted.

The container ship 'Ever Given' in Suez, Egypt.

Animals suffer on even the most uneventful of sea journeys. But when something goes wrong — the disaster with the Spanish calves on the Elbeik, for example, in which the animals were forced to remain on the ship for three months — it generally goes badly wrong. When the calves finally entered the port of Cartagena, they were emaciated, dehydrated, had skin conditions, wounds, broken horns and tails, ulcers, and some were in such a bad state they could barely open their eyes or respond to stimuli.

There is no shortage of evidence that live exports is the antithesis of good animal welfare practice, yet the trade continues unabated. Maybe now, with the narrowly-averted disaster in the Suez, the time has come for the live export trade to be put under the microscope for once and for all. In my view, ending the trade is the only way to prevent the suffering of an estimated two billion animals trucked and shipped around the globe every year.

Gerry Boland

Keadue

Co Roscommon

Semi-sunken ships in Suez in the ’50s

The ship the Ever Given brought back memories of my youth and the Suez crisis in the ‘50s when the canal was blockaded by semi-sunken ships and there seemed to be a genuine concern that there could be another war. Fair dues to the Egyptian engineers, but of course they did build the pyramids with their bare hands.

Michael Foley

Rathmines

Dublin 6

Farcical bonuses for transit companies

In a hilarious episode of the old BBC comedy series, Yes Minister, the best hospital in the country was the one that was empty of patients and so bosses could concentrate on their administrative work and thus received bonuses for their successful management system. It was of course farcical yet in Australia the Melbourne train and tram services companies have received bonuses for exceeding their performance targets. The performance was based on how closely they stuck to their schedules which was helped by the fact that due to Covid lockdown restrictions there were few or no passengers to slow them down.

Only a politician could have developed a performance measurement system that allowed for top scores for no work even though that does imply no mistakes

Real life is funnier than TV comedy, at least in Victoria, Australia.

Dennis Fitzgerald

Melbourne

Australia