Letters to the Editor: Shaping a recovery for world’s poor after Covid

We’ve had a traumatic 16 months. The pandemic has cast a shadow on lives across our island, taking some too soon and increasing economic insecurity for many more.

Thankfully, science has brought hope and over the coming weeks, life in Ireland and many other developed countries will soon resemble normality.

Others aren’t as lucky. Many of world’s poorest people will continue to live with the economic and social effects of Covid-19 for a long time to come. For them, ‘normal’ is now a foreign country.

The pandemic has meant that the great progress over the last two decades in addressing extreme poverty, hunger and disease has been reversed.

More than 100m people have been pushed into extreme poverty as a direct consequence of Covid-19, the first time in 20 years the global extreme poverty rate has risen.

Prospects for future development are also being jeopardised. An additional 101m children fell below the minimum reading proficiency level last year, as the virus meant they could not attend school.

As marginalised families count the cost of this pandemic, they say they cannot afford to send their daughters to school. Instead, girls are asked to work to support their families or too frequently enter into marriages in their early teens.

We cannot ignore such a dramatic reversal in progress in the prospects of many hundreds of millions of people.

I am determined that Ireland play an important role in the global response. Just as we increased government investment at home to help offset the challenges posed by the pandemic, this year we also increased our allocation to overseas development aid.

The pandemic is a reminder that the our world is at its best when we work together as a collective of independent but interdependent people to our mutual benefit interest, in the spirit of Meitheal that characterised Irish life for so long.

Starting today, Ireland is hosting a two-day meeting of development ministers from 29 OECD countries to plot a collective pathway forward, with a particular focus on how we can maximise the potential of our shared investment in international development. We will discuss really important questions:

• How do we undo the catastrophic economic impact of the pandemic?
• How do we get children — particularly girls — back into education?
• How do we do that smartly, recognising that many OECD countries will be challenged to substantially increase allocations to international development in the face of their own pandemic recoveries?
• And, while as ministers we know that our safety and security at home is linked with our investment in ensuring that others remain safe and secure in their home places, how do we communicate this effectively with our citizens?

The meeting will also address the issue of climate change. With COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, taking place in November, this is an important opportunity for OECD countries to discuss effective global responses.

It is very significant that Ireland is hosting such a vital global conference. Irish Aid, the government’s overseas development assistance programme, is recognised as a world leader in delivering principled, untied assistance, and for its partnership with developing countries. That partnership is needed now more than ever.

This week’s conference affords Ireland the opportunity to help shape the recovery for the world’s poorest people.

It allows us to help ensure the world builds back better and greener. Ireland will not be found wanting.

Minister Colm Brophy TD

Minister of State for OverseasDevelopment and Diaspora

Crisis is timely for new Garda powers

I found the recent article Very concerning: Experts worry over new powers for gardaí incredible.

The old political adage of never wasting a crisis springs to mind.

In the middle of a pandemic, how the Department of Justice can find the time to produce this enormous change to how the gardaí operate is mind-blowing. How is that going to protect the rights of the citizens?

The Department of Justice is attempting to drive it through whilst people’s minds and thoughts are elsewhere.

Shame on them.

Diarmuid Higgins

Turner’s Cross

Cork

Safeguards needed for change in laws

I would only support these new Garda laws if more safeguards are put in place.

Some of these laws are needed but I would implore the lawmakers to make sure the safeguards are as good as the laws otherwise it will lose the support of the public.

Marie Gaffney

Santry

Columnist’s use of sexist stereotyping

I’m wondering if Joyce Fegan is living in the 1980s and not 2021 when she writes things like: ‘From the moment children are born, we typically dress them in either blue or pink, we give girls dolls and boys trucks and they’re surrounded by billboards selling things like perfume but with women’s naked bodies doing the advertising’

In her column Culture of sexism and discrimination is all around us, she seems to have missed out on 40 years of progress or else she has just copied and pasted an article trotting out the same tired old cliches saying that all the ills between genders are to do with men.

She has also somehow linked this to teenage males asking for ‘nudes’ on social media.

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She makes no mention of males being pressurised into sharing inimate photos too or what their stories were in the surveys that were conducted, or what peer pressure they also experienced.

Teenagers of both sexes are preoccupied with image and spend hours showing off on social media — it’s just a fact of life.

If there are darker and more disturbing elements to this side of their lives at that age then both genders need to make changes in their behaviour and need to be supported in doing that. Trying to blame it on completely outdated examples of sexist stereotyping is utterly ridiculous though.

Mark Howard

Francis St

Dublin 8

G7 back a failing economic ideology

So the G7 met and deliberated and issued statements of how they are going to save the world.

Their most ardent plans and policies could count for little as they fail to even mention the single most urgent problem confronting human beings at present: The inability of outdated economic ideology to cope with, manage, and get the best out of the genius of technological achievement.

Our great world leaders ignore the implications.

They are trying to manage a new world order of immense ability, abundance and accelerating elimination of dependence on human input (ie, work) with a philosophy which evolved to promote exactly the opposite to what we desperately need.

Constantly increasing output coupled with working harder and longer are entirely alien to the wonderful technological age our genius has managed to create.

Economic “recovery” is of little use if it means a return to an utterly inadequate and failing economic philosophy.

What the G7 desperately needs to do, in conjunction with two great economic powers presently excluded, is design, agree on and implement an economic philosophy which, instead of promoting growth, restrains output to what is needed for consumption; restores conditions for local commerce; ensures employment sufficient to sustain society, and, in the longer term, extends affluence to all.

Padraic Neary

Tubbercurry

Co Sligo

Tory Brexiteers and DUP are of same ilk

The similarities between the UK Tory Brexiteers and the DUP are uncanny. The former vocally supported the Northern Ireland Protocol to get Brexit over the line.

Now they want it removed unilaterally.

The DUP supported an Irish Language Act to get the Northern Ireland Assembly reinstated.

Now they want to delay it into oblivion.

Paul Fellows

Bailick Road

Midleton

Brexit backers in denial of outcome

It is striking that individuals who backed the Brexit campaign are in complete denial over the way it turned out with what has become known as the Northern Ireland Protocol.

This was not the work of Northern Ireland’s nationalist community nor of the Irish Government despite the claims of some loyalists.

It was introduced as part of the withdrawal agreement negotiated between British prime minister Boris Johnson and the EU and Mr Johnson and the EU are unlikely to be influenced by those who flout the law and set out to instigate confrontations with other traditions.

Noel Harrington

Kinsale

Co Cork