Letters to the Editor: Documentary casts an eye over our brutal past

Pray for our Sinners explored church abuse in the 1960s and 70s.

Viewing the documentary, Pray For Our Sinners brought back painful memories. I suffered corporal punishment also (as did virtually all of my classmates). Sadly, in my experience lay teachers were equally culpable. 

In contrast, having been taught by seven or eight priests in St Pats in Navan, the experience was much more agreeable. The late Dr Patrick Randles, the subject of Pray for Our Sinners, is deserving of great praise for his campaign against this vile practice.

Fr Andrew Farrell was very much in the dock in the film. And, it would appear had serious questions to answer. In many ways, this is hardest of all to fathom. A man who contributed so much good to society (civil and religious ) in Navan, would appear to have been overly loyal to a teaching order which had too many ‘bad eggs’. As Brendan Behan’s brother, Dominic, once aptly remarked, many of them neither acted in a Christian or brotherly manner. One would dearly love to have found out Fr Farrell’s rationale, but sadly we will never know.

My criticisms of the film are two-fold. Firstly, it did not compare and contrast with other, non-Catholic countries. For example, 27 states in the USA forcibly sterilised unmarried mothers at the behest of the eugenics advocate, Margaret Sanger, (who was also founder of the large pro-abortion organisation, Planned Parenthood). The secular Scandinavians took this a step further, with a combined abortion/sterilisation policy. The UK officially described unmarried mothers as “moral imbeciles” and carried out thousands of forced adoptions between the mid 1950s and 1970s, often at the behest of parents and social workers.

So ironically, while we were far from perfect, we were the best of a bad lot. Likewise with corporal punishment. The album The Wall by Pink Floyd was based on the band’s members experiences of cruel abuse in school in 1960s England. Prince Charles, soon to be King Charles III, was deliberately sent by his parents to a school where he suffered both corporal punishment and bullying by some of his fellow students. He was deemed to be too shy and introverted and this, bizarrely, was considered the appropriate treatment. He has spoken frequently of how traumatised he was by the experience.

Eric Conway

Navan

Co Meath

Big landlords must pay their fair share

Instead of tracking people with a few properties, the government should grow teeth and pursue the undertaxed, super-rich corporations for even a little more more tax. This money would house countless thousands of people.

Dr Florence Craven

Bracknagh

Co Offaly

Three-day abortion wait is demeaning

Our long experience as abortion rights campaigners tells us very few people voted ‘yes’ on May 25, 2018, because of the three-day waiting period, whatever Health Minister Stephen Donnelly may claim.

The claim is irrelevant anyway. The abortion review is to see what works and what doesn’t, what’s good law and what’s bad. And the three-day delay to abortion provision, besides being patronising, infantilising even, is bad law.

The World Health Organization says: “Mandatory waiting periods can have the effect of delaying care, which can jeopardise women’s ability to access safe, legal abortion services and demeans women as competent decision-makers.”

The three-day delay means two trips to an abortion provider. Which is inconvenient if you live in a city and have a comfortable home life. But if you are not well off, the cost of extra time off work or extra childcare can be prohibitive. If you live in a rural area, this means extra travel costs, and hours more away from home. If you are in an abusive situation, that’s twice as many risks you have to take to access healthcare. If your abortion provider is picketed by anti-abortion providers, that’s twice you’ve got to run their gauntlet of hate.

The three-day delay, as with other obstacles to abortion provision in Ireland, were inserted into our laws to make conservative politicians more comfortable. The price of their comfort was the discomfort and suffering of thousands of Irish abortion service users. It would be cynical in the extreme if Donnelly and the rest ignore the recommendations of their own review and perpetuate this bad law.

Lucy Boland

Rebels For Choice co-convener

Dunmanway

Co Cork

Irish beef industry is not sustainable

Beef is an inherently environmentally damaging product. That is a fact. Claims of Irish exceptionalism on this front have not been substantiated by evidence. Exporting beef more than 8,000 km away to China in the midst of a climate crisis is environmental madness.

Ireland had the highest greenhouse gas emissions per capita in all of the EU for the final quarter of last year. Agriculture is by far our biggest sectoral emitter.

Advocates for the meat industry argue that “people need to eat”. Agreed. But people do not need to eat meat, and the damage done by meat production to the planet is huge. That is the point.

Regarding the red herring that is the “carbon leakage” argument, the warped logic seems to be: We produce an inherently environmentally damaging product in a marginally less damaging way than other countries (allegedly). They will make money from adding even more fuel to the fire if we don’t, so we are right to claim a piece of the action.

Another red herring is the “sure aren’t we only responsible for x% of global emissions” argument. If every country adopts this attitude, we’re cooked. Every country is “only responsible for a percentage of emissions”.

Moreover, as one our most eminent economists recently noted, almost all of Irish beef farmers’ incomes come from EU payments, so average value added in the beef sector is close to zero.

The Irish beef industry is simply not sustainable.

Rob Sadlier

Rathfarnham

Dublin 16

Raze all buildings of historic shame

It would appear that renaming Berkeley Library in Trinity College is a mere exercise in semantics.

If people were genuinely concerned about any and every connection to slavery, then all the historic buildings in Trinity should be razed to the ground forthwith since they were founded in part on the proceeds of tobacco (an industry not hailed as one espousing equality, fairness and freedom in bygone years).

Trinity also reserved fellowships for those not of the Catholic faith for quite a number of years; religious discrimination I perceive.

Women were only admitted as full members from 1904;. do I detect sexism here?

A triple whammy of discriminative practices nurtured within those historic edifices one would think. If names are being removed, surely buildings cannot be far behind.

Aileen Hooper

Stoneybatter

Dublin 7

Conspiracy council

There have been numerous disruptions to local council meetings in my locality from people with concerning views: the anti-vaxxers, the anti-5G campaigners, and the ones who seem to listen only to the extreme dark corners of the internet.

Why can’t we have the usual boring council meetings that no one wants to listen to or speak at?

Dennis Fitzgerald

Melbourne

Australia