Kieran Moore (Letters, September 8) takes a robust swipe at the paltry service intervention for vulnerable children across the disability spectrum. His ire is mostly well placed, albeit he misunderstands the innate flaws in the Camhs hierarchical setup and, presuming they’re disproportionately scapegoated, he claims that “Camhs gets all the rap, and other services covering disability...... get away scot-free by comparison”.
Just to enlighten him, Camhs teams deserve all the opprobrium they elicit, due to the professional arrogance of their team leaders.... aka psychiatrists.
While other Camhs therapeutic team members attempt to operate a valid and valuable response, the distorted power-mongering of the psychiatric players therein scupper any chance of a basic modicum of wholesome care in the round. There is no good reason whatsoever that psychiatry should enjoy such a domineering profile within these services.
We all are aware of the recent tragic South Kerry debacle prompting a wide-ranging review that exposed the fallacious realities pending. Claiming lack of staffing merely camouflages an inherent flaw of therapeutic approach.
Having worked in this area over many frustrating past years, I continue to despair of any realistic or sustained progress. Current child disability services are a mess for everyone concerned, mainly due to poor planning, poor mid-management HSE governance, and copious reflex sticking-plaster remedies being heaped on an already flawed operational transition.
The Camhs’ psychiatrists typically, and through a sense of entitled arrogance, fail abysmally to intersect meaningfully in the new child disability network team scenario with any degree of humility or healthy team dynamic. It’s as if they feel they are above the nitty-gritty of multi-disciplinary engagement and truly egalitarian professionalism with other therapeutic players. There is no credible, health, scientific, or therapeutic rationale to their presumptuous apartheid.
Maybe some day the HSE can appoint some clinically aware and able people to their mid-echelons...people who are really in the know and who can support the coal-face CDNTs who are trying their utmost to function within a scandalous swamp of chaotic oversight, ensuring the services cannot deliver for a variety of blatantly obvious reasons, with so many clinical team managers opting out to other healthcare jobs, leaving a sinking ship well below its plimsoll line.
Too much unproductive ballast, not enough buoyancy in the mid-ship. Sad but true.
Jim Cosgrove
Clinical Music Therapist
Lismore
Co Waterford
Cuts to the speed limits are not enough
The introduction of new reduced speed limits will not, on their own, reduce fatalities or serious injuries on our roads.
International Transport Forum research carried out on behalf of the OECD examined road safety performance in 10 European countries.
It concluded that there was a direct correlation between speed and the number of crashes.
Its recommendations were a reduction in speed limits on roads and for different types of vehicles.
It also recommended speed limits where people can survive crashes, stricter enforcement, safety upgrades on road infrastructure and speed controls.
A three-year study carried out by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health on speed reduction to 20 mph on 76 streets in Belfast city in 2016, showed that it had little impact on long-term outcomes including collisions, casualties, and speed, and really only reduced traffic volume in these streets.
What it did find was lower emissions, better quality of life, and in order to reduce crashes or collisions it recommended more driver training, better marketing, social engagement, in-car interventions, more CCTV, and police communication and enforcement.
Legislation to reduce speed limits on its own, even with fixed GoSafe vans, and on/off enforcement will not stop road collisions but a combination of all of the aforementioned may.
Christy Galligan
Letterkenny
Co Donegal
Set up a smaller RTÉ in Athlone
RTÉ needs to be abolished in its present format and re-established somewhere like Athlone.
Its Montrose Studio and lands in Stillorgan would fetch a very considerable sum of money on the open market. This would more than cover the costs of setting up a smaller station that could attempt to be a national broadcaster.
RTÉ failed dismally in its role as a national broadcaster and simply served as a local Dublin broadcaster while demanding that the rest of Ireland should fund it while clearly mismanaging its finances and grossly overpaying its top staff.
RTÉ has now become toxic and the name will forever be associated with Dublin-centred bias, corruption, and “keeping it in the family circle” as we see the same old faces being trotted out ad nauseam. Their former selves will undoubtedly be continued as a local Dublin station under private enterprise but not funded by the nation.
I challenge anybody to make a valid argument as to why RTÉ should be funded by the State.
John Mc Inerney
Raheen
Co Limerick
Citizens will pay for poor security
When abject failure is your defence and security policy of choice, expect drug gangs and criminals to fully exploit it. The continuing failure by Minister Micheál Martin and the Government to address the crisis in the Defence Forces highlights what little value they put on defence and security and on members of the Defence Forces. It amounts to a dereliction of duty, for which the citizens of the State will pay.
Conor Hogarty
Blackrock
Co Dublin
Has cost of living turned Gilligan off?
It took a long time, but when someone as famous as John Gilligan declares he wouldn’t live in Ireland again because the place has gone to hell, then it must be time to take this on board.
I mean John must be by now appalled at the cost of living here, for one thing.
What do you think?
Robert Sullivan,
Bantry
Co Cork
Catholic guilt is dead and gone
The cliché of “Catholic guilt” is dated and tiresome on several grounds (Tom McElligott, Irish Examiner letters September 2).
In 2023 only very elderly Catholics will have been raised with any real awareness of the connection between sin and guilt, and the promise of forgiveness for the truly repentant.
Thanks to decades of dropping mass-attendance, lack of proper catechesis, and a la carte Catholicism, the younger generation will find the term “Catholic guilt” as alien as “wireless telegraph”.
Those long-lapsed Catholics still using the term “Catholic guilt” might ask themselves why they bother to continue feeling plagued by their consciences having left the practice of their religion.
Above all, getting rid of religion in society did not get rid of guilt or shame. Instead, we have created whole new classes of “secular guilt” and shame: Locally, Ireland’s neutrality during the Second World War has become “Irish war guilt”; we’ve been busy gnashing our teeth over almost every aspect of Irish society since the founding of the State, being so much better now ourselves.
More generally we’ve had the guilt of white male privilege, cancel culture, shame over colonialism (even in Ireland, one of the first colonies in more modern times!) foisted on us.
The list is endless.
Significantly, what is missing is the Catholic corollary of “forgiveness”, which has been replaced with secular vindictiveness.
Nick Folley
Carrigaline
Co Cork
