Letters to the Editor: Summer time and the livin' is easy...
Billy Ryle says he can't wait to spend more time on the Tralee/Fenit greenway, and enjoy a summer of (hopefully successful) sporting encounters. Picture: iStock
Despite suffering from cabin fever during last week’s torrential downpour, I’m confident that today’s spring equinox will herald a warm, bright, and dry season. At equinox, the sun shines directly on the equator. Daylight and darkness there are almost equal at 12 hours each. The classic jazz song ‘Summertime’ reminds us that in summertime, the “livin’ is easy”.
Let’s hope so because summer time begins at 1am on Sunday, March 31, when the clocks go forward by one hour.
The days are noticeably longer. The trees are sweetly blooming. Warmth, growth, and greenery are returning. Birds are singing and building nests. Bees are buzzing. Animals are mating and producing offspring. How wonderful it is to listen to the bleating of lambs in the fields and to marvel, like William Wordsworth, at “a host of golden daffodils, beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze”.
The return of warmer weather and brighter evenings puts a spring in my step and joy in my heart. It’s my kind of weather.
It restores my energy after the cold, dark winter. Spring whets my appetite for exercise, sport, and outdoor living.
Alfred Lord Tennyson maintains that “in spring a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love”. Mine turns to sea swimming, leisurely hours in the garden, cycling on the spectacular Tralee/Fenit greenway, coffee al fresco, and the mouth-watering anticipation of a feast of Gaelic games in the parochial expectation of a trophy-winning season for the ladies’ and gents’ teams of Kerry and my club, Austin Stacks. Bring it on!
Your report on the starvation affecting tens of thousands of Gazans makes for grim reading (‘Famine in Gaza is almost here. The world needs to act now’ — Irish Examiner, March 18).
As ActionAid Ireland CEO Karol Balfe says, “the facts are indisputable”. Pictures of “skeletal children with hollowed-out eyes on the brink of death” are being posted on social media and news aggregation sites. But what can the world meaningfully do as Israel openly disputes what we are seeing happening with our very own eyes against defenceless little children?
One avenue that gets very little coverage is how large corporations are not just facilitating this outrage but are also profiting from it. We saw the pressure that was put on businesses around the world to cease operations in Russia when it invaded Ukraine and its indiscriminate killing of civilians. Why is there not the same call to pressure companies, many of them well known, to cease or withdraw from Israel in the face of such mass slaughter and starvation of civilians?
If everyone in Ireland and around the world uninstalled one well-known app that they regularly use, as part of a mass boycott, then the corporate world will undoubtedly wake up.
Money talks, and it is probably the only currency that will impact Israel to change its ways on the unimaginable horrors that are unfolding before us.
Leo Varadkar’s US Damascene enlightenment knows no bounds. Seems like a Paddy’s Day shindig in Washington is what it takes to get him to muster the cojones to openly call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The grotesque travesty has only been going on for five months, after all, and with over 31,000 Gazan civilians now killed (aka murdered), he reckons it’s about time it all halted. One wonders what revelatory insight prompted his sudden call to peace. Was he not aware of the angry universal protests all the while, Ireland very much included; the outrageous suffering being inflicted on innocent civilians; the massacres being perpetrated daily: the total destruction of infrastructure; the causing of famine conditions etc — and all this to satiate Netanyahu’s lust for power and the annihilation of the Palestinian right to self-determination?
Such shallow attention to statesmanship and authentic representation of one’s own country’s cry for humanitarian sanity begs the patent question of his leadership or, rather, the shocking lack thereof.
That said, many world leaders have been slow to demand the obvious humane decision to lay down arms. Keeping one’s so-called diplomatic powder dry seems to be the name of the spineless political game.
Yes, Hamas were guilty of a terrible atrocity, but exponentially trumping that bears no contemplating, and is a crime against humanity. Grandstanding with much-belated ceasefire utterance to a US regime which has hitherto supported the war to the hilt, is paltry and pathetic.
I was last here in Upper Nile, South Sudan, in November 2021. At that time, I found children who should have been in their classrooms learning under a tree — school benches neatly lined up facing the same direction, mimicking their classroom set up. The reason: New climate-induced floods had caused the River Nile to overflow its banks and destroy school infrastructure.
I return this week to find children yet again out of school. This time as a result of climate-induced heatwaves.
Schools without appropriate cooling systems have been advised to close by the ministry of education. I can assure you that no school in the internally displaced person’s camps we work with has the luxury of a cooling system!
It is being reported locally that at least 15 children have died of meningitis and other heat-related illnesses.
The climate crisis is putting not only the right to education of children at risk, but indeed their very right to life. We need more action, we need more leadership, and we need it now.
On RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland (Thursday, March 14) I heard the chairman of the Turf Cutters and Contractors Association, who is also an Independent TD, refer to the European Commission as a “foreign power” in a discussion pertaining to bog rewetting and Ireland’s tardiness in the process.
In the context of our country’s history, past world wars, and the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the use of the words and the concept of a “foreign power” needs a basic level of cop-on and civic awareness.
The use of the phrase in terms of this country’s relationship with the European Commission is indicative of the curse of populism, is totally irresponsible, and deeply insulting.
CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB
