Letters to the Editor: There are no easy solutions to the scourge of homelessness
Members of the public placed flowers and messages of condolences at the Grand Canal where two homeless men died at the weekend. Picture: Sam Boal/Collins
The sad deaths of two people in the Grand Canal at the weekend focused minds again on the lives of people ending up homeless.
There is a huge number of people working in the NGO (non-governmental organisation) sector and statutory bodies working hard addressing the problem of homelessness, supported by an incredible amount of funding from various sources. No one agency can claim exclusive expertise. This is because it is a complex problem as we highlighted in our submission to the Oireachtas joint committee on housing, local government & heritage when they met to consider homelessness on January 29, 2021, it is clear that there are no easy solutions.
This too is compounded by the fact that we live in a country where personal freedom is paramount, even if at times there can be tragic outcomes.
People, whatever their social status do have rights and responsibilities. This is an example of some of the issues that arise when we reflect on the death of someone labelled homeless, especially when they are known to us, as was the case in this instance.
The work of gardaí and the ambulance service dealing with tragic events such as the deaths of the two men last weekend is all too often overlooked or taken for granted.
As Helen O’Callaghan notes ('Chickenpox: How it's spreading, why it needs immediate medical care, and how to spot it' — Irish Examiner, July 9) people who have had chickenpox are susceptible to shingles which is an incredibly debilitating illness, leaving the sufferer with neither strength nor energy for ages.
The mammy fell ill with shingles in 2017. A few weeks later I got the shingles vaccine. During the consultation, the GP mentioned that it was expensive. His receptionist remarked about the €150 expense and then said “actually I’ve paid more for a pair of shoes”.
Some weeks later I recounted this to a pharmacist who said: “That’s nothing. I have patients spending more than that on shingles medication every month for many months and it hardly works.”
Having seen how debilitating shingles can be, having talked with people who had the illness and remembering how enfeebled I was when I had chickenpox, I highly recommend the vaccine. It isn’t a life saver but it is a quality of life saver.
For years most of the mainstream media and political leaders on the centre right like Emmanuel Macron and Simon Harris have been preaching to working-class people and the radical left that the possibility of a socialist government taking power was impossible. They claimed we were in fact at the end of history and capitalism was the new world order, that there was no alternative to free market neoliberal economics.
But the French workers have blown this myth out of the water and put socialism back on the agenda in France. At the same time they have also defeated the prospect of a far right government by presenting the French working-class with the choice of voting for an alternative left government.
The programme of the French left included: Wealth tax, a minimum wage hike of 14%, huge investment in public housing, price freezes on energy and essentials, reduce the retirement age to 60, ecological planning, and arms embargo and sanctions on Israel.
Workers in Ireland and throughout the world should take inspiration from the French workers and unite in the fight against capitalism and fascism and for a freer and more equal world without hunger and war.
As the debate continues in the US within the Democratic party as to Biden’s suitability to remain as their candidate for the November elections based on his health and mental acuity, the biggest elephant in the room is his disastrous foreign policy regarding Gaza and his ongoing military support for the nefarious Netanyahu administration.
In spite of his domestic policy achievements, the moral failures of his decisions regarding the Israel/Gaza conflict are uppermost in many observers minds both domestically and internationally.
His stubbornness and inflexibility in continuing to support Netanyahu have made him complicit in the enormous death toll of innocent Gazans.
This will be his legacy.
He needs to step down for a multitude of reasons, not least the certainty that terrible Trump will win if he remains.
On July 6, thousands of people marched through the streets of Dublin protesting against Ireland’s abortion law. Are these people crazy? Is the abortion issue not done-and-dusted? Does abortion not need to become more widely available?
The answer to all these questions is a resounding ‘no’.
We now know that no fewer than 10,033 abortions were carried out in Ireland last year, a HSE figure released after 7pm on a Friday evening, probably in an attempt to bury the dismal story.
“Rare” was one of the common buzz-words used in the lead up to the 2018 Referendum in order to convince the Irish electorate to repeal the Eighth Amendment and legalise abortion. One in 6 unborn babies now has his or her life deliberately ended in the womb.
Nobody could currently call abortion rare in Ireland and the people who marched in huge numbers on Saturday feel deeply betrayed by politicians who made false promises in 2018.
The abortion figures are spiralling upwards (6666 in 2019, 8156 in 2022 and over 10 000 in 2023). Regardless of this disturbing trend, the Government is making no effort to turn the tide and is even considering liberalising the law.
Addressing the Dublin rally, the Independent TD Carol Nolan (Laois-Offaly) described the increase as a “national scandal” and called for the establishment of an urgent taskforce to tackle the spiralling numbers. This is a proposal that should be acted upon immediately. Even though the genie is unfortunately out of the bottle now, it is still possible to rekindle a culture of life in Ireland.
To facilitate this, the 3-day waiting period should definitely be retained, there should be no encouragement for medics to act outside of the existing abortion legislation and total protection should be guaranteed for all health-service workers who hold a conscientious objection to a procedure that, after all, ends a human life.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of natural resources, but its people are one of the most impoverished due to colonial exploitation and past and recent conflicts.
The abuse began with the slave trade in the 15th century.
King Leopold II of Belgium turned the Congo into his personal empire, which cost the lives of up to eight million Congolese people as exposed by Roger Casement.
Colonial abuses continued up to and beyond independence in 1960, including the assassination of prime minister Patrice Lumumba.
Joseph Mobutu seized power in 1965 and his rule until 1997 involved widespread corruption and human rights abuses.
The Rwandan genocide in 1994, sparked off a series of conflicts in eastern Congo that have continued up to the present time.
The First Congo War in 1996/97 cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The Second Congo War began in 1998 with estimates of the death toll reaching up to five million people.
The so-called international community has failed the people of the Congo DRC catastrophically, on multiple occasions. The latest UN MONUSCO mission has been in the DRC for over 25 years. It has been the largest and most expensive mission ever undertaken by the UN.
It has failed utterly and is now abandoning the Congolese people. Interventions by regional African organisations and neighbouring countries have added to the problems rather than resolving them. African lives matter just as much as European lives.
All of humanity urgently needs an effective global jurisprudence and conflict resolution system based on global justice.
The 1960s UN mission in the Congo cost the lives of 26 Irish soldiers. Their sacrifices were justified at the time. Instead of supporting wars in Europe, in breach of Irish neutrality, the Irish Government should be supporting peace and justice in the Congo and elsewhere.
