Letters to the Editor: Fitting tribute to Irish soldier who died a hero in Lebanon
Private Billy Kedian's remains being borne to the cemetery on a gun carriage during his funeral in Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo, in 1999. Picture: Keith Heneghan/GreenGraph
On Saturday last I drove to Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo, to commemorate the memory of Pte Billy Kedian, who died a hero in Lebanon as a result of an Israeli direct air strike on C Company’s HQ in 1999. Billy got all his men safely into an underground bunker but died at the entrance, as the last man in. He would have been 45 on his birthday on Saturday.
This commemoration was very well organised by the committee of Mayo officials, local leaders, and supported by Senator Gerard Craughwell, and Cathal Berry TD.
A local farmer donated the site on his lands, adjoining Billy’s home, and a local stonemason created a magnificent and poignant reminder for all future generations of the heroism and bravery of the young 20-year-old local boy, who sacrificed his life to save his comrades. Mayo County Council donated €10,000 to the organising committee, and that committee provided his family, friends and the hundreds who attended with a ceremony befitting another hero from the Defence Forces.
Notably absent was the secretary general of the Department of Defence; the chief of staff of the Defence Forces; the minister for defence, who acting in his multi tasking role as minister for foreign affairs, chose to be in Africa; and the Government was represented by a junior minister, who performed admirably.
It was indeed a memorable tribute to a young Irish soldier and his family.
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The International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion on July 19 on Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories has important implications for the rule of international law, and for all of humanity.
Given the Israeli war crimes and probably genocide in Gaza, the US invitation to Israeli prime minister Netanyahu to address the Houses of Congress is an affront to the proper rule of international laws and to most of humanity including to the Jewish people, who suffered catastrophically in the Holocaust.
A Lancet medical journal report estimates the number of fatalities caused by Israeli military attacks on Gaza may reach 186,000. At least 108 media workers, and 366 UN staff and family members have been killed in Gaza.
There were at least 700,000 Israeli illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem prior to October 7. This does not include Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands prior to 1967. The ICJ opinion obliges Israel to return all such illegal settlements to the Palestinian people or provide adequate compensation.
Israel is not alone in breaches of international laws, and it has been supported by the US and by many members of Nato and the EU. The US-led wars of aggression since the end of the Cold War in breach of the UN Charter have caused the deaths of millions of innocent civilians, and trillions of dollars in destruction, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere. The Gaza war crimes must be a turning point, towards the restoration of the proper rule of international and humanitarian laws.
The ICJ opinion also details the duties and legal consequences for all UN member states. This and other rulings and opinions by the ICJ and the ICC, oblige Ireland not to support Israeli war crimes in any way, and to fully comply with its international law duties with respect to Israeli illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and the rights of Palestinian people to self-determination.
It was heart-rending to see Channel 4 News showing some of the 150,000 weary and distressed Palestinian adults and children on the move again in one day in the intense nine-month now Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
An older lady on her own sat exhausted on the side of a hot, dusty road. A boy pulled his sister behind him in a small crate converted into a trailer with wheels. She is too malnourished to walk. A panicked woman holding her 20-week old grandchild. She lost the baby’s parents in the confusion of moving out quickly. The people and families hurried along looking anxious, wondering if they have been abandoned by the world.
They were leaving Khan Yunis in Gaza on the orders of Israel’s military which wants to go in for the second time in three months to try and eliminate Hamas in the city. Around the same time, Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu arrived into the city of Washington DC to address a packed joint session of the US Congress, where smartly suited politicians stood and applauded him. Some 50 Democrat politicians and independent senator, Bernie Sanders, deliberately did not attend and boycotted his speech.
The UN recently estimated 1.9m (90%) of the population moved many times around Gaza in the last nine months to escape the war.
The support for the Palestinian people in Gaza and in the West Bank continues in Cork with a gathering at 1pm and a march every Saturday for over 40 weeks since the invasion of Gaza began — calling for an end to the war and for sincere negotiations to create a two-state solution.
We hope for a ceasefire and the return of the remaining hostages to Israel from Hamas; for more food and aid to enter all parts of Gaza.
What happened on October 7 when Hamas went into Israel and killed more than 1,000 people and took hostages wasn’t right — it does not justify the massive destruction and violence since by Israel in Gaza; 40,000 mostly civilian deaths and more wounded. Journalists, doctors, nurses and ambulance medics in Gaza also killed by missile and rocket attacks.
I think the war in Gaza is one of the saddest news stories and humanitarian disasters of 2023 and 2024.
Serious questions need to be asked as to why the world is letting an operating system prone to outages dominate global IT systems.
Our own HSE is still recovering from our last major cyberattack with the Windows ransom attack in 2021.
Linux, Unix, and macOS (which is based on Unix) systems do not seem to suffer such widespread disruptions, though they have vulnerabilities and also require patches and regular security updates.
Blaming a third party which has been given kernel access is no excuse.
Questions also need to be asked re Microsoft’s responsibility in ensuring that all computers using its Windows systems worldwide are fully patched and up to date. Vulnerable Windows machines may put all Windows machines with internet access at risk.
Writing in on July 20, Steven J Vaughan-Nichols wrote: “Who in the world would trust Windows for any mission-critical work? All it took was a single faulty content update — not really even code — to fry Windows computers from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
“Just as bad, undoing the problem requires manual fixes to every computer, PC by PC. Why was the update so awful? Why did it cause hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — of PCs around the world to crash and get locked into endless reboot loops? Because … we depend all too much on a single product: Windows. Windows has become a single point of failure for the world’s IT infrastructure.
"We really must move on, not to a world where everyone uses Macs or desktop Linux, but one where we use a multitude of different operating systems.”
I highly recommend this article, our deep dependence in Ireland and throughout the world on Windows needs to be urgently addressed.
The editorial — ‘Crime loosened Church’s grip’ (Irish Examiner, July 23) — seems conflicted because while expressing sympathy for the victims of the former Bishop Eamonn Casey, there is a commensurately distinct note of glee that the deceased Bishop’s ignominious fall from grace may have caused serious damage to the standing and reputation of the Irish Catholic Church’s hierarchy.
I say hierarchy, because the Catholic Church is much more than its hierarchy.
The Church is composed mainly of lay Catholic faithful, such as the recently canonised Italian teenager Carlo Acutis or the late Frank Duff, as well as many others in lower clerical orders.
For instance, in the centuries when the Catholic Church in Ireland was subjected to intolerance and persecution, the Church existed mainly in and through its beaten and downtrodden lay people; that continues to be, and will always be, the case and thanks to St Pope John Paul II’s catechism, the Catholic laity have a powerful beacon of light to guide them on the right path of their earthly journey.
