If, as reported, the scoping inquiry report into abuse in schools proposes a statutory investigation also confined to Roman Catholic schools, that is disappointing.
Victims in schools with a Church of Ireland (or Protestant) ethos require an opportunity to report what happened to them. Those schools should be subject to the same official investigation as Roman Catholic schools.
I hope, for the sake of secular Irish democracy, that the reports are mistaken about a sectarian limitation on any recommended statutory inquiry.
Abuse of pupils in King’s Hospital, Wilson’s Hospital, and St Patrick’s Cathedral Grammar schools is documented. King’s Hospital School pupils were abused by school swimming pool manager Derry O’Rourke.
In Deep Deception (2010, pp124-7, 136-7), Justine McCarthy detailed examples of such abuse. It included a 1980-81 King’s Hospital boarder who told a teacher what had happened. The information was not acted on. Had it been officially pursued, 10 years of misery inflicted on countless other children could have been avoided.
St Patrick’s Cathedral School pupils were subjected to abuse by a cathedral worker. When alerted, school authorities failed to pass on warnings to parents. They were told by parents of one child who had Patrick O’Brien prosecuted, with no assistance from the school or cathedral. O’Brien, who was not named in court, received a suspended sentence. Like O’Rourke, he went on to abuse more children.
Astonishingly, O’Brien was allowed again to work in St Patrick’s. Other abused children and their parents knew nothing about O’Brien then — so successful was the school/cathedral cover-up.
A culture of secrecy surrounding abuse in Protestant schools should end. Roman Catholic schools, that once protected themselves with silence, were forced to change by a justified public demand for transparency and accountability.
The policy of omertà in Protestant schools was demonstrated when a newspaper wrote last year to Roman Catholic and Protestant schools for information on abuse and how they dealt with it. The Catholic schools responded with information, the Protestant schools uniformly ignored the request.
The State (and the media) should pursue this issue in an even-handed manner. Doing so gives all victims the impression that they will be supported. Not doing so creates second-class, voiceless victims based on sectarian criteria.
Niall Meehan, Journalism and Media faculty, Griffith College, Dublin
How will Ireland achieve wind goal?
It is remarkable that many articles published in the media by commentators, academics, and politicians — including Irish MEPs — claim that Ireland has huge potential to be a future exporter of wind energy from 2040 onwards.
Many go so far as stating that Ireland will be the “Saudi Arabia of wind energy”, supplying excess wind energy generated here to the EU and further afield.
However, none of these articles explains precisely how Ireland will achieve this extraordinary if delusional status.
None of these commentators base their predictions on current or future scientific data and, as such, can be seriously misleading and cause unrealistic economic and societal expectations.
There is an abundance of historical and current scientific data published daily by EirGrid, Ireland’s electricity grid operator (smartgriddashboard.ie), and Wind Europe — the official wind organisation of the EU (windeurope.org).
Both detail Ireland’s and each EU member state’s daily output as a percentage of wind in relation to total demand and, importantly, the amount of wind-generated in Gigawatt hours (GWhs) for each state.
A study of weather patterns and wind generation capacity over several years shows wind in Ireland and across the EU is extremely intermittent and, for extended periods as we are now experiencing, is seriously becalmed — resulting in low output and minimal electricity generation.
For instance, on Monday, July 15, Ireland produced 1.6GWhs of wind energy — hardly enough to power the street lights of a small town — and the average daily electricity output from wind for this July is 11.9GWhs. Similar figures were experienced for the months of May and June due to low wind levels.
Even with projected installed wind capacity of 37GWhs by 2050, with similar weather conditions, Ireland can expect to generate only 90GWhs of electricity. At higher wind share, it could generate up to 450GWhs per day — much of which will be required for home consumption.
It is instructive to compare these figures with the electricity demands of the 27 EU member states.
At 30% wind share of total peak demand of around 6500GWhs, the EU current installed wind capacity produces over 2000GWhs of electricity per day.
Unlike Ireland, most EU countries are already rapidly installing more onshore and offshore wind capacity. Clearly, it is naive to expect any of them to be dependent on Ireland for future supplies.
John Leahy, Wilton, Cork
Call out the US
Excellent article by Colin Sheridan (‘Romantic America is dead and gone’, July 27) which I totally agree with. Unfortunately, this newspaper — as well as others — does not call out the malevolent behaviour of the USA all over the world.
Their economic and military power cowers people into soft or no criticism at all over their many abusive deeds.
We currently see it daily with their supplying of whatever weapons Israel needs in butchering Palestinians. It’s time for right-thinking and brave people to continually expose their many illegal activities.
Tim Butler, Spur Hill, Cork
Consider the vice presidential pick
Gareth O’Callaghan quotes Donald Trump’s response to Kamala Harris’ selection as the US vice presidential candidate when he said that it would be an insult to the country if Kamala Harris were to be the first woman president.
Mr O’Callaghan says Mr Trump’s words “were tarnishing every woman of colour in the US”.
Elsewhere, on the same day, Liz Truss was savagely ridiculed on your book page by your reviewer Deirdre O’Shaughnessy.
Does that mean Ms O’Shaughnessy was tarnishing all white British women? Actually, she was justifiably questioning whether Ms Truss should ever have been considered a suitable candidate for prime minister of Britain.
Mr Trump (and everyone else) has every right to question her fitness to have her finger on the nuclear button.
Nothing betrays how selfish ambition trumps patriotism like the cynicism of many vice presidential picks, which sometimes has dreadful consequences.
Abraham Lincoln inexplicably chose Andrew Johnson for vice president — a supporter of slavery — to “balance the ticket”, after president Lincoln’s murder sabotaged Reconstruction, (a kind of ‘de-Nazification’ intended to prevent racists from taking back power in the south), condemned the recently freed slaves to something like apartheid for another century, and made a mockery of the sacrifice of the Civil War dead.
In 1944, Franklin D Roosevelt (already in bad health) dropped his vice president, Henry Wallace, just to please the rich party donors.
Mr Wallace was perhaps the most brilliant American politician of the 20th century. Mr Roosevelt died soon after his re-election, paving the way for Harry Truman to drop the atomic bomb and start the Cold War.
Mr Wallace opposed the dropping of atomic bombs and the formation of Nato. What a different world we would have if Mr Roosevelt had held his ground.
Presidents Lincoln and Roosevelt were among the best American presidents, but both arguably destroyed their legacy by a cynical and foolish choice of vice president.
More recently, George Bush Snr chose Dan Quayle for vice president and John McCain chose Sarah Palin. By mere good fortune, we were spared president Quayle or president Palin — no thanks to Bush or McCain, both now canonised by mainstream American opinion.
US voters will vote mostly on domestic issues and silly phony culture wars. We here should concern ourselves only with who will bring more war, the rest is not our problem.
We have an idea how Mr Trump views foreign affairs. Ms Harris, when sent to the Middle East, seemed not to have known that the US supports (or pretends to support) a two-state solution in Palestine.
Nobody really knows what JD Vance believes about anything. Neither does Mr Trump, I suspect.
He probably did not give it any more thought than presidents Lincoln or Roosevelt did.
Tim O’Halloran, Ferndale Rd, Dublin
