Letters to the Editor: No real truce as long as Israel's deadly bombing of Gaza continues
Palestinians inspect the rubble of a building destroyed by an Israeli army strike at Al-Shati camp in Gaza City on Wednesday. Picture: Yousef Al Zanoun/AP
Israeli bombing killed more than 100 people in Gaza, including at least 35 children, in retaliation for the killing of one Israeli soldier by unknown militants on October 28, 2025.
Such 100-1 disproportionate killing is either a war crime, or a continuation of the genocide, or both.
It’s likely the ongoing genocide has already caused the deaths of up to 100,000 people in Gaza.
US president Donald Trump insists that “nothing will jeopardise truce”. There is no real truce or genuine peace process in Gaza or in the wider Middle East. The US and its Nato and EU allies continue to supply weapons, munitions, and financial and political support to Israel.
Too many other governments, including Ireland, remain silent or complicit. In the wider Middle East over the past year, Israeli attacks on Lebanon have killed more than 800 people, injured more than 5,000, and Israel still occupies parts of southern Lebanon. Following the overthrowing of the Assad regime in Syria in December 2024, Israel has been bombing in Syria and occupies several hundred square miles of Syria beyond the Golan Heights.
In June 2025, Israel and the US carried out bombing attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets in Iran, causing the deaths of more than 600 people. Dreadful wars in Sudan and the Congo are being ignored. The risks of nuclear war in Europe and elsewhere are increasing, and global environmental destruction continues towards an irreversible tipping point.
The only bright light in this dark horizon has been the election of peace and justice activist Catherine Connolly as president of Ireland. Let’s hope this peace and justice example will spread to help restore the now non-existent rule of international laws.
My heart goes out to the young mothers of today’s Ireland.
Unlike her parents, the typical mum has to rise at an ungodly hour to get the family breakfast ready and bring the children to the creche and/or school before getting herself organised to go to work.
This is not an option because it usually requires two salaries to pay the rent or, if they are lucky, the mortgage on an apartment or house. After work, she collects the children and gets to go home where, if she is lucky enough, both she and her partner will make dinner for the family, help the children with homework, before sending them off to bed. She can take a couple of hours’ rest and recuperation in front of the television before tiredness overcomes her and she heads to bed. This gruelling routine repeats ad nauseam until she is old before her time and life has passed her by.
It doesn’t have to be like this. In March 2024, in a referendum, the Government attempted to hoodwink the public into removing a guarantee from our Constitution that mothers should not, out of economic necessity, have to go out to work to the detriment of their families.
The voters saw through this chicanery and, by a huge majority, rejected it. The Government’s motive for this try on most probably came from a real fear that it could be taken to court for the failure over the years to do anything to permit stay-at-home mothers to exist in Ireland.
Recent budgets have done practically nothing to help the situation. This leads to the real fear that, sooner or later, someone or some organisation will take legal action to force Government to live up to its constitutional responsibilities in the matter.
Fergus Finlay argues that Catherine Connolly’s democratic mandate is somehow weakened because if “you divide her vote arithmetically by the size of the electorate, the answer is 25.29%”.
It strikes me as a strange argument, since I recalled Michael D Higgins winning his re-election in 2018 on an even lower turnout than this year — with support from “only” 24.18% of the total electorate.
Yet I do not recall Finlay being so concerned that Higgins had to feel obliged to “prove” he was an inclusive president.
And if we want to continue this game further — 25.29% is also the proportion of the electorate Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael won in the general election last year, and it does not break past 27.5% even when you add in the nine pro-government Independents.
No serious commentator would argue that a government should be concerned about being elected on such a share of the electorate, so I’m not sure why the presidency should be any different.
In a recent moving speech in Tuam Cathedral, Fr Mark Quinn blamed constant criticism by the media of the Catholic Church for many lay Catholics leaving it. However, probably the real reason why so many people have sadly left the Church is that they have come to grasp the truth that they have always had little or no voice in how their Church is run.
Back in the 1970s, if lay Catholic parents really had a voice to express themselves clearly at that time, they would surely have asked the leaders of the Church to make sure that its teaching orders must stop shouting at and beating their children so much.
But the clergy should, today, start the long overdue process of sitting down from time to time with its lay people — just like Jesus did with the family of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus — so that they all can discuss together better the stories of the gospel if they really and truly want more lay Catholics to return to the Church.
It was cheering to read that Cork City will see a 53% increase in bus services and two 24-hour services (Irish Examiner, October 29).
It would be even more heartening, in the meantime, to be assured that the 51 Bus Éireann Expressway service between Cork and Galway will make its advertised stop in Mallow town centre every hour.
This is a major public transport artery between major towns and cities (including Limerick, Shannon Airport, and Ennis).
Too frequently, the bus fails to call at Mallow — making the service completely unreliable for work and leisure. It is pushing more of us back into our cars, and that can only worsen congestion and emissions.
In 2015, former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon said “climate change carries no passport and knows no national borders”. In the 10 years that have passed, the international community has been criticised for not acting swiftly or coherently enough on the issue of climate change. What has changed and also entered the public consciousness in the past 10 years is interest around the UNFCCC’s Cop events. It is the Cop events that galvanised the Friday’s for Future movement in 2018.
However, while the Cop events do bring together nations to discuss the most significant issue of the 21st century, not all nations can fully engage. Amongst these nations is Taiwan.
Despite not being a full member, Taiwan has worked to fulfil the UNFCCC’s framework on a nationally determined contribution to show its transparency in it low carbon goals.
Taiwan has also set an ambitious path to achieve net zero by 2050, and worked to ensure every part of the Taiwanese government is working on individual climate mitigation plans. Taiwan, like Ireland and every other country, will be affected by climate change.
As alarming as it is if climate change worsens, the last thing any nation will consider is who may participate in Cop and who may not. All nations should be able to come together to work to avoid a worse-case scenario on the issue of climate change.
In relation to the article published on October 29, 'Venture capital deals worth €128m closed in Ireland during Q3', can you ask KPMG the following which wasn’t in the report published:
- How many of those deals were into actual start-ups (ie new companies rather than later-stage companies)?
- How many went to companies that were pre-revenue at the time of the investment?
- How many went to companies that were not cashflow positive (ie operating at a loss or not yet generating positive operating cashflow)?
- What percentage (or number) of the deals were to companies outside the Dublin area?
- Could you break down the deal flow by geography within Ireland (eg Dublin vs other regions/provinces)?
- Could you provide a segmentation by company maturity (seed, early-stage, growth) for the 14 deals?
- Are the two largest deals — ProVerum and Nory AI — representative of the portfolio, or are they skewing the overall figures?
- Do you have any insight into how many of the companies had prior revenue, and how many did not, at the time of investment?
