Letters to the Editor: Charlie Bird’s professional impact
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I remember Charlie Bird interviewing Fr Niall O’Brien through prison bars in the Philippines in 1984.
Fr Niall, along with two priests (a Filipino and an Australian), and six lay workers had been arrested on a false charge of murder of a mayor. Fr Niall was a community and human rights activist and he told of their innocence and that they had been arrested on a trumped-up charge because their work brought them in contact with the poor who they had taught to stand up for their rights in a non-violent way.
He said that it didn’t sit well with the (in 1984) old semi-feudal regime in the Philippines. Fr Niall was not optimistic about their being freed.
The interview was broadcast on February 22 and Fr Niall was released five months later and returned to Ireland on July 14, 1984. His co-accused were released too. Fr Niall returned to the Philippines in 1986 after the end of that regime. This was the impact Charlie Bird’s interview had in highlighting their grim situation to Ireland and Australia.
Charlie had charisma and helped us to pay attention to important news. He was a great TV news reporter. He wasn’t subsumed by RTÉ as he had a spirit of independence. When we heard his name, we knew or expected it to be important. He became an iconic figure before he retired from RTÉ’s news division.
His battle with motor neurone disease in the last years of his life highlighted what a very difficult disease it is and his courage in facing it and utilising it as a way of raising millions of euro for charities. He brought a lot of kind and good people together in achieving this, showing us there are still good people in the world.
Here is an extract from the Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association’s tribute to him: “Charlie has truly left an enduring legacy, whose impact will be written in history and will be felt by all of us for many, many years to come.”
My condolences to all his family on their great loss. Fr Niall O’Brien died in April 2004.
Our much-vaunted céad míle fáilte, especially over the national holiday hullabaloo, is shockingly contradicted by the immigrants’ tents on Mount St in Dublin.
How can our holy Catholic bishops and our wholly millionaire countrymen allow the Government to betray our best instincts? There are empty offices and churches all over the city.
If there is no better welcome, over this weekend of celebrations, for these embattled callers on our generosity, I will have to find a tent and join them next week.
After your report a few weeks ago about Irish Water seeking planning permission for a sewage treatment plant on Kilkee’s hugely popular cliff walk, and in spite of strong opposition it is shameful it has not been dropped, especially when it is a crime against the environment.
Minister for the Environment Eamon Ryan must force Irish Water to show common sense, and stop this attempt to destroy one of the most beautiful amenities on the Wild Atlantic Way?
The magnificence of the Clare coast has been acknowledged for so long by so many including noted English writer Charlotte Bronte who spent her honeymoon there in 1854 and wrote: “Such a wild iron-bound coast — with such an ocean-view as I had not yet seen and such battling of waves with rocks as I had never imagined.” Ms Bronte wrote to a friend while staying in Kilkee, and apparently these lines were probably written only a couple of hundred metres from the site of the proposed sewage plant. Most important it remains as stunning to this day!
I am writing this letter because some think because the idea is so outrageous it will automatically be rejected at the planning stage. But I was reminded by a member of Clare Country Council “that is not the way the system works”.
A fact that is clear from some housing projects given permission during the property bubble. Worse still, untreated raw sewage has been pumped into the bay there for the last 50 years which was never addressed.
Now Irish Water is taking advantage of that scandal to try to ram through an insane location for the waste treatment plant which no one disagrees is desperately needed. Destroying the cliff walk which offers a vista and panorama more dramatic than the Cliffs of Moher is simply indefensible when a more suitable location for the treatment plant can easily be found.
The sudden closure of the Sonia O’Sullivan track is a disaster and very upsetting for all sports people and fans in Cork.
Many people who visit or use the facility couldn’t help noticing the poor state of it in recent times.
It’s galling to think thousands of runners young and old have nowhere to train or compete in Ireland’s third city (Belfast is Ireland’s second city). Now parents of young sports people have to ferry their kids to places like Newcastle West, Clonmel, Nenagh, etc.
Athlone has an international standard indoor arena. Cork has never had such a facility, despite the fact that clubs like Leevale AC have won numerous national awards.
It must be hugely embarrassing for honorary Corkman and Athletics Ireland CEO Hamish Adams that there is no indoor or outdoor or indeed any sort of track in his adopted home town!
To many readers this is just another example of how once-proud Cork has fallen behind the rest of this State; the events centre fiasco, the lack of a proper motorway network (save for the M8), and so on and so forth.
Those of us old enough to recall the Aesop’s Fable tale of the Bat Beast and Birds, may well have had food for thought this week.
Willie O’Dea TD, Niamh Smyth TD, and Senator Lisa Chambers, all from the Fianna Fail ‘nest’, came out and informed us that they had voted against both of the recent referendums.
For good measure James O’Connor, TD for East Cork, came out and stated that “I couldn’t agree more with the statement of Willie O’Dea”.
Lisa Chambers canvassed openly for both referenda.
What hypocritical “bravery”.
Why could they not have the courage to make statements against the proposals prior to the ballots.
Talk about “hunting with the hound and running with the hare”.
The moral of the fable of course is: “He that is neither one thing nor the other has no friends”.
With all the information available these days it’s a pity to see Michael Deasy raise the false and tired old canard of “the Nazi Pope” Pius XII (‘Pope naïve in his Ukraine comments’, letters, March 14, 2024).
The 19th-century Italian reunification wars under Garibaldi had reduced the Papal States to an area roughly corresponding to the present-day Vatican. The 1929 Concordat between the Vatican and Mussolini merely gave official stamp to that reality. What alternative ought have been?
If the Vatican had become part of the Italian state it would have been subject to close inspection by Mussolini’s fascists and in no position to assist roughly 4,000 Jews escape the clutches of the fascist regime once World War II got underway. Mr Deasy paints a nonsensical picture of Pius XII sitting on supposed Vatican treasures like Smaug the dragon whilst Jews perished in Hitler’s Germany.
The truth is that Pius XII was one of the few European leaders who openly criticised the Nazi regime, in his Papal encyclical “Mit Brennender Sorge” (“With Deep Sorrow...”) on March 14, 1937.
Pius XII had to tread a wary course, as all good diplomats understand — to criticise a regime without making things worse for those already under persecution by completely alienating the regime itself and closing their ears to whatever one might have to say on the matter. Unlike all other European states, the Vatican has no army with which to back up its diplomacy.
For context, a full year later in 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlin returned from Munich having struck a deal with Hitler and declaring: “I believe we have peace in our time.”
The Vatican continued to criticise Nazi atrocities in general terms during the war, such as their radio broadcast in January 1940 in relation to Nazi atrocities in Poland. Had Pius XII been any more publicly vocal in his criticism of the Nazi regime’s treatment of the Jews, it would also have drawn attention to any secret efforts made to assist Jews, trying to operate surrounded by Mussolini’s fascist state which was allied to the Nazis.
But the true measure of where Vatican sympathies lay can be found in the praise given to it by many Jewish leaders and public figures in the years after the war. Therefore to claim in face of such facts of history, as Mr Deasy does, that “the Vatican has a very poor track record when it comes to despots and tyrants” is an outrageous and unhistorical slander.