Letters to the editor: The post office treats us all as equals
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I think Samuel Beckett would have approved of the post office.
None of his characters ever had a title — not even Mr, Mrs, or Ms.
He recognised the fundamental equality of humans — we are all born and all will die on this Earth.
Once we enter the post office, there is no hierarchy. We all slope in as equals, to join the queue. We shuffle along silently as the numbers are called.
At the counter, we all receive the same courteous service. There is no king or peasant here.
Vladimir: That passed the time.
Estragon: It would have passed in any case.
Vladimir: Yes, but not so rapidly.
When the Indian mystic Maharshi was asked “How should we treat others?”, he replied “There are no ‘others’.”
There is no hierarchy in the world of the heart and the physical body. We all have the same basic human needs and vulnerabilities. Beckett knew this.
Mundane as it may seem, public services that provide us all equally with our human needs for water, electricity, healthcare, education and yes, postal services, create the structures that allow us all to flourish.
This was the transformative vision of post-war Europe, that we enjoyed until 2008.
The US Postal Service Act of 1792 made clear that the postal system was intended to benefit the public good.
In the most neoliberal country in the world, it is sacrosanct — it is still in public ownership.
The post office is part of the heart of the local community.
Its buildings can’t be measured in purely monetary terms and sold to the highest bidder, as An Post is so short-sightedly proposing to do.
One wonders why religious-ethos schools (read ‘Catholic’) are so often singled out as the alleged supreme cause of division, for example by Jennifer Horgan (‘Faith segregation in schools keeps children out of their communities’ — April 4
Many of the points she makes against religious segregation have also been made against school uniforms and would even form logically sound arguments against gaelscoileanna.
The bad behaviour she describes among kids of different faiths (in the 1970s) is unfortunately a part of flawed human nature, and would find expression over physical appearance, race, or economic status if it weren’t expressed in religious terms.
We don’t argue that everyone should be the same race or appearance to prevent this; we argue instead that diversity ought be celebrated.
Ms Horgan apparently believes the best way to celebrate diversity is to suppress it.
She might as well blame the other parent she befriends for wanting a Catholic education for their child.
No matter where you send your child, there will be children and parents in your locality with whom you are unfamiliar as they go to a different school or even just a different class, unless you live in a hamlet where a single school serves the entire local population as far as the horizon.
We cannot educate our children in a vast open-plan warehouse where the entire population are all taught en masse.
We can apply her arguments equally to adult behaviour — ending the practice of having different political parties which serve to keep us apart, or different social circles according to our values and outlooks or fashions.
A great leveling of society where we could all wear the ubiquitous blue-grey boiler suit seen everywhere in Communist China until the 1980s, so everyone can ‘be the same’, be ‘included’, and not ‘feel left out’, while at the same time trumpeting the virtues of ‘diversity’ out the other side of our mouths.
Perhaps unwittingly she finally provides some insight into the real motives for ending the current system when she writes “we must remove the sacraments from the school day. We must work to ensure faith formation does not colour any other subject.”
Well, I admire her candour in summing up the thrust of her article so succinctly.
It was quite interesting to hear Micheál Martin at the Fianna Fáil ard fheis label the impact of social media and phone use on children as the “new public health crisis of our time”.
Notwithstanding the failure of parenting that this suggests — resources to help parents support their children and those aimed at directing children in crisis towards targeted support are simply at breaking point.
It is blatantly obvious to anyone working with young people, especially in an educational setting, that there is a catastrophic lack of adequate funding to support young people especially between the ages of 16 and 18.
If the Tánaiste is to be believed on this issue it will take measures as bold as the smoking ban he introduced while minister of health to begin to make an impact in this area.
We live in hope.
Once again the piecemeal approach by the Garda Commissioner, opting for 30-minute checkpoints per shift in order to reduce traffic accidents etc, is another gimmick that doesn’t fool anyone.
Most operational uniformed units in this country are already doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to roads policing and not just the photo-op shoots directed by Garda HQ on holiday weekends.
The stark reality is that 61 people have died on our roads this year, 15 more than last year.
The reason is that the failure of this Government and its relevant departments, Justice and Transport, to invest in appropriate countermeasures that will help reduce these fatalities.
Only 659 gardaí out of a total 10,446 uniformed gardaí — excluding some of the the 1,018 in Garda HQ — are assigned to the traffic corps in this country; a decrease of 40% since 2009.
These figures are misleading given that some uniformed members are assigned clerical work, or other specialist units like community policing, so they won’t be engaged in operational policing.
We have over 5,306km of roads, made up of motorways, dual carriageways, single lane roads, etc.
You don’t have to be a mathematician to realise that the number of dedicated traffic corps members is insufficient to police our roads.
Another major scandal is the number of uninsured or disqualified drivers.
At least 24,328 drivers who were disqualified by the courts failed to relinquish their licences or permits between 2016 and 2022.
The MIBI published a report that there were over 188,000 uninsured drivers driving on our roads in 2022, an increase of 13,626 from the previous year.
Alarm bells should be ringing at this stage.
Then we come to the ludicrous situation where once again, because of GDPR concerns, engineering teams in local authorities can’t access data on road collisions over the last six years.
That they can’t access the detailed maps that show where collisions have occurred is going from the sublime to the ridiculous.
That a piece of EU legislation transposed into our legislation would be a barrier to make our roads safer is beyond the pale.
Then there are the limitations placed on Go Safe vans which are operating at only 20%.
While they may slow drivers down for a short period they are not effective and their deployment is very restricted.
How many fatalities or lives ruined does it take before the system of roads policing is overhauled with a dedicated and properly resourced traffic corps visible on our road 24/7?
Before making worthless pronouncements on Israel (at tax-payers’ expense), Simon Harris needs to first prove himself as a national Taoiseach. Harris’s attempts at playing the little statesman mean nothing to the Gazans who are dying in front of Egypt’s border guards.
Nick Folley is right to suggest that the pseudo-science of creationism, which is bad religion and worse “science”, should have no place on school curricula (‘Scratching surface of Christianity’ — Irish Examiner) April 12.
His other suggestion, however, that Jesus claimed to be divine, referencing John 14:16, is very problematical.
Jesus, born in Nazareth (not Bethlehem), lived and died a loyal son of the Abrahamic covenant; the religion about him is Christianity.
Concerning the ‘I am’ sayings in this Gospel, it is good practice to read them in the third person.
Thus, ‘I am the bread of life’ can read ‘Jesus is the bread of life’.
A similar principle applies to John 14:16 — ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’.
Such claims may or may not be true:
They are beliefs about the historical Jesus, even though he never uttered them, notes Professor Keith Ward, formerly of the University of Oxford, author of The Birth of Jesus the Jew: Midrash and the Infancy Gospels (Columba Books)
Peter Keenan, Kinsale, Co Cork