Letters to the Editor: Accepting consequences is a crucial part of being a good person
Had Taoiseach Outside Home Damien Storan Protesters His Family Harris Recently Picture: Has Simon
Sarah Harte’s article (‘Right to peaceful protest can’t be at a cost to human rights of others’, May 8) on protests expresses a common argument about what is and isn’t acceptable when protesting.
As such, there is a common counterpoint to it. That is, when you place limits on protesting, those limits apply to all protesting and can be used to suppress the voice of the people.
Take the argument about protesting outside politicians’ houses. Now, I have a different opinion about this to Sarah, in that I believe that protesting outside politicians’ houses is a legitimate form of protest. Particularly when that politician is a member of the Cabinet.
My opinion is that when someone takes on the role of minister, they take on responsibility for the actions of government in the area they are assigned. This makes them legitimate targets for protest. Sarah suggested at the end of her article that good people won’t go into politics if they don’t feel protected. Well, I would argue that if we want good people in politics, we should try not to remove them from the consequences of their actions.
Accepting those consequences is a crucial part of being a good person.
However, Sarah is absolutely correct that there is a line that should not be crossed. The thing is, that line is already there, and we already have legislation that empowers gardaí to deal with protesters who break the law.
Harassment, if it meets the legal definition, is an offence. Damage to property is an offence. Trespassing on private property is an offence. Lurking outside someone’s house, as long as you are on public land, is not an offence and should not be an offence.
If we were to enact legislation to make it an offence, we open the door to shutting down almost any protest.
I struggle to think of any area of Cork City that doesn’t, at the very least, have some apartments over shops. Is that really what we want to do here? Or should we just trust that protests outside someone’s house are going to attract additional scrutiny from the gardaí to ensure that they don’t cross a line?
Hearing of the death of Mary Banotti reminded me of a morning walking the streets of Dublin with her a lifetime ago.
We were both nurses and she wanted to see how we were working with homeless people and how she could help us. She was a wise and humble woman with a curious mind. It was a long morning with no mobile phone distractions.
We visited the many hospital casualty departments, the hostels, night shelters, day centres, and met people from all sections of the community enroute.
We met homeless people going to work in gardens of better-off people, and some going to court where the judge was on first-name terms with them. We met friendly gardaí, often well known to the people we worked with. Some people were slipping in and out of the “early houses”.
We spent time walking through the grounds of St Brendan’s Hospital meeting people lost in their own thoughts, and others spoke simply about institutional life.
She listened intently and treated everyone with respect.
She was interested to know how I ended up where I was and was most interested in my Tipperary roots where there was a huge emphasis on our shared community. She wore a pair of my mother’s hand-knitted gloves until they fell apart!
We exchanged correspondence over the years and we met last a few years ago at the Clifden Arts Festival and I was so pleased to thank her once again for her encouragement. I wonder what she would think of today’s Ireland? I am sure she would say: “We live in a great little country” and “Yes we can”.
Thank you, Mary.
The “hiding” of hurling behind a paywall means that the casual TV sports viewer is denied access to all of those marvellous sporting events, in front of massive crowds full of incident, excitement, and atmosphere. This is a major loss of opportunity to highlight this marvellous game to adults and children who could watch these games (in full or in part) by just flicking channels and be inspired by what they see.
Other codes (notably rugby) flood the TV channels with games — the casual viewer can’t miss them. They are promoting their game successfully.
The GAA has lost the plot, where promotion of the game of hurling is concerned. They have backed it into a corner and “ghettoised” it.
Wake up GAA — urgently! Hurling deserves better.
As an electric vehicle (EV) owner, I read your vox pop article on EVs in Cork with great interest.
It’s unfortunate that the opinions of an actual EV owner were not included for balance. Representing as fact the opinions of people who have no experience driving an EV is quite misleading.
For example, EVs are significantly less likely to go on fire compared to internal combustion engine vehicles.
Most EVs these days can comfortably travel 350km-400km on a single charge, which is more than enough range for your average driver.
Recently there has been a concerted effort by various media outlets to discredit EVs and discourage people from buying them. I can’t understand why this is.
At least the future seems bright. The opinion of the nine-year-old was the only one of merit in the
entire article.
Brexiteers love culture wars and politics. Because many of them are economically and financially expert. Brexit’s deficiencies will be felt politically. But the real costs are economic and financial, are already being felt — and being “expertly” papered over.
Britain is a sophisticated and civilised place. No empire was “nice”, but the Spaniards, Portuguese, Japanese, Russians, French, and Belgians were far worse when they scrambled for colonial territories.
The Tory Party will lose a lot of seats at the next general election. In ways, compared with the true sovereign costs of Brexit, the party political consequences are almost incidental.
Here in Ireland, we know all about it. When a political class takes leave of its senses, or even its eye off the ball, ordinary citizens feel it first. Hospital ward closures, school closures, the diminution of every essential purpose and function the State exists to perform.
That can either be addressed or deleted with lies and chauvinist rhetoric. Ireland paid through the nose to recover its sovereignty. Britain’s current leaders can only print money and make windy speeches for so long before it faces the fact that Brexit was an instance of national self-harm promulgated and potentiated by a clique of out-and-out charlatans at the Oxford Union Debating Society.
Ireland is pro-Europe. But Ireland is, when all is said and done, pro-Britain to a large extent too. When Britain sneezes, we catch the cold. The two countries are inextricably intertwined.
Apart from an absolute determination not to allow a countrywide discussion of how a small contribution, regular and reliable, of nuclear energy, delivered through the developing new small reactors, I do not believe our tired and “set-in-its-ways” Government has an agenda — beyond “no discussion of nuclear whatever happens”.
Also a lack of a clear agenda for dealing with growing electricity requirements and an increasing failure to meet our reduction of carbon emission legal commitments.
And after all the boasting about Ireland’s wonderful, world-beating offshore wind energy, it turns out that absolutely nothing has been done about it. It is apparently going to be world-beatingly expensive — for us, “the customers”, as well as any “wind energy provider” taking on this challenge.
It also turns out, very belatedly I would consider, that there is no available suitable place on the west coast to manage the huge work of setting up a system capable of placing the offshore turbines and bringing the energy ashore; also, of course, providing the means of getting this excessively expensive energy across the country to where it is mainly needed, in Dublin and along the west coast.