Tag Archives: The Irish Times letters page

Claire McGettrick, co-founder of the Adoption Rights Alliance

There is an unhelpful and wholly inaccurate paradigm encompassing the discourses around adoption in Ireland, which assumes that adopted people and natural mothers are on opposite sides, engaged in an almighty war around privacy.

On one side you have the needy adopted person, and on the other, the natural mother who is terrified of her adult child coming back into her life.

An adopted person’s right to information about themselves and contact with natural family are entirely separate issues.

Adopted people want the same access to their personal data as every other Irish citizen; no adopted person is demanding the right to a relationship.

Moreover, not all adopted people want contact with natural family members, and in fact, a significant number of natural mothers wish to seek out their adult children but feel powerless to do so.

Evelyn Mahon’s claim (“Women who gave up their children for adoption should not be made to suffer twice,” Opinion & Analysis, July 4th) that the institution of adoption is based on “the welfare principle of the best interests of the child” is entirely at odds with the archival evidence and testimony of human rights abuses gathered by Dr Maeve O’Rourke and myself as part of the multi-award winning Clann Project.

Ireland’s closed, secret, forced adoption system was not child-centred, nor was it rooted in anything resembling a feminist ethos: natural mothers insist they were forced to swear that they would never contact their children again.

There is no evidence that natural mothers sought or were guaranteed secrecy from their children, and in practice such a guarantee could never have been given as birth registrations have been public records since 1864.

It is long past time to move on from the myth that adopted people and natural mothers are competing against each other for privacy rights.

It is inaccurate, offensive, and damages our efforts to address the injustices against women and children in 20th-century Ireland.

Claire McGettrick,
Co-founder, Adoption Rights Alliance,
Irish Research Council
Postgraduate Scholar,
UCD School of Sociology,
Dublin 4.

Adoption and the right to information (The Irish Times letters page)

Previously: With Philomena

Update:

Minister for Communications Richard Bruton

I live in rural Donegal, about two miles from the nearest village. Eir and others told us that we would need to dig a trench from our house to the public road for a duct to enclose fibre-optic cable. I costed it and the job was coming in at more than €1,000. The works would have involved breaking concrete at the bottom of our driveway.

So I did some research. I contacted 3 mobile, got a wireless mobile router and a booster antenna from Amazon. We now have unlimited data for €30 per month. The booster cost €50.

My concern is this. Are we sleep-walking into spending €3 billion on “last year’s” technology? It seems to me that we may well be.

Experts are invariably conflicted. It’s always better to ask someone whose livelihood doesn’t depend upon the answer.

Over and over again in this country, our biggest and costliest mistakes arise from failing to ask the obvious questions.

Michael Deasy,
Carrigart,
Co Donegal.

Rural broadband and new technology (The Irish Times)

Meanwhile…

Previously: ‘An All-Too Familiar Vista In Major Communications Contracts’

Derek Leinster, a campaigner for survivors of the Bethany Home, Rathgar, Dublin 6 (top in the 1950s)

We read with anguish the many letters that Derek Leinster writes to the Church of Ireland Gazette relating to the babies and children who perished while in the care of the Bethany “Homes”.

It is a cause of immense shame to many of us who were unaware of this scandalous situation to witness the abject failure of the Church of Ireland to step up to the mark and shoulder a share of the cost, at the very least, of some tangible physical memorial stones to the memory of the babies and children who died in the various Bethany “Homes” and elsewhere, never mind offer an overdue apology and, where appropriate, compensation to the diminishing band of “survivors” who bravely and stoically bore the treatment they experienced in these questionable “Homes”.

Moreover, when the Church of Ireland finally decides to clearly support the memory of the dead babies and children and to actively help the survivors whom Derek Leinster and the Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors represent, then pressure needs to be brought to bear on the Irish Government to acknowledge the existence of the “Protestant” babies and children at Mount Jerome and elsewhere in the same way that the scandal of the Tuam Angels has brought a response involving millions of euros for the work involved.

Surely there must be a serving bishop (even archbishop), serving cleric or office-holding layperson who is willing to speak up, speak out and enable the Church of Ireland to acknowledge failure with respect to this dreadful historic wrongdoing, exhibit compassion to the memory of these little ones as we approach Holy Innocents later this month and enable us all to delight in the babe in the manger on Christmas morn knowing that a wrong has been righted and that the babies and children have not been forgotten who perished in our care in these “Homes”.

Derek Leinster must no longer be “a voice crying in the wilderness”, action must follow.

Canon Ronnie Clark,
Cloughey,
Co Down.

Remembering the babies at Bethany (The Irish Times letters page)

Previously: ‘Our Protestant Dead Are People Too’

Minister for Health Simon Harris

When questioned by your paper about the massive cost increase for the new children’s hospital, Minister for Health Simon Harris wasted no time in taking the high moral ground and stating that he “will make no apology for extending our children’s care”.

With the decision today of 95 per cent of the members of the INMO to strike for a pay increase, is he therefore qualifying that statement by adding, “so long as I don’t have to pay staff”?

Regrettably, the Minister is all too quick to avoid any effort to provide justification to the taxpayers of this country for the out-of-control situation with the new hospital project.

Why does he provide a blank cheque to the hospital project while at the same time telling us that he cannot afford to pay the very people needed to operate such hospitals? He’ll stand over any cost – except nursing cost – really?

T Gerard Bennett,
Bunbrosna,
Co Westmeath.

Paying nurses and the INMO strike (The Irish Times letters page)

Rollingnews

A man in possession of cannabis that he used to treat the symptoms of his epilepsy has been fined €100.

I find it hard to believe that we are, in Ireland, still so far behind the times on this matter.

The medical and therapeutic applications of cannabis are well-known internationally. There are a handful of conditions for which cannabis appears to be the only effective treatment.

Why are we keeping citizens of Ireland from accessing safe and regulated medicinal cannabis?

I would like to see my representatives get out in front of this issue, rather than towing the line on something that any reasonable person can see makes absolutely no sense.

The prohibition of cannabis is a waste of taxpayers’ money, a drain on Garda time and resources, a strain on our already bulging courtrooms and (the crux of the matter) a wholly immoral exercise.

Stephen Maguire,
Dublin 14.

Cannabis and the law (The Irish Times letters page)

Pic: Wendy McCormick

Related: Man in possession of cannabis for epilepsy treatment fined €100 (Gordon Deegan, The Irish Times)

Pic: Medical Xpress

Ballot papers for the recent presidential election being sorted into first preference piles in Saggart, Dublin last week

After opening the ballot boxes, we always read of the presence or absence of tallymen.

Never a mention of tallywomen or tallychildren. Do women or children not count?

Dermot O’Rourke,
Lucan,
Co Dublin.

FIGHT!

Don’t say the tallyman . . . (The Irish Times letters page)

Sam Boal/Rollingnews

I recently encountered a scam that requires highlighting. The demand for accommodation in towns and cities that house third-level institutions has left parents, desperate for suitable accommodation for their children commencing their college life, vulnerable to this scam.

Criminals have started to advertise accommodation online that they don’t own or have no right to. They upload a picture of the accommodation with the proper address and advertise it as being available to rent without the consent or desire of the homeowner.

Unsuspecting clients make contact with whom they perceive as the landlord. They are asked to pay the standard deposit and one month rent up-front.

They even receive a contract and are give a bank account (typically abroad) in which to transfer the money.

Only when it is too late do the victims realise that the accommodation was never available to rent. One family I know were caught for €950. Scams such as this are becoming more sophisticated and punitive on the unsuspecting public.

John Connolly,
Rahoon,
Galway.

Rental scam targets students (The Irish Times letters page)

Earlier: ‘Pound For Pound, Dublin Is The Best Returning Market…In 24 Cities’

Labour leader Brendan Howlin

According to Brendan Halligan, pro-democratic centre-left and centre-right political parties should all merge to stand against anti-democratic populists, authoritarians and nativists.

Brendan is wrong, in his own terms.

Ireland’s mainstream political parties already co-operate, in formal coalitions, in local government and in the operation of the Dáil and Seanad. We can work together to defend democratic values and oppose extremism without any logical requirement to merge.

There are significant differences between Ireland’s centrist parties. In every government it has joined, Labour has protected wages, social protection and State industries to the best of its ability. And we have had to fight to do so against others in government.

A single Irish centrist party, dominated by the centre-right, would have given us a lower minimum wage, lower welfare payments, widespread privatisation and a weaker economic recovery as a result.

Labour has also uniquely championed marriage equality and women’s reproductive rights, long before other parties caught up with social change on these matters.

It matters to have multiple parties. As we can see in Westminster and elsewhere, backbenchers in one big party have a lot less influence than minority parties in coalition.

Brendan rightly points to the importance of institutions in cementing democratic gains.

But he overlooks the fact that proportional representation has been institutionalised in Ireland, and the most extreme examples of populism in the western world have occurred in countries operating under less proportional referendums and voting systems, such as the disproportional electoral system that gave Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz-KDNP party in Hungary two-thirds of the seats (67 per cent) with just under half of the votes (49 per cent).

As long as we maintain proportional representation, Ireland’s people are better served by having a choice of government coalitions, each of which offers real policy differences. If choice was reduced to a national centrist party versus extremists, this would weaken Irish democracy.

In such a scenario, it is inevitable that people would eventually grow disaffected with the centrist monolith and vote for change, even if that meant electing Ireland’s answer to Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán or Boris Johnson.

As long as there are multiple parties, there will be greater freedom of speech, greater diversity of policy ideas and stronger democracy as a result.

Brendan Howlin, TD
Leader of the Labour Party,
Leinster House,
Kildare Street,
Dublin 2.

Brendan Howlin: Why Halligan is wrong about merging parties (The Irish Times letters page)