Letters to the Editor: Remember the sacrifice of brave Sophie Scholl
Julia Jentsch played the title role in 'Sophie Scholl' about the young woman who died for her participation in the non-violent White Rose anti-Nazi resistance movement.
Last week marked the 80th anniversary of when the Allies freed the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.
There will soon be the 82nd anniversary on February 22 of a young German woman who was brutally executed by the Nazis in 1943.
On January 3 this year, a video short popped up on my YouTube screen about Sophie Scholl, executed for treason, aged 21, by the Nazi regime. I decided to find out more about her.
In 2024, the European Parliament named a building after her, where German actress Julia Jentsch, who won two film awards in 2005 for playing her in the movie , spoke about her life and times.
Sophie joined the short-lived and non-violent White Rose student resistance to the Nazi regime. She and her brother Hans distributed pro-democracy and anti-Nazi leaflets. They were seen by a Nazi supporter and quickly arrested. It was the fourth year of the war and millions of Germans publicly supported Hitler and would be terrified to oppose him. It meant certain arrest and death.
Before she died on February 22, 1943, she said: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter if, through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”
Her brother Hans was executed on the same day, and their friend Christoph Probst, within a few minutes of each other — 5pm, 5:02pm, and 5:05pm. Six seconds from when she was slid on a board under the guillotine to her death. Hans shouted in German: “Long live freedom.”
The three were buried side by side in a Munich cemetery.
There are still those who speak up for the imprisoned and oppressed by regimes. They sometimes are killed, as they were. Resisting and ending brutal regimes continues in our times.
It’s mind-boggling to hear that we now have 23 junior ministers in situ. Someone with a great sense of humour must have come up this arrangement. It’s really an absolute joke to see the number of junior ministers that the Government has appointed.
I don’t believe for one moment that any of these appointments will make a jot of difference to the running of the country, bar costing the taxpayers a fortune. These politicians must be laughing at us while they are on the way to the bank.
The late PJ O’Rourke , the American author, journalist, and political satirist, once uttered the following words, which I find apposite to the above: “It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.”
In her column about sleepless women, Esther McCarthy mentions Cpap machines. One in five women suffers from sleep apnoea. The best thing to do is get your sleep-deprived (and probably angry) other half to record you on their moby, take the recording to the GP, and ask to see the sleep specialist.
In my case, I borrowed the loan of a pulse oximeter and wore it for a week before showing the data to a GP, who dismissed it as “a gimmick”, to which I responded: “I don’t care. I want an appointment with the sleep consultant.”
Rather reluctantly, he agreed. Now I wear the Cpap machine’s ‘Hannibal Lecter’ mask at night but I sleep soundly.
Some might think it is a passion killer but, on the other hand, if your sleep partner is getting an uninterrupted night’s sleep, they might be more amenable towards the kissy kissy stuff.
One in three men suffer from sleep apnoea. An additional problem for men post-andropause (the male version of the menopause that no one ever mentions) is prostate enlargement, which can mean many trips to the wee house during the night.
This can be alleviated somewhat by eating a handful of chopped sunflower seeds and a handful of chopped pumpkin seeds, and taking a Saw Palmetto capsule every day. Additionally, avoid drinking much after about 8pm because what goes in — a few hours later — is going to come out.
The dogs in the street know that trees which are too close to power lines are the number one reason why people are without electricity in a storm.
The lack of initiative to prune trees and remove dead ones is the No1 reason why thousands are without a vital resource. The ESB and Coillte can’t make up their minds who is responsible for pruning and cutting trees, leading to stagnation on the issue, with more and more ageing trees coming down on power lines.
Dutch elm disease is a problem for our trees and even healthy ones can get the cancer, so trees near power lines need to be watched very carefully and ideally dealt with long before any storm happens. Trees and power lines do not mix and thousands of lives are disrupted, which is known to cost the economy countless millions
because a lot of things are digital now. Beyond that, we have very old electricity poles, which are red rotten inside, which should have been replaced decades ago and are bound to snap or buckle in a storm.
But the real kicker is the thousands of customers getting standing charges and Vat on top of it for no power.
The problem of power outages from fallen trees can be solved with initiatives to clear and prune trees undoubtedly. Perhaps, over time, payments are too lucrative and special interests want things to stay as they are with no improvement while customers get charged unjustly for no service?
Amongst the baskets full of executive orders signed by the recently inaugurated US president, I haven’t, despite my best efforts, found any order citing the protection of dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, from being eaten by illegal immigrants from Haiti.
This animal welfare issue was of serious concern to Mr Trump during the presidential debate with Kamala Harris on September 10, 2024, whereafter he was strongly supported by his vice president Mr Vance, a senator for Ohio, who confirmed that the Haitian community had “caused a lot of problems” in the area. “It’s led to animals disappearing,” he said.
With such engrossed concern from both the incoming president and vice-president, it defies logic that the matter wasn’t a leading choice on the Oval Office menu.
TB or not TB, that was the question answered in 2024 with €100.616m of taxpayers’ money.
That amount was spent on The National Bovine Tuberculosis (TB) Eradication Programme, which aims to eliminate this disease from the national cattle herd.
Ireland’s first bovine TB (bTB) eradication programme was started as far back as 1950 and became compulsory throughout the country by 1962.
In keeping with a good Shakespearian play, a villain has been identified in this ongoing rural drama. The badger has been accused of being central to the spread of bTB.
Farming and government representatives engage in anti-badger misinformation devoid of scientific merit or understanding of badger behaviour.
The snaring of badgers is another wire-based strand of the bTB eradication programme. Each year badgers are snared and shot under licence shamefully issued by the Department of Heritage’s National Parks and Wildlife Service.
This killing takes place even though the majority of badgers (80%) cruelly snared and shot by department contractors and later tested for bTB were found to not have the disease.
The killing of badgers at the behest of the Department of Agriculture is a State-approved brutal pogrom against badgers.
When it is traffic-sign clear that killing badgers by snare/rifle will not eradicate or contain bTB, those with a skin in the disease game persist in walking the cul-de-sac badger trail.
Money and research studies have tracked the ebb and flow of bTB on Irish farms. In 2025, the disease has cemented itself into the rural environment with an acceptance that a bTB eradication policy is futile and that a containment policy is best practice.
A scientific, effective, and humane bTB control strategy that is cattle-based would eliminate any reason to kill badgers.
The relentless pursuit of this bTB scapegoat not only squanders taxpayer money but distracts from the solutions that lie within the farmyard, not the badger sett.
