As a survivor of the Magdalene laundries, I fully support Seán McDermott St being turned into a site of conscience and remembrance for every Magdalene laundry survivor who suffered at the hands of State and Church all over Ireland.
They were terrible times in our history. A big thank you goes to the members of the Justice For Magdalenes Research: Maeve O’Rourke, Catherine O’Donnell, James Smith, and Claire McGettrick, who is a survivor herself. Thank you also to Gary Gannon and Mannix Flynn, and to all the Magdalene laundry survivors themselves who fought hard for the centre, including Mary Smith, who started up the Justice For Magdalenes group in Dublin in 2009.
The laundry survivors may have never got justice if it were not for Smith, alongside Sheila O’Byrne, Anna Corrigan, and many more who protested outside the Dáil on a daily basis for years.
As for myself, I have been emailing Government departments since 2014 to try and get the HAA card promised to all Magdalene survivors by Justice John Quirke in his recommendations to Enda Kenny’s government in 2013.
Hopefully, the present Government will do the right thing and honour our proper health card.
Many of us are in bad health and ageing, in our late 70s, 80s, and 90s. We need fast access to doctors and hospital appointments, not waiting on hospital lists for over a year or doctors’ waiting lists for one to three weeks. We deserve better than that in our final years.
As Magdalene laundry survivors we’re happy with Seán McDermott St and the HAA card would be the icing on the cake.
But we need that now.
Teresa Doyle O’Connor, Clara, Co Offaly
Disappearing path a safety hazard
With regard to Michael Moynihan’s column: Great to see you raising the issue of traffic congestion and illegal parking in the Ballinlough area. Thank you!
Just a short note to bring to your attention the infamous and insane “disappearing footpath” at the bottom of Ardfallen estate. Here, pedestrians are required to walk out onto the road for a 30m stretch before a footpath is again present. I’ve observed schoolchildren and elderly, infirm citizens alike perilously navigating around parked (often occupied) cars out onto the busy intersection to pass by.
Numerous communications with local councillors have proved fruitless. Dare I say it but it may take an injury or worse before action is taken. If not a footpath, could we not have bollards to allow us to walk safely?
Ger Jeffers, Browningstown Park
AI talk just another cock-and-bull tale?
All this talk of AI, so much of it foreboding, is not at all good for my wellbeing.
This starkly contrasts to the days of my youth, when AI was a far more natural and harmonious process. In those days, when it was time for a heifer to become a first- time mother or it was again at the stage for a cow to add to her progeny, the AI man, more commonly referred to in our house as the ‘bull man’, was contacted at the local agricultural co-op.
He would arrive with an assortment of straws — which bore much more potency than the barley straw in the haggard — and ‘attend’ to the animal’s maternal requirements.
Nature would then be allowed to take its course and new life invariably ensued.
Michael Gannon, St Thomas Sq, Kilkenny City
Effects of housing crisis on birth rate
New research carried out on behalf of the Catholic Church’s marriage preparation service Accord has found that almost seven in 10 of those surveyed, aged 25 to 34, stated that the cost of owning a home is causing delays in getting married or having children.
The research also found that half of the couples in this survey who were planning to get married would have done so earlier if it were not for the housing situation.
Ostensibly, the lack of housing impacts couples in their day-to-day lives, especially when it comes to renting. One worries that the birth rate will be seriously affected, which will have knock-on consequences in future years for government policy, taxation, and retirement planning.
One must remember that if there are fewer children in the next few years, there will be fewer people in the labour force; ergo we will have fewer people paying taxes to pay our pensions. All this certainly will have an a knock-on effect.
Housing has to be a top priority for this new administration.
John O’Brien, Clonmel, Co Tipperary
Passing the buck on mental health
Here we go again. Yet another review by a hospital that is not staffed to understand or manage urgent mental illness issues. There is no doubt that several people with mental health issues leave accident and emergency departments and are recorded as self-discharges.
This is not unique to Galway. In UHL, presenting at A&E with a mental health issue is similarly mismanaged. As a family, we well know, from what our son has experienced.
Never ever was there a qualified psychiatrist available or on call. A crisis referral was managed by a nurse. No private space to discuss the crisis. The most common response we received was “we will refer your son to our day centre”.
Defer and move on the responsibility. And then the dreaded waiting list. But no guarantees when our son would be seen. The HSE is expert in passing the buck. As elderly parents, we took our son home. To manage his crisis and try to keep him alive.
That sums up mental health and crisis supports in Irish hospitals.
Parents are left to carry the burden, even though our children go to an emergency department where alleged experts are supposed to intervene. Softer medicine if you have a broken bone or need stitches. But managing a distressed mind is low priority.
Tony O’Gorman, Galway
Failure acceptance in public service
The reaction to the revelations of a waste of €7m on a failed IT project, while shocking, should come as no surprise to us, as it is just another in a long litany of such failures in publicly-funded projects, the prime example being the National Children’s Hospital.
From the perspective of the public service departments in which responsibility for these ongoing failures lies, there is at least some consistency in that there appear to be no lessons learned from these failures, or at least no application of systemic corrections to ensure no repeats.
As a taxpayer who believes strongly in the provision of robust public services and is prepared to pay my taxes to support them and protect them from privatisation, these failures are deeply disappointing. They reflect a culture within our public sector of abdicating responsibility to private -sector consultants ready and eager to feed from the trough of public money, knowing there will be no accountability. It also highlights an apparent deficit in basic project-management skills within the public sector, particularly around risk management and accountability.
As we have seen in the US and UK, failures leading to the waste
of taxpayer money open the door
to privatisation and the commodification of what should be seen as public services with a social rather than financial dividend. To protect public services, we need Government to face down this acceptance of failure within the public sector with real reform.
Barry Walsh, Blackrock, Cork
