Voting rights for Northern Ireland residents
Sir, – Newton Emerson’s suggestion on voting rights for Northern Ireland residents in presidential elections (“Give everyone in NI the right to vote for president”, Opinion, May 15th) would lead to the ridiculous situation that British citizens (who are not also Irish citizens) living in Northern Ireland would be eligible to vote in an election that their counterparts resident south of the Border would not. – Yours, etc,
GEORGE WALKER,
London.
Fair Deal?
Sir, – Congratulations to your correspondent Dominic Coyle for an exceptionally good and reasoned explanation of the “Fair Deal Scheme” or as he correctly calls it “The Nursing Home Support Scheme” (“Is Fair Deal really fair?”, Your Money, May 13th).
Paddy McKillen’s billion-pound legal battle over Claridge’s hotel reaches ‘high noon’
My father’s friend who knew nothing about his alcoholism surprised us at his funeral
Marriage equality a decade on: ‘Things have gone backwards’
Colm Tóibín on poet Paul Durcan: ‘Beside the wildness, there is tenderness’
Hopefully I or my partner, who have paid taxes all of our lives, will never have to avail of the scheme but in the event that either of us has to go down that route I would rather like to sing the praises of the “authorities” for having such a scheme in place rather than think I’m being punished. It would be very difficult to get a fairer deal. – Yours, etc,
CIARAN McNAMARA,
Templeogue,
Dublin 16.
August Augustinians
Sir, – The election of a relatively unknown cardinal, Robert F Prevost, to the papacy has catapulted another Augustinian to world fame. History will judge if his pontificate is to be as influential as the actions of two other Augustinian friars: Martin Luther – much influenced by St Augustine, who spearheaded the Reformation – and Gregor Mendel, who in his monastery garden, experimenting on peas, laid the foundations for the science of genetics, thereby also providing the mechanism, “rediscovered” in 1900, for how natural selection works, the basis of Darwin’s brilliant idea.
It is to be applauded that the new pope’s predecessor, Leo XIII, who lived into his 94th year, both supported the study of the natural sciences and encouraged Catholic historians to write objectively about history, sentiments to be encouraged in a world plagued by disinformation and “alternative realities”.
In 1899, however, he censured “Americanism”, which sought to adapt Catholicism to contemporary ideas and practices. We await with interest Leo XIV’s “take” on contemporary issues. – Yours, etc,
PETER KEENAN,
Upper O’Connell St,
Kinsale,
Co Cork
AI in education
Sir, – The Senior Cycle Redevelopment Implementation Support Measures document recently issued by the Department of Education addresses the threat of AI to the integrity of Leaving Certificate examinations by proposing the setting up of a “taskforce”.
The reformed Leaving Certificate commences in September. As Prof Áine Hyland pointed out at the recent Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI) conference, elsewhere “the marks allocated for essays or projects undertaken outside the supervised examination hall are either reduced or disregarded in final results. Written examinations, supervised in examination halls, have reappeared as the assessment of choice in many jurisdictions and institutions.”
Two respected international assessment-experts back this up. Daisy Christodoulou, author of Making Good Progress? the future of Assessment for Learning, writes that “the growing and undetectable use of generative AI poses a huge threat to the integrity of assessments, and by extension to the integrity of education.”
The columnist Duncan Robinson has a theory that lots of big political scandals are not exposed but merely noticed. “They hide in plain sight before they become public scandals. I think the extent of AI plagiarism is one of these scandals-in-waiting. Everyone in this world knows it’s a big problem – it just hasn’t filtered through to the general public yet.”
Most punchily, Daniel Muijs, professor of education at Queen’s University Belfast, says about the proposals in the Republic: “Increasing the importance of coursework in high-stakes assessment just as the AI revolution hits must be one of the worst decisions in education.”
That taskforce should be able to complete its work in a day or two. – Yours, etc,
JULIAN GIRDHAM,
St Columba’s College,
Whitechurch,
Dublin 16.
Economic migrants
Sir, -Michael McDowell (“Visceral hostility of US leaves EU and UK in a quandary”, Opinion, May 14th) claims “economic migration disguised as asylum-seeking ... is an ever-growing issue for the political viability of the EU”.
Does he know how many people claiming asylum here are in fact economic migrants and how big this number is in comparison to the total amounts of economic migrants? It would be nice to have figures rather than hearsay in a throwaway line. – Yours, etc,
ROBERT WALSH,
Brompton Park Crescent,
Fulham,
London.
Sir, – “The experiment is over, ” said the UK prime minister as he released his landmark white paper on immigration (“Starmer unveils new measures to cut number of immigrants”, Mark Paul, World News, May 13th). The backlash from self-described progressives was predictable, but those who called Keir Starmer’s vow to “take back control of our borders” a betrayal of left-wing values have short memories. When the Labour leader accused UK industry of being “addicted to importing cheap labour”, he was only saying what capitalists and socialists once took for granted.
Andrew Carnegie, the great robber baron of America’s Gilded Age, called immigration “a golden stream which flows into the country each year”. Carnegie’s contemporary Karl Marx observed the same stream depressing wages in Britain: “The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.”
The belated airing of these inconvenient economic truths in Westminster will discomfort south Dublin’s champagne socialists and plutocrats alike, but they have long been obvious to the Irish working class, still friendless in Dáil Éireann. – Yours, etc,
AIDAN HARTE,
Naas,
Co Kildare.
Peadar O’Donnell
Sir, – Further to Frank McNally’s comments on Peadar O’Donnell’s libel case (An Irishman’s Diary, May 15th), O’Donnell continued to attract the attention of anti-communist zealots throughout the 1930s – when communism did not have a snowball’s chance in hell of taking hold.
Prof James Hogan identified O’Donnell in 1935 as a “leading communist agitator” in his book, Could Ireland Become Communist? Hogan, a founder member of the Blueshirts, alleged that Republican Congress was a new Moscow-directed party in disguise.
In August 1936, following the revolt of the generals against the elected Popular Front government in Spain, a letter writer to the Irish Independent accused “Comrade Peadar O’Donnell” of promoting a “hellish” doctrine of “God-hatred” that could transform Ireland into “a second Spain”.
Cardinal Joseph MacRory publicly intervened on behalf of “Catholic Spain” against what he claimed was an “unrepresentative” government, and argued that congress’s expression of support for the Spanish Republic – “communist” and “atheistic” – merited the attention of the Irish authorities.
In a letter published by The Irish Times, O’Donnell’s colleague Frank Ryan put the republican case for supporting democratic rule in Spain. MacRory wanted the rebels to win because he thought the Catholic Church would be destroyed. Ryan wrote: “I recall that exactly the same fears were expressed by dignitaries of the church during our armed struggle for freedom here. Because of that fear, Irish Republican soldiers were outlawed as ‘murderers and looters’, dubbed ‘Reds’ who would destroy religion, and put under the dire penalties of excommunication.” Had these predictions come to pass?
When Spain’s Catholic clergy identified themselves with the generals’ rebellion, he continued, they turned “churches into barracks”. Ryan stated that “the real enemies of Christianity in Spain are the fascist generals who openly proclaim that they will set up a military dictatorship, suppress trade unions and prohibit the workers’ right to strike.” The church, he maintained, should stay out of politics.
Frank Ryan’s republican argument took a long time to become persuasive in Ireland. – Yours, etc,
JOHN MULQUEEN,
Clontarf,
Dublin.
Religion in the classroom
Sir,- Mary O’Dowd (Letters, May 14th) opines that Paddy Monahan’s suggestion that faith formation be moved outside of core school hours is “ill-considered”. She links faith formation to promoting “love, care, sharing, empathy, all of which are values so necessary in the era of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, etc”.
These values exist in children already, and it is possible to nurture them without it being unnecessarily wrapped up in religious indoctrination. This happens in non-religious homes and schools across the country every day.
Why not nurture these values free of warped concepts like original sin (which inculcates a sense of guilt and shame in children) and hell for non-believers (the details of which can be found on the Vatican’s own website)?
Is it loving or caring to indoctrinate children (including non-religious children) into believing such things? Her thesis echoes Finn McRedmond‘s recent column (“You don’t have to be religious to accept it was God who brought Trump and Zelenskiy together”, Opinion May 1st), in which she wrote of the “kinds of generalised values derived from a Christian scripture: generosity, reciprocation”.
The values of generosity and reciprocation predate, and are not “derived from”, Christian scripture. They result from human evolution. Believe it or not, people can and do live moral lives without believing unbelievable things. I know plenty.
Regarding Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the former is a Christian who has strong support among Christians, and the latter is a Russian Orthodox Christian who has the support of the Russian Orthodox Church. Meanwhile, Binyamin Netanyahu and Israeli settlers have invoked the Bible to justify committing abominable atrocities, war crimes and breaches of international law. – Yours, etc,
ROB SADLIER,
Rathfarnham,
Dublin 16.
Eurovision
Sir, – Justine McCarthy derides the “virtue signalling” of Eurovision fans protesting Israeli involvement in the contest (“Words of condemnation won’t feed Gaza”s starving children”, Opinion, May 16th).
What does Ms McCarthy want us to do? Eurovision fans don’t have access to aid convoys or the ear of Donald Trump. Maybe the fans are taking a leaf out of Ireland‘s book as we are experts in virtue signalling and gesture politics – witness the Occupied Territories Bill.
The ultimate gesture on which Ms McCarthy may reflect is that Israel progressed to the final and Ireland didn’t in a public vote.
Let’s get real. It’s a song contest and will have no impact on the tragedy of the war. – Yours, etc,
KENNETH HARPER,
Burtonport,
Co Donegal.
Sir – So yet again Ireland has failed to reach the Eurovision final . The contest in general is no longer a “song” contest but rather a competition as to who can shriek the loudest, wear the least clothes and perform the best gymnastics!
I for one will not be watching the final! – Yours, etc,
LAURA O’MARA,
Stillorgan,
Co Dublin.
Sir, – In retrospect, a boycott would have been a prudent decision. – Yours, etc,
FRANK J BYRNE,
Glasnevin Hill,
Glasnevin,
Dublin 9.
.
Vilification of landlords
Sir, – I opened your paper this morning to see on a front-page story about a landlord being fined (“Dublin landlord fined record sum of €22,000″, page 1, May 16th) for failing to register 20 tenancies. I have a letting agency and 99 per cent of Irish landlords are like most Irish people, good and kind. I dislike this vilification of landlords, almost on a daily basis. – Yours, etc,
RICHARD LACEY,
Leeson Park,
Ranelagh,
Dublin 6,
Keeping Trump on side
Sir, – Diarmuid Ferriter’s excoriating assessment of UK prime minister Keir Starmer (“Was it for this that London endured the Blitz?”, Opinion, May 16th) paper is totally misguided. It became obvious years ago that the absolute worst way to manage Donald Trump is to antagonise him. Making an enemy out of the current US president by calling him out or rebuking his actions at home would not serve the interests of the UK or the rest of the West.
Far better to carefully play to Trump’s better nature and win him over, just as the UK has done with the trade deal. Trump’s autocratic tendencies are indeed worrying, but he is no “deranged dictator”, as Ferrriter suggests. At a time like this, with Russia deliberately prolonging the war in Ukraine and Israel inflicting heinous war crimes in Gaza, it is imperative to keep Trump on side. Like it or not, he is the only person capable of ending both conflicts – by putting pressure on both Vladimir Putin and Binyamin Netanyahu. – Yours, etc,
THOMAS CONWAY,
Ballina,
Co Tipperary.
