Sir, - All too frequently, your pages bear articles and news items on events and revelations relating to abuse of and cruelty to children, past and present, and rightly arouse deep concern and anger by such reportage. However, one form of cruel abuse, practised daily on small children, seems to go unnoticed, and has done so for millennia.
The ritual mutilation of infant boys, known as circumcision, is inflicted dozens of times each day throughout the country. This ancient and barbarous practice, in the huge majority of instances, is carried out in conformity with meaningless custom, and quite without any medical reason or indication. In the case of two world religions, it forms part of their ritual, and is mandatory.
The operation, while minor, is acutely painful and, in common with all surgical procedures, carries some risk. It is almost always totally unjustified, and nothing more than an unsavoury inheritance from older and more be knighted times and customs. If such a procedure were to be forcibly inflicted without anaesthesia on a non consenting adult, it would certainly be classed as grievous bodily harm, and would, in due course, earn for its perpetrator a considerable prison sentence. Male infants, it would seem, are deemed to be devoid of any such protection in the matter, and are considered incapable of feeling the pain and distress inseparable from such an act. Is it not time to outlaw this barbarism? After all, we here in western society vociferously condemn so called female circumcision, rightly regarding it as a hideous brutality. Are little boys to be excepted from our compassion? - Yours, etc.,
Mount Pleasant, Waterford.