Sir. As my first opportunity to vote in an Irish national election approaches, I am attempting to be thorough in studying issues put forward by competing parties.
This week's leaves me bewildered: the controversy for payments to single mothers appears to be centred on cost alone (the claim that young women get pregnant in order to obtain a house to enable them to leave their family home I find so ludicrous it doesn't deserve comment, other than to observe the theory was advanced by a woman who has neither experienced pregnancy nor given birth to a child). I don't hear mention of the fact that single mothers are denied choice as to whether or not they bear the infant because abortion is illegal in Ireland. Those who voted against abortion in earlier referenda must be reminded that the cost of supporting these mothers and their infants is the cost of their success at the ballot box so long as the fathers are not held legally responsible.
But aside from the moral or financial concerns of the subject, what disturbs me most of all in this debate, particularly because of the silence surrounding it, is that these young women have obviously had "unsafe" (i.e. unprotected) sex, thus risking their lives and that of their infants to contracting AIDS.
Let's hope today's young generation will benefit from the forth coming sex education in primary schools and use good judgment when they become sexually active. Yours, etc.,
(dual Irish/American citizenship)
Kinsale,
Co Cork.