Some weeks ago, we heard of the outrage of Italy’s agriculture minister Francesco Lollobrigida at carbonara sauce that contained pancetta (pork belly), instead of guanciale (pork cheek). The egregious faux-pas made international headlines; you don’t mess with the Italian brand. Nor can you mess with the Frenchman’s champagne, because neither madame nor monsieur will for a moment tolerate their food and drink being misidentified, mislabelled, poured wrongly, or drank at the wrong time of day. They don’t just respect the food: they worship its provenance.

Meanwhile in the movie Saipan, Roy Keane points out the reason everyone loves Ireland is ‘cos we’re a joke’. We’re the funny guys, not taking ourselves seriously. One wonders what would happen if he was Minister for Agriculture Roy Keane, would we sill be reading, as we do this week with Ballinspittle farmer Martin O’Regan, that there is no requirement to use Irish grains in Irish whiskey.

While the IFA continue to fight the Mercosur deal saying that beef from Brazil may be contaminated with hormones and antibiotics that are banned in the EU, our valuable Irish cows are fed imported grain from, where else? Brazil. You are what you eat, no? In the meantime, we are exporting our own grain across the world, almost 300,000 tonnes of it in 2024.

Compared to the pride other countries have in their own homegrown products, we seem to have lost anything like it.

Where the French will set fire to a bin for mislabelling their Camembert, we are forced to put up with shoddy pitches and unlevel playing fields. We’re proud to be Irish, and our pride should extend to our food too.

We are complicit

An interview with secondary school teacher and researcher Eoghan Cleary in The Examiner this week is chilling, on apps that allow users (teenage boys are the targeted audience) to indulge in violent porn. They can custom-make an AI girlfriend, or subservient mistress, and have the option to do ‘any sexually explicit interactions you can think of’. More of these interactions are things you haven’t thought of and never would.

If they like, they can upload and use a photo of a real-life person to bring the project ‘to life’, and act out these fantasies on the teacher, their friend, the lady from the shop who put her picture on Facebook.

Mr Cleary makes this numbing statement: ‘We know that sexually violent crime for under 18 years olds in Ireland has multiplied 6.5 times in the 15 years, since the majority of Irish adolescents got independent access to the internet through smart phone ownership’. These are children, without the capacity to understand what they’re doing. This kind of material is not just making a victim of the girl involved, but the boy too. They’re also not looking for these apps: the ads are on ‘TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and TV and film streaming websites and platforms.’

Adults allow their kids unfettered use of these apps. ‘Bad’ parents don’t check what their kids are doing, and neither do ‘good’ parents. The Australian government is the only one in the entire world to try to tackle the insidious and outwardly evil that’s done to kids using social media.

As more revelations of the Jeffrey Epsteins of this world come out, and continue to come out because crimes like these don’t ever stop, many celebrities and ‘friends’ can say ‘Oh but we didn’t know what he was doing/what he was really like’.

We do know what these companies are doing, and we do know what they are capable of. We cannot stand by, act dumb, and be complicit in these crimes against childhood.