Ó Caoimh would be horrified by GAA's huge debt

EDITOR – I would have no hesitation in accepting the offer from SuperValu to rename Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

With a huge debt of over €30m, the funds on offer would take the pressure off the county board. Our hurling and football teams would benefit from more resources available to them and would be able to compete better against opposing teams and bring All Ireland titles back to the Leeside once again.

As we can see, from well-funded county boards, their teams are winning and figuring in All Irelands and my gut feeling is this debt is impacting on all our teams. Padraig Ó Caoimh and all those other great GAA men would be in horror of this huge debt and in no doubt would want it cleared as soon as possible.

Like most Cork people, we would delight to see the MacCarthy Cup and the Sam Maguire Cup back on Leeside once again. Regarding SuperValu, it’s a generous offer from them and they have a good record in supporting our Gaelic games over the past years.

Jeremiah McCarthy,
Tawnies Grove,
Clonakilty.

Adoption records still being smothered in secrecy

EDITOR – Adopted people are still facing an uphill battle to get any information in the very secretive world of adoption in Ireland. The Birth information and Tracing Act 2022 was seen as a milestone in allowing adopted people to know who they are from a position where absolutely no information was given to adoptees.

However, the same year the Act was brought out, the government enacted the Electoral Reform Act blocking anyone from accessing the electoral roll, other than political parties.

This is a hell of a coincidence, to say the least.

What they gave with the one hand, they took with the other in doing what they can to give out minimum information and restrict its usage as much as possible. We still have strong forces in this country which oppose adopted people ever knowing anything.

This country is so secretive about giving out any information that the 1926 census, which goes back to the Free State days, is not due to be released until 2027. Never mind any census since the 1937 constitution was enacted.

The huge backlog in people trying to get access to their records under the Birth Information and Tracing Act has many adopted people still on hold. Even where adoptees get their records, files may be incomplete with missing crucial documents, especially from the natural mother’s side of the adoption process.

It looks like it will take some time indeed before adopted people are fully emancipated, instead of being smothered in secrecy and downright lies in some cases to suit those with small minds.

Maurice Fitzgerald,
Shanbally,
Co Cork.

Our careless language is dehumanising people

EDITOR – the USA folk song Deportee tells the story of the air crash of Mexican migrants being returned to Mexico from the USA. A line in the song says the dead were just ‘deportees’. The news reports in Ireland recently have been doing the same – human beings are being described as ‘just’ migrants, rough sleepers and ‘unvetted males’.

They are being dehumanised. In Ireland, and throughout the world, the far right (fascism) is on the march. When they go low, we must go high.

Michael Hallissey,
Mayfield,
Bandon.

Should we allow this plundering

EDITOR – Once again a fleet of fishing trawlers from Japan, Korea and Taiwan have arrived off our west coast. They are using thousands of miles of long lines to catch blue fin tuna from their huge trawlers on Irish waters worth millions of dollars and then they will return home. Blue fin tuna spend around six months every year off our south and west coast but Irish fishermen are not allowed to catch them.

This is part of an agreement worked out in the common fisheries policy of the EU over the past decades by our own government and never mentioned in the Dáil except by Padraig McLoughlinn and Martin Kenny. Our seas are the richest in the EU but we have the smallest quotas of our own fish.

Are we to allow this plunder to go unhindered while Irish-fishermen cannot make a living to feed their families and have to decommission their boats?

Noel Harrington,
Kinsale.

Israel has turned clock back years

EDITOR – The ancient Israelites ended the gruesome custom of their predecessors, who sacrificed young children to the Canaanite gods. Some centuries later, King Herod Antipas suspended that prohibition in Bethlehem, no doubt, insisting his butchery of the innocents was ‘legitimate self-defence’.

The current rulers of Israel (who absolutely claimed to be descendants and heirs of the ancient Hebrews) have now turned back the clock 3,000 years.

The toll of small mangled corpses in Gaza is currently estimated at over 10,000 and rising daily. Thus Canaan is triumphantly resurrected, and Herod respectively vindicated, by those who replace history with self-serving myths. They have perverted the notion of a chosen people to that of a master race – of traditional piety to hypocritical savagery.

‘Holocaust’ is the appropriate term for slaughter of this magnitude. Judges deliberating in The Hague will have the benefit of legal precedents established at Nuremberg in 1946.

S O’Mahony,
Gurteennakilla,
Ballydehob.