EDITOR - Sage Advocacy has issued an invite to survivors of institutional abuse in Cork  to engage with its information and advocacy support services.

A nationwide team of Sage advocates support survivors to access information about services to which they are entitled.

This service is open to all institutional survivors, who are invited to contact Sage at 01 536 7330, or email [email protected].

Services are available to all survivors across the country. People not need to have previously received redress to access this support, and there are no age restrictions.   

If you or any of your family or friends spent time in an institution such as an industrial or reformatory school, or Magdalene laundry, or a mother and baby home, or county home, the team at Sage Advocacy is available for you.

We can help you to access supports you may be entitled to.

Sage Advocacy’s nationwide team of advocates will support those who need it. It could be with a financial issue, a difficulty relating to your housing, or something medical, to name but a few.

The trauma which survivors experience is life enduring and, in many cases, is revisited in older age, where survivors experience difficulties in getting appropriate housing or medical care.

The fear of being re-institutionalised in congregated care settings such as a nursing home is real for many survivors.

The relationship between the person and their advocate is one-to-one. The advocate has no other interest than to promote, support and defend each person’s voice and rights and will only take action that has been consented to by the survivor.

Sage Advocacy is the national advocacy service for older adults and survivors of institutional abuse.

The service is free of charge and confidential, and Sage will act independent of family members, service providers and system interests, whether church, state or institutional.

Sage Advocacy is funded from public sources, chiefly the HSE and the Department of Education, with additional funding from EU programmes and the Department of Justice.

Bibiana Savin, Sage Advocacy CEO.

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Please help the children of Sudan

EDITOR - As Sudan’s devastating conflict surpasses the grim 1000-day mark, World Vision is urging the international community to confront the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe and respond to the children’s cries for safety, peace and a return to normalcy.

What began as a political crisis has escalated into the world’s largest displacement, with nearly 13 million people displaced since April 2023. Multiple humanitarian agencies, including World Vision, are calling it the world’s most severe humanitarian disaster. Children are bearing the brunt of the conflict, robbed of their homes, education, health and hope for the future.

Today, children make up 17.3 million of the 33.7 million people who require life-saving humanitarian assistance. Girls and boys are suffering on an enormous scale. More than five million displaced, nearly four million children under five are acutely malnourished, and hundreds of thousands are at imminent risk of death from hunger. More than 13 million children are not in school.

Children want the violence to stop. They want to live in peace, and they want to go home and for things to return to normal. The fighting has now been going on for 1,000 days, fracturing the futures of a generation of girls and boys. It’s time this stopped.

The continued delay in securing peace and delivering adequate aid is a moral failure. Every day, children face overlapping threats that demand an urgent, multisectoral, child-centred response. The failure to secure peace and provide anything like adequate aid is a stain on the global conscience and moral failure of those leaders who can press for peace.

World Vision urges global leaders, the international community and the donor community to immediately compel all warring parties to agree to an immediate, permanent ceasefire and guarantee rapid, safe access for humanitarian aid across Sudan, and increase funding to protect children and improve their health, education, and future well-being in Sudan.

Simon Mane, National Director, World Vision Sudan.

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Trump, a modern day Don Quixote

EDITOR - Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes, I suspect, did not anticipate a sequel to Don Quixote appearing some four centuries later, nor that it would unfold in real time, on the internet and in social media.

In Cervantes’ tale, we meet Alonso Quijano, a minor nobleman who reads so many chivalric romances that reality eventually gives up. Convinced the world is crying out for his heroism, he reinvents himself as Don Quixote de la Mancha, dons armour, mounts his steed, and rides off to combat evil wherever he imagines it to be.

Substitute a golf cart for a nag and a blond toupée for a dented helmet, and the resemblance to Donald Trump becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

Like Quijano, Mr Trump appears to inhabit a universe in which he is forever the wronged hero, eternally beset by shadowy villains yet always on the brink of glorious vindication. He wages battle against a rogues’ gallery of conspirators: election officials, judges, journalists, scientists, and, on particularly energetic days, entire countries.

In Cervantes’ novel, Quixote’s misadventures are endearing because they are fictional and because they end. Let’s pray that Mr Trump will dismount from his high horse and make peace with reality.

Joe Terry, Blarney.

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Older people are suffering homelessness

EDITOR -   The growing number of older people seeking the homeless assistance service is a worrying trend across Ireland. A person can find themselves in that position for a number of reasons, from an eviction to a relationship breakdown. The Simon Community does great work in all of this, helping people to get a roof over their heads.

There have been calls to sort out this housing problem for years, and this Government has struggled to fix this problem and it is now out of control across the whole country. We need a change of Government in the next election.

Noel Harrington, Kinsale.