Articles in the Comment Category

Comment The feeling that we have finally woken up to the prevalence and seriousness of domestic violence, and all forms of violence directed towards people on the basis of their sexuality or gender identification, seems to be a very pronounced one in Irish society at the current time. In the aftermath of the murder of schoolteacher Aisling Murphy while she was out exercising in Tullamore, Co Offaly in January this year, there was a nationwide outpouring of grief and outrage that brought with it an “enough is enough” affirmation comparable to ...

COMMENT SOLSTICE In the traditional rush towards December 25 that becomes the general preoccupation these days, another very significant date in the month’s calendar generally gets side-lined. Four days before Christmas Day, December 21, marks the winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year. One of the ways we are transiently aware of the date is the annual attention given by the media to those who assemble at the site of the Neolithic passage tomb in Newgrange, Co Meath, where the first rays of the dawn light up ...

COMMENT Co Monaghan’s vitally important agri-food sector finds itself assailed by a number of significant pressures at the present time that our politicians, farm and business organisations should be monitoring with close care. The problem of labour shortages and the difficulties being presented for mushroom, poultry and meat producers was raised in Seanad Éireann in the last week by Fianna Fáil Senator Robbie Gallagher. Senator Gallagher identified the problem as arising from the time it now took to process employment permit applications, significant because of the extent to which the sectors ...

Comment The visit by local Government Minister Heather Humphreys to Rossmore Forest Park in Monaghan this week brought welcome and timely focus to the quite extraordinary growth in popularity of the amenity during the Covid-19 pandemic. It also raised important questions about the direction the future development of the park should take and what the best means is to tap much of its still largely unrealised potential from both the tourism and educational points of view. These are questions which merit debate and discussion not merely at the level of Monaghan ...

Comment The bad news on our doorstep as a Border county of the ongoing violent disturbances on Northern Ireland streets provokes tremors of unease even in these more insular pandemic times when everyone’s world has grown smaller and even happenings a relatively short distance away can seem somehow remote and not of pressing relevance to our own concerns. True, there is something about the footage that has appeared on news channels each evening, of rioters in clumsy disguise hurling petrol bombs and rocks at vehicles and police personnel that seems anachronistic ...

Comment 2021 marks the centenary of the foundation of the Northern ireland state. Centenaries are customarily occasions for commemoration and celebration, but how this particular one will be marked is problematic. We are currently in what has been proclaimed the Decade of Centenaries, when momentous recent historical happenings that shaped the political and social course of modern Ireland are re-evaluated by historians and commentators and recognised with due ceremony. As we have passed from 1916 through the War of Independence years up to the Treaty and Civil War periods, this exercise ...

Comment Having waged an arduous campaign to resist the doomsday scenario of the UK Government’s Brexit escapade and avoid the creation of a hard Border on the island, the people of our circulation area and those of frontier counties on either side of the divide will, we imagine, have monitored the trend of some of the debate around the Government’s extension of Covid-19 Level 5 restrictions this week with various levels of incredulity. Calls for a “zero-Covid” strategy that would have as one of its impacts the temporary sealing of the ...

Comment When life in Ireland and across the globe began to be significantly impacted by the coronavirus in march of last year, people accepted the growing sacrifices and curtailments of movement and freedom with the then realistic shared hope that the public health emergency would be a relatively transient thing. It became a common conversational prediction that by Christmas the crisis, or at least the worst of it, would be over, and the pressures that Covid-19 exerted on physical and, increasingly, mental wellbeing were borne with the reasonable conviction that, this ...

Comment The adoption by Monaghan Co Council on Monday of a new Migrant Integration Strategy is a timely step in the address of an important social issue. In a year in which the Covid-19 pandemic has become the ubiquitous concern, the need to respect the rights and dignity of all human beings and to ensure that unity rather than division hallmarks the way in which our increasingly cosmopolitan demographic knits together has demanded its own place in public preoccupations. The Black Lives Matter campaign has made its voice heard throughout the ...

COMMENT The death of major literary figures is usually perceived in terms of national loss, with grief general that the prevalent culture will no longer be enriched by their creativity, that the pen has been stilled and the story woven by their imagination will be added to no more. Such has certainly been the case with Eugene McCabe, whose passing last week at the august age of four score and ten evoked tributes from president Michael D Higgins, national politicians and the lions of the worlds of literature and the theatre ...