Articles in the Comment Category

The last word on the Town Council era of local government in Co Monaghan has now been spoken. The valedictory functions of the Castleblayney and Monaghan authorities, reported this week, and those of Clones, Carrickmacross and Ballybay that preceded them, are significant events in our history. Taken with the local government election process that will be completed in the county this weekend, they mark a point of momentous transition in the manner in which the business of local administration, a key one in public society, is delivered. ...

If elections are thermometers that take the temperature of the times, the outcome of Friday’s local government and European Parliament polls could be seen to diagnose an Irish population close to boiling point with the incumbent practitioners of politics. The trouble with such clinical findings is that they are often over-elaborately read by the media medicos – what might be a mild cold brought on by the chill of austerity has provoked some baleful prognosis that the symptoms herald a raging fever that is set to ravage the political ...

The terrible event that happened in the centre of Monaghan Town on May 17, 1974 will, assuredly, never be forgotten. But the manner of its remembering has changed over the years in significant respects. This evolving process reaches another stage this Sunday, when the civic leaders of the town and county councils will lay wreaths at the memorial erected in Church Square to those who lost their lives in the bombing, as part of an inter-denominational service marking the 40th anniversary of the event. As the people ...

The nostalgic atmosphere and ceremonial sense surrounding Tuesday’s final meeting of Monaghan Co Council before the May 23 local elections brought home the imminence, and possible portentousness, of the profound changes in local government administration the country is shortly to see. Admittedly the significance of the moment was most immediately confined to the ‘insider’ perspective of the elected representatives who are either departing the public stage or preparing to seek a return to it, the executive and staff who are in the process of easing the phase of transition ...

Representatives of the childcare sector in Co Monaghan who intensively lobbied the members of Monaghan Co Council in recent weeks on the issue of rates being imposed on service providers were always going to be pushing an open door – and one, in the times that’s in it, held even more invitingly ajar by the imminence of the local government elections. The councillors at their meeting on Monday gave emphatic unanimous support to the case made to them – and it is a case with elements that are compelling ...

From H G Wells onwards, the great writers of science fiction have often concerned themselves with the question of whether we would be the slaves or the masters of the extraordinary advances in technology that have distinguished the progress of mankind over the past century. A hundred years ago, the proliferation of the motor car made this a question that concerned society too: as Henry Ford perfected his ambition of building an automobile for “the great multitude” many social commentators, including their most humble manifestation the newspaper leader writer, ...

The life expectancy and life quality of human beings can be crucially influenced, for good or ill, by the eating habits they acquire from an early age. Just how important good nutrition practices are to cultivate in the very young has perhaps been under-estimated in the past, but its increasing emphasis in health promotion activities today, and the greater “food literacy” of the modern consumer, should be effective guarantors that the emerging generations of Irish people are given foundations for future health and wellbeing sturdier than the generations that ...

Armed robbery, diesel laundering and the theft of livestock were identified by Fine Gael councillor Hugh McElvaney on Monday as the three major streams of serious criminal activity afflicting our county and Border region. Colr McElvaney’s accurate observation was made during a Co Monaghan Joint Policing Committee discussion on the sharp increase in cattle thefts in the county during 2013. It was an interesting and illuminating debate, showing the value of the JPC structure as a forum for broadening public awareness of, and giving vent to public concerns ...

The process of adopting Budgets for 2014, what used to be dubbed “striking the rate”, has now been completed by the county’s local authorities, marking an historic, watershed moment in their existence. The rates reductions brought in at Town Council level, the first in a great many years, are remarkable against the prevailing economic background – and notable too as the first step in converging the figure levied on the county’s commercial sector towards a single countywide rate that is one of the objectives of the new single administrative ...

To suggest that the comments of Ian Paisley in relation to the Dublin and Monaghan bombings – widely reported in the media last week in the run-up to the broadcast on Monday of a BBC interview with the controversial Unionist politician on his career – might be to the ultimate benefit of those seeking the truth about the atrocity is to risk abrading further the wounds that Mr Paisley’s words undoubtedly aggravated. Nonetheless, it is in our editorial view a legitimate interpretation to put on the renewed attention the ...