Articles in the Comment Category

Footage showing emotional and physical mistreatment of children in three crèches in Dublin and Wicklow will have shocked and appalled those who watched Tuesday night’s Prime Time investigation programme on RTE. The programme itself, and its preceding publicity, raises legitimate public concerns about the adequacy of the safeguards in place in this area, and the manner in which standards at childcare facilities in this country are operated. It is important, however, to strike an objective and proportionate response to the RTE exposé – witnessing children being treated cruelly ...

The banks, according to Fianna Fáil member of Monaghan Co Council Pádraig McNally this week, are getting away with murder. Colr McNally’s comment, made during the course of a debate which called into question the interest rate increase practices of AIB and EBS, succinctly encompasses a great deal of current public disaffection with how our financial institutions are operating. Banks have never had a particularly favourable popular image, and since the onset of the current economic downturn, the transient positive capital they might have built up before boom ...

Many of our readers will have been understandably angered and offended by disparaging comments about the people of Monaghan made by a Dublin Labour TD, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, and reported in a Sunday newspaper. For different reasons, both their context and content are troubling. It could be offered in mitigation that Deputy Ó Ríordáin, a relatively inexperienced public representative, spoke as he did without malice aforethought, making his remarks not in a public forum but in what he believed was a private conversation with a constituent. All ...

The release yesterday of the review of child protection practices in place in the Clogher Diocese of the Catholic Church brought welcome analytical focus to both the present and the past approaches adopted in this regard. The findings of the reviewers from the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church in Ireland are generally commending of the current structures in operation in the diocese, where 41 out of 48 criteria are deemed fully met, and the remainder met partially, an outcome which we imagine would be in ...

“It is a bloodbath on the high street at the present time,” the Cathaoirleach of Monaghan Town Council Seamus Treanor stated this week in reference to the enormous pressures being faced by business and industry to remain viable. Colr Treanor’s picturesque image does convey the gravity of the situation confronting many employers in our county – although the explicitness of the metaphor obscures the fact that the extent of the difficulties that businesses struggle to cope with on a day-to-day basis usually remains hidden from public view. The ...

The fifteenth anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement this week enjoyed a significant if not predominant place in the pronouncements of politicians and the focus of the media. As the world watches warily if not altogether seriously the bellicose posturing of North Korea (on which a former member of our staff provides an illuminating close-quarters insight in our pages this week), and the substantial and profoundly divisive legacy of Margaret Thatcher is dissected in the aftermath of her passing, it is understandable that what is a ...

For a county comprised of towns and villages that pride themselves on a strong sense of community, Monaghan people are astonishingly tolerant of the activities of the minority who blight our urban and rural environments with the pollution of litter and waste. The standards achieved annually by our participants in the Tidy Towns initiative communicate the level of hard work and commitment given voluntarily in the cause of creating and maintaining a clean living environment. While there is certainly some degree of competitive motivation powering these endeavours, the ...

Although the severe service reductions experienced by Monaghan General Hospital in recent times make it easy to be antagonistically disposed towards representatives of the Health Service Executive, a dispassionate observer at Tuesday night’s meeting of Monaghan Town Council would have found it difficult not to feel at least a twinge of sympathy for the situation which the HSE officials present to discuss a number of local health concerns were confronted with. General Manager Bridget Clarke and Cavan/Monaghan Service Development Manager Cathal Hand may have assumed that the high feeling ...

Important religious events in Monaghan Town and in Rome this week were bound by a common embrace of the pillars of renewal and constancy sustaining the spiritual lives of those who follow the Catholic faith. Tuesday saw the Mass of Inauguration for the newly elected Pope Francis, watched closely by a worldwide audience for early evidence of the distinctive signature the latest successor to St Peter is expected to inscribe on his pontificate. The previous evening the people of the parish of Monaghan & Rackwallace gathered in ...

The members of Co Monaghan Vocational Education Committee on Monday completed their ongoing inspection of the component buildings of the new Knockaconny Education Campus with a tour of the resplendent Monaghan Institute of further education centre. To finally see the training provision supplied by the Institute, formerly MIFET, accommodated in purpose build surroundings of a surpassing standard was a highly significant moment for the Committee. And the occasion was a deeply meaningful one for the Institute’s Director Dr Fiona McGrath, whose address to the VEC at the ...