Articles in the Comment Category

With just over a week remaining in which the reduced €5 fee can be availed of, there is an alarmingly small number of people from Co Monaghan who have chosen to register their septic tank or domestic waste water treatment systems in compliance with recently introduced legislation. Figures given at Monday’s Co Council meeting indicated that only 6.6% of people have so far registered – a mere 800 or so out of 12,000. The reluctance of those in villages and rural locations to take this step is in ...

PRIDE IN PLACE The annual announcement of the National Tidy Towns Awards results always generates considerable interest in Co Monaghan, which has a long and distinguished record of achievement in this particular field. The 2012 performance of our county’s participants is an impressive one, with established high achievers maintaining the elevated standards that have become their benchmark, and many locations showing notable improvement as they seek to elevate their standing in what has become one of the most successful channels for the productive utilisation of community energies. It is ...

“The silly season is over,” a pugnacious Enda Kenny pronounced several times to the media prior to Tuesday’s first Cabinet meeting after the summer recess. The Taoiseach was of course referring to that season of relative drought for newspeople that roughly equates with the calendar month of August – a time when the debating chambers of national and local politics fall silent, the courts in the main enter recess, and “hard” news is at a premium. Newspapers and the broadcast media generally deploy two strategies to fill the ...

Prostitution is not a subject much discussed in public forums in Co Monaghan and the prevailing perception would be that it is not a significant social problem in our circulation area. Away from the arenas of public debate, however, there is a rising volume of anecdotal evidence which suggests that there is at least the beginnings of an organised sex trade in operation in the towns of Co Monaghan and in some rural locations – with the social media playing a key role in circulating information about its practitioners ...

Yesterday’s dreadful weather conditions in many parts of the country, and the largely sodden summer that had preceded it, reinforced the lesson that, despite all the profound changes undergone by agricultural production in recent times, the vagaries of the climate remain an unchanging constant in the economic equation that determines the fortunes of the Irish farmer. For those engaged in agriculture themselves, the lesson has been superfluous – and freighted with a bitter twist of irony given the fact that many sectors of production had been experiencing comparatively prosperous ...

Last week’s presentation to Monaghan Co Council by two authoritative voices in the Irish angling sphere – Inland Fisheries Ireland Chief Executive Dr Ciaran Byrne, and Mr Peter Walsh, Secretary of the Irish Angling Development Alliance – was an illuminating one. Dr Byrne took as his theme the perception and the reality of the health or otherwise of Co Monaghan’s traditionally strong angling tourism resource and it was clear that to some extent the factors responsible for its decline in recent years had been mis-assigned in much of the ...

The Garda operation taking place over the coming weekend to combat speeding on the county’s roads is a laudable initiative, and one to which all responsible roadusers will assuredly give their support and co-operation to. It is also, tragically, a timely one. Recent weekends have seen a succession of serious and fatal traffic accidents on Irish roads – we seem to be experiencing an escalation in such occurrences after a time in which the statistics for them were revealing an encouraging downturn. The factors for road fatalities ...

The visit to Ireland this week of Burmese pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi was an important and inspiring occasion. For one thing, it was a timely prompt to place our own fiscal and economic difficulties into a degree of perspective. Her presence invited the realisation that, as much as our national problems are a very real source of pain for many and extremely pre-occupying to the occasional occlusion of a global perspective, we enjoy freedoms to complain, argue and protest for change that are not universally enjoyed ...

The penitential dimension to the International Eucharistic Congress of the Catholic Church taking place in Dublin this week is one of its most striking features. For any faith in which symbolism is a predominant lingua franca, the visit to Lough Derg being made by the papal legate, Cardinal Marc Oullet, is a significant gesture of repentance, particularly if it is, as Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has stated, being carried out at the behest of Pope Benedict himself. It is one of several aspects of the events associated with the ...

The aftermath of the passing of the fiscal treaty referendum feels just as muted and ambiguous as its prelude. Unlike the outcome of election contests, referenda polls do not usually bequeath a sense of significant shift in the national or local landscape when the votes are finally counted – the determination of the nation’s decision on this particular issue, perhaps more than most of the constitutional and European questions we have been called on to respond to in recent years, certainly leaves on great impressions of triumph or tragedy ...