Articles in the Comment Category

There is a complex weave of feelings in this country towards the British Royal Family. Commonly, we profess puzzlement, and often amusement, at the preoccupation of the British people and its media with the activities of its royals. It seems a strange mixture of lionisation and leering: anachronistic deference strolling hand in hand with prurient privacy invasion. Yet the fact that one Irish television broadcaster, TV3, will provide extensive coverage of Friday’s royal wedding suggests that some degree of that fascination has impregnated our own culture. ...

“An outdated and punitive method of raising revenue.” The words used by Monaghan Town Council Cathaoirleach Robbie Gallagher this week to argue strongly for a radical reform in the method of local government funding that would see the current reliance by Councils on commercial rates reduced or removed entirely will strike a deeply sympathetic chord with the many businesspeople in our county for whom the conduct of commerce has become less a pursuit of profit than a dogged daily battle for survival. Colr Gallagher’s notice of motion passed at Monday ...

The view is sometimes expressed that the older members of our community are among those whose needs are most neglected. How to cater for an ageing population is an important contemporary debate. While health and social care groups engage meaningfully with the issue and seek to identify service deficits and address them, some commercial forces operating in our midst cannot be accused of inactivity in this area. The advertising industry and those who avail of it have woken up to the fact that older citizens often have a ...

Monday last, April 4, marked the anniversary of the murder by an assassin’s bullet of the American civil rights campaigner Dr Martin Luther King Jr in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968. The killing was one of the defining moments in 20th century history: a dreadful act that in its immediate aftermath seemed to throw the aspiration for racial equality and the defeat of prejudice into eclipse. Out of that eclipse, however, the principles to which Dr King devoted himself were to blaze out with an irresistible brilliance as the ...

This week’s announcement that completion of a formal course of training will very shortly become a compulsory requirement for learner drivers is undoubtedly a step in the right direction in addressing the still disturbingly high number of serious accidents and fatalities on Irish roads. This newspaper has consistently advocated that the best means of ensuring that new drivers are proficient in driving techniques, acquainted with the rules of the road and – most importantly – maturely aware of their responsibilities to other road users is to build the necessary ...

The local political storm precipitated by the news of the prospective closure of the District Veterinary Office in Ballybay as a public facility, and the worrying implications for the 51 staff employed there and the health of the town economy, was a predictable one. The manner in which it manifested itself at last Wednesday’s meeting of Monaghan Co Council – with the hot potato of ultimate responsibility for the decision being projected back and forth among the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael councillors on wafts of hot vocal air ...

This Thursday, St Patrick’s Day, people will gather in a number of towns in our circulation area, in common with people of Irish lineage or affiliation throughout the world, to give expression to their sense of national identity and pride in the name of the patron saint who brought the Christian message to our country some 1,600 years ago. The motivation for the celebrations that take place on March 17 is now arguably more communal than spiritual. St Patrick’s Day is no longer an appreciably religious occasion in ...

The declaration by Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore that there would be no honeymoon period for the new Coalition Government that was beginning its formal coming into being yesterday as these words were being written was a realistic – and prescient – pronouncement. The Fine Gael and Labour leaders have already ample knowledge of the weight of expectation implicit in the powerful mandate bestowed upon them by the electorate. Decisions and pronouncements made at Monday’s meeting of Monaghan Co Council supplied more. The new holders of Ministerial ...

The wave of public protest sweeping across much of the Arab world at present will be remembered as one of the defining events of our times. The fervour for freedom that has possessed the people of a number of North African and Gulf nations is marked by the irresistible revolutionary impetus that has intermittently propelled profound shifts in the history of the human race. In some places, such as Egypt, it has already initiated a distinct if tentative change from autocratic governance to at least the promise of self-determination. ...

A shared declaration of the party leaders who performed for the public on Monday’s night’s televised General Election debate was radical reform, to a greater or lesser degree, of the structures responsible for health service provision in this country. The contemporaneously unfolding news that the availability of out-of-hours’ GP services in the north-east region was to be drastically curtailed because of a cost-cutting measure by the Health Service Executive added powerful impetus, and urgency, to the arguments being advanced. It was, however, local political vigilance rather than national ...