Letters 2005-06-17

Fianna Fáil

The poor, the sick and the aged

Old people can be treated like dogs in our nursing homes, gardaí can fit people up. We can have "gligeens" of ministers who can shake hands and mug it for the cameras but can not read briefing documents.

We can have stealth taxes which affect the poor most, we can have queues for trolleys in our hospitals, all without a whisper from the Soldiers of Destiny.

Despite the above catalogue of recent shame, the only issue that got Government backbenchers off their fat asses was the possibility of café bar licences.

This attack on the sacred pub licence made these previously tame TDs scream blue murder and threaten allsorts. They started drawing lines in sand and burning effigies of the PD Minister for Everything but Fairness (McDowell).

They put the upstart PDs in their place and reminded them once again that Harney and co are the mudguard rather than the vanguard of the Government.

Now if only we could interest the Fianna Fáil backbenchers in giving a damn about the poor, the sick and the aged.

Ger Dorgan

Artane, Dublin 5

Irish population trends 1821-2036

Famine may have killed six million

Emma Browne's article on the above subject, Village 3-9 June 2005, uses some questionable statistics regarding the famine period.

The graph with the article shows a declining population before the 1841 census, which is clearly wrong and an extraordinary mistake to make when dealing with Irish population figures. She says that "some estimates put it at 8.5 million up to 1845" which is in flat contradiction to the graph in which it is inserted. And she claims that "one million emigrated during the Famine and one million died."

Officials and demographers at the time did not accept the official figure for the population of 8.2 million in 1841 as being reliable. Cecil Woodham-Smith records this in her book. It was reckoned on the basis of some recounts that there was an underestimate of about one third. Sticking with figures rounded to the nearest million, that means the population figure for 1841 as established by the partial official recount, was 11 million.

That was not the only occasion on which census figures had to be readjusted. It happened again in the UK in 1991 because of the poll tax. Tithes in their new form and other taxes, among many other factors, were a major factor in 1841 that inclined people not to volunteer information.

This figure of 11 million in 1841 is probably an underestimate because the French statistician, César Moreau, estimated the population as high as 9,050,00 in 1827, 14 years earlier. It is accepted that the annual Irish population rate of growth for the period was 1.6 per cent which would have given a figure in the region of 13 million by 1846-47. The official figure for 1851 was 6.5 million and ironically this could be an overestimate as people were then inclined to "overinclude" themselves in the hope of extra relief.

Accepting Emma's figure for emigration of one million we are left with a considerably larger death figure than the one million she claims. In fact, it could be uncannily close to six million. It is an extraordinary situation that such widely different estimates can exist for such an event.

One of the amazing facts about the Great Hunger was that there was no attempt at the time to count the numbers who died. I suggest that it is a long overdue fact of our history that should be clearly established once and for all. Perhaps your columns can be utilised to help rectify that situation.

Jack Lane

Millstreet, Co Cork

Health service

State should fix GP's salaries

I cannot believe that the GPs of Ireland have increased their already extortionate fees once again. How much do these people want to squeeze out of ordinary working families? It seems they are not content with charging up to €60 for a single visit (child or adult).

It seems they become GPs for the primary reason of enrichment. They can't even be made put up price lists outside their practices or accept doctor only medical cards! It is time the State put these villains on fixed salaries based on years in service and perfomances given. No more fees. It is no wonder that people make the A & E rooms their first stop when they become ill.

Gordon Kennedy

Ballsbridge , Dublin 4

Institutional abuse

Thanking Dr Corry on behalf of abuse victims

Dr Michael Corry's letter 19 May, highlights many of the reasons why I took the decision to go on hunger strike for 22 days in April 2004.

I read Dr Corry's letter with keen interest, and I waited in hope to read replies from the processional bodies, involved with survivors, in relation to the Redress Board, replies from Dr Corry's professional colleagues. Psychiatrists, who like Dr Corry, attend the Redress Board, where some of them have had their professional integrity undermined. I would like to qualify the above with one of many examples. When I was on hunger strike, a woman who attended the redress board came to see me. She talked about the fear and panic she experienced when a member of the redress board told her the post-traumatic stress disorder she suffers – diagnosed by her psychiatrist – was in fact a form of post-natal depression. This woman said "I wanted to get up and run out of there and never go back". On the same day of this woman's terrifying ordeal, her solicitor told her the financial offer made to her by the Redress Board was now reduced by almost half the amount.

I hoped to read letters from survivors' solicitors and barristers. These professional people have witnessed first hand what Dr Corry outlines in his letter ie: the humiliation and intimidation visited on their clients when they appear in front of the Redress Board. Letters from survivors' counsellors, who listened to their clients tell of their degrading experiences in an atmosphere that renders many of them too frightened to talk.

Alas! Dr. Corry is a lone voice among the above-mentioned professional bodies. Hence questions beg. Questions like: are these professional people sworn to a similar kind of secrecy that is demanded of survivors when they sign to accept the financial pittance offered to them for the drip-fed devastation of their childhoods and the brokenness they continue to suffer in their adult lives? Is it a case of 'terms and conditions apply' woven somewhere in the print of these persons' contracts with the Redress Board. Is there another layer of reasons for the professional people's silent response to Dr Corry's letter?

I feel I talk for many survivors when I say my entire life has been blighted by the abuse I experienced in my childhood. When a person's childhood is systematically abused, day upon day, year upon year, be the abuse emotional or physical, a person's entire humanity is abused; no part of a person's integrity escapes this degradation. In other words, a person's entire dignity is devastated and their wholeness is utterly disintegrated.

We survivors of institutional abuse, whose childhoods were annihilated, are today's broken adults. We survive in a state of continuous bewilderment; we are still drifting, to quote Dr Corry, "from one crises to another". In the hope that somehow, somewhere, someday, the atrocities committed against us as children might begin to make sense.

However, there is one way to protect survivors from being further abused by the Redress Board. This one way is for the professional bodies mentioned in this letter to join with Dr Corry in his struggle to bring about change in the tyrannical atmosphere that prevails in the Redress Board at present.

The above-mentioned professional people have one kind of power. The power to insist – indeed they have a moral duty to demand – their clients, survivors of instuitional abuse, be afforded the respect and dignity denied them as children. Maybe then the Goddess Themis will smile on her scales of right and justice, as they balance with dignity and respect for one section of the most vulnerable adults in Irish society today.

On behalf of all survivors of institutional abuse, I would like to thank Dr Corry for the compassion and heartfelt concern he shows in his letter for all of us.

Tom Sweeney

Tallaght, Dublin 24

The need for remorse

So far in Ireland we have opened our eyes to industrial abuse, clerical abuse, abuse in orphanages and other institutions that was so hard to imagine 20 or more years ago.

For abuse victims acceptance by others is the most important thing they desire, not an answer that comes later through many years of counselling, for some nearing the end for others just starting.

But what of those abuse victims many years ago that were subjected to another form of abuse which still goes on in the mental health hospitals to cover up the truth? When one has been admitted to a mental health hospital and labelled, who would believe their story? Where are the use of clinical psychologists in our state who can deal directly with emotional and physiological issues a victim has after abuse?

Also what of the silent victims of adoption abuse who fear to speak out because their only lifeline is with the adopted family?

The issues that have come out were once covered over by agents of the State, passed on from one system to another as with the church. We are all victims of one form or another and show remorse to one another when we have yet to come to terms with our own issues, no matter how small.

Brian Dineen

Killbarack

History

Bertie Ahern and World War I

During his recent visit to a World War 1 memorial in Belgium, the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said he wanted to "lay to rest the spectre of violence in Ireland", and, to this end, he is inspired by Irish warfare against Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Turks and others who never invaded, conquered, expropriated, colonised or starved Ireland in one of the most violent and bloody episodes the world has ever known.

Ahern says the differences between Irish nationalists and unionists were "transcended by their higher, common purpose". The unionists went to war (against a country which a few months earlier had armed them in their revolt against the British Parliament) for King and Country, aka the British Empire at the height of its genocidal, world-conquering power.

Nationalists joined the British Army to defend the rights of small nations. Where was the common purpose in that? What was higher about it? And what purpose did anyone actually achieve in the Killing Fields of WW1 that Ahern is so keen to emulate?

Pat Muldowney

Magee College, University of Ulster, Derry

Inaccurate reporting

Maureen Dowd should do her research. Due to time constraints over the past two months, I've not had a chance to read Village. I have found some free time and am catching up with the ones I didn't get a chance to read properly.

While most of this catching up has been an enjoyable experience, Maureen Dowd hasn't been. In one particular issue (29 April-5 May – Uncle Dick and Papa), Dowd blatantly lies. She writes that Dick Cheney and Pope Benedict XVI are "eager to prolong a patriarchal society that prohibits gay marriage".

While this is true for the Pope, this is not the case for Cheney. In July 2004, Mr and Mrs Cheney (along with John Kerry and John Edwards and about 46 other senators) opposed a federal constitutional amendment of George W Bush banning gay marriage. Mr and Mrs Cheney's opinion is that each state should decide for themselves whether they wanted gay marriage or not.

Really, Ms Dowd should get her facts right. Facts may stand in the way of a good story (or column) but that's no reason to ignore them. The Cheneys may or may not be pro-gay marriage but one thing for sure is that they are not anti-gay marriage.

Philip Nulty

Ardee, Co Louth

UK politics

Some great caring realm

Gordon Brown says he is concerned about the lives of women and children in Africa, yet we know that he is not concerned about the lives of women and children in Iraq.

Tony Blair is to be the President of the European Union, yet the United Kingdom is not even in the Euro money system. Will he be loyal to the Euro or to Sterling?

With respect to help for Africa, we only hear from Bono, Geldof, Bush and Blair. Again, as with Iraq, the United Nations is excluded.

In the meantime, a ring of 40,000 troops is put around Baghdad to keep it quite, after all no news is good news. How is it with the United Kingdom's colonial record in Kenya in recent decades that it is not being brought before the International Court of Justice?

Instead it portrays itself as some great, generous, benevolent and caring realm.

Peter Kennedy

Sutton, Dublin 13