Articles in the Comment Category

We have had much good economic news in our county in recent times that encourages the sense of tentative but steady progression out of the turbulent maelstrom of recession. Developments such as Combi-Lift’s ambitious plans for expansion and job creation, and the acquisition by the Cavan Monaghan Education and Training Board of the provision of important traineeship and apprenticeship programmes, are strong indicators of a brighter future for our county, one in which job opportunities will be locally available to the emerging generations of young people in a manner commensurate with ...

Although acknowledgement of suicide as a matter of serious national social concern is now widespread, and a good deal of the stigma formerly attaching to it has been shed, there has been little abatement of it as a cause of premature mortality and a source of deep and grievous suffering for families in our own and other counties. Its resistance to a fullness of understanding, despite increasing study from a wide range of psychological and sociological perspectives, marks suicide as a problem that will be ever in our midst. Consequently there ...

Like the entrepreneurial flair spoken of when we last editorialised, community spirit has long denoted the way of life in Co Monaghan. Our evolution as a predominantly rural county has been shaped by the strong sense of identity our people feel for their own native place. Although we have five significant urban centres, something unusual for a county of our size and geographic placement, a significant share of our population has remained resident in and around smaller settlements and worked to establish services and a quality of life there that have ...

Two significant developments at opposing ends of the economic activity spectrum in our county this week certainly emanate that good news feel that newspapers and those who labour on them much prefer, despite popular perceptions otherwise, to convey to their readership. Both the turning of the sod by global forklift manufacture leaders Combilift on their new €40 million factory development at Tullyherim, and the launch by Minister Heather Humphreys of the craft and artisan food retail outlet operating during the peak tourism weeks ahead from the Castle Leslie Gate Lodge in ...

The Government is to be commended for its intention to bring forward legislation that will endeavour to resolve some of the very difficult issues that have long surrounded the area of adoption in this country. This week’s publication of the heads of the proposed Adoption Bill, and the discussion that has preceded and is likely to intensify following this move, can be seen as another stage in the social evolution of the nation. For some time now we have been engaged in a purposeful process, although often a tentative and painful one, ...

Pride sometimes gets a bad Press. Ever since Christendom labelled it as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, moral and cultural cautions have abounded against allowing it to take too much of a hold over our individual lives. But, like the Greek take on “strife” that was meditated upon in these columns last week, there are good and bad forms of this innately human characteristic. The pride that makes us elevate our standards and better ourselves can also make us selfish and self-serving at others’ expense – but if we struggle to find ...

The Ancient Greeks, as they so often did, had a word (or two) for it: Eris agathos, or good strife. Their poet Hesiod saw it as a real and substantial force of nature, as powerful and influential on humankind as the wind or the tides: that compulsion to competitive, emulative betterment that makes us strive to achieve. Not to be outdone, we Irish have sometimes put a name on it too, more prosaic, perhaps, but just as evocative: county pride. We seem to have it in abundance in Co Monaghan: it is visible ...

The launch last Friday of the third Monaghan Town Country Music Festival, to take place later this month, highlighted a field of activity in which the people of our county perform conspicuously well. We have established throughout our county’s extent a formidable and varied range of community-based summer events, ranging from music performances, agricultural shows, vintage and heritage showcases and village and rural area galas, all of which enliven local life and provide a focal point and sense of purpose for our prodigious capacity for voluntary effort. The organisation of these activities ...

THE EQUALITY JOURNEY The wide range of activities that took place across our county during the recent Social Inclusion Week undoubtedly sharpened awareness of the eternal topicality of equality issues, reinforcing the message that while a great deal has been done to extend social opportunity to everyone in our county, there remains a great deal more to do. We tend to pride ourselves as individuals upon our modern acceptance of groupings that were once marginalised or isolated – the single mother, the person with different skin colour, same-sex couples, people with disabilities, ...

TThe importance of the GAA to the Irish social engine is indisputable. From its very beginnings the Association has laid legitimate claim to territory beyond the demarcations of the playing field, drawing to itself a governance of influence on aspects of life that are interwoven with how we define what it is to be Irish. It has facilitated, and often battled to preserve, the identifying distinctiveness of our language and forms of cultural expression – and it has provided an interlocking structure that has enabled our social building ...