Stop burning buildings that can be used to help the needy

STOP burning places where needy people might live.

When I was young, the council houses built for Irish people were likely to get windows broken if it was feared families threatened with tuberculosis might be granted one. That was going to keep them away?

Fear was a stupid emotion in that context – as is the horror now of burning out foreigners, even before they arrive, who might get a good night’s sleep with a roof over their heads.

Think of the suffering children around the world, as in Gaza, and find your way back to sanity.

Ireland is not full, and what is needed is for more accommodation to be built. It is not a crisis (except for ‘patriotic’ Irish criminality) when humanity and basic decency step up. ROBERT SULLIVAN,

Bantry, Co. Cork.

Valentine’s lesson

LOVE will be in the air on Wednesday, Valentine’s Day, a significant cultural, religious, and commercial celebration of romance and love.

St Valentine, a third-century priest in the pagan Roman Empire, was imprisoned and martyred for marrying Christian couples. All Christian denominations regard marriage as a sacred institution. Catholic marriage is a sacrament and a lifelong union of an opposite-sex couple.

For the marriage to be valid in civil law, a completed marriage registration form (MRF) must be lodged with the civic registrar.

In a more secular Ireland, many couples opt for a civil law marriage. Since 2015, same-sex couples can legally marry with the same rights and obligations towards each other as opposite-sex married couples.

In effect, civil law marriage is now available to all citizens.

Having done so well to provide same-sex marriage for those who so dearly craved it, the Government may be opening a Pandora’s Box of legal and family disputes by needlessly including ‘durable relationships’ in its definition of family.

The term ‘durable relationships’ is insecure, uncertain, laissez-faire and leaves one or both parties exposed in the event of a relationship break-up or death. Most of all, it’s unfair to any children of one, the other or both adults in the relationship.

All such problems can be avoided if the adult pair marry under civil law. St Valentine sacrificed his life so that lovers could marry.

The Government had the bottle to provide civil law marriage for all its citizens. So, the term ‘durable relationships’ is an unnecessary complication when adult lovers of all ages and sexual orientations can tie the knot in a civil law marriage.

BILLY RYLE, Tralee, Co. Kerry.

Weight challenges

RE: ‘Should airlines start weighing passengers?’ (Mail): while I haven’t flown since 1980, I agree that body weight should be considered with airline ticket prices, mostly due to fuel costs. I still feel compelled to add that many, if not most, obese people self-medicate through over-eating. I utilised that method during most of my pre-teen years, and even later in life after quitting my (ab)use of cannabis and alcohol.

Mostly due to adverse childhood-experience trauma, I ‘live’ with chronic anxiety and clinical depression that are only partly treatable via medication. It’s an emotionally tumultuous daily existence; a continuous discomforting anticipation of ‘the other shoe dropping’ and simultaneously being scared of how badly I will deal with the upsetting event, which usually never transpires.

It can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is treated with some form of selfmedicating, which for me is prescription or alcohol.

Someday I could instead revert to over-eating.