We should value human life over the economy
REGARDING George Hook’s comment that lockdown must be lifted, while admitting he can’t stop thinking about dying: when you say we have to let people die, you’re saying that we have to let you die too.
What is it that has made some people think so little about themselves that they believe they should die because it’s inconvenient not to? No-one has to die unnecessarily.
Making the economy more important than people has gone too far. When everyone’s life is threatened, industry and commerce of necessity closed down. Without income, all those bills, mortgage payments, commercial rents and debt servicing needn’t be paid until the danger passes.
Governments have been letting people die from climate change for decades on financial grounds, and by continuing to do so, they show that they think people, children, and future generations aren’t worth the financial sacrifice of keeping them alive – like they’re no more important than animals.
When we surrender to the conventional wisdom that the economy is everything, we reject our constitutional and human rights and give them to those who think we should sacrifice our lives to spare them the inconvenience of protecting us, when we should be demanding our rights to be safe from harm or replacing them with those who will make us so.
We’re now in a fight to the death against climate change, and if we lose it, our species and most of the others on Earth will go extinct. We have very little time left to save ourselves, and if we surrender to those who don’t want to spend what it takes to win this war, we will be killing all human life.
We can’t let others do our thinking for our dying, and must resist those who think that their car is more important than other people’s lives, or that the taxes collected on it and its fuels can’t be lost to keep people alive.
Following that route leads to slavery and suicide.
The investors in greenhouse gasproducing machinery or vehicles, the banks that give loans to buy them, the bondholders who buy government debt to pay for them for those paid with taxes, the fossil fuel producers, motor makers and farmers all have to be seriously inconvenienced if a normal life on
Earth for humans is to go on.
If the financial world is unwilling to stop polar ice from melting, to refreeze the permafrost and the ice already gone that protected the ocean surfaces covering billions of tonnes of frozen methane and poisonous hydrogen sulphide producing bacteria, and to help governments in every way to do so, it must pay in taxes for it to be done.
Since the financial world has been instrumental in sinking taxpayers into unrepayable levels of debt by lending imprudently and unlawfully to their governments or profiting from future taxes on the money markets, it has the duty to do so and taxpayers have every right to expect it. MICHAEL A McPHILLIPS,
Ballymun, Dublin 9.
Water problems
I AM always intrigued that whenever we have a dry spell, we are urged to preserve water. We are told that household water use is up by 20% since the Covid-19 lockdown began.
Surely this figure is at least counterbalanced by the number of closed factories, construction sites, cafés, restaurants & hairdressers? Plus, the not-insignificant fact that we had 11million visitors to the country last year, while this year’s figure is unlikely to hit 10% of that.
I’m intrigued to know if we have added any water storage capacity in the last 25 years or so. Since the mid-1990s the population here has grown from 3.5million to almost 5million – an increase of 40%.
Has anyone in our Government/ civil service made plans around this increase? Or is the lack of water storage/hospital beds/school places/new houses/rural broadband just one of those unfortunate realities that nobody could possibly have seen coming? Perhaps a pay rise would help.
GERRY KELLY, Rathgar, Dublin 6.
Horse-racing folly
ALLOWING horse racing to jump the economic queue so that it can resume earlier than planned under the lockdown unwinding schedule is an example of Ireland’s invisible plutocracy.
Horse racing was never going to cool its fetlocks while waiting in Phase 3.
The result? Horse racing gets the starter’s orders while hairdressers and barbers must wait until July to flex their scissors in order to fulfil an essential service.
Contrast this with horse racing whose only function is to be a gambling medium.
It is the ultimate unnecessary activity that spuriously claims to generate essential economic activity.
Horse racing is not for one of kind of deed or heart. The abuse and killing of horses in the pursuit of financial profit lies behind it.
Since 2001, more than €1.2billion of taxpayers’ money has been doled out by several Irish governments to horse and greyhound racing.
Public money supports two minority recreational interests that have a seam of animal cruelty running through them. It is enough to tear your current amount of copious hair out. JOHN TIERNEY, Campaigns Director, Association of Hunt
Saboteurs, Dublin 1.