Words matter more than we can say

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column

Michael Commane

We are not slow to give out about our politicians and public representatives. But it must be a tough job.

Most of them work hard, are regularly away from their families, they lose their anonymity and every word they say is parsed to the nth degree.

There was the old adage that paper never refuses ink, certainly social media has no problem disseminating fake news 24/7.

Far too often we fail to see all the good that happens in our country. When I stand back and see the changes that have taken place in my lifetime in Ireland it is beyond our wildest dreams. Democracy has worked well in Ireland.

That does not mean we should not keep politicians on their toes. High standards must be the norm.

 

When we first heard Donald Trump use profanities we were shocked but we seem to have become accustomed to it and it doesn’t bother us any longer.

 

After the riots in Dublin on November 23 a flurry of words began to be used by public personages. In the Dáil on Wednesday, November 29 Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee referred to the rioters as ‘thugs’ and ‘scumbags’. That is not appropriate language for a government minister to use in our parliament.

How would we have reacted had the minister called them effers?

The word thug originates in India. It was given to criminals who stole from travellers. The British stamped out the practice in the 1830s.

Scumbag is a nasty word, it’s crude and vulgar too. Its origins come from a used condom.

I think Helen McEntee should be advised to be somewhat more accurate in her use of words, especially as she is Minister for Justice.

Some days after the Dublin riots Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty  used the word ‘masses' in an RTÉ Radio interview. It seemed he was referring to the general public. Was he including me when he used the word? 

Would he consider himself one of the masses or was it a slip of the tongue? It’s a word that frightens me. It has all sorts of pejorative connotations.

I was confused to hear Minister of State at the Department of Education, Josepha Madigan say on last week’s Upfront  programme on RTÉ 1: ‘We all have a subjective view of a particular word.’ What exactly does that mean?

On a lighter note, in a recent radio interview Simon Harris, Minister for Higher Education Research Innovation and Science said: ‘I think we have to be honest with the public.’ Yes, that phrase, ‘I think we have to be honest’, is one many of us use but does the minister have to think about being honest with us?

In the world of social media everyone, literate or illiterate, has a platform to say whatever she or he likes and it need have nothing to do with the truth. 

Well done to Garda Commissioner Drew Harris, advising us all to stop ‘othering’ people. It’s a new verb for me but it makes great sense and something we all need to do.

David Norris’ wise words on sleeping

"Sleeping is one of the great joys of life."

- Soon to retire Senator David Norris in an interview on RTÉ’s The Week in Politics on Sunday.

And he should have added those moments on a non-workday morning when we can remain in bed, between sleep and awake.

The bed is always far more attractive in these long winter nights, with high winds and heavy rain as has been the case over the weekend.

75th anniversary of Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Today is the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Below is an extract from Paul Gillespie’s opinion piece in the weekend edition of The Irish Times.

 “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

This is Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on December 10th, 1948. Its 75th anniversary on Sunday prompts reflections on the declaration’s real historical role. Has it helped achieve the rights proclaimed in its 30 articles?

In summary, they begin with fundamental rights: to life, liberty and security of person; against slavery; to recognition, equality and remedy for people before the law; against arbitrary arrest and for a fair and public hearing; to be presumed innocent and against arbitrary interference with their reputation.

They go on to proclaim rights to: freedom of movement within and without states; seek asylum; have a nationality, marry, own and not be deprived of property. Freedoms of opinion, expression and assembly follow, including “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”. Then come rights to take part in governing a country or be represented, with equal access to public services, and to vote in elections by secret ballot.

Sister Berenice O’Keeffe OP, RIP (1925 - 2023)

Dominican Sister Berenice O’Keeffe died in Dublin on Thursday, December 7.

Berenice spent most of her life teaching and spent many years in Muckross Park College, where she was school principal.

Berenice had a lifelong interest in the arts and was a talented artist. She greatly enjoyed a sabbatical year in Rome, where she feasted her eyes on the wonder, beauty of one of the world’s great cities. 

Her sister Sister Terence, also a Dominican sister,  was novice mistress for a number of years. Her brother Edmond (Fr Gerard), who was two years younger, was a Dominican priest. The late Fr Kevin Condon OP, who died in 2021, was a first cousin.

Shortly after Newbridge College became  coeducational she became a member of the staff at the school. Her brother Edmond had been at the school long before her, as he sat his Leaving Certificate Examination there in 1945.

Sister Berenice was a friendly affable woman. She was kind and had a great sense of humour.

On a stunning summer afternoon we met on the top of Connor Pass on the Dingle Peninsula. All I can remember was that I made a smart-aleck comment. Her response outmatched mine and was far smarter and cleverer. She smiled, knowing well she had won and off she went.

Apologies, this writer is limited in his knowledge of Sister Berenice, but over the years he has heard many fine words spoken about the woman.

She was born in Ballykearney in County Cork in 1925.

Her funeral Mass takes place in the convent chapel in Cabra on Monday, December 11 at 11am.

May she rest in peace.

Shane McGowan’s funeral Mass a moment in Irish history

After the funeral Mass of Shane McGowan in the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary in Nengah, Co Tipperary yesterday can the Catholic Church in Ireland ever be the same again.

Parish priest Fr Patrick Gilbert deserves great praise for how he presided over the funeral Mass.

Is it ever possible after Shane McGowan’s funeral Mass for a priest in Ireland ever again to dictate to people how a funeral Mass is conducted?

Yesterday’s Mass, which ran from 3.30pm to 6.10pm was the church at prayer.

Victoria Clarke’s story about Shane receiving Holy Communion every day in hospital and how the priest chaplain refused to allow the Blessed Sacrament to remain with him at the side of his bed tells its own story. 

One might question aspects of what happened during the Mass. Was it appropriate for a reader to address the congregation on the conclusion of the Scripture text?

The dancing close to the sanctuary was a wonderful moment.

Pathetic people who change other people’s words

The piece below appeared in The Irish Times on Saturday. It is a lovely piece of writing. What else from John Banville. On the hard copy there is a picture from the late 1970s, which includes John Banville, Seamus de Fate, Sean Purcell.

Subeditors are the unsung heroes and heroines of the newspaper industry, with ultimate responsibility for what appears on the printed page

---

The subeditor is, or used to be, the unsung hero and heroine of the newspaper industry: unsung, and frequently abused. I heard an editor in the old days characterise subs as “pathetic people who change other people’s words and go home in the dark”.

It was rarely acknowledged that it was the subs who had ultimate responsibility for what appeared on the printed page. We were the ones who had to make sure the facts were factual, to spot potential libels, and to suppress unintended double entendres.

My boss Jack Jones, the finest chief subeditor I was fortunate enough to work with, cautioned me on my first night on the Irish Press subs’ desk that the two things a sub must have are a sound knowledge of the laws of defamation, and a filthy mind. We also had to value accuracy, linguistic clarity and grace of expression. And of course it helped to know how to punctuate.

In its heyday in the 1970s, when I worked there, the Irish Press had one of the best-informed industrial correspondents “in these islands”, as we used to say back then. Let us call him GD. He was a gentle man, and a gentleman, that rarest of phenomena in the raucous business of daily newspaper production. The only drawback was that GD wrote in so convoluted and gnomic a style that it often seemed to the paper’s long-suffering subs that his mother tongue must have been Mandarin.

A memorable moment

One evening when we were working away on tomorrow’s edition, GD approached the chief sub and asked him who had subbed his story that had appeared in that morning’s paper, dealing with some industrial dispute or other. Subs at all times had to be shielded from the wrath of irate reporters. On that occasion, however, the chief sub, who really should have known better, pointed to Sean Purcell, my neighbour on the desk, and said: “He did.”

An expectant silence fell. We did not know whether to dread the rancorous confrontation between the indignant newsman and the hapless sub that was surely inevitable, or to hug ourselves in rich anticipation – there were not many diverting occurrences in the long night of the sub. To our surprise, however, GD put a hand on Sean’s shoulder and said with feeling: “Thanks, you made me say what I meant to say.”

It was a memorable moment, unique in my experience. What was it they sang in Oklahoma? “The farmer and the cowman should be friends . . .”

Sean Purcell, who died just a couple of weeks ago, was something of a legend among subeditors, a legend I was in at the making of, since we worked together not only on the now defunct Press but later at The Irish Times. His subbed copy was clear and clean and always, always accurate.

Although he had never learned the alphabet – there was a hiatus somewhere in his early education – he was a superb stylist in the English language. And that counted for a lot on the Irish Press, where all reporters’ copy was reshaped from top to bottom, or, indeed, from bottom to top, for frequently a sub would rejig a piece of copy by lifting the final paragraph and making it the first.

Sean was a demon for detail. I recall a night when he and I almost made the paper miss the midnight deadline, so engrossed were we in a dispute over the pronunciation of the word “impious”; he turned out to be right, as so often.

He was mischievous, as I suppose we all were. One evening when I was standing in for the chief sub I gave Sean a story to edit on Dr Rose Dugdale, one-time socialite, holder of a PhD on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and an IRA activist. One of her more colourful exploits was the burglarising of her own family’s home in Devon and the theft from it of pictures and other items valued at some £80,000 – at her trial, her father appeared as a witness for the prosecution. In Ireland, she took part in a raid of Russborough House in which paintings worth £8 million were stolen by a Provo gang.

Diversions

The story I gave Sean to sub was an account of the capture of Dugdale, and in particular the elaborate measures taken by gardaí to prevent a possible attempt by the IRA to rescue her. The headline Sean wrote, or should I say tried out on me, was:

Massive guard mounted on Dr Dugdale

I looked at him over my specs and said: “Sean !”

But one of Sean’s skills was to appear the picture of rubicund innocence. I told him to rewrite the headline. He did so, snickering.

Such were the innocent diversions of our long stretches – it did sometimes feel like imprisonment – on the subs’ desk. Sean never doubted that subbing was an honourable craft, and that the sub had a duty to the reporter whose words he was, if not changing, then rearranging, and to the reader who needed to be able to trust that what he or she was reading was accurate, fair and authentic.

The age of fake news in which we are nowadays mired was still far off. We did our best, we upheld certain rigorous standards, we gave what grace we could to words written by others . . . and then we went home in the dark.

A worrying and serious leak at Sellafield plant

With the exception of this story from the Guardian, there has been little or no reporting on the serious leak at Sellafiled. 

Whatever name it is given, it is a dangerous plant and far too close to Ireland for our comfort.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/05/sellafield-nuclear-site-leak-could-pose-risk-to-public?CMP=share_btn_link

A sobering thought from a Psalm

The Psalms are a treasure of wisdom. They can preach hell fire, fury and war but they can also give us moments of great peace and serenity, confidence too:

'The Lord is my light and my help; whom shall I fear?’

- Psalm 26/27: verse 1

At last we need to fix the waste problem

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column

Michael Commane

My late parents were ahead of the curve on this one, indeed I can imagine so too were most of our late parents.

Last month the European Parliament voted on a stronger ‘right to repair’ for consumers. The plan or hope is that across the European Union people will find it possible to repair broken or damaged goods.

The vote was overwhelmingly in favour: 590 voted yes, 15 against and 15 abstentions.

 

Planned obsolescence has become the status quo. It’s fashionable to throw out rather than repair.

When we were first made aware of planned obsolescence we were annoyed with the manufacturers, we felt the wool was being pulled over our eyes and we were being forced to throw something out when it stopped working. 

Now it’s part of our vocabulary. Today it’s what we automatically do without asking ourselves why can’t it be fixed.

Only last week I was at a recycling depot and saw a cage filled to the brim with electrical equipment. 

Indeed, I have on occasion, with permission from the staff member on duty, taken an item out of it, brought it home and fixed it. In some cases it meant replacing a one amp fuse in a plug.

 

What has got us to this stage in our so-called development?

Anyone who reads this column knows that I cycle. Up until about 10/15 years ago I took it as normal to fix a puncture. I admit to having got lazy and I now leave the bicycle in to a shop for the job to be done. 

To my knowledge there is not a bicycle shop in the land that repairs punctures. Instead, they whip out the tube, bin it, and replace it with a new one. Just think of the rubber that is wasted in that exercise.

There’s a suggestion for an entrepreneur, set up a small business fixing bicycle punctures. The money and material that would be saved. It’s about time we stopped saying: ‘It’s not worth it’. It is.

I remember my father on occasion fixing our shoes using a last, which is a metal object, shaped like a human foot. It was, maybe still is,  used by cobblers to repair shoes. Does anyone ever leave shoes in to be ‘soled and heeled’ today? I doubt it.

Over the last number of weeks I found myself using a washing machine that is 35 years old. The washing tabs said best before 2010. I’m no professional on clothes and fabrics but all the items I washed in that machine with those tabs came out clean and fresh.

The next time something breaks down on you why not visit YouTube and there is every possibility it will come to the rescue and direct you how to get the machine working again.

The new European draft legislation would mean saving four million tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, which is the equivalent to removing two million cars off our roads.

Older people will remember their mothers darning socks and their fathers putting shoes on lasts.

 

It might be going a little too far and certainly politically incorrect to revert to that arrangement. But we darn  need to cop on and make things last.

The Observer - the world’s first Sunday newspaper

On this day, December 4, 1791 the first edition of The Obeserver newspaper was published. It was the world’s first Sunday newspaper.

Ireland falls short of EU packaging regulations

Twenty eight per cent of Ireland’s plastic packaging is recycled. It's a percentage that falls short of meeting mandatory EU targets.

Have people become addicted to having two, three vans per day arriving at their homes delivering goods purchased online?

The d in the old Irish sixpenny piece

The Thinking Anew column in The IrishTimes today.

Michael Commane

Have you ever thought about the number of currency changes you have experienced during the course of your life? Our current euro coins and notes came into use on January 1, 1999, which means no one 23-years-old or younger remembers our own national currency. We moved away from pounds, shillings and pence  to the decimal system on February 15, 1971,  and that  means there are fewer than three quarters of a million people who remember that particular changeover. Change is a feature of our lives. And change forces us be alert, to be ever conscious of the world about us.

A  few days ago I found an old Irish sixpence from the pounds shillings and pence (£sd) era. It’s a lovely coin with an Irish wolfhound on one side and the Irish harp on the other.

At the top of the coin the denomination is written as 6^d. It never once dawned on me what the ‘d’ stood for, nor did I ever think of asking what it meant. And that was the currency I used all during my teenage years. Only  last month when I found the old sixpenny piece, did I take  the trouble to  discover its meaning. It stands for the Latin word denarius, meaning an ancient Roman silver coin. It really is astonishing what we miss, what we don’t understand, what we don’t bother to discover. There is so much going on right in front of our eyes and it never dawns on us to wonder and ask.

Over the last number of weeks I began  feeding a wagtail. Slowly but surely the bird appeared at my door every morning. We became friends and I enjoyed its arrival every day. 

If only we kept our eyes open we’d be astonished with the ever-changing newness. Heraclitus, who lived in the sixth century BCE, held that everything is constantly changing.

It’s too easy to be like the ostrich and bury our head in the sand.

 

We grow accustomed to feeling secure in our own small worlds. Ignorance can make us frightened, frightened of other people. It can make us create scapegoats, demonising those who differ from us.

 

In tomorrow’s Gospel (Mark 13: 33 - 37) Jesus advises us: “So stay awake, because you do not know when the master of the house is coming, evening, midnight, cockcrow, dawn; if he comes unexpectedly, he must not find you asleep”.

Inspiring words, advice to all of us to avoid living our lives in a rut, doing things because that’s what we are accustomed to doing.

The Christian message is one of adventure, pushing us out to new horizons, tempting us to ask questions we never dare ask. Christianity has  nothing to do with staidness or being caught in a time warp. Christianity does not mean doggedly following a rule book written in and for the past.

 

Regarding the synod held in Rome in October Pope Francis said: “That expression –  ‘We have always done it that way’ –  is poison for the life of the Church. Those who think this way, perhaps without even realising it, make the mistake of not taking seriously the times in which they are living.”

They are powerful words. Far too often we are afraid of the unknown, afraid to change. It’s so tempting to lash out, to shout and roar, to be violent when we are afraid. John Hume has given us a great example of a wise, adventurous man, who craved change but always in the context of peace and reconciliation.

Brendan Hoban, a priest in the diocese of Killala, wrote about the pontificate of Pope Francis in the Rite and Reason column in this newspaper recently: “Instead of a restoration of the old church, there is now a rediscovery of the vision of Vatican II. Instead of control by the ordained, there will be governance by the baptised. Instead of an endless winter of discontent, there is now a new springtime of hope and promise.”

That’s exactly what the season of Advent is about,  and it begins tomorrow.  How delighted I am that I found that sixpenny piece. It has made me realise how important it is to be curious, to be adventurous, to see Advent as a time of change and excitement, a time of growth. These are great days, Alleluia.

Why

Why all the embarrassment

about being happy?

Sometimes I’m as happy

as a sleeping dog,

and for the same reasons.

and for others.

-American poet Wendell Berry

The words of two government ministers and a TD

In a radio interview earlier in the week Simon Harris, Minister for Higher Education Research Innovation and Science said: “I think we have to be honest with the public.”

Words, language can easily become movable feasts. Many of us tend to say it, but why does Mr Harris have to think about being honest?

In a similar vein, Sinn Fein TD, Pearse Doherty on radio yesterday when talking about last Thursday’s riots in Dublin, at one stage referred to the ‘masses’. It sounded all wrong or did the Deputy let something slip?

The Minister for Justice served no one well yesterday in the Dáil when she called people SBs. As the Garda commission said it’s not a good idea to ‘other’ people.

Diplomatic negligence led to conflict in Gaza

Lara Marlowe’s opinion piece in The Irish Times yesterday throws some light on the current conflict in the Middle East.

In the photograph taken on the White House lawn, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shake hands while Bill Clinton hovers over, beaming like a proud schoolmaster.

A time-lapsed photo might have shown two shadowy, invisible actors waiting in the wings: Yigal Amir, the fundamentalist Jewish Israeli who would assassinate Rabin in 1995, and Hamas, the Muslim fundamentalist group that would supplant Arafat’s Fatah as Israel’s enemy number one.

Extreme right-wing members of the settler movement now sit in prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, where they advocate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the annexation of the West Bank. Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and took another 240 Israelis hostage on October 7th. Israel’s furious response has killed more than 14,000 Palestinians in what Antonio Guterres recently called “a killing of civilians that is unparalleled and unprecedented” in his time as UN secretary general.

How did it get this bad? Gross diplomatic negligence by the US and, to an extent, Europe accounts for much of the downward spiral. Washington and Brussels allowed Netanyahu, who has served as prime minister for 16 of the past 27 years, to sabotage the two-state solution by multiplying exponentially the number of settlers in the West Bank, to 700,000 today.

Israeli pronouncements based on extreme language in Hamas’s 1988 charter portray it as hell bent on the annihilation of Israel. The truth is more nuanced. Hamas repeatedly offered to accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which implied tacit recognition of an Israeli state in between.

Successive Hamas leaders proposed a long-term hudna, an Islamic term for a ceasefire, with Israel, in exchange for a state in the territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war. “The hudna has been a part of Hamas’s thinking since the movement’s founding,” researcher Dag Tuastad wrote in a 2010 research paper for the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

Tuastad documented Hamas offers of a long-term ceasefire in 1988, 1997, 1999 and 2008. All asked for evacuation of the settlements, which are illegal under international law, release of Palestinian prisoners transferred to Israel in violation of the 4th Geneva Convention, and withdrawal to the 1967 borders.

Hamas officials offered to commit to anywhere from a decade to 30 years of peace. Some demanded that the right of return, enshrined in UN General Assembly resolution 194, be addressed immediately. Others said it could wait until peace took hold. All these initiatives were rejected or ignored by Israel and the US.

Hamas were not, of course, innocent peaceniks. They dispatched suicide bombers to Israeli cities and fired countless mortars and rockets at Israeli towns. Israel assassinated two Hamas leaders, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, in 2004, shortly after each had proposed a long-term ceasefire.

The US and EU parroted Israel’s demand that Hamas recognise Israel and renounce violence. When did Israel recognise Palestine or renounce violence?

Hamas has always refused to recognise Israel, though Henry Siegman, a former director of the American Jewish Congress, wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2006 that he had been assured by high-ranking Hamas leaders that the militants might be willing to recognise Israel if Israel recognised Palestinian rights.

On May 1st, 2017, Meshaal held a press conference at the Sheraton Hotel in Doha to formally announce that Hamas would accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He also distinguished between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, saying that Hamas’s conflict “is with the Zionist project, not with the Jews because of their religion”.

Again, Hamas’s proposal, which was in line with international law and UN resolutions, was rejected out of hand by Israel and the US. Later that year Donald Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem.

Such missed opportunities go a long way to explaining how the war between Hamas and Israel escalated from children throwing stones at Israeli soldiers in the 1987 intifada to the wholesale slaughter of the past seven weeks. Contrary to what Netanyahu says, Hamas is not Isis. The latter is a fanatical, apocalyptic group who dream of a worldwide caliphate. Hamas is an Islamist nationalist group that wants a Palestinian homeland in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Ben Hubbard of the New York Times travelled to Beirut and Doha to ask exiled Hamas officials why the group committed the atrocities of October 7th. Such interviews would have been unthinkable with Isis, which kidnapped and beheaded western journalists.

Hamas officials told Hubbard they were angered that attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, where more than 400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire this year, went unnoticed and unpunished. Israeli police raided the Al Aqsa mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam. And Gaza has endured a 16-year blockade imposed by Israel. They saw Arab countries abandoning the Palestinians to normalise relations with Israel. Palestine was seeping away, and the world was indifferent. Hamas felt they had to do something extreme to blow up the status quo.

It makes no sense to force people to retire

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

Travelling from West Kerry to Tralee last week in commuter traffic to take a morning train to Dublin the heavens opened. It’s a long time since I have seen such a downpour. Indeed, it was so heavy even to take the few steps from the car to the station door meant getting wet.

A friend, who was on her way to work, drove me to the train and in the course of our conversation we began to talk about our jobs, working and when is the right time to retire. I was returning to work after sick leave. I’d been away from my job since late September and was naturally nervous, maybe anxious about returning, nevertheless glad to be going back. 

Half jokingly, half in earnest I said to the person driving me that I was tempted to hand in the towel and retire, then again what would I do if I retired. I enjoy my job and would greatly miss it. It’s such a privilege to be in a job that you like doing.

I remember when I was a child a neighbour saying to me that whatever job you do you can do it well and enjoy it.

Wasn’t it Marx and Engels who saw work as part of the ingredient of making us who we are?

I heard someone on radio last week say that the word retirement is an awful word and should be removed from our vocabulary. And even more poignantly a surgeon, who is mandated to retire next year, held out his hands, rhetorically asking me if they were going to be any different the day after he is due to retire. He is recognised as one of the best surgeons in his field.

Of course people who have worked all their lives should have the possibility of leaving their jobs in their mid to late 60s. 

But it sounds beyond crazy that people who are fit and capable should be forced to retired at a given age because that’s the way it’s always been done.

In a different context but with a startling relevance to the subject of retirement Pope Francis had this say at the closing of the recently held synod:  “That expression - ‘We have always done it that way’ - is poison for the life of the church.

Those who think this way, perhaps without even realising it, make the mistake of not taking seriously the times in which they are living.”

Francis is spot on.

My father worked until he was 82 in a nine to five job and enjoyed every minute of it. He would have been lost without his work. And my mother, who worked in the home, worked until she was in her late 70s. No one ever compelled her to retire.

On the one hand people are forced to retire at a given age, on the other hand the State is at present concerned how it is going to fund the pension pot. As society grows older and people live longer there will be more demands on the tax system. 

What happens if the small number of multinationals decide to pull out of Ireland. Last year they paid €22.6 billion in taxes to Revenue.

Well said Oscar Wilde: ‘With age comes wisdom’.