LETTER: Removal of hospital statue
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Wednesday March 10 2010
A Eagharthóir, Sometimes, for reasons illogical, bureaucracy assails the sensibilities of an entire people and ignores the very reality that is the essence of what creates and constitutes community.
On Friday March 5 such an event took place in Killarney and very many are horrified as a result. Since 1939, when the District Hospital was built, a life size statue of the Sacret Heart stood sentinel over the main entrance. Its presence harmed nobody and consoled many.
The new, post LIsbon, Ireland demands that all public manifestations of what constitutes our national identity and religious affiliation must be obliterated. It is bringing to fulfulment the fear that I expressed to my teaching colleagues, prior to retirement, that the day was fast approaching when all classroom signs and symbols of our Christian faith would have to be removed.
Very soon everything about us as a race will be neutral. We willl stand for nothing and represent nothing. We will be in between in the misty flats, drifting to and fro, anchored only by the whim of the passing day.
To my mind, it looks like incredible arrogance to say to the people of an entire area that your past is of no consequence, that your identity is irrelevant and that you cannot give public expression to your deepest beliefs – the beliefs that sustained you and for which your forebears suffered and struggled.
There is most surely an incredible irony in the fact that our most senior politicians are travelling to the farthest corners of the world for Saint Patrick's Day while at the same time a statutory body is tearing down a sacred symbol, beloved of thousands for over seven decades.
Objective norms are the sine qua non of any group, community or society. Without them, there exists merely a vacuum to be filled with a fanciful whim or an obsessive indulgence. 'Situation ethics' leads to chaos in society and a lack of reasonable focus in individuals.
The removal of the statue from the roof of the now Community Hospital has caused enormous distress. The action is at the behest of a State body charged with alleviating pain, anguish and that very condition, distress.
Mo Bhuíochas,
Michael Gleeson, Mayor of Killarney.
- Mo Bhuíochas, Michael Gleeson, Mayor of Killarney.
