A chara, - Two news items in a side-column of your edition of April 17th stopped me in my tracks. One concerned a sick, confused woman of 90 years, who died in University College Hospital, Galway, late last year, after falling from a trolley and breaking her leg, having been left unattended in casualty.
The other mentioned the death of a woman in her forties, from hypothermia, under a park bench in Rathangan, Co Kildare, less than a mile from her home.
I am filled with a sense of deep sympathy for these two poor, unfortunate women and their kin, allied to a feeling of rage and frustration at the needlessness of their respective deaths. The loneliness and poignancy of their passing is so at variance with the current gung-ho, feel-good, Celtic Tiger romp to prompt self-questioning like: "How can such things happen in Utopia?"
Or am I just an ordinary, miserable, crabbed party-pooper - or a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool, creepin'-Jesus, "left-wing Pinko?" - Is mise,
Fergus Kelly, The Links, Donabate, Co Dublin.