Sir, – It’s March and the Transition Year Ball (TY) season has swung into gear. Fifteen and 16-year-olds are stepping into their glad rags, hiring hotel rooms and whooping it up before they enter fifth year and the dreaded Leaving Cert looms.
Parents allow this to happen. “They’re good kids, just having a bit of fun, letting off a bit of steam,” is the standard remark. Sixteenth birthday parties come and go, house parties where “no alcohol is served” but the majority drink, sitting around kitchen tables, swigging vodka out of naggins while parents turn a blind eye.
This is a culture that has normalised binge drinking in kids as young as 15. We are to blame – parents, policy makers and the drinks industry.
Despite reports that alcohol consumption overall has fallen in recent years this is not the case with youth binge drinking.
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Alcohol Action Ireland report that youth drinking in Ireland has surged by 12 per cent over the past decade, from 66 per cent in 2016 to 78 per cent in 2025 and it is their main area of concern. Of those, almost two thirds regularly binge drink and one in three drinkers have an alcohol use disorder
There is robust evidence that parents who give their underage children alcohol often unwittingly facilitate the early initiation of not just any use but heavy use of alcohol in later years. The evidence is very firm in conclusion: “Don’t expose young teens to alcohol.”
Time to call TY balls and 16th birthday parties out for the drink-fuelled binges that they are and find another way for TY kids to let off steam. How parents drink also has an impact on teenage drinking habits. When it comes to binge- drinking, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” . –Yours, etc,
DR CATHERINE CONLON,
Ballintemple,
Cork.
Long time waiting
Sir, – My daughter and granddaughters posted an 80th birthday card to me from Britain. It was posted in plenty of time on January 18th, correctly addressed and stamped. It arrived in Terenure on March 4th. This has got to be a record.
I am treating it as my Mother’s Day card. – Yours, etc,
CATHERINE MURRAY,
Terenure,
Dublin 6W.
Heart and soul and eulogies
Sir, – Jennifer O’ Connell’s column (“We’re not bouncy castle Catholics - we’re the incense and eulogies kind,” February 28th) suggests that much of Irish Catholic ritual continues more from habit than conviction – that our attachment to funerals may stem more from tradition than faith.
Bairbre McNicholas argues differently (Letters, March 5th). For her, ritual – especially during loss – holds deep meaning, even for doubters – that traditions offer hope rather than mere superstition.
When my Dad died, we wrote a few words for his funeral Mass, as we thought this would be expected of us. We were surprised to learn that my parents’ parish did not permit family eulogies in church.
The priest had never met my father. He collected our memories and shared them during Mass. Though kindly meant and well delivered, his words felt a little removed from the Dad we knew.
This experience brought home to me just how meaningful it can be for families to take part directly in remembering a loved one.
I think the issue isn’t whether ritual is empty, but whether personal remembrance can exist within tradition. Something vital occurs between formal prayer and private memory.
Incense and eulogies both connect the sacred and personal; families should be able to participate in these goodbyes, while being careful not to undermine the Mass and the church setting.
I agree with Joan Burgess (Letters, March 3rd) about “eulogy” and its simple meaning – “good words” coming from the classical Greek. Surely words of remembrances when expressed in “good words”, when brief and respectful, honour both the deceased and the sacred setting.
Perhaps we need both: incense for the soul and eulogies for the heart – a faith strong enough for grief, yet flexible enough for memory. – Yours, etc,
BARBARA CLANCY,
Stillorgan,
Co Dublin.
A visit to the White House
Sir, – With all the killings, bombings, destruction in the Middle East, and now displacement of tens of thousands of Lebanese, all started on a whim by US president Donald Trump, I call on the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin not to bow and scrape on my behalf at the White House on March 17th. I don’t think I can stomach it. – Yours, etc,
EVELYN MADIGAN,
Terenure,
Dublin 6W.
War in the Middle East
Sir, – Hundreds of thousands of people are on the move as the war in the Middle East continues to spread.
The evacuation orders last week in south Lebanon and southern Beirut are a clear indication of where this latest round of bombardment is headed.
Many will die. Hundreds of thousands of homes will be destroyed, and millions will suffer across the region for years to come.
Iran’s population of 92 million citizens is twice that of Iraq and four times that of Syria.
We’re potentially heading into one of the greatest refugee crises the world has witnessed. It’s happening at a time when many countries have drastically cut their overseas aid budgets. Ireland has been a positive exception to this trend.
GOAL has been working in the Middle East for many years, proudly supporting the people of Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Syria and will continue to do so. – Yours, etc,
COLIN LEE.
GOAL Director of
Programme & Operations,
Dún Laoghaire,
Dublin.
Arts and humanities
Sir, – Tom Felle (“Traditional Arts Degree needs to be reinvented,” March 5th) is correct that the Arts degree must evolve. But I would argue that AI education needs to start at primary level.
China recently mandated AI education for children starting at age six, while Estonia has integrated AI Leap programmes into its secondary curriculum to ensure students are AI-native long before they reach university. Ireland risks falling behind not just in technology but in the literacy required to govern it.
As Tom Felle correctly points out, AI is encroaching on the traditional “safe’” territories of Stem, law and business. We are starting to see what some experts predict will be one of the most disruptive work revolutions ever witnessed and our employment landscape could be transformed by 2030.
However, as an AI founder and transformation consultant, my own experience has taught me a counter-intuitive truth.
My ability to innovate in this space is drawn less from technical code and more from my humanities and journalism degrees and my psychotherapy training. Why? Because the most difficult part of the AI revolution is not the technology. It is the psychology of change, the ethics of adoption and the nuance of human interaction.
My daughter will sit her Leaving Cert in June and despite the prevailing Stem-or-bust pressure in schools, intends to study philosophy, psychology and English. Far from being unrealistic, I believe these subjects are her best insurance policy.
In the 2026 job market, philosophy will help with the logic and ethics needed for AI governance. Psychology will inform the human-in-the-loop expertise required by the EU AI Act and English can provide the high-level communication and prompt-engineering skills required to lead AI-driven teams. She isn’t just studying the past, she’s mastering the interface of the future.
As for my son, he qualifies as a carpenter this summer, practising a centuries-old craft that requires a physical and intuitive presence no large language model (LLM) can replicate.
We don’t need to reinvent the Arts degree to include numeracy, AI fluency and data literacy.
We need to reinvent our education system and redefine our priorities to recognise that in a world of artificial intelligence, human intelligence and skills are the ultimate premium. – Yours, etc,
MARIE TOFT,
Co Cork.
Sir, – I read with some dismay the Strategic Plan published by the national funding body Research Ireland last week. Research Ireland was created from the merger of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Irish Research Council (IRC), and to say that the arts, humanities and social sciences have been sidelined by this merger is an understatement.
Research Ireland’s strategic plan is full of aspirational language, and makes occasional reference to culture and knowledge creation, but this reads as a concession to the humanities rather than being an integral driver of the plan: the focus is clearly on leveraging research funding to support industry and drive the economy, thus “securing higher productivity, addressing global challenges, and supporting Ireland’s future prosperity”.
Societal challenges, which might have included securing a critical, informed and culturally literate population, are oriented towards Stem.
It is as if the arts and humanities have no role in meeting global challenges or indeed in contributing to the economy: creative industries are only mentioned twice in passing.
It’s short-sighted not to see that arts and humanities research contributes to supporting a cultural economy that is one of Ireland’s greatest exports: if its monetary value is hard to quantify, surely the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science of Ireland James Lawless, can see that Ireland’s cultural production – including its world-renowned authors, artists, actors, film makers – is a form of soft power, as well as having inherent value as a contribution to our global cultural commons.
In short, this strategic plan, whilst ambitious in other areas, fails to think imaginatively and boldly about the role that the arts, humanities and social sciences might play in Ireland’s future. This makes little sense, even when it comes to metrics.
A key measure of research excellence included in the plan is the securing of 19 ERC grants in the period 2021-2024.
The authors might mull over the fact that last three European Research Council grants awarded to UCC researchers were in fact in the domain of arts, humanities and social sciences, and UCC to its credit has recognised that this is an area of success worth supporting. If EU money talks, then Research Ireland clearly isn’t listening.
Ireland needs its research culture to work for wider society and to secure our shared future. On that we are in agreement.
But it will be a very uncertain and culturally barren future indeed if arts, humanities and social science research is sidelined as much as this plan suggests. – Yours, etc,
PROF TOM BIRKETT,
School of English and
Digital Humanities,
(current ERC award holder),
University College Cork.
Growing food and resilience
Sir, – Dónal McCormack reminds us of the role played by allotments in supporting Ireland’s food security (Letters, March 4th). He makes the point that early 20th century Ireland understood something we are slowly rediscovering today: growing food locally builds resilience.
Currently Ireland imports most of its fruit and vegetables, leaving our food system exposed to global shocks, such as wars and fuel shortages.
In an increasingly unstable and unpredictable world, community gardens and allotments offer a simple, practical way to shorten food supply chains. In addition, they have untold other benefits, for soil health, social connections, mental health, biodiversity and community resilience.
The inclusion of allotments and community gardens in the Planning and Development Act 2024 was an important step in redressing the balance in favour of local food production.
The next step is implementation. Local authorities should support access to land so that every town and village can have a space to grow.
A community garden in every community would be a powerful investment in resilience for the century ahead. – Yours, etc,
HANS ZOMER,
Chief executive,
GAP Ireland,
Dublin.
A word fail on the snail trail
Sir, – Brendan Daly paints a wonderful picture of his trip to Marrakesh for us in the Magazine (“A muse called, Marrakesh,” March 7th).
In his evening street food tour, he describes the use of “toothpicks to extract gluttonous, rubbery snails from their dirty white shells”.
At this point, one presumes the snails were deceased and well past being gluttonous.
May I respectfully suggest the word Brendan was looking for was “glutinous”. – Yours, etc,
FRANK J BYRNE,
Gran Canaria,
Spain.
Not tackling schools rugby
Sir, – I cannot understand why The Irish Times no longer reports on schools’ rugby. Even the results of matches are not published.
Schools’ rugby is the bedrock on which our four professional rugby teams depend for player development and future international players.
I have just witnessed two highly competitive semi-finals of the Leinster Senior Schools Cup where the standard of play and commitment of the players was a joy to watch and the style of rugby was what one would wish to see at the professional level.
The level of on-field discipline is so good that referees rarely have to intervene.
Surely the work of the schools in upgrading playing facilities, the quality of coaching, the dedication of players and the parental involvement in bringing the players to matches and training sessions is worth acknowledging by providing reports on these quality matches which are well attended.
In my day, the match report and the possibility of being mentioned in dispatches was a source of great pride for player and parents.
I still have the newspaper cuttings of our Junior Cup win 65 years ago. Please can we have a revival of reporting on this extremely important part of rugby football in Ireland? – Yours, etc.
NIALL PELLY snr,
Westminster Road,
Foxrock,
Dublin 18.
Sir, – What is going on ?
I bought the Irish Times on Wednesday to luxuriate in every word of the magnificent St Mary’s victory over the auld enemy, Terenure College, in the Leinster Schools Cup semi-final.
Can’t find it . . . it must be here somewhere. No, not a word. Zilch.
What is the world coming to? – Yours,etc,
MICHAEL O’CONNELL,
Cabinteely,
Dublin.
