Sir, - I was amused to read in your leading article on Catholic hospitals (September 4th), the phrase: "Scare mongering is not argument". Apart from the oddity of describing Dr. Connell's moderately expressed anxiety about some remarks of the Constitution Review Group by the highly emotive word "scare mongering," surely it is obvious that scare mongering is one of the most effective and widely used arguments in society, whether in insurance or advertising or medicine. To say nothing of politicians from Hitler to Ian Paisley. Your leader writer seems to have a very cramped idea of argument.
Dr Connell seems to me to have given a clear analysis and a just response to a sentence of the Constitutional Review Body. It seems to imply a threat to remove public funding from Catholic hospitals, if they do not perform operations that are reckoned as immoral by the Catholic Church.
The thrust of your leading article seems to be that the State is now to determine what is right or wrong, and the Churches and other institutions had better dance to their tune or have their funds cut off. And the State means, of course, whatever coterie of politicians has managed to seize the ministries by the various intrigues and deals with which we have become familiar, thanks to our bizarre electoral system. Some of them have been decidedly dubious. This is tyranny, not liberty; statism, not pluralism. Yours, etc.,
The Abbey,
Galway City.