Galway Advertiser 1999/1999_07_01/GA_01071999_E1_018.pdf 

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Don't discriminate real about against your a lasting favourite predator
Dear Editor, Letters giving out about fox hunting appear in newspapers with the regularity of the fox hunting season itself. Why this sport seems to irritate so many people is really puzzling. Admittedly the fox is a pretty cute animal. Until one of them savages a flock of sheep, or makes a slaughterhouse out of a chicken coop, or bites the leg off a kitten. As Forrest Gump might say, 'Cuteness is as cuteness does'. I suspect one of the big things that irritates the anti-hunt crowd is the link between fox hunting and the old gentry, the Anglo-Irish landlords and all that crowd. That's certainly what gets the English hunt sabs, and also those in the Labour party who hate the Torys. I would like to offer an argument in favour of hunting from a slightly different angle than most of the ones I've heard. And I'd really like to know how the anti-hunting crowd would answer it (although I've got a pretty good idea). Many of the pro-foxites ground their arguments in the way they understand nature orders things: predators go after other predators, and that's just the way it is. Foxes eat chickens; chickens eat whatever they eat. Nature is red in tooth and nail: ecological harmony is based on big predators eating littler predators: "Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum." In fact, nature is all about life and death, killers and killed; hunters and hiders, carnivores and herbivores; those who eat and those who are eaten. In all this wild and wonderful festival of mastication there is only one predator who comes in for almighty criticism, and that's the biggest predator of them all, the carnivore that makes the Great White Shark look like a vegetarian. I refer, of course, to man (speaking generically), a predator in the same way as a fox is or a lion or a falcon. Rub-a-dub-dub/here comes my grub. Millions of years ago man the predator was slaughtering every size and shape of animal for food or for skins (to make clothes) or for religious purposes (the Lascaux Caves in France were not just an art workshop) and sometimes, one imagines, just because he got a kick out of chasing some fleet-

Comment & Letters

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e have been forced to the reluctant conclusion over the last few months that contemporary Ireland, at present riding on the back of the Celtic Tiger wearing the latest designer clothes and tapp-taping on modems and earlocked to mobile phones, as far removed from the narrow-mindedness and intolerance of the 'bad old days' of the 40s and 50s as could be, nonethe less retains a distinctly atavistic stripe on its back. We have been quite surprised, even astonished to realise that there is in even the most 'progressive' citizens of this coun try, who would scorn the very suggestion that they might be still animated by any of the bad old nationalist passions that inflamed their father's or grandfather's genera tion, a deep, unshakeable and visceral dislike, amounting in some cases to outright hatred, of our Unionist fellow-islanders. Now, God knows, there are reasons enough to justify this attitude. Few in the South - in the North it would be insulting even to raise the topic - need to be reminded of things like gerrymandering, job and bousing discrimination. Unionist triumphalism, the satanic dance of summer marches through Nationalist enclaves, arrests in the night, the odd unfortunate accident' that happened to Nationalists picked up for 'questioning' by the RUC.

A d a r k legacy o f s u s p i c i o n
hirty-five years and more have burned a whole sequence of terrible images into the Nationalist imagination: the frenzied attacks of Loyalists on the Catholic Lower Falls Road, the fiasco of internment, Bloody Sunday, the deliberate wrecking tactics of the Unionist Workers Council Strike that brought down the power-sharing executive... If the Nationalists of Northern Island have good reason to hate the Unionists, we in the South have shared vicariously in the degradation of our co-religionists. And yet... these attitudes go nowhere. They are dead ends. They are examples of a kind of social and political compulsion mania which repeats, endlessly, that the Unionists are liars, bullies, arrogant SOBs who deserve all they're getting now.

Yet a n o t h e r d e a d l i n e . . .

footed creature, even if it managed to get away from him. What's hunting the fox but man the predator still doing what he's been genetically programmed to do from the very beginning? Ok, nobody eats foxes (at least not in these islands), but I can tell you there's few things as tasty as a veni son-burger, not to mention a salmon or a good-sized trout. And I regularly put away several cows and sheep, preferably between two slices of bread or with a good mint sauce poured on top. Look at our teeth. Those are canine incisors, purpose-made to rip and tear. We're not vegetarians. We're carnivores. Nature made us that way. We need the good stuff a healthy animal carries around inside it. One of the reasons modem man and woman is so out of shape is because they don't eat the right foods. And so we have to stuff ourselves full of vit amins to keep body and soul together and stop our hair from falling out. And life is about stress, contrary to all the self-help gums. The only way to live is to live on the edge. And I can't think of a better way for flabby modem men and women to get the blood coursing through the veins than to gallop along on a fine horse leaping over field hedges and walls, while follow ing by a pack of baying hounds, in pursuit of that cute little verminous creature, the fox. The only pity about so many modem hunts is that they rarely manage to actually catch the little brute. Ok, I'm putting my tongue in my cheek. You might even say I've bitten off more than I can chew (ooh! pardon the pun), but honesdy, fox hunters - who are as decent a bunch of people as you could ever meet - have a greater real apprecia tion and understanding of the fox (or the stag, or the boar, or whatever) and the importance of maintaining its natural habi tat than the sentimentalists of the Basil Brush faction, many of whom view the amorality of the natural world through the eyes of Walt Disney. Oh, and the toffs don't dominate the hunt anymore. In fact, it's become an egalitarian sport again, just like it was a couple of thousand years ago when our ancestors used to run after their dinner in their bare feet, a practice that no doubt worked up a great appetite. Bon chance! Bon chase! 'TaUy-ho'

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nd by now we mean right now, today: June 30. We've been here before. We've all heard the irritatingly monotonous tick-ticking of the clock as the island of Ireland hunkers down for another long count. First the Good Friday Agreement. Then the problems with the Good Friday Agreement. And now the tick-ticking reminds us that prime minister Tony Blair and Taoiseach Bertie Ahem are once again sitting, sleeves rolled-up, shirts getting sweaty and dirty, with the Unionists and the Nationalists and doing their damnedest to knock together heads so that the crazies don't start shooting each other - and anybody else who happens to get in the way - just like in the 'bad old days'. As we pen these lines there are about eight hours to go before the midnight June 30 dead line (are these 'deadlines' really very helpful in a climate where 'dead' has a more than metaphorical sense to it?). Can it be done? Will Blair and Ahem be able to cobble togeth er some last-minute form of words to which David Trimble (whose very considerable sac rifices - personal and political - have not received the credit they deserve) and Gerry Adams (who has also demonstrated an increasing political realism) can both nod assent?

Recycling anybody?
Dear Editor, Did you ever think of recycling? Well, what if you put out more recy cling bins? That might keep Galway tidy. So if you put out more recycling bins that just might do the trick. Because if you don't, Galway will look like a dump. Yours sincerely, Michael Connolly (age 8), Polken, Castlegar, Galway.

...and y e t a n o t h e r 'form of words'

T h e j o y s of spacious parking in Killarney
Dear Editor, On entering Killarney, on our journey from West Cork, I was encouraged to stop because of die high lighting of car parks. What a treat to find such spacious park ing adjoining a tourist town at the cost of two 20p coins for two hours. Galway Corporation take note. The whole system smacked of intelligent planning, and most of all. people friendliness. Yours sincerely. Margaret Desbonnet, Roacaro, Co Galway.

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robably. But it is as certain as the fact that the sun will rise in the morning that it will only be another bandage on the deep slash of mutual suspicion that keeps each of these men, and their advisors, from recognising that unless the necessity of compro mise is recognised by both, and that absolute positions breed the only kind of absolute mor tal men and women can know in this world, and that is death, the Irish people in both polit ical jurisdictions, and Irish and British prime ministers are going to keep finding them selves hearing the insistent tick-ticking of the clock as it moves inexorably towards yet another 'deadline'. It's not over yet Not by a long shot.