Opinion

No-one should experience destitution on being granted refugee status

As a child watching the news it pains me to see children as young or younger than me suffering. I can’t help feeling grief when I see toddlers drowning on their journey to find a better life overseas. I can’t help feeling angry at the fact they have done nothing to deserve this cruel fate. I can’t help feeling disgusted at the horrific conditions of camps, bursting with thousands of starving people.

Last week was Refugee Week yet the issue was relatively quiet in the media compared to the public outrage last year over the Syrian refugees coming to Europe. I feel as if this issue is still a pressing matter as huge refugee camps, such as Kakuma in Kenya, are still occupied by thousands of people driven from their country by conflict that they have had no part in.

In the world today one in every 122 people is now a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. It is important that we reach out to help these people who are going through horrors that we can’t possibly imagine.

The UK received 39,000 asylum applications, less than many other European countries such as Germany. Just 45 per cent of cases were granted asylum and allowed to stay. Those not granted asylum have not just been forced away from their home, but another country that they hoped to find safety in. This is madness considering there are unoccupied houses scattered around the country and people willing to offer up spare rooms in their houses.                                                               

However, with increasing issues regarding terrorism and attacks the public are scared of more foreign people entering the country and the ideals they will bring with them. This fear is not justified as it stems back to society’s prejudice against people of different races and their religious beliefs. We should try to help refugees as they are people just like us, but have through no fault of their own have had their lives ripped apart. To generalise and stereotype a whole religion for a few rogue individual’s acts would be devastating to their lives and also ruin their expansion of diversity in our country.

Northern Ireland does try to help out refugees based here as organisations such as NICRAS who provide English classes and social gatherings to try to integrate refugees into the community.

Asylum is a matter that Westminster deals with, however, Stormont can make many more improvements. We should make sure no-one experiences destitution on being granted refugee status. The reality for many is they become homeless because of delays in the benefit system. This is not acceptable and more shelters and temporary housing should be present and a fast-tracked benefit process on emergency matters such as refugee’s cases could possibly be put in place.

Donations of money, clothes, food or even just cards welcoming refugees to the country can make such a difference to their lives. Five minutes could change someone’s life or even just put a smile on their face.

RUBY McKINNEY (15)


Belfast

‘Abortion’ scourge just as much a ‘man issue’ as a woman’s

Danny Treacy’s recent letter (May 22) counter pointing what he rightly describes as the ironic paradox and polarity of defending the (defenceless) unborn while cheapening life in the murder of fellow human beings is both apt and fearlessly honest, yet this in and of itself does not vindicate or justify the murder of the unborn. Life, likewise the enormity of the sin of taking a life is trivialised in euphemism and lame ambivalence, would-be justification and duplicity, globally.

Danny plays fast and loose with the definition and criteria of ‘life’, which do not depend on what he conveniently sanitises as ‘insentient’ beings or  ‘inanimate’ entities somehow unworthy of being considered as ‘fully’ human.


Smoke and mirrors, Danny .

A far more overreaching and transcendent imperative is the truth, eternal and universal, that which Danny trivialises and sanitises as a mere ‘cell’, or at most ‘embryo’ is intrinsically human in, by and as from conception and fully merits its natural growth to birth. And that the (euphemistically) ‘terminated’ ‘late term’ unborn feel no pain has been proven to be a convenient fallacy, a myth.

Those who portray ‘abortion’ as somehow progressive, enlightened, all for the best in the best of all possible worlds and caricature those opposed to ‘abortion’ as cranks and reactionaries, or religious fanatics – or indeed even ‘religious’ at all – lay a false trail and show themselves in a poor light. ‘Abortion’ and opposition to it is as much and just as justifiably a ‘man issue’ as a woman’s – just as war or any other scourge is for both men and women to condemn.

The pro-abortion pseudo conviction springs from a cruel, implacable ethos of materialism, consumerism, utility (the ‘clinic’), likewise convenience, super individualism and narcissism.

As to the ‘absolutism’ Danny cites, life and death are absolutes and few among us surrender or abandon the former and enter the latter willingly. There are naturally those who, suffering beyond tolerance, understandably welcome or even seek death. So why gratuitously, casually impose death?

The agenda is to normalise ‘abortion’ – Fine Gael has already stated party ‘openness’ to all opinions on the matter. Other parties, in a futile attempt to be ‘all things to all people’ and to ‘both run with the hare and hunt with the hound,’ will of course follow suit.

AIDAN CONVERY


Draperstown, Co Derry

Political wasteland

What a political wasteland we inhabit, even  if the decapitated head of Stormont be briefly replaced in the next fortnight.  At least it will make the place look human again for a while.

And we will have equal marriage and an Irish/Ulster Scots Act -- those grave and pressing matters which we daily agonise about. We won’t have to care about piffling things like waiting three years for a hip operation.

What we should all rejoice in is the primacy of polarisation. We have stood firmly against the enemy and divided the spoils. We have strengthened the union or we have created ‘a strategic route towards  a united Ireland’ – take your pick. We have a DUP with a wealth of votes and apparently going places. We have SDLP, Alliance and Ulster Unionists, with a modest but significant measure of votes, and nowhere to go. We have Sinn Féin with huge stacks of votes and allowed to go nowhere. And above us dangles the sword of Brexit.

Some of us will strive for a sensible Brexit – the younger brother of a soft Brexit.

Some of us openly want a hard Brexit – control our shores from hordes of migrants. Some of us secretly want a hard Brexit (it could be a strategic route to a united Ireland). There are still some who dream of no Brexit at all. And all at a time when Inflation has jumped from 0.3% in May 2016 to 3.0% in June 2017. No worries then.

JOE McBRIDE


Maghera, Co Derry       

DUP’s days of dictating morals are long gone

It is nice to see Leo Varadkar becoming the leader of Fine Gael and taoiseach of the Republic.  


I wonder how long it will be before we see an openly gay man or woman or even someone who is transgender becoming the next leader of the Democratic Unionist Party?

Now is the time for the Democratic Unionists to come to terms with the fact that some people are gay, the DUP, stance on same-sex marriage etc makes the Republic look like a modern progressive country while Northern Ireland looks like a Puritan backwater of a place that belongs to Oliver Cromwell’s English commonwealth of the 1650s.

No wonder then that young Protestants in Northern Ireland are reluctant to vote ‘unionist’.


The days when unionism and Presbyterianism could dictate the morals or how people thought are over. Unionism and Presbyterianism must learn how to adapt to a new world where people –particularly the young – are no longer differential to their so-called betters.

JAMES ANNETT


Popular Unionist, London