LAST Friday was Good Friday, the beginning of the bank holidays and everyone was in a happy mood.
The US president was coming to celebrate 25 years of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and many were sunning themselves in European destinations. The media was talking about holidays, plane flights and ferries. The hotels and pubs were celebrating being able to stay open with no restrictions and making thousands of pounds.
No-one knew or seemed to care what day it was, and why it’s a holiday. The Church remains silent, afraid of opening its mouth, yet Good Friday represents the greatest agreement ever, when Jesus Christ was crucified to break man’s chains of bondage to sin and restore his relationship to his father God.
Only 30 years ago the BBC covered Easter with a week of films/documentaries that was followed with a blockbuster movie – The Robe, Jesus of Nazareth or The Greatest Story Ever Told. The BBC did this as part of requirements laid out as the national broadcaster, paid for by the licence fee, covering religious broadcasting.
Even with declining attendances at established Churches within the UK there has been increased attendances in independent Churches, with those claiming to be Christian still numbered in the millions. Yet the BBC refused this year to carry any mention of Christianity in Holy Week with programmes/documentaries, and on
Good Friday BBC2 carried a small 50-minute journey visiting monasteries with no change to its broadcasting on BBC1. Is Christianity no longer to be covered and millions alienated who pay a licence fee to the BBC, by not recognising Christianity at Easter time? It’s as if the BBC has made a decision to not recognise the very meaning behind the bank holiday, to eradicate Jesus from Good Friday, and cause people to forget what Good Friday is about.
Saddest of all is that no-one seems to protest against this position taken by the BBC, or is it that the BBC feels safe today to discard Christianity in the knowledge that the Church and Christians will remain silent, afraid of further persecution by liberalism/ secularism?
To me it seems that the BBC and most in business and society are happy to celebrate Good Friday as a holiday alongside the rest of Easter, but just like Christmas have forgotten by choice to recognise the reason they have a holiday in the first place.
I ask the people of Northern Ireland, have you forgotten the meaning of Easter and are you content for the BBC to ignore the true meaning behind Good Friday?
REV PAUL S BURNS
Kings Christian Fellowship Church
Sandy Row, Belfast BT12
Job losses result of Brexit
Maeve O’Neill from People Before Profit calls job losses at Derry’s Women Centre ‘devastating’. Those job losses, as well as those in education, are a direct result of the decision to vote for Brexit. Job losses in the Women’s Centre are only the start of scores, perhaps hundreds, of such losses.
Did Maeve really think that we could leave the EU yet keep the European social funding on which jobs as well as essential services and programmes for disadvantaged and vulnerable groups depend? Did Brexiteers genuinely believe that the British government would honour its promise to match lost EU funding? If so, they are even more credulous than I imagined.
The London School of Economics estimates that Brexit has added £230 to the annual family food budget. Since the working poor spend disproportionately more of their income on food, that burden falls heaviest on them. Now Brexit is putting people out of work and limiting the life chances of thousands of disadvantaged people. They are paying the price of People Before Profit’s Brexit folly.
It is not possible to vote for Brexit and then bemoan the hardships that the vote has caused.
Brexit was a regressive, right-wing movement; a toxic brew of xenophobia and delusions of a return to British imperial grandeur. That a party claiming to be socialist connived at a policy that is doing so much harm to working people is inexcusable. Not so much People Before Profit as ideology before people.
CECILIA KENNEDY
Belfast BT7
Blessed are the peacemakers
TWENTY-five years ago the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was signed, commencing a new path to bringing a lasting peace across the island of Ireland after decades of violence.
In 1998 I voted Yes in the GFA referendum. Like many of my generation, who grew up during the Troubles, we either experienced, witnessed or remembered some of those dark years of violence and also possibly knew some of the innocent victims or their families.
Thankfully since 1998 the north has been totally transformed into a place of peace and prosperity.
There is now a generation of young people who have been born since the GFA and who know nothing about the violence of the past. I now have young nephews and nieces who are growing up in a normal and peaceful society.
So I pray and hope that the efforts of so many great leaders now deceased who helped negotiate the GFA are remembered for their selfless sacrifice. I particularly think and pray for the late John and Pat Hume who, in my humble personal opinion, will go down in the annals of Irish history as both peacemakers and saints.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
PATRICK CLARKE
Castlewellan, Co Down
Colour-scheme politics
SUNEIL Sharma – ‘SDLP is on a political ventilator” (April 3) – commented that in essence the rationale for the decline of the SDLP lay in its apparently conservative social values. Puzzlingly, he suggested that their voter base would be widened by becoming more like Sinn Féin and Alliance, an approach that would surely lead to the conclusion that there were already two parties in that space, and a third won’t succeed. The people of the six counties are more conservative than is widely understood; but sadly the non-Catholic sectors of the population are saddled with political parties whose only interest is in counting the number of red, white and blue pavements, and with wrestling with the interpretation of a piece of legislation that is 223 years old. These parties have no coherent social or economic policy platforms and are content to drive otherwise conservative members of the Catholic/nationalist populations to vote for a party that does not fully reflect who they are.
So long as we are saddled with political parties that are founded on the colour scheme of their election leaflets and posters, the emotions, feelings, attitudes and aspirations that make us who we really are and which would lead to real political parties – Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and Socialists – will never inform and drive our social and political development, and policies in the areas that concern us as human beings (as parents, family members, employees, teachers, etc) will never properly mature.
BRENDAN MILLIGAN
Downpatrick, Co Down
