We Must be Talking

  Billionaires            Gerry OShea Elon Musk rattled the American political system recently. The leaders of the political parties in Washington settled on a budget deal that would avert the looming end-of-year government shutdown. This negotiated agreement was worked out by the leaders of both parties in the House and Senate without objection from the incoming president, Donald Trump, or his advisers.  The compromise bill would have the needed support in both Houses, and President Biden said he would sign it. Then, a series of tweets by Mr. Musk berated the deal for failing to press home his version of the conservative agenda. Amazingly, the Republican leaders folded immediately, and the bill died, leaving just a few days for the frustrated negotiators to devise an alternative to avoid a government shutdown over Christmas. Historians could not identify even one occasion in the last 100 years when an outsider vet...

  A Chaotic Country         Gerry OShea Sean O’Casey’s most accomplished play, “Juno and the Paycock,” was set in the Dublin tenements during the Irish Civil War. The country was in disarray, with reports of internecine atrocities dominating the daily news stories. The play includes a major work strike involving the livelihood of a family member, Mary, who also is pregnant without a partner, and her brother, Johnny, a freedom fighter, is marked for execution for informing on a comrade. The world that O’Casey portrays is a miasma of sadness and negativity. Shakespeare’s words in “Hamlet” come to mind: “When sorrows come, they come not in single spies but in battalions.”   No wonder that Captain Boyle, the ineffective paterfamilias in the play, seeing the desolation all around, utters the oft-quoted line just before the curtain comes down: “The whole world is in a state of chassis” (chaos) I think of Captain Boyle’s pronouncement when I...

  The Recent Irish Election        Gerry OShea Unlike most countries, the two large parties that dominate Irish politics were not formed along class lines. Their history goes back to a vote by delegates at a crucial Dail meeting on January 7 th , 1922, which narrowly approved the Anglo-Irish Treaty with 64 in favor and 57 opposed. Many of those on the losing side rationalized that they were not bound by the result of the vote in the Dail because they had sworn an oath to an elusive Republic that superseded the vote in parliament. After a disastrous 11-month civil war, Eamon De Valera, the main spokesman for the Treaty rejectionists, founded a new party called Fianna Fail in 1928 that promised to push the country in an aggressively Republican direction. He was elected Taoiseach (prime minister) in 1932 and continued in that position until 1948. Ironically, it was his successor, John A Costello from the Fine Gael Party, which rejected much of the...

  Moral Perspectives in America      Gerry OShea The clear division between the traditionalists and progressives in the American Catholic Church has become more glaring during the last few decades. A more free-thinking membership has largely supplanted the old-time religion involving weekly attendance at mass and regular confession of sins to a priest. In my Yonkers neighborhood stretching along McLean Avenue from Broadway on the west to Bronx River Rd., which is still populated by large numbers of emigrants from Ireland, three Catholic schools have been closed in the last few years, and the number of people attending weekly mass has dropped dramatically from just a generation ago. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey highlights a major difference between Catholics identifying themselves as supporters of the Republican and Democratic parties. 82% of Catholics who are Democrats feel that global climate change presents a serious moral problem, while among Repub...

  Trip to Honduras        Gerry OShea I recently returned from a four-day visit to San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras. I was accompanied by Vincent Collins, his wife Linda, and Patricia Alarcon Cavalie. We were representing the New York-based charity HOPe, which has a project in the region of Choloma on the outskirts of the city. All of us, except Linda, are members of the organization. HOPe was founded in Yonkers by a group of Irish people in 1997, the 150 th anniversary of the worst year of the Irish potato famine. The members of this group, led by Pat Buckley from Killarney, felt that bemoaning the awful laissez-faire policies of the British Government, which caused the Irish disaster, was an inadequate response to the Gorta Mor tragedy.   We looked for other ways of honoring the lives of the million or more Irish people who died from starvation or related diseases in their family huts or on the streets, or in the coffin...

  Election Reflections       Gerry OShea On a post-election day when I lived in Dublin, I recall meeting a local man who was very involved with one of the political parties in the previous day’s contest. I asked him for his views on the election. I still recall clearly his answer: “The election was fine but the f----ing voters turned on us, despite all we did for them.” This response will resonate with many Democrats as they reflect on the recent presidential election. After all, the health of the American economy is deemed by experts to be so strong that it claimed a cover-page headline in the prestigious Economist magazine, stating in bold letters that the United States economy is the envy of the world. They compared the employment statistics, wage increases, and growth of GDP with those of all the other major countries and found the United States ahead in these measurements. Add the good news of major gains in the stock market, which usually p...

  Guns in America                 Gerry OShea More than 43,000 people were killed by guns in the United States in 2023. That accounts for one death every twelve minutes. More than half of these deaths were suicides or accidents, and almost 19,000 were homicides. In addition, guns were named as one of the leading causes of death among young children and teenagers.   A mass shooting is defined as an incident resulting in the death or injury of four or more people. By this measure, there were 656 mass shootings in the United States last year. In 2022, the previous year, the statistics show close to 48,000 gun deaths and 647 mass shootings. Two of these incidents, separated by ten days in May of that year, one at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, the other at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, account for a total of 31 deaths, among them 19 children. In both tragic cases, the gunman used an AR...