Nothing as It Seems

Some thoughts on Ronan McGreevy’s Irish Times article After reading Ronan McGreevy’s article in the Irish Times (22nd November 2013) I imagine he was deliberately making an effort to be provocative. If it was not for the immeasurable level of non-human animal cruelty and suffering that occurs every day as a result of Ireland’s meat consumption, McGreevy’s feature might have been more amusing.   It is surprising, and indeed disappointing, that the Irish Times would consider printing a piece as uninformed, misleading and compassionless as this.    A meat-free diet is practiced for a number of reasons—ethical, health, religious and cultural—and contrary to McGreevy’s depiction of vegetarians simply having a “misplaced sentiment towards farm animals,” many have reflected on the problem of eating animal flesh on the basis of moral reasoning. Writers such as Montaigne and Erasmus criticised the abuse of animals in butchery and Leonardo da Vinci himself was a vegetarian.

A version of this article was printed in  Humanism Ireland , Jan-Feb, Vol. 144 (2014) About half a century ago, homosexuality was illegal everywhere in the world, with the exception of a dozen or so countries. It wasn't until the 1960s and 1970s that the gay rights movement, supported by the principle of human rights, accelerated. Today homosexuality is legal in about 120 countries—though still banned in several places—and some have even moved towards legally recognising same-sex marriage. In 2001 the first laws enabling same-sex marriage occurred in the Netherlands; since then, fourteen other countries (including Argentina, Belgium, and South Africa) and several other regional jurisdictions have also introduced same-sex marriage. Homosexuality in the Republic of Ireland was finally decriminalised in June 1993. Despite a slow start, the trajectory of gay rights moved rather fast, with the  Civil Partnership and Certain Rights and Obligations of Cohabitants Act 201