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 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 Coha...

A version of this article was printed in  Humanism Ireland , March-April, Vol. 145 (2014)   Should we legalise performance-enhancing drugs in sport? In July this year, American Tyson Gay and Jamaican Asafa Powell (the second and fourth fastest men of all time over 100 meters respectively) tested positive for banned substances.  Other athletes, such as Jamaican sprinter Sherone Simpson and 31 Turkish athletes also failed drugs tests just prior to the Moscow World Championships in August. Further recent drug scandals include the conviction of the sports-doping doctor Eufemiano Fuentes , who claims to be associated with top Spanish football league clubs, a long list of professional cyclists, tennis players, and past London marathon winners. The ruling of the Spanish court to destroy evidence from the Fuentes trial, however, means that we may never ascertain who was involved with his clinic. Over the past few decades, there have been several doping scandals i...

Should in vitro meat replace conventional meat production?   An edited version of this article was printed in  Humanism Ireland , Nov-Dec, Vol. 143 (2013) The first public tasting of an in vitro beef burger , made from meat grown in a laboratory, using tissue engineering, was cooked and consumed at a news conference in London yesterday (5th August 2013). The burger, m ade completely from synthetic meat at a cost of €250,000, was developed by Professor Mark Post , a specialist in tissue engineering, at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands, using stem cells. It was revealed that Sergey Brin , one of the founders of Google, invested in the project. Post and his team of scientists took cells from a cow and converted them into strips of muscle that they joined to make a patty. The way it’s produced, in a sense, has more in common with how plants grow than sentient beings. One of the tasters at the London event, Hanni Rützler ,   said: "I was expecting...

Should terminally ill patients have a right to die? A version of this article was printed in  Humanism Ireland , Sep-Oct, Vol. 142 (2013) Suppose you have just discovered you are suffering from multiple sclerosis, a disease of the nervous system. This condition, you learn, is progressive and, in time, you’ll become fully paralysed; most likely, as a result, you’ll be entirely dependent on the care of others. Worse still, you realise you’ll no longer be able to look after yourself and will not be capable of swallowing the food somebody else placed in your mouth. To avoid dying from hunger, you’ll have to be fed through a tube inserted into your stomach. Fortunately for most, the chances of suffering from multiple sclerosis are rare. This is not the case, however, for 59-year-old Marie Fleming who is terminally ill with the condition. Although it has no impairing on her cognitive facility, she suffers frequently from severe and at times intolerable pain. She has fough...