Sandra Harris Writes

  This is the transcript of a letter I sent to the Irish Times newspaper on 21/06/2024. A LETTER TO THE EDITOR: SUSPENDED SENTENCE FOR SOLDIER WHO VICIOUSLY ASSAULTED YOUNG LIMERICK WOMAN. Dear Editor, I am disgusted and appalled at the ridiculously lenient ‘sentence’ handed down to soldier Cathal Crotty this week by Judge Tom O’Donnell. In May 2022, Crotty severely battered Natasha O’Brien on a Limerick street because she attempted to stop him shouting homophobic slurs at fellow passers-by. ‘Two to put her down, two more to put her out,’ Crotty boasted  on social media  after the attack. This is not a man, this is a despicable coward and bully. What happened to Zero Tolerance of violence against women? What is the point of Gardai and government ministers urging women to ‘come forward’ and report their rapes and incidents of domestic violence or street violence at the hands of men if the men then get off scot-free? What kind of deterrent is that? What message does it give the abu

  IT COMES TO US ALL… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I recently discovered that a man I knew slightly but really liked and was looking forward to getting to know better- we’ll call him Dave- had died, just two days after I last saw him. I did that thing that pretty much everyone does when they hear that someone they know has died. I said to the person imparting the news: Oh, but how can he be gone? I’d only just seen him and talked to him two days earlier…! As if that could somehow make someone immune from death. I was stunned at the news and really, really sad at the loss to the world of such a decent, gentle kind-hearted soul, someone who adored animals and wildlife, music and poetry (he’d written countless poems himself) and chatting to people and having a laugh. He’d been cut down in his prime as well, having not even reached his fiftieth birthday. I’ll say it again, it just made me so sad, thinking about how he might have had plans left undone and wishes and dreams left unfulfilled.