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Letters to the Editor
Prince Charles, Christian Aid and GM foods
Your excellent article on GM foods (Gazette, 22nd August) missed two further grounds for not encouraging genetically modified strains.
The first is economic. It is normal for a company selling GM seed for which it or its licensor has a patent to require the purchaser to contract not to use the produce for seed. The patent holder demands this so that the purchaser, having grown the crop and benefited from its high yield, returns again to buy more seed. Without this, it would be uneconomic to research and develop the modified strain.
The consequence is that large producers are favoured. Small farmers - whose budget is limited and who would normally reserve sufficient seed from a crop to sow one for next year - are unable to make this economy and so find it harder to compete with the big boys. This is especially hard on farmers in developing countries, preventing economic development except by industrial farmers and condemning the rest to poverty.
The second is the danger that derives from the vulnerability of monoculture to disease, something we should know all about in Ireland, where it was a major cause of the Famine. Labourers and tenant farmers used the most productive potato they knew; when a new blight evolved - and new plant diseases are evolving all the time - it spread rapidly and destroyed the national crop.
The same can happen with genetically modified plants: the most productive strain will be used most widely, to the exclusion of most others. Should - perhaps when - a new disease develops to prey on it, it has the potential to destroy the world crop. And when that does happen, famine will not be just country-wide.
So the Prince was right.
Peter Hirsch
1 Braddock Reach
Killinchy
Co. Down
BT23 6PY
My good friend the dean of St Patrick’s - also of Suirmount, Clonmel - is a regular visitor to this house and has a keen eye for what appear to him as shortcomings (Letter, 29th August). No house is perfect, but as the resident of Bishop’s House, Kilkenny, I feel compelled to mention - among many points I might make - the following.
• This is a wonderfully spacious residence in which to hold a variety of large functions - for example, all the teachers from nearly thirty primary schools in the diocese can be entertained without difficulty.
• The scale of its public rooms is displayed by the fact that its dining room houses the enormous table previously in the former Palace nearby, and the now-restored chairs that have for generations surrounded that table look splendid. I am delighted that we have also been able to rehang the vast majority of the episcopal portraits.
• Now that the Heritage Council has finished its restoration of the former Palace and the gracious grounds of both it and this house are being maintained together, there is an appropriate and imaginative feeling of integrity about this site in central Kilkenny, where bishops have lived since the fourteenth century.
• The chapel, now almost fully furnished at last, will be - if it is appropriate to put it so - the envy of many other bishops.
• The great height of the drawing room creates an acoustic, where, for the first time in my life, I am living in a house where it is possible to play the grand piano at soirees to best effect!
The story of the evolution of this house has been long and arduous and I do not wish to reopen the discussion in what might appear to be too solemn a manner. That said, I am keenly aware of the number of people who have worked very hard to make this a most congenial contemporary residence.
Like the dean, I too can remember the Irish mail-boats, but they are so long out of service that I fear making comparisons with them indicates more the attitude of an antiquarian than an architect!
Michael Cashel and Ossory
Bishop’s House
Troysgate
Kilkenny
Archbishop Harper’s comments on homosexuality
I write this letter as a clergyman from the Diocese of Pittsburgh, USA, and as a friend of the Church of Ireland, having spent six weeks ministering in a parish within the Diocese of Derry and Raphoe in the summer of 2005.
Since that time, I have read the online edition of the Church of Ireland Gazette with great regularity and with much joy. Like Dr Brian Follis in his letter of 22nd August, I too wondered why Archbishop Harper said what he said about homosexuality and the timing of his remarks.
Sadly, by taking the stand he does, the Archbishop stands on one side of a divide over the revealed truth and authority of Holy Scripture as it has been received by the Church, and it is the side where a large majority of the believers in the Anglican Communion cannot and will not stand.
It is why GAFCON and not Lambeth represents the future for many of us. In fact, the newly-consecrated Bishop of South Carolina, Mark Lawrence, noted rather insightfully that GAFCON is the heir apparent to assume leadership of the Anglican Communion.
Recently Bishop Lawrence said: "I witnessed a new birth last month at GAFCON. The Global South has come to its place of maturity. I don’t know how the two structures [GAFCON and Lambeth] will work together in the future. Those who adapt the quickest will be the ones who win the day."
One paucity for the Church of Ireland was that none of her bishops attended GAFCON; I had hoped that Bishops Ken Clarke, Ken Good and Harold Miller especially would have been in Jerusalem. But alas it was not to be.
David D. Wilson (The Revd)
St David’s Church
905 East McMurray Road
Venetia
PA 15367
United States of America
It has been interesting and informative to read the three recent articles on canon law (Gazette, 8th, 15th and 22nd August). However, it seems very odd that any series on canon law in the Church of Ireland could fail to mention the very unfortunate experience of the existence of extremely restrictive liturgical canons from the time of Disestablishment up to the revision of 1974.
Under these, several members of the clergy were subjected to what may be described as liturgical persecution for "offences" which would hardly raise an eyebrow nowadays. Nor, even more strange, has there been any reference by any of your three contributors to the constructive and positive approach of the Select Committee on the Canons which enabled most of the issues to be dealt with successfully by Synod.
The Committee’s 1973 Report, accepted by Synod, set forth in a very comprehensive way basic principles for the framing and, where necessary, modification of liturgical canons which may be regarded as of continuing relevance and importance and which, in turn, paved the way for the final approval of the revised canons in 1974.
Can it be that none of your contributors is familiar with this document (or the description and exposition of its contents on pages 221-226 and pages 271-277 of my doctoral thesis of 1987)?
There is not even a reference to the Church of Ireland’s "shame" in its inhibitions upon the exhibition of the cross up to the rescinding of these through the (highly courageous) initiative of a Northern layman, Mr W.S. Milner, at the General Synod in 1964.
Michael Kennedy (Canon)
Lisnadill Rectory
60 Newtownhamilton Road
Armagh