Madam, - Late last year, on a trip to Poland, I spent a day in the infamous German extermination camp at Auschwitz. Everywhere we turned in this awful place, from the holding cells, the punishment and torture cells, the execution yard, the one remaining crematorium and the vast wooden accommodation huts which held thousands of innocent men, women and children awaiting execution in the gas chambers, I asked myself how educated people in the heart of modern Europe could inflict such cruelty on helpless fellow human beings. And how could it happen again?
We know that it has happened again in the genocides of Bosnia, Rwanda and Cambodia, events over which we had little control in Ireland. I found part of my answer that day in Auschwitz, in a bale of cloth in a room containing tons of human hair. The bale of cloth looked no different from a bale of Donegal tweed, but it was made from human hair. Thousands of such bales were sent back to Germany during the war to be made into elegant suits of clothing to be bought and worn by German men and women.
I realised that Nazi propaganda, long before and during the war, so numbed and blinded the consciences of much of the population of Germany - and indeed other occupied countries - that they no longer saw their Jewish neighbours as full human beings. The Jews in Europe were considered less than human, an inconvenience to be eliminated, yet exploited in the process, even to the extent using their hair for clothing. Of course they were also useful for medical "research" and experiments under such monsters as Dr Mengele. Leading German drug companies, household names today, co-operated and benefited from these experiments. Could it happen again?
Fast forward to Ireland 2008 where the campaigns for abortion and embryonic stem-cell research gather momentum. The unborn child, from the moment of conception - whether that be in the mother's womb or a laboratory in UCC - is a full human being, with the God-given right to life, just like you and me, just like the innocents of Auschwitz. These are our brothers and sisters. They deserve better and we cannot claim ignorance. - Yours, etc,