The front picture of today’s Irish Daily Star - there’s a picture of a drowned 3 year old boy washed up on a Turkish beach.
Now, I don’t deny that there is a lot of fucked up stuff that goes on in the world, but for a publisher to see it as appropriate to put a photo of a dead toddler, with his paling skin, is on a totally different level.
I think what’s ultimately wrong here is that society is being desensitised to this type of thing - people just walk by the newspaper rack and don’t even notice it anymore. It’s sick.
Do you not see the alternative view? It’s beyond appalling and it’s shocking but it’s driven home the awful plight of these refugees and finally something might be done about it.
all todays Irish papers except the Times had some version of the image on the front page.
totally disagree that images like this desensitises people, I think quite the opposite to be honest. All the news and talk shows today have been about it, and there has been a fairly loud outrage over it all.
Fully aware that for some this is the new social media hip thing to be one like the lion being killed etc, but if something comes of it then at least social media will have had some use.
There is a similar thread on this and as I said in that one , I ll say it on this. That picture needed to be published. While not quite as horrific as pictures seen after the liberation of the death camps in 45, it is the closest since. If nothing else that picture shows we can still do something to salvage it
I just think of a kid seeing that in a newsagents and maybe not saying anything, or understanding what they have just seen - but it sticking with them…
I see some of the most dysfunctional shit imaginable around the area my office is in - serious abuse, physical, psychological. Much of it drug-related, and the knock-on impact on children. Kids should be allowed to be kids - to be free of exposure to horrors that one man can inflict on another.
That they do and are maturing a lot younger these days. That picture is so heartbraking, it brings out emotions of anger and compassion at the same time
I was chatting to a lad yesterday. Hardy old dog of a labourer. He told me he was English, but then asked what part of Ireland I was from. He then told me he had lived in letterfrack for a few years, and that he was planning on going back to show his wife. I asked where he had lived. His eyes started welling up a bit.
I asked him gently had he been in the boys home (infamous infamous stain on society)
He told me with tears in his eyes that he had been there from the age of eight until he was seventeen.
It fairly sickens me. To see a big, hard man reduced to tears two generations later, and to think what that poor eight year old boy must have gone through.