Suzanne Harrington: I feed a seagull in my garden — while the children of Gaza starve

Irish Examiner

4 days ago

Every morning, a massive seagull sits outside the back door, waiting for breakfast.
He loves bananas and cashews. He hates cherries and blueberries. He puts up with pineapple, if there's nothing else.
And he wolfs down lumps of bread, which protrude sideways in his fat neck, like a python who has swallowed a cow.
In the garden under the seomra where I'm writing, two foxes set up home last winter.
Every night, they come out for dinner. They like eggs in their shells, and dry dog food, but will eat anything, including tofu and jam sandwiches.
In the hedge, there's a colony of tiny, tweety birds, who like to viciously fight each other for the unending supply of sunflower seeds in their feeder, and a very zen hedgehog who trundles out to steal bits of fox food.
Recently, during the hot weather, I dug a hole and put in a little pond, complete with water pump, aquatic plants, and pond bacteria that keeps the water clean, so that any or all of the above could have a drink or a dip, if they fancied. Which they do.
Were I to harm any of these creatures who hang out in my garden, I'd be breaking the law.
Under UK law, it's illegal to injure, kill, or harass seagulls, or their nests and eggs. This law has been in place since 1981.
Foxes are protected under another animal welfare act, from 2006, and hedgehogs have two different laws protecting them.
Right now, this second, the wildlife in my garden is better-fed and has more legal rights to be not just alive, but to live in peace, than the small children of Gaza — and their parents and grandparents, their aunts and uncles, and cousins and friends.
Quite literally, the tweety birds in my hedge have better access to daily nutrition and fresh water than these starving children and their starving families.
Last year, thinking that a human-rights lawyer and the son of a Black immigrant single parent might be a less-bad electoral bet than the Brexit-inducing Eton yobs who preceded them, I stupidly voted Labour.
Now, watching Britain's prime minister, Keir Starmer, and foreign secretary, David Lammy, kowtowing to a 'terrorist' state while criminalising peaceful domestic protest against possible genocide as 'terrorism', I'm in an acute state of voter regret.
Usually, voter regret just means whoever you voted for didn't get in.
That a human-rights lawyer I helped elect could, after less than a year in power, be propping up a possible genocide by selling military components to a 'terrorist' regime intent on mass-murdering innocents so that they can turn their occupied territory in to a blood-soaked Riviera — what I wouldn't give to revoke my vote and a sizeable chunk of the UK electorate would be with me.
Even the right-wing, migrant-hating Daily Express printed an image of a starving Palestinian toddler on its front page the other day. A starvation enabled by a rampaging American dictator.
Yet we're supposed to care about Oasis, or Ozzy, or those Coldplay kiss-cam people, or how bad the English women's team are at penalties, while, a few short hours away, ordinary people are being murdered by starvation.
I go in my garden to feed the wildlife, and try not to go mad thinking about the mass murder of children.
And how nobody is making it stop.
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