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SOUTH KOREAN PRESIDENT Park Geun-Hye apologised today for her government’s failure to combat systemic and regulatory “evils” blamed for the loss of about 300 lives in a ferry disaster.
Two days after her prime minister resigned over the tragedy, Park’s comments are another attempt to defuse growing public anger about the April 16 sinking of the 6,825-tonne Sewol.
Apology
“I don’t know how to apologise for the failure to prevent this accident, and for the insufficient first response,” Park said in a statement to her cabinet that was broadcast on national television.
I am sorry to the people and heavy-hearted that many precious lives were lost.
Park’s government has been widely criticised over perceived corruption and lax safety standards that may have led to the disaster, with claims that the ferry was overloaded and that the passenger list was inaccurate and incomplete.
Echoing words used by Prime Minister Chung Hong-Won when he fell on his sword on Sunday, Park blamed systemic and regulatory failings for one of South Korea’s worst ever maritime tragedies.
“I feel so regretful for having been unable to correct such long-running evils and letting an accident like this take place,” she said.
Park accepted Chung’s resignation but ordered him to remain in office until the recovery operation was completed.
Paying respects
Earlier, the president had travelled to Ansan, just south of Seoul, where she paid her respects at a memorial for the schoolchildren who died in the disaster.
Of the 476 people on board the Sewol, 325 were students from the same high school in Ansan. Only 75 of them were rescued.
But in a sign of the boiling anger felt by relatives of the missing and the dead, there were shouted demands for her floral tribute to be removed from the shrine, and reports the president had been jostled.
The confirmed death toll from the accident, which took place several hundred kilometres south of Ansan, stood at 193, with 109 people still missing.
Search mission spokesman Koh Myung-Seok said divers had worked their way through passenger cabins on the fourth and fifth levels of the submerged ferry, recovering four more bodies.
Divers hampered by currents
But he added that 26 of the ferry’s 64 cabins had yet to be accessed, with divers hampered by strong currents and debris that was blocking access.
As the operation on the sea bed crept forward, the probe into the catastrophe was gathering pace, with the head of the ferry’s operator called to answer investigators’ questions.
Kim Han-Sik, the CEO of Chonghaejin Marine, was summoned to the prosecutors’ office in the port city of Incheon, from where the ill-fated ferry departed
Kim, 71, issued a tearful apology for the “horrible tragedy” the day after the accident, saying he and other company officials were responsible for a “grave sin” in letting it happen.
Live footage Tuesday showed Kim – wearing a dark hat and a mask shielding most of his face – mobbed by TV crews and reporters as he limped into the prosecutors’ office, held up by two aides.
Kim faces charges including negligence, embezzlement and tax evasion related to the family that effectively owns the company, according to media reports.
Raiding coastguard office
Yesterday, prosecutors raided the coastguard office in the southern port of Mokpo to probe allegations that it had failed to respond quickly enough to a passenger’s emergency call.
All 15 of the surviving crew responsible for sailing the huge ferry remain in custody, facing charges including negligence and abandoning passengers.
The public’s already dim view of the crew worsened when the coastguard released a video showing the trouserless captain scrambling to safety as hundreds of his passengers remained trapped inside the ferry.
The 10-minute video – taken by rescue officials – shows 69-year-old Lee Joon-Seok, wearing a sweater and underpants, hastily escaping from the bridge of the tilting ship.
The footage shows the open decks nearly empty, after crew repeatedly instructed passengers to stay in their cabins until it became impossible for them to evacuate.
The delay in the crucial final stages – when most crew members fled the ferry – sparked outrage that many lives could have been saved if passengers had received timely instructions.
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undeniable link between cancer and processed meats, lets stick cancer warnings on packs of ham ect
what else can we stick cancer labels on…
@Dave: yes, let’s. I’d fully back that idea. I got a leaflet from my kids school, reproduced by the department of ed, regarding healthy school lunches. On the front page picture they had ham and cheese sandwiches. Since when age ham and cheese sandwiches healthy?
@Dave:
How about just the one “Living causes death” sticker that we can put on everything?
@Dave
salads, rashers, spuds, cabbage…..
@Dave: Ya can’t compare something like food and oxygen which has an immediate benefit vs long term harm with something like alcohol and tobacco which does nothing positive for the body in any shape or form. Say you were fighting off an infection, the body will down tools and go over to sort out the ‘more dangerous’ toxin that has just entered the body. That’s saying something about what the body reckons about alcohol.
Friends of Fine Gael in the Vintners Federation of Ireland lobbying Simon who u-turned. That’s how things work in Ireland. Nothing against alcohol personally but long term abuse will kill you, check out the World Health Organisation’s views on this topic.
@Dave: There should be health warnings on all animal products especially Dairy and processed meats. It’s ludicrous to think that’s the human race has evolved to need to drink the milk of a cow to survive. Milk is full of a cows hormones that nature intended to end up in a baby cow. Not the human food chain..
Next scandal: GSK farmacie and Irish medical authorities where hiding knowledge about dangerous side effects for Mexican influence flu vaccine called Pandemix.
@Hans Vos: ah come on hans thats safe coz they zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz sorry fell asleep
Labels on everything, no fun for anyone
Pointless, if people rely on packaging to tell them about different health warnings they’d be better of dead.
Election posters don’t make me vote for a particular candidate, warnings on cigarettes never made me quit, and warnings on beer won’t make me stop enjoying a drink. Warn away!
Just another screw paddy scheme
Nanny state. Won’t be able to do anything without a warning or a tax on it soon
Just another way to harass people
So when your out celebrating something in a nice restaurant & your nice bottle of wine will have a label on it, basically telling you “ this could kill you” great fun night, not….
I doubt they care the much about the label.
I’d say their more worried about once the label is on, how much coverage does it get till booze goes plain packaging.
Healthy Ireland did a survey in 2016 that found between 73 and 84% of women didn’t know about the link between breast cancer and alcohol, with younger women being less aware, in a country where 1 in 8 breast cancer cases is alcohol attributable and 1 in 5 women below the age of 25 drinks their weekly recommended amount of alcohol in one sitting. One drink per day raises a woman’s risk of breast cancer by 9%, 13% if breast cancer is in her family.
Still, I’m sure it’s just coincidence that the 3 TDs leading the charge against cancer labelling are middle aged men.
If you want to remain ignorant of the risks of cancer from alcohol, fine, don’t read the labels, but don’t presume to inflict that on those of us who do care about ourselves and the people we love leading a long and healthy life. It’s about the freedom to make an INFORMED choice and reducing some of the pressure on our health service that results in 10% of the budget being spent dealing with alcohol harm.
As for red meat, yup, according to the W.H.O., there’s adequate evidence to say some forms of meat are carcinogenic & people should be informed
But there’s also a key difference between meat & alcohol in that meat is marketed mainly on it’s attributes, alcohol on aspirations. And of course, that plays to people’s perceptions of threat, reducing them for alcohol.
There is an element here too of ‘whataboutery’. This is the ALCOHOL Bill, not the MEAT Bill.
Also, alcohol is associated with 7 different cancers, mouth; upper throat; larynx; oesophagus; breast; liver; bowel, meat is only associated with bowel cancer.
Finally, not all meat contains class 1 carcinogens but ALL alcohol drinks do.
@Ireland Unlocked: So those opposing this are “….. are middle aged men.” very scientific and broad and incorrect. It is an ill thought out idea, like the sugar tax pretty ineffective. Make your points on radio, TV, by promotion. Sticking a label on my bottle of my Redbreat Lustau edition isn’t going to stop me drinking it (the one glass every odd month I take) nor is it going to kill me with cancer – fact. So go ahead stick labels on everything but leave the middle aged men and middle aged whiskey alone.
@Austin Rock: *Redbreast
@Austin Rock: Austin, our health policies aren’t specifically designed around you so how YOU react really isn’t the point. There will always be some who choose to ignore the scientifically gathered, peer reviewed evidence, just as there are some who continue to deny climate change etc.
As for my comment on the middle aged male TDs leading the charge to dilute the Bill even further, undeniably women bear the brunt of our harmful relationship with alcohol, they are physically more exposed to the toxic effects of alcohol and they are also usually the frontline care givers for those with alcohol problems as well as the victims of alcohol fueled sexual and domestic violence. In addition, the most vocal politicians advocating for the Bill have been women, Frances Black, Marcella Corcoran Kennedy, Alice Higgins, Máire Devine, Catherine Noone. Also, the intersection between those who want to remove these warnings and those TDs who were anti-choice is notable and I would see this clearly as an issue of gendered health equality as much as anything else.
What difference does it make ? If you’re going to drink then you will regardless of what warnings are on labels.
At the end of the day, which will we value more profit or health!
Considering how small the Irish drinks market is compared to say the UK this idea of warning labels will reduce the range and choice of wines, beers etc. Large producers won’t be willing to do bespoke labelling for small volumes.
@Fergal O’Hagan: 10% of our health budget goes on dealing with alcohol harm while our elderly are left on trollies because 1500 hospital beds per night are occupied due to alcohol. I’m grateful the ‘market’ here isn’t any bigger.
Producers routinely modify labelling for different markets to comply with health and nutrition labelling requirements and to deal with language, cultural differences etc and it’s only a matter of time until other jurisdictions adopt this requirement. This is Ireland’s opportunity to lead, just as it did on public smoking.
It’s not government’s role to conceal health information from citizens to benefit an industry.
@Ireland Unlocked: Ireland has the highest taxes on wine and beer in the EU. Nobody would deny the health problems caused by drinking but surely the tax on alcohol is enough to fund the entire Health budget and a few other budgets besides.
@Sean: That’s an interesting topic. In 2010 the HSE tried to calculate the total cost of alcohol harm across health, justice, lost days in employment etc and came up with a figure of about €3.8bn. Tax revenue from alcohol sales was about €2.3bn that same year so there was actually a shortfall of €1.5bn and it’s very debatable whether the alcohol industry could survive if it actually was obliged to meet all the costs it’s product generates.
There’s a wee label put on your feet when your born and there is a bigger label put above your grave when you die, another wee label won’t make much difference, its all there to inform and hopefully, the information provided is correct.
BREAKING…Alcohol is bad for you.
The trouble with alcohol abuse is that it is a symptom, not a cause in and of itself and no amount of labeling or price hikes are going to reduce our levels of addiction, be it to alcohol, drugs, gambling etc… In order to do that, we need to dig a lot deeper and start addressing the issues which cause or intensify addiction in the first place.
@Maria Casey: There is definitely truth in this, Particularly traumas that kids suffer (ACES) do lead to substance abuse but it’s also true to say that one of the things that causes childhood trauma is alcohol so the cycle has to be broken somehow. Same goes for social inequalities, alcohol takes a bigger harmful toll on the less well off, which then generates more social inequality.
Most public health people I know are acutely aware of this but the debate and resulting policy never gets beyond a struggle between the industry narrative on personal responsibility and the very clear problem of commercial determinants of health – people being targeted with below cost booze for example.
It’s important to distinguish too between people who drink too much to deal with psychological pain and those who drink too much simply because our culture has a very distorted view of what ‘too much’ is.
Around 10% of us are dependent drinkers but a much bigger percentage (~54%) drink in a way that will negatively impact on our health. So culture has to be tackled and price, promotion and the availablity of alcohol all play into sustaining the culture.
Look to California to where this will lead. They have labels on pretty much everything saying there is a risk of cancer.
@The Bob:
They label the sun !?!
It’s the wrong way of looking at the harm caused by alcohol. If it only harmed the drinker it would be just their choice, but it hurts their partners and children more. It’s a major factor in rape, domestic violence, child abuse and suicide. It’s a major factor in public urination and assaults and women feel unsafe walking at night with gangs of drunk men on the streets. The level of drinking in Ireland is out of control and exceeds what is needed to relax and have a good time, and yes you might have a better time after a drink or two.
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