DAN Martin, the rugby player featured in last week's Packet front page story, is undoubtedly a very courageous young man and a forgiving one.

He says he "holds no animosity towards his two attackers" and "it could have been far worse." These words say a lot about this man who endured severe injuries including bruising, swelling to his face and seven stitches, all as a direct result of attempting to help someone else who was being attacked by these two thugs.

However, I'm very much afraid that his attitude, whilst very commendable, teeters on the brink of near acceptance of this sort of disgraceful behaviour by society, ie it is now the norm that young people get drunk, get violent and we should get used to this!

Well, I regret that I don't subscribe to this modern day and age phenomenon.

The fact is that we, society, have gone soft and have thus allowed the proliferation of crimes to the extent that here in the UK we now have the biggest prison population of any other EU country.

Christianity, the UK's chosen religion, fights shy of real justice - the death penalty - for those who deliberately take the lives of others whilst the law no longer allows hard labour to be part of the penal punishment system. Hypocrisy also enters our system, via the USA, whereby a life sentence only in fact equated to X number of years in prison with parole, intervening to reduce even further the number of years actually served, or as prescribed in the actual sentence passed by the judge.

The law is an ass in this country, but then so are we for tolerating it!

My final thought on this particular reported case is that those like Dan Martin should attract more up-front civic recognition - an award? - for personal courage.

Peter Mahoney, Reawla Lane, Reawla, Hayle