Sir, – In his Budget contribution Fianna Fáil finance spoksperson Michael McGrath referred to a Department of Social Protection letter to a constituent. He said that it listed jobs opportunities in Canada and offered to help draft a CV in the format used by Canadian employers. I suggest that it could have done more.
It could have offered to pay Canadian and other foreign job applicants €2,500, say – half of the minimum dole for a year – each to depart on condition that they wouldn´t sign on again for at least five years. That would help to have a number of useful effects.
It would immediately help to lower social protection expenditure, including on training courses for jobs (not enough of which exist in Ireland or which don´t pay enough for desired lifestyles). With about 75 per cent of current school-leavers set to depart to enhance their lifestyles, and hundreds of thousands of older people without jobs or in jobs that don´t pay well enough, the take-up would lower social protection expenditure massively in the years ahead.
That lowering overall Budget expenditure would help us stop adding to our public debt and help the HSE pay enough to get and retain workers whose departure to enhance lifestyles threatens to undermine further our creaking health service. – Yours, etc,
JOE FOYLE,
Sandford Road,
Ranelagh,
Dublin 6.
Sir, – The Budget indicated that national debt/GDP will remain north of an unsustainable 100 per cent for the foreseeable future. As a consequence, about half of all income tax will be used, possibly for rest of this decade, to meet interest charges on this debt notwithstanding an imminent exit from the bailout.
Against this background, there was no indication in the Budget that any new sacrifices are being made by one of the best paid and pensioned cabinets in the world or by their overpaid advisers, senior public servants and wealthy supporters.
Where are the moderate salaries, reasonable pensions and equitable taxation that might be reasonably expected as part of an austerity programme which, after several years, continues to be inflicted by the few on the majority? – Yours, etc,
BRIAN FLANAGAN,
Ardmeen Park,
Blackrock ,
Co Dublin.
Sir, – “This is no country for old men (women)” and “An aged man is but a paltry thing”. Two lines from WB Yeats are apt for Ireland today.
Our senior citizens are such easy targets for this Government with medical card probity being enforced, their telephone rental allowance been scrapped, even the bereavement grant abolished.
It is not such a long time ago that a Fine Gael government attacked our children with the attempted introduction of shoe tax. The current Government seems to be proving their track record in enforcing hardship on its citizens. Pity it hasn’t got the scruples to tackle the real culprits that have our country in the state it is!
Hang your head in shame Fine Gael. – Yours, etc,
JANET TAYLOR,
The Palms,
Clonskeagh,
Dublin 14.
Sir, – Ernest Blythe would be proud of the recent Budget and William Martin Murphy would have endorsed it as an appropriate commemoration of the 1913 Lockout. – Yours, etc,
ADRIAN J ENGLISH,
Kilcolman Court,
Glenageary,
Co Dublin.