Sir, - I note with interest, a wry interest, comments delivered by Mr Denis O'Brien at the ISME conference in Athlone (The Irish Times, May 25th). Mr O'Brien apparently takes a dim view of the state of the State's infrastructure. In particular he singles out our roads, hospitals, the ESB and Aer Rianta for criticism.
His solution to the problem is to break them up and privatise them. To borrow a line from Mandy Rice-Davies, who, like Mr O'Brien, also knew how to rub politicians up the right way, "He would say that, wouldn't he?"
If any of the above - the ESB, Aer Rianta, any facet of our health care system, or our national highways - were to be privatised in the morning, you could bet your bottom dollar that Mr O'Brien would be first in the queue to invest in same. At the right price of course. And how would Mr O'Brien finance this investment in our newly privatised national assets? Simplicity itself; he merely has to recycle the fortune he made buying the Esat franchise for a pittance.
For those of you who have forgotten what the State got for the licence, £15 million was the paltry sum. Not bad going, when you consider that Esat was sold on a couple of years later for £2 billion. Granted, Mr O'Brien and his backers had to invest in the company; still, the profits were astronomical, and Mr O'Brien's personal killing was of the order of £250 million, a bonanza almost certainly unprecedented in this country.
Had the FG-Lab-DL government of the day got a realistic price for the sale of the nation's second telephone system, perhaps the nation's roads, hospitals and airports might now live up to Mr O'Brien's high standards. - Yours, etc.,
Gerard Caffrey, Brownstown, The Curragh, Co Kildare.