Sir, - In his Irishman's Diary of May 14th, Tom Quinn took a metaphorical hatchet to the character, culture and achievements of this State since independence from Britain. We must remind ourselves of the condition of this land in the preceding years. We had suffered the unreasonable and morally indefensible British refusal to the Irish people, under threat of war, of the right to whatever form of government they chose, according to the principle of consent. Dublin, the so-called second city of the Empire, languished in dire, squalid poverty, acquiring the sobriquet "Europe's Calcutta".
As reported in the Economist recently, the current GDP per capita per annum in the Republic is 3 per cent higher than in Britain and 11 per cent higher than the EU average. Irish incomes, measured by GDP per head, were less than two-thirds of those in Britain as recently as 1987. Northern Ireland's GDP per head is a mere 76 per cent of that of the UK, or 74 per cent of the Republic. Success cannot be measured in material terms alone and there are many aspects of life in Ireland today which are unsatisfactory or unacceptable, but by any standards, the Ireland of today is far far better than the defeated, depressed, brainwashed, impoverished island of 90 years ago. We owe an enormous debt to Pádraig Pearse and his comrades for the undemocratic sacrifice which they made for their country. Some people may have a nostalgia for slavery, but most of us are glad we have got up off our knees and that we are now respected members of the European Union.
Let us compare our current status to our Celtic cousins in Wales, a country still part of the "United" Kingdom. About two-thirds of Wales is now an EU Objective 1 Area because of the level of poverty to which it has descended. Rates of unemployment, under-employment, insecure employment, low wages, preventable illness, disability, long-term sickness and bad housing are consistently higher there than in other parts of Britain. Core industries have been closed down or neglected and talented young people flock to serve the economy of England because of the lack of opportunity at home.
I advise Mr Quinn and his like to abandon fantasy and see British rule as it really is. - Is mise,
ALLEN CONLAN,
Ashbourne,
Co Meath.
Sir, - Tom Quinn is spot on. Apart from the gratification of ruling ourselves, almost every other outcome of independence has been negative.
Our economy suffered horrendously for decades from a combination of underdevelopment, mismanagement and lack of direction, made all the worse by appallingly misguided policies that started with the trade war with the UK in the 1930s.
Our population plummeted because of the Protestant exodus from a State that made it clear that they were not welcome, and abandonment by the young and educated, who saw there was nothing in this backward, inward-looking country that held any attraction for them.
Even today, despite the tremendous progress over the past 10 years, we still cannot trust any of the main parties to run the economy responsibly. It has only been since we turned over the control of our economy to an outside power again, this time Europe, that fiscal responsibility has been imposed on the ruling élite.
Our political development was dominated from the start by a pointless Civil War, which created two main political parties whose reason for existence seemed to be solely to counter each other. Instead of a mature democracy we created a stunted, faction-ridden, bitter system, dominated by local politics and stroke-pulling, where the subversion of the law was and is seen as a badge of honour, and politicians never have to bow to public pressure and resign over anything - in stark contrast to the UK, where MP's resign over issues that are forgotten within weeks.
Finally, if we had remained part of the Commonwealth, we would never have been blighted by the creation of a perverse Church-State symbiont, forcing its own misguided ethics on the entire populace, imposing censorship, and restricting women in general to being child-rearers and home-makers, not out of choice but by direction.
No one can predict how this island would have developed over the past 80 years if we had remained part of Britain, but we can surely reflect that, in most meaningful ways, it could not have been much worse than we managed by our own efforts. - Yours, etc.,
KEVIN PRENDERGAST,
Templeogue,
Dublin 6W.