Church, state and prosperity

Madam, - Kevin Myers attributes Ireland's economic success to the collapse of the power of the Catholic Church and to the release…

Madam, - Kevin Myers attributes Ireland's economic success to the collapse of the power of the Catholic Church and to the release of creative energy which this produced in the world of business and private enterprise (An Irishman's Diary, April 14th).

I suggest he has got it the wrong way round.

The withering of the influence of the Church was not the cause of our economic leap forward. It was one of its results. People who were better educated and better off and who, through travel and television, had more knowledge of the outside world than any previous generation were no longer prepared to accept unquestioningly the authority of the Church. The disenchantment was accelerated by a series of scandals and the outcome of the turmoil this has created in the Church is yet to be seen.

Mr Myers couples the semi-State companies with the Church as the villains in our economic history. He omits to mention that these companies put in place a national infrastructure - in power, fuel, transport and food - upon which the development of the country was based. And they started from nothing.

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We rejoice in our present success, but it behoves us to remember where we came from and those who laid the foundations for our prosperity - the people who fought for our independence as a nation; the public servants who built up the economic structure of the State; the religious who provided education and hospital care and tended to the poor. Of course we live in a different world now and we can be very wise in retrospect, but Mr Myers's facile and unthinking dismissal of the work of previous generations is not helpful in bringing us towards a mature view of our historical development. - Yours, etc.,

JOYCE ANDREWS, Belfield Lodge, Goatstown Road, Dublin 14.