Madam, - Your opinion pages of December 23rd were most enlightening. I hope that all Fianna Fáil TDs read Morgan Kelly's article on the futility of recapitalising the discredited Anglo Irish Bank ("Better to incinerate €1.5bn than squander it on Anglo Irish Bank"). It is obvious that to support this bank is a criminal waste of taxpayers' money.
Irish people are now having to face up to the fact that what they thought was an economic miracle was built on deception and irresponsible greed. Government Ministers are in the bankers' and developers' pockets and this all needs to be stopped before Irish taxpayers are put in hock for a generation.
Elaine Byrne, writing in the same edition, is right to say it is time for people to start thinking for themselves as they have been failed by the political and financial elites. - Yours, etc,
Madam, - I'm genuinely indebted to Morgan Kelly for providing the first clear, concise and credible explanation I've seen of the Government's treatment of Anglo Irish Bank.
The "softly, softly" approach to Anglo Irish, which has baffled and infuriated many informed commentators, would be genuinely frightening if it represented the Government's actual thinking on the banking crisis. Seen as a Fianna Fáil attempt to protect its own financial backers with shedloads of our money, however, it is at least broadly in character.
But one thing still puzzles me. The consistent historical practice of the Fianna Fáil party in my lifetime has been to ditch open support of all sorts of special interests groups, from the Catholic Church to the publicans, as soon as they've ceased to be politically useful. So what can explain the continuing loyalty to property developers, which may end up costing the party dearly in electoral terms?
Are those funds which oiled the democratic process in Ireland still flowing? Or - mirabile dictu - could it be that the modern Fianna Fáil party has finally grown (by its own standards at least) a conscience, and mutated into a party that actually stays bought? - Yours, etc,