Sir, - The Minister for Labour, Trade and Consumer Affairs, Tom Kitt (November 6th), expressed his amusement at John Bruton's argument that Bertie Ahern's Government had done nothing to alleviate the transport needs of our "ever-expanding capital".
Explaining the cause of his amusement, Mr Kitt took us back to 1984. He should have taken us back to 1944, where he would have found much more cause for amusement.
It was in 1944 that his Fianna Fail predecessors tried and failed to get their Transport Bill through Dail Eireann. Following defeat late at night, the then Taoiseach, Mr de Valera, went to Aras an Uachtarain to advise President Douglas Hyde to dissolve the Dail - an episode immortalised by Dublin Opinion in "The Midnight Ride of Tall Devere". In the general election that followed, Fianna Fail won - and immediately pushed through the previously defeated Transport Bill, the effect of which was to amalgamate the Great Southern Railway, the Great Northern Railway, the Dublin Transport Company and all similar companies into a new conglomerate to be known as CIE.
Mr Sean Lemass, as Minister for Industry and Commerce, was chief architect of the takeover and immediately appointed his brother, Mr Frank Lemass, as general manager - an act of nepotism such as was unheard of in Ireland until then and a portent of things to come.
Twenty years later, in 1964, the then Minister for Transport and Power, Mr Erskine Childers, closed down scores of railway stations all over Ireland and had hundreds of miles of railway track torn up.
Later, as Minister for Health, he did the same to hospitals by the expedient of dividing Ireland into health board regions, presumably on the English model. His meddling had the effect of closing as many hospitals as it had closed railway stations and is the cause of the hospital waitinglists and road traffic congestion that we have seen in recent years.
The decline in transport and hospital services did not set in with John Bruton, however much Mr Kitt would like to have us think that they did.
It set in many years earlier with Mr Lemass and Mr Childers and Fianna Fail. - Yours, etc.,
John Donohoe, Turlobstown House, Coole, Co Westmeath.