Sir, - I would appreciate a space in your letters column in which to make a submission to two of our Cabinet members, the Minister of Social Welfare and the Minister of Tourism and Trade. It is that those senior citizens of Irish birth (verifiable, as it is, on the currently required presentation of our indigenous entitled personnel, by their birth certificates) be granted the free transport facilities in their entirety upon their holidays or other visitations to their homeland, for the duration of their stay here.
It would not cost the Exchequer very much. This is a point which our first Socialist Minister of Finance should recognise as a tremendous and non costly gesture of social consciousness.
They do not come with empty pockets, are good spenders and would be encouraged to come to their country more frequently. The postal orders (to paraphrase the late John Healy) which they sent home helped to balance and redress some of the outflow to offshore tax havens which the well heeled failed to invest in the expansion of the factories and industry which could have kept them in Ireland.
That light that flickers in the Park would glow more brightly and more meaningfully, and our tourist figures would assuredly increase. It is the gesture and the thought that should be paramount, and any (remunerative) consequences be of accidental and incidental importance.
It would be superfluous to rationalise the suggestion's merits, and an affront to those aged kinsfolks' dignity and worthiness to expect them to seek its implementation. I hope a caring nation, in its Cabinet, will give them some sign and evidence of our remembrance. They were the poor emigrant youth of the late 1930s, the 1940s and the 1950s, whose neglected education condemned them to a life of hard manual labour. Le meas,
Ascal Radharc an Sliabh,
Crois Aroild,
Dubh Linn.