Sir, - Having been an avid reader of The Irish Times for many years, I have come to expect and appreciate a high standard of journalism from your paper. So I was astounded to read Maire Geoghegan-Quinn's pathetic attempt (June 28th) to justify the Taoiseach's botched Cabinet appointments. For example, does she really believe that categorising Forestry or Fuel as "natural resources" would be as logical as "categorising feet and shoes together, because they both tend to be found at the end of people's legs"? After all, how much more sense does it make to lump Energy with Buses?
Moreover, it is certainly questionable that Mervyn Taylor's success in "repositioning equality from being a pious aspiration" should be a "good reason for doing away with the Department" and that merely changing the letter-heads (at what cost, exactly?) at the Departments of Public Enterprise and Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands will give islanders an "equal voice at Cabinet" or fundamentally change the ethos in CIE. As for the final paragraph of the article, it makes no sense whatsoever. "If you want something to eat you do not go to a hunger- prevention unit, you pick up some fast-food. If you are entitled to a State payment you don't go to the Department of Social Welfare. You go to the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs. And you've no problem saying so.
What? Surely this nonsensical pamphlet would have made the editor of Pravda proud.
This article brought to my attention the wider issue of journalism and the composition of the new Cabinet. Why has no journalist asked if the decision to submerge Equality in the Department of Justice, relegating it to a junior Ministry, is indicative of the Taoiseach's view that equality is just a matter of the "prohibition of discrimination"? Whether the temporary and possibly illegal move to make David Andrews a Cabinet Minister and junior Minister for Europe was an example of the Taoiseach's inability to decide who should be his Foreign Minister? Or whether the renaming of the Department of Energy, Transport and Communications was designed to assuage the Minister's chagrin at not becoming Tanaiste or even Minister for Finance or Enterprise and Employment?
Furthermore, I was extremely surprised that neither Sean Duignan nor anyone else asked Miss Harney why she agreed to Bobby Molloy's appointment as "super-junior Minister" when she herself promised the former occupant of that post in the Dail that it would be the first thing the PDs would cut if in government.
Given the new Government's obvious friendship with the Independent Group and local radio's vested interest in the success of Fianna Fail, only The Irish Times and RTE remain to offer serious journalism and debate to the Irish people. I hope and trust you will soon do that. - Yours, etc.,
Roselawn Road, Dublin 15