Madam, - Congratulations to Hugh Linehan for his excellent article (March 15th) on the St Patrick's Festival and its identity crisis, and also to Fintan O'Toole for his column of March 14th on the failure of Government to resolve long-running issues.
Taken together, both articles point towards what I feel to be the single biggest issue in modern Ireland: the utter lack of any vision for who we now are as a society and a country, and where we are going to go in the next few decades.
I would like to quote a line written approximately 2,500 years ago: "Without a vision the people will perish". That's from the book of Micah in the Old Testament. Perhaps in modern Ireland it is judged "offensive" to quote the Bible, but it can be fairly appropriate too. - Yours, etc,
GERARD KELLY, Orwell Gardens, Rathgar, Dublin 6.