Sir, – Anthony O’Halloran, in his strange defence of politicians looking after the parish pump (Opinion, August 10th), seems to miss at least two very important points.
First, the constituency work he refers to ad nauseam is merely somebody without any productive work to complete trying to ensure re-election to their very well-paid life. Second, do we not elect TDs to run the country in our best interests? If not, why do we elect them? We already have thousands of well-paid councillors that are supposed to be running the parish pumps. However, if this is so, then let them really concentrate on running the country and do all their re-election crawling in their spare time, not when they should be busy preventing economic, environmental, health, agricultural and transport disasters such as the ones now slowly crushing our country. – Yours, etc,
RICHARD D BARTON,
Kevin Street,
Tinahely, Co Wicklow.