Sir, - Malcolm Byrne (June 8th) challenges us to set out our ideals for the future of politics rather than engage in a narrow tit-for-tat series of letters to this paper.
I am one of a group of people who, if recent trends continue, will be in a majority come the next election - those who do not vote. I have not exercised this right for 10 years or more because I happen to think that the right to vote is not so precious when the choice is between the corrupt and those who sit silently by watching the same corruption eating the very heart out of the Irish political system.
Yet it is not the brown envelope corruption that turns most people off. It is the system which legalises the petty corruption in which all politicians engage.
Why should we put forward our ideals for the future of politics? If we do, will politicians then start to do that for which they are elected? Will they start working (accountably) a five-day week like the thousands of hardworking people from rural Ireland who leave home at six or seven o'clock in the morning to get to their workplaces in Dublin for nine, returning home at seven or eight in the evening and paying their fare out of a meagre salary which has already been heavily taxed, while the politicians amble in at 10 or 11 on Tuesday to return home again on Thursday and claim expenses for doing so - on top of a salary (which they claim is small but is somewhere between £50 and £60 per hour spent at their real work)?
Will part of this idealism be that they stop paying themselves these huge expenses for which the justification is, to say the least, dubious? Will they reduce their holiday entitlement to a reasonable level? Will we see in the TV shots of the Dail more than half-a-dozen seats occupied? Will they do anything about a system that gives themselves multiple pensions long before what they consider to be pension age for those they represent? Will they, like everyone else had to do, reduce their numbers and increase productivity? When the punishment for wrong-doing is a paid holiday with free access to the only subsidised bar in any work place in the country, is it any wonder people are cynical?
An ideal is a concept of perfection. It is state from which politicians are so far removed that mention of the word in the present climate is to fly in the face of reality. - Yours, etc.,
F. J. Fitzsimons, Drumbracken, Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan.