SARAH DREA,
Sir, - Martin Kay's piece on Public Private Partnerships in your December 21st edition made good reading. This type of analysis of PPPs is welcome and overdue.
Isn't it of enormous public interest to note that "society has no theory or guidance for scrutinising a process which the NDP has decided to use widely"? The resolve of our elected representatives to forge ahead with large-scale PPP projects in the absence of any rigorous assessment is difficult to understand.
One result of this blinkered resolve is the level of opposition to the proposed roads programme. Ordinary people - voters - are asking why the 1998 recommendations of the National Road Needs Study, carried out by experts and paid for by public money, have been cast aside, apparently on little more than a whim.
In the absence of a comprehensive cost/benefit analysis of the massive road-building programme, it is only natural that people will ask what PPPs have to do with value for money and the common good. Are our elected representatives interested in exploring these questions? - Yours, etc.,
SARAH DREA, Rathcash, Co Kilkenny.