Sir, - Thank you for employing Maire Geoghegan-Quinn as a columnist as it continues to lessen the chance that she will one day return to electoral politics. Her article of January 10th exhibited the kind of opinions which one would not expect not to hear from an intelligent commentator.
Her defence of the existing arrangements for assessing asylum applications takes no account of the fact that the Government has removed the provisions for an independent body to consider these and made that power subject to the whims of the same officials who disgracefully forced refugees (innocent until proven guilty) to stand for hours in the cold and rain. She characterises individuals who come to Ireland in search of a better life as opportunists or "Dick Whittington types" and then goes on to declare that "whatever their reasons for leaving their homeland, illegal immigrants who fail to meet the criteria which would qualify them for refugee status are a serious drain on our resources and have no right to be here."
Her entire argument collapses on its failure to explain why we should not allow a limited number of such people into the State. The claim that many members of the Irish diaspora who were in similar circumstances "found jobs or they starved" takes no account of the 20,000-plus people who left these shores each year from the 1940s onwards to take advantage of more generous job prospects, tax systems and welfare benefits in the UK, Australia, North America and South Africa, where many followed the great Irish tradition of participating in the vanguard of white colonialism. Furthermore, the fact that we prohibit newlyarrived immigrants (many with no previous experience of a welfare system) from working in the first place is totally ignored. Could it really be that Mrs GeogheganQuinn cannot find it in her heart to allow at least a few thousand "Dick Whittingtons" to join in our prosperity as we did in that of other countries in the past? - Yours, etc.,
Leo Eric VaradkarRoselawn Road, Dublin 15.