Sir, - Mr Ciaran Murray, Chief Executive of Ballymun Regeneration Ltd., says that the EU diktat on tax incentives will put the regeneration of Ballymun at risk. He might well have added that the idiotic regionalisation policy will compound BRL's woes. The politicians, journalists and economists who have been mouthing the "begging bowl" mantra for some time now have ensured that those who were left behind in the present economic revival will not catch up with the prosperous pack in the foreseeable future.
Not surprisingly, the people who are losing out now are the same people who paid the price of EEC entry in 1973. Theirs were the jobs that were sacrificed when European competition blitzed the traditional industries upon which the local authority estates were dependent. Funds did flow in from Europe, certainly, but successive governments used that money to buy votes, and the poor do not vote in great numbers, even though their children occupy a greatly disproportionate number of places in the methadone clinics, the prisons, and the graveyards.
It has to be admitted that Europe's role in broadening the chasm between the haves and the have-nots in Irish society was not engineered with malice aforethought; rather was it the work of an absentee and indifferent bureaucracy. But a change of government in Germany (cheered on by the "Begging Bowl" brigade at home) has inspired the predominantly socialist governments of the EU to impose upon Ireland harmonisation policies which the major powers of Europe would never accept were they to be applied to nuclear energy, the massive subsidisation of the arms trade, or the preferential trading agreements they agreed for their former colonies. The indecision which created the European dream is "with O'Leary in the grave". Euroland is as mythical an entity as Utopia.
The mythological connection has relevance for Ballymun. BRL must steer a course between the Scylla of regionalisation and the Charybdis of sunken tax incentives, for if it doesn't fall foul of the former, it is certain to be pulled down by the latter.
Ballymun will be the first test of the government promise to provide exchequer funding for those disadvantaged communities that are on the wrong side of the Healy-Rae Line. As for the socialist governments of Europe - and their allies at home - there is comfort in the words of Edward VII who said: "We are all socialists now". - Yours, etc.,
Thomas Walsh, Tommy Gibson, Peadar Kelly, Editorial Board, Ballymun News, Silloge Gardens,
Dublin 11.