In response to Ethel Crowley (January 4th) and Leonora McConville (January 13th), can I ask when Ireland was ever innocent, friendly and caring?
It is almost a century since Yeats wrote his lines about those "who fumble in the greasy till". In my own childhood, spent in West Limerick in the 1960s, I can recall beggars who went from door to door trying to get some money and a little food to survive on. The lives that these people led along with the many who were forced to leave our shores to try to find work indicates an Ireland that was well capable of selfishness in the past. Then as now, poverty existed alongside great wealth.
Furthermore, we are today being bombarded with media reports of the two tribunals which are currently sitting. These reports contain allegations on how the political and business elite of this country were behaving in the 1970s and 1980s. Though the outcome of these tribunals is awaited with interest, the picture they paint is far from edifying.
It seems to me that Ms Crowley in particular is referring back to an imaginary society that only ever existed in Bord Failte advertisements. - Yours, etc.,
Patrick Coleman, Clonsilla, Dublin 15.