Sir, - When I was a student I horrified the more conservative members of my family by saying that when I reached voting age I would vote Fianna Fáil. I thought the enigmatic de Valera would do something to narrow the all too obvious gap between the well-off minority and the dismally poor majority.
He did bring in a few valuable social reforms (about workers' holidays, for instance) and his foreign policy insisted that small nations were always likely to be bullied or bribed into supporting one of the "great" powers. But when he retired, the gap between the poor and the well-off was still gaping wide and in the subsequent years has apparently got even worse.
Fianna Fáil have become the party of the rich, ready to stoop to any subterfuge to stay in power with their wealthy masters' help. Like true demagogues, they boast about their support for democracy without having any idea what the word means.
It means rule by the people, not the mere chance to vote in at intervals a parliament whose members will largely be guided in all their actions by conservative but ambitious bureaucrats putting into practice what the party in power and its financiers instruct.
Your readers will know most of the wrongs inflicted by Fianna Fáil governments, such as cutting off Irish aid to countries far poorer than ours, ignoring their own promise (as so often) to help the urgent struggle which many governments have supported to solve the alarming perils of climate changes; driving more holes in already weak educational and health systems.
There is also a valuable gift the Government could give us. It could give us back our merchant fleet, which Fianna Fáil created in the last minute of the 11th hour during the second World War. Some of us, knowing war was impending, warned in vain that when it came we would be in danger of starving. De Valera, when at last he studied the problem, said we could produce food for only 100 days in a year.
As it is, other parties, having scrapped our fleet as their contribution to Irish well-being, left a situation where all our exports and imports have the cost of their transport paid to foreign shipowners, unlike even the land-locked Swiss. They have a merchant fleet bigger than free Ireland ever had, because they see the advantage of keeping their money at home, not in foreign shipowners' pockets, and in having another source of employment not formerly available. - Yours, etc.,
Dr JOHN de COURCY
IRELAND,
Dalkey,
Co Dublin.