Madam, - I was delighted when the leader of the Progressive Democrats, Michael McDowell, plugged my book Ireland's Job Famine and its Aftermath in recent speeches.
Now the party's director of policy, Seamus Mulconry, gives a further boost in your Letters page (January 26th).
However, it pains me that men of such intelligence seem to have failed to get past the title page. Both seem to feel that because a book with that title was published in 1998, this proves beyond doubt that the improvement in Ireland's employment situation began under their watch. This is despite all available statistics demonstrating that the recovery began while the Labour Party's Ruairi Quinn was minister of finance from 1994 to 1997.
Anyone who actually reads the book will find that, as well as giving a history of the struggle of unemployed people, it warns that, although jobs were beginning to be available in the mid- 1990s, many disadvantaged communities had been so damaged by a generation of mass unemployment that they now needed massive and focused investment.
The Irish National Organisation for the Unemployed won a commitment to such investment in the 2000 social partnership agreement. This turned into the Rapid programme - and was comprehensively reneged on by the FF/PD Government. The recovery of these damaged communities was thereafter left to the free market, which cared as little for the children as it had cared for the parents.
The current disastrous condition of these communities is a direct result of neglect at that crucial moment. This neglect did, without doubt, happen on this Government's watch. - Yours, etc,
MIKE ALLEN, General Secretary, Labour Party, Ely Place, Dublin 2.