Madam, – Could anyone explain why journalists such as Fintan O’Toole (Opinion, August 31st) constantly have articles published that spell out a disastrous scenario in our economy, in face of the more benign versions portrayed by our Government?
What are the citizens of this country to believe – are they facing Armageddon according to so-called opinion-formers or is there hope for the survival of our small island, as those who have been elected to manage the State maintain?
It is unfair of Mr O’Toole to paint such a gloomy canvas (despite his picturesque pose) without displaying some vestige of brightness. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – €18.9 billion in tax receipts for the year to August 2010 apparently means that the Department of Finance expects Ireland to earn €31 billion for the full year. Yet Ireland is prepared to dump up to €25 billion into Anglo Irish Bank, not to mention the billions already dumped, and yet to be dumped, into Ireland’s struggling financial institutions in an effort to keep them solvent and impress foreign lenders into believing that Ireland knows what it is doing.
Nama has yet to convince anybody that it will succeed and Ireland’s budget deficit grows steadily, despite savage cuts with promises of more to come in the December 2010 budget. Your paper (September 3rd) reports Brian Lenihan as believing that this is the way “. . . of keeping the whole financial reputation of the country afloat”.
Is he, and are the rest of us, living in the la-la land of self-delusion referred to by your correspondent, Fintan O’Toole (Opinion, August 31st) or is it only Fianna Fáil backbenchers who can foresee Ireland’s financial melt-down, identified by your Political Editor Stephen Collins (Opinion, September 1st)? – Yours, etc,