Madam, - Does Seamus Brennan have no sense of irony? He has described election pledges by Fine Gael and Labour as "reckless" and said they could bankrupt the country (The Irish Times, March 21st).
Has Mr Brennan forgotten his own role in the formulation of the infamous 1977 Fianna Fáil manifesto? As general secretary of Fianna Fail, he supported reckless promises, including the abolition of property rates and the removal of tax on cars, which were to be responsible for a decade of economic ruin.
And has he forgotten the promises he made to the electorate in the Programme for Government in 2002? As Minister for Transport, he promised a metro link to Dublin Airport to be opened by 2007, reform of the Road Transport Act to allow for competition in the bus market, and the establishment of a "Greater Dublin Land Use and Transport Authority" to bring focus to land-use and transport issues in the capital.
Bold plans, with big price-tags - and none of them delivered, leaving Dublin commuters facing more years of gridlock.
If Mr Brennan had not supported policies which brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy, and had delivered on any of his own promises at the last election, then his criticism of Opposition policies might have had some scintilla of credibility. - Yours, etc,
BARRY WALSH, Brooklawn, Clontarf, Dublin 3.
Madam, - I have listened with incredulity to Seamus Brennan complaining about the "unprecedented" pre-election promises of the opposition parties and the threat they pose to the economy.
Is it possible that he is related to the Seamus Brennan who, in the campaign leading up to the 1977 election, marketed on behalf of Fianna Fáil the most disastrous set of pre-election promises the country has ever seen and from which it took our economy decades to recover? - Yours, etc,
DONAL HANLEY, Gainsborough Avenue, Malahide, Co Dublin.