Madam, - Recent letters advocating the transfer of capital city status from Dublin to elsewhere on the island simply prolong the simplistic "Dublin versus the rest" argument that has, for far too long, been part of our national discourse.
While I accept there are problems facing areas outside Dublin I have never been convinced that they can be resolved by such an approach.
The truth is that Dublin itself faces many problems. In many cases these have been caused by Government action as much as inaction - notably the refusal to enable Dublin to make its own decisions. Instead we have the ridiculous situation whereby Leitrim, with a population of 29,000, has the same local government structure as Dublin, with a population of nearly 1.2 million.
Instead of local decision-making we have constant and incompetent, interference by Government in areas such transport, where it has left us with a multiplicity of agencies all controlled from the centre. The much-delayed DTA Bill simply provides for the same people and vested interests to be left in charge.
Despite a massive housing problem in Dublin, central Government denies the city and county the necessary funds to provide enough homes. Having failed in this primary responsibility Government then established the so called Affordable Housing Partnership that interferes with, but does not seriously enable, the possibility of us directly providing the necessary accommodation.
Incredibly, the national Government even appoints the members of the Dublin St Patrick's Day Parade Committee.
All this occurs while the same Government refuses to pay the €27 million in commercial rates that it owes for 2007 alone on Government properties in the city.
I favour regional development, as well as proper
decentralisation and devolution. Both make sense for our country
and for Dublin. But I am fed up with the notion that Dublin is
somehow the enemy and Dubliners some sort of money-sucking drain on
the economy. The opposite is the truth. Dublin is the engine of the
country. It is the capital and it will remain so. - Yours, etc,
Cllr DERMOT LACEY,
Beech Hill Drive,
Dublin 4.
Madam, - In the matter of proposing and establishing new capitals (Prof Ged Martin, April 30th), it is interesting to note that last week the Taoiseach honoured in Washington DC the Irishman James Hoban - who, in addition to designing and building the White House, played an important role in the early development of that city for almost 40 years.
Even more notably, the original design of Canberra was carried
out by a husband-and-wife team in the Frank Lloyd Wright tradition
in which the true genius loci was Marion Lucy Mahony Griffin
(1871-1961), offspring of a Cork-born journalist and his wife, a
doctor's daughter who knew Abraham Lincoln. - Yours, etc,
DENIS BERGIN,
Mount Pleasant,
South Carolina, USA.