Madam, - Jim Ford (March 29th) mischievously suggests that the historic meeting at Stormont earlier this week could lead to a Fianna Fáil government involving Sinn Féin. He attempts to create this scenario from a tissue of suppositions and what-ifs without the slightest basis in fact.
Rather than herald the prospect of a truly transformed political dispensation on the island between the two traditions, he cynically warns that it presents us with a fearful prospect in terms of the general election.
However, the Taoiseach has been unequivocal in relation to the prospect of any future government involving or requiring the support of Sinn Féin. There is no basis on which Fianna Fáil could agree policies on taxation, Europe, and many other important areas of public policy.
Mr Ford can muse all he likes about the possibilities of the election and its outcome. However, when we go to the polls this year, we will do so as the first generation of Irish people in almost 150 years who can live and work in the same country as our grandparents and not be forced by poverty or unemployment to emigrate, as so many more before us have done.
The election should be about policies and ideas about how to sustain our progress. It should not be about parties or politicians obsessing over their own ambitions either for themselves or their parties. - Yours, etc,
PAT HYNES, Moreen Road, Sandyford, Dublin 16.
A chara, - Jim Ford (March 29th) insultingly refers to the next government as being a possible "Mafia marriage" of Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin.
While I appreciate that Sinn Féin's political success will lead to more and more scaremongering by those who begrudge the party that success, Mr Ford would do well to review the list of political parties involved in recent tribunals.
I think he will see that "Mafia marriages" have long been in existence in Irish politics and that those marriages have always excluded Sinn Féin. - Is mise,
E.F. FANNING, Churchtown, Dublin 14.