Madam, - The article by Paul Gillespie in your supplement on the EU presidency (January 5th) places Ireland firmly as a part of a global economy.
There is no choice now. We are part of the system. So what is our role? In the past 10 years we have been a valuable source of young, enthusiastic, educated, resourceful people to supply the needs of a modernising corporate world. For a decade our GDP shot up.
But these factors of production can now be found more cheaply elsewhere and Ireland must find a new role at a time when that Irish quality of consensus building referred to in Mr Gillespie's article is being undermined by neo-liberal policies.
The quality of being able to work as a community (for example, as in the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness) is not so prevalent now. Our society is more divided. We have grown selfish with wealth, more atomised, less community minded. The rights of the individual are frequently held to supersede community values.
This is the battle underlying Deirdre de Burca's concerns in your letters page. Should our future be neo-liberal or co-operative? This is the choice, in Mr Gillespie's words, "between a relatively generous approach to funding an enlarged Union or opting for closer relations with a richer more developed core". This is the choice debated in the letter page of the same day regarding the rights of individuals to build in rural areas and the interests of communities, generally represented by professional planners.
It is very pleasing to see lively debate about such fundamental philosophical issues. I do hope it encourages people to think about these choices. - Yours, etc.,
JUDY OSBORNE, Ashford, Co Wicklow.