Sir, - May I plead with you to allow me a few column-inches in your Letters page to express a concern, and hopefully start a debate, about a matter that should worry us much more? I refer to the sale of important national assets to foreign investors whose only interest, surely, is to make profits for their shareholders.
I believe I am not alone in the view that there are certain public utilities that are too important to exist for shareholders' profits rather than the public interest, and I do not think that one needs to be a fanatical socialist to agree with that. I believe that, for an island, state telecommunications and air transport are in that category. I realise that the sale by the State of certain utilities ("privatisation") is a fact of modern life and so I was not particularly opposed to the selling off of Telecom (or, if you prefer, Eircom). There was high-pressure advertising to get Irish people to buy what was basically already theirs, so I felt that we Irish would still own and control our telecom network.
Now I read (for the shareholders have not yet been officially told) that the most successful and growing section of the enterprise, the mobile phone network, is to be sold off to the big British company Vodafone. Would anybody be too surprised to learn that the whole Irish telecommunications network could be sold off to British investors (speculators)? One assumes that the current Irish offer will be rejected.
Then, take air transport. I am not referring here to the low-cost leisure airlines that come (e.g. Ryanair) and go (e.g. TransAer), but to the basic business services of Aer Lingus that have stood the test of the hard times as well as the good. The "one world" alliance has seen the handing over of Aer Lingus routes such as Dublin to Bristol, Leeds and Newcastle to British airlines (BA subsidiaries). Who knows what may happen after a sell-off of the national airline?
I am no extreme nationalist, but I am sufficiently patriotic to feel that we owe it to previous generations not to sell off the family silver. - Yours, etc.,
W.J. Murphy, Malahide, Co Dublin.