Use your vote to send our politicians a message
POST offices, banks, Garda stations, hospitals and schools are being systematically closed across rural Ireland. Marauding criminals are free to plunder and pillage our homesteads with impunity, reminiscent of the Viking raids.
Mortgages are being sold to absentee landlords masquerading as vulture funds. Exorbitant rent increases, followed by evictions, are leaving our people on the streets, devoid of hope or dignity and creating homelessness akin to the mid-1840s.
We, the electorate, feel abandoned and angry. But we have a Presidential election to decide who is going to wallow in extravagance and opulence at the old viceregal lodge in the Phoenix Park for the next seven years.
What we, the people, must decide this Friday is how best to use our ever-so-fleeting moment of power in the polling booth.
Should we send an unequivocal message reflecting our anger and frustration to the establishment? A message that our politicians will get every time they look at the face of our President?
EUGENE CASSIDY, Co. Cavan.
Campbell’s marchers
THEY’RE claiming half a million diehards marched in London against Brexit, led by the likes of Alastair Campbell – the innocent blood of Iraqi children still dripping from his guilty hands.
This is the calibre of man who gets all the air-time he demands in Ireland and Britain, where he ignores the will of the British electorate with his attempts to expunge his indelible stains of illegal war and invasion under Tony Blair. He has the same credibility as anyone who speaks for bullies and blackguards.
True to form, he conveniently ignores the votes of 17million-plus people who democratically decided to leave the tyranny of the EU.
If this is the type of ‘leader’ the Remoaners are looking for to legitimatise possible strife in the face of the reality of life that Britain faces today, then they have found the right mouse, if that is not too strong a word. ROBERT SULLIVAN,
Co. Cork.
Tread carefully, Leo
LEO VARADKAR treads a very dangerous path suggesting terrorism might result from renewal of a functioning border in Ireland, between North and South.
Such talk smacks of desperation on realisation that a border is a distinct possibility.
If such a border re-emerges, it is likely to be at the insistence of the EU, as smuggling will mainly be from a lower-value UK economy to the much-higher-priced EU.
The decision to reinstate a border, unpalatable as it might be to many, will, however, be taken by democratically elected governance and cannot be influenced by a terrorist threat.
Any suggestion that the bullet and bomb might influence important democratic decisions raises the spectre of capitulation to terrorism and much greater problems for Europe than a departing Britain.
PADRAIC NEARY, Co. Sligo.
Pushing the envelope
I WOULD advise anyone posting a birthday card with money in it not to use the fancy coloured envelopes which accompany these cards.
Instead, put the card in a plain (business-type) brown envelope. It is too obvious that those coloured envelopes may contain more than a birthday card.
If it is unsafe to post such letters, then that is not the problem of the sender. HARRY MULHERN, Dublin.
Saudi ‘credibility’
THE definition of credibility involves the notions of trust and belief, although this seems to have been stretched well past breaking point with the case of the missing, now apparently dead, journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
President Trump has accepted the Saudi Arabian reports about the death, and its manner, as being ‘credible’ and called it an ‘important first step’.
Given that the first reports, about two weeks ago, suggested that he had left the consulate safely, their credibility must be questioned.
Their statement about a fist fight concerns a death two weeks ago which should have been immediately reported to all appropriate people, organisations and countries, but this did not happen. That should have been the ‘important first step’.
The lesson here is that credibility is easily lost and hard to regain. Those vouching for the credibility of others must in themselves be credible, and there are many failing that in this event. Rest in peace, Jamal Khashoggi. DENNIS FITZGERALD,
by email.
Cigarette packaging
CAN anyone tell me the point of plain packaging on cigarettes?
My understanding of it was that it was to deter young people from smoking. The packs have the same graphic images except they are on a brown background. What is the difference between a brown background and one that is gold, red or blue? I imagine it’s a nightmare for shop staff to determine which slot in the machine they go into, but it’s no deterrent to young people. What’s the point?
LORETTO KING, Galway.