Smoke already rises to hide the damage

Sir — It seems we are about to be hoodwinked yet again on the new children’s hospital. The smoke is already being generated for the screen behind which will lie the collateral damage and fallout caused by the shaving of financial resources off departmental budgets to compensate for the absurd overrun in this project.

It is now an absolute necessity that these ‘savings’, required this year and in following years, are not just accurately quantified but are related back in detail to the projects and services that will be affected and the impact of the consequences on citizens.

This will ensure that the trick of spreading the pain ‘“everywhere but nowhere” will not be possible; it will minimise the opportunism of politicians to blame everything, most of all their own inadequacies, on the children’s hospital; and it will expose those who are to blame for this fiasco to an unremitting derision of their own making, from which they may not hide. Michael Gannon,

Kilkenny