Change is urgently needed Let’s look to Ireland

TO quote Ruth Marr (Letters, December 22), “we’ve heard it all before and nobody will buy it for Christmas, let alone for life”. I wish to echo her sentiments; however, certainly not in relation to Gordon Brown, but in respect of her beloved SNP. Later in her letter, Ms Marr expounds “a confident Scotland which increasingly sees its future as a modern European nation, not tied to a diminished UK”.

Where does she get her rose-coloured spectacles from?

After more than 13 years of SNP government with incompetence on every level – health, education, police, business purchases, ferry design and building, bridge design, and the latest, drug abuse deaths – we need a change.

I am quite sure I speak for the silent majority of Scots, who do love their country but will make sure it remains part of the potentially growing UK and no longer part of the European Community, which has little to look forward to now that we have left – stagnation, bankruptcy and collapse.

Boyd Houston, Dollar.

IN THE debate on Scottish independence we should take a look at the independent country next door, the Republic of Ireland. Last week it was announced Ireland is second only to Norway and joint second with Switzerland on a United Nations annual ranking of 189 countries measured according to average longevity, education

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and income. Ireland was ahead of Germany (6), Sweden (7), Australia (8), and the UK (13).

Ireland’s UN Human Development score has increased 23.5 per cent since the recordings began in 1990. The Irish economy has almost doubled since 1990, but the biggest Human Development driver was progress in education.

Average life expectancy at birth was 74.8 in Ireland in 1990 and has now risen to 82.3.

This is the progress independence has brought to Scotland’s next-door neighbour over the last 30 years.

Tom Johnston, Cumbernauld.