Madam, - Desmond Fitzgerald (October 8th) seems wilfully to have misread my letter of October 7th. I have never voted for Fianna Fáil; indeed in the past two elections I voted against FF and gave my vote to Fine Gael.
That was my point. I could not with, any enthusiasm, have voted for Fine Gael; my votes were against the Government. I suspect I was not alone.
Mr. Fitzgerald makes a virtue out of the fact that Enda Kenny is not an "intellectual politician". I, for one, would prefer that our leaders be men and women of some intellect. While I cannot disagree that Mr Kenny has proved himself to be an excellent (re)organizer of a political party, this is something that a strong leader could have delegated to another. Right now we do not need reorganisers of political parties. We need leaders in the cast of FDR.
Mr Fitzgerald implies that I hold Fine Gael somehow accountable for Ireland's current difficulty. This is a straw-man argument. While Fine Gael in in this regard, the party has failed under Enda Kenny to articulate a coherent vision for a different Ireland. In the midst of the current crisis, the citizens of this country do not want to hear vain political point-scoring.
We need our leaders to be seen to work together to fix the problem and get us out of this sorry mess. The time for political accountability will come later when Fianna Fáil gets punished at the next election. Fine Gael's choice is whether this happens negatively, by default, or positively, because it has offered the electorate a reason to vote for it. - Yours, etc,
ALAN HYNES, Rathmore, Corofin, Co Galway.