U-turns and new turns

Sir, – So Simon Coveney has done a U-turn on green bin charges ("Coveney scraps plan for mandatory green bin levy", May 18th). How dreadful! I would like to know when making a U-turn became something you had to be ashamed of? It seems to me that increasingly people – politicians in particular – have to defend themselves against accusations of what appears to have become a crime of some sort.

If I embark on a course of action and then am informed that there is a block ahead, I am likely to run into some sort of trouble, or a policy won’t work, it makes a lot of sense for me to turn back – in effect make a U-turn – if I can.

Apart from being a sensible course of action, sometimes it takes more courage to make a U-turn and take all the flak from a hypercritical media than to plough ahead on a course that has no chance of succeeding.

Making a U-turn involves facing up to the fact that the original decision may have been misguided, and it is difficult to say: “I was wrong” when critics are waiting with fingers poised over keyboards to launch into paroxysms of outrage. – Yours, etc,

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TERESA GRAHAM,

Tramore,

Co Waterford.