Sir, – When I started reading Gerard Howlin’s piece (‘Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has big ambitions – but can she succeed in health?,’ Opinion, April 7th), it didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. In the first paragraph there was a reference to the Department of Health and the health sector: “Health is no longer the Angola it once was”.
So, 32 years after the Lusaka Protocol was signed and fighting ended in Angola, the country is still mentioned as some sort of unsolvable basket case. This is not the first time this type of reference has been made over the years. The phrase is generally credited to Brian Cowen while health minister in the late-1990s.
As someone who lived in Angola during the mid-1990s, when the civil war was ongoing, I find this lazy reference to Angola somewhat insulting to its people. It is not the war-ravaged country it once was. Howlin is not the only person to reference Angola this way. Politicians, journalists and many other commentators have done so many times when discussing health in Ireland. This is so disrespectful to Angolans. We should think back to before the Celtic Tiger years, when Ireland was sometimes referred to as a backward country. We didn’t like that then, did we?
Maybe we should keep this in mind and leave Angola out of “health” discussions. It found peace many years ago. – Yours, etc,
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BRIAN CULLEN,
Pine Valley Avenue,
Rathfarnham,
Dublin 16.
