Madam, - Fintan O'Toole's column of June 7th, "Norway's admirable choices", contains a number of assertions which are not true.
1. He begins, "For any scientific experiment to be valid there has to be a control". Controls are not necessary for true experiments. Either the experiment works or it doesn't. It would not be possible to design a control for most important scientific discoveries.
2. He goes on to mention Norway as a "control" for Ireland. Not the best choice. Finland, with a large invading, domineering, acquisitive, neighbour to the east and with severely limited natural resources, is a far better parallel.
3. "We both [ Norway and Ireland] remained heavily agricultural societies for longer than most of western Europe". Norway was never a heavily agricultural society because less than 3 per cent of it is cultivated and its climate and topography do not favour agriculture. It was never a big exporter of agricultural products as we were and are.
4. Norway "has arguably the highest quality of life in the world". But when the London Economist Intelligence Unit devised a "quality of life" index for 111 countries using nine indicators, Ireland "comfortably" topped the table.
5. "The simplistic way to explain Norway's success is the oil". It is not just simplistic - it's real. Norway, with its population of 4.5 million, had about the same amount of North Sea oil and gas as Britain, with its 55 million. And the oil and gas made a huge difference to Britain.
Norway is the second biggest oil exporter in the world. We don't have enough gas for ourselves.
6. We "effectively donate our offshore gas resources to multinational companies". Norwegian oil and gas reserves were worth 50 to 100 times (estimates vary widely) the value of our gas fields, making it viable for the Norwegians to develop the fields themselves. Many multinational exploration companies have lost interest in Ireland because the cost/benefit ratio is not worthwhile.
7. Running through the column is the vague implication that we could have made a choice, as Norway did, and stayed out of the EU. We did not have a choice. In 1972 unemployment was close to 20 per cent and adult emigration was running at about 40 per cent. We still had twice as many births as deaths in the country.
US investment has changed all that. Why Ireland? There are many reasons (educated population, English language, stable government, developed country, friendly with US), but the main ones are our corporation tax of 12.5 per cent and the fact that we are in the EU. The real parallel, Finland, joined the EU at the first opportunity.
Why bother to write to you? I dislike my country being patronised. - Yours, etc,
BARRY O'DONNELL, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.