Sir, - At ISME's annual conference last year, Billy At Icy quipped that "ISME was the military wing of the Progressive Democrats". The INOU's president, Mr Paul Billings (yes, he was on the platform), seems to have chortled at this humorous remark.
To have that joke raised to the level of serious political comment (Dick Walsh, March 8th) is farcical. To seek to give it substance by reference to Eoghan Hynes, ISME's former chairman, speaking at the PD Conference in Limerick is silly.
The Irish Times columnist was mistaken when he claimed that ISME had stated that there was "no genuine unemployment". Not so. We attempted to address the phenomenon of "apparent" full employment from the employers' perspective with simultaneously 264,000 on the live register. Mr Walsh would have served his readers best if he had engaged in serious comment concerning ISME's report Putting the Unemployed Back to Work, which he described as "extraordinary".
Yours, etc.,
Chief executive,
ISME (Irish Small and Medium
Enterprises Association),
17 Kildare Street,
Dublin 2.