Sir - It is not true that the proposed statue to Connolly is the "first memorial to Connolly in Dublin". Dublin, "80 years on" has not been so laggard in its homage to Connolly. Nearly 50 years ago, as Minister for Health, we completely replaced the decrepit hospital bed stock in the country, later adjudged by an international jury to be "with Sweden's, the finest hospitals in the world". In an attempt to honour Connolly's wish that the Republic would "cherish equally all the children of the nation", I tried to give to all our mothers, and their children, free access to these superbly equipped and staffed hospitals. Incredibly, with the approval of all our politicians, including Connolly's Labour Party the scheme was vetoed and forbidden by Rome and dropped. Those hospitals, with that fine free service, could have adorned Connolly's "not to be" socialist republic.
Probably the most magnificent of all these hospitals, at my request, was named by the Dublin Health Authority, for Connolly, "The James Connolly Memorial Hospital" in Abbotstown.
In today's republic of contrasting great wealth and poverty where for the trivia of a woman's engagement ring one of our millionaires recently squandered millions of pounds, 40 per cent of our children under 14 are said to go to bed hungry every night, and a third of our people live below the poverty line. Eighty years on, a bronze statue to Connolly in Dublin of inner city mass poverty, out of control youth drug abuse, unmanageable crime rates, high unemployment, and mass demoralisation, with climbing suicide rates, seems to me to be, in his wife's poignant words, a poor return for "your lovely young life Jim". - Yours, etc.,
Ballynahown,
Co Galway.