Sir, - I try not to miss reading Dr FitzGerald's column on Saturdays. As one who has never formally studied economics, I found his column of June 28th particularly enlightening.
He writes: "The prime task of the incoming Government will be to turn our whole society around so as to face the unfamiliar problem of coping with a rate of economic growth unknown in Europe during the past 40 years." So, 150 years ago the Famine; but now the problem of coping with the Celtic Tiger! O tempora. O mores. Tem- pora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis. May I humbly suggest that this task has many implications that should be made explicit and may I suggest further that the task is not just for the Government but for the whole of our society, and the churches in particular. The Pope has said in his letter Centesimus Annus: "The Marxist solution has failed, but the realities of marginalisation and exploitation remain in the world .. . The collapse of the communist system . . . certainly removes an obstacle to facing these problems .. . but it is not enough to bring about their solution. Indeed there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread .. . which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces."
Wide use is made of a teaching aid that is fairly straightforward and explicit for economic morons like me: it is a cake on the family table, where mother always makes an unerringly just distribution. Being unselfish herself she instantly recognises the selfishness of any "mefein" member. But how does one transfer this solution to orders of magnitude above the family table: at national and global levels? The collapse of the communist system I have mentioned. The we had the Rio gathering and five years later at the recent UN meeting in New York smooth rhetoric utterly failed to camouflage the ugly manifestations of national selfishness. I get the impression our third-level education system is almost totally dedicated to the pursuit of technological breakthroughs and economic management - bread-and-butter issues, or caviar-and-claret, if you prefer yuppie language. This percolates down to the other levels. Yet we have all heard that human life has more dimensions than just bread alone. Are we open to the pursuit of these dimensions? What legal and economic resources are made available at third level for the pursuit of these horizons of human enquiry? I remain full of hope ever since that day, two years ago, when I read that a man told an ISME conference in Galway he was overpaid. Yes, that man is an economist, but he is very much more. -Yours, etc., (Fr) THOMAS KELLEHER,
Kinsale,
Co Cork.