Sir, - A businessman walks away with almost a quarter of a billion pounds because he flogs to a multinational corporation the right to exploit a crucial resource - telecommunications. This right was given to him a few years earlier for £16 million by an Irish Government - a coalition of Fine Gael, Labour and Democratic Left, as it happens.
This blatant and obscene speculation in a resource that properly belongs to the millions of Irish citizens who create it, use it and pay for it is greeted by the political establishment and the establishment media with obsequious articles and editorials praising the alleged perspicacity and business acumen of Mr O'Brien and his associates. As if it hadn't been flagged for 20 years that information technology and the communications infrastructure would become a prime area of rapid and sustained growth. As if the Government that sold the licence couldn't see that it might as well give its favoured private individuals a right to print legal tender.
Eircom will also likely finish up in the clutches of multinational institutions. Fabulous natural gas wealth in the Corrib Field off the coast of Mayo and Galway has been handed by Fianna Fail to an oil company with not one penny in State royalties demanded. And if the Government is allowed, the national airports, national airline and other crucial assets will also be sold off.
All the main political parties actively or tacitly embrace the privatisation drive. Most of the leadership of the trade unions are also pathetically embedded in the loop. But this cringing adherence to the capitalist market is already exacting a terrible toll of suffering among growing numbers of working people and the unemployed.
A shameless orgy of greed involving a small cabal of land speculators, developers and construction bosses is putting the civil right to a secure home out of reach of hundreds of thousands of people. Private landlords are allowed to rack-rent with a shameless ruthlessness that would have made their landed counterparts in the 19th century blush with embarrassment.
Gutless politicians from the establishment political parties preside over all this with arms folded. On the numerous occasions when I have confronted them about it in what is allegedly the sovereign tribunal of the Irish people - Dail Eireann - the Taoiseach and his Ministers splutter abut "the market", "EU rules" and "constitutional difficulties" as excuses.
The truth is that the establishment parties have, for decades, been bought and sold, in mind and body, by powerful commercial interests. In the very shadow of the tribunals investigating the corrupt relationship between big business and politics in the 1980s, politicians are executing policy decisions that are making corporations and individuals rich to a degree that could not have been imagined in that decade. And sections of the same media which boast of having called prominent politicians to account for the scandals of the 1980s recount all this with glowing plaudits for the principal players.
It is not clear how long the feast for the favoured few can go on before it ends - but end it will. The reckless self-delusion that the Celtic Tiger can go on for 25 years will give way to the reality that overpriced stock markets, rampant speculation and massive private indebtedness can crash with ferocious repercussions. And working people, the unemployed and the poor will be left to pick up the pieces while the bloated feast-goers will retreat to their favoured offshore tax havens.
We shouldn't wait for that. It is high time the pendulum was pushed back towards the principles of production for need, planning for people and social and public ownership of crucial assets, directed by the widest democratic control and accountability, as opposed to the often lumbering bureaucracy of the past. - Yours, etc.,
Joe Higgins TD, Dail Eireann, Baile Atha Cliath 2.