Sir, - At last the truth is out: we are a fully fledged banana republic; the only thing missing is the climate required to grow the fruit. It now appears that for a great period of the Eighties and Nineties this country was effectively out of control, being governed for some of the time by a party whose leader was in thrall to big business.
Big business was in turn making its own rules, organising what tax it would or would not pay, safe in the knowledge that it would not be hindered by any petty Revenue officials or bothersome bankers. The Revenue, cast into the outer darkness for daring to allow its gaze to fall on the residents (off-shore) of the Golden Circle, turned its attention to small businesses as it spared no effort in weeding out these dangerous tax evaders and saving the country for democracy. The bankers were equally busy: red carpet treatment for the multi-named, many-accounted customer, straightforward carpeting for those too stupid to use the banking system to its fullest evasive extent and whose need for overdraft facilities to maintain even a minimal lifestyle was regarded as a gross misuse of the banks' valuable time. The drug barons, in the meantime, were having their own problems. The difficulties posed by having to front legitimate business concerns, maintain a middle-class profile, knock off the odd gang member, get the children into a good fee-paying school, organise the regular shipment from Holland, buy the wife a stud farm and take four continental holidays a year - and all on the paltry few bob you got from the Social - it was enough to make a man wear his underpants on his head and claim to be Mickey Mouse. And all the time we tightened our belts. As the interest rates rose around us and the good ship Ireland headed for the rocks, shipping water, we bailed and bailed. Some bailed out altogether, posted the keys back to the mortgage company and disappeared into the night. Some took the age-old route to the New World - these were the illegals of recent memory, the new diaspora. Hospital beds closed, schools were overcrowded and under-resourced, the victims of the drug barons filled our jails, our children were educated for export and elderly people who had worked all their lives existed on menial welfare payments.
Still, you have to admit its a great little country, so it is! - Yours, etc.,
Orla Nolan, Rathmines Road, Dublin 6.