Madam, - Eamon Ryan is clearly one of the more thoughtful, intelligent and compassionate members of this Fianna Fáil/Green coalition government. (Let's forget the nonsense that the PDs still exist in anything other than Government's political philosophy.)
However his comment in the Dáil last Thursday that "we revelled in it" - in reference to the Celtic Tiger years - cannot go unchallenged and seems to indicate a radical shift to the right by the Green Party that is as unwelcome as, to me, it is unexpected.
We did not all revel in it. Some of us did shout "stop". The thousands of families still on housing waiting lists were not those who built and bought bigger houses for extraordinary sums. The young children who sit begging on Grafton Street were not from families who flew to Madison Avenue to buy their "cheap" Gucci bags. The people sitting in traffic jams are not the cause, but the effect, of crazy decisions made by those who held Ministerial Office when we had the resources to tackle these problems.
Many people gave the Greens a first or high preference at the last election because we believed the party provided some radical balance in Irish public life. However, their craven acceptance of the establishment view of who should pay for the problems funked in the past 12 wasted years is a clear marker to those of us who believe in a fair society to be wary of ever doing so again. - Yours, etc,
Cllr DERMOT LACEY, Beech Hill Drive, Dublin 4.