BACK PAGES:December 29th, 1980: SEAN O'LEARY ran two successful general election campaigns for Fine Gael in the early 1980s and was subsequently appointed a senator and later a High Court judge. In comments published in this newspaper posthumously following his death at Christmas 2006, he criticised the Supreme Court for taking "a harsh, populist approach" to people accused of socially unacceptable crimes and failing to vindicate their legal rights. In 1980 he had offered this critique of the then state of the country in a letter to The Irish Times.
Sir, – Coming to the end of 1980, where do we stand as a country? We have:
1. A currency which is overvalued against all our major trading partners except Britain. This has come about because in the two years of the EMS we have had a rate of inflation far above that of other European countries (other than the United Kingdom) and far higher than the United States of America.
2. Foreign and national borrowing which is increasing to frightening proportions.
3. State finances in total chaos. Not only do we have the large deficits on current account which require the borrowing mentioned above but these borrowings arise in an unplanned fashion We seem incapable of estimating with any degree of accuracy our expenditure and income for 12 months in advance. “Ad-Hoc-ery” rules OK!
4. An expanding and increasingly expensive public employment sector together with a reducing manufacturing workforce with static wages due to the inability of the private employers to pay the same increases as the public sector.
5. A resultant collapse of our infrastructure. Trains are late because rolling stock has not been replaced, buses in urban areas are so old as to be pathetic. It appears that at least a third of all public-service vehicles are so decrepit as to need maintenance each night, as a one-day strike of maintenance men will put that number off the road. Telephones (installed in record numbers admittedly) do not work due to non-investment in necessary capital expenditure. Whole areas of the country are cut off by manual [telephone] systems which are no longer able to cope. Local authority services are hampered by lack of finance, and employ people but have no money to pay for the goods these people need to do their jobs. We have a postal service which has not recovered from the strike of last year for unknown reasons.
6. A [Fianna Fáil] Government (in a state of economic paralysis) who seek to divert our attention by concentrating their rhetoric on an external (sic) enemy, the Ulster Unionists, whom we can’t and should not want to defeat but who are at present a handy diversion from the economic facts of life.
7. A press who with one honourable exception (the Irish Independent) have lost their critical faculty of those in power and concentrate instead on every mistake of the Parliamentary Opposition. We have a state of near total press acceptance of the priorities being laid down for that press by those in government. There appears to be no realisation within the media of the dangers of that position.
What do you call a country whose currency is at risk, whose borrowing is heavy, whose State finances are in a mess, with an expanding public sector cost and reducing production base, whose infrastructure is collapsing, with an external enemy to divert attention, whose press is in a state of panic for fear of opposing those in power?
As an Irishman I do not want to see Ireland fail. I have a vested interest in its success. I do not care if Fianna Fáil or the party I support achieve this success, but by God it is about time the Government started governing and forgot its preening for a General Election. They have until June 1982; let them get on with it and let the Opposition both Parliamentary and extra-Parliamentary (such as the press) hound them until they do so. Yours, etc.
Sean A O’Leary
Glasheen Road, Cork
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