A chara, – My morning coffee was interrupted with a spluttering fury and dumbfounded incredulity upon reading the Letters page. Cian Caffrey (April 18th) espouses the wonder of running away to Australia, after acquiring a sufficient education in an Irish university, to avoid the inconvenience of dealing with the economic woes which have befallen the country.
Can he seriously advocate the practice of exploiting a third-level education, paid for by the State, and taking flight abroad upon qualification, disregarding the country which invested heavily in his education?
Such a crass, self-centred view is surely symptomatic of the endemic greed sown in the boom years, flowering as a sense of undue self-entitlement and cavalier disdain for the hard work the Republic requires to re-attain economic independence and stability.
With close to 15 per cent of the workforce unemployed, the defeatist, head-in-the-sand stance of Mr Caffrey is an antipode of the requisite commitment. In order to reaffirm the pride and self-worth of our country as a whole I feel we need to find and invoke a sense of communal need and purpose, committing ourselves to our shared future without recourse to flight abroad. As Mr Caffrey says, Kevin Ryan (April 15th) has a choice. Stay and rebuild from the ashes the country of his birth whose independence was delivered after the course of centuries of unnecessarily bloody conflict, or jet off the sunnier climes because the pay is better. – Is mise,