Sir, - Here at St Nicholas's we are glad to welcome upwards of 25,000 visitors each year to the finest medieval church west of the Shannon. To enable us to do that we rely very much on the initiative and friendliness of the members of our FAS scheme. But the wages which our different employees receive are embarrassingly dissimilar. Two married men with two and four dependent children receive respectively £148 and £178 a week, while a single mother with one child receives £182.65 in addition to a quite substantial rent allowance.My question to our public representatives is this: did we as a community really intend to produce a situation where those who have accepted the responsibilities of marriage are actually worse off than single parents? The only way in which they could be better off is if their wives were to go out to work. Do we want that to be the norm in our society? - Yours, etc., Very Rev Dr Robert B.
MacCarthy,Rector, St Nicholas' Collegiate Church, Lombard Street, Galway.