Madam, – Stephen Collins (Opinion, October 3rd) referred to the discussion on the RTÉ programme Frontlineas a "bad-mannered assault on Colm McCarthy by a range of vested interests". It is significant that Mr Collins should describe those of the audience on September 28th who were critical of the Government's pillaging of the public purse – and Mr McCarthy's role in that process – as "vested interests".
The Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes has proposed, among a wide range of other measures, reduction of social welfare rates and child benefit payments, raising the fee for attendance at the A E departments of hospitals to €125, reducing the number of Garda stations by half, cutting the number of special needs assistants in schools and reducing capitation grants for primary schools.
Your correspondent would have been better employed trying to understand the destructive effects of the McCarthy committee’s scattergun economics, and how it would ravage the lives of many individuals and families. The report itself is little more than a collection of each Government department’s wish-list of savings stapled together and dressed up in a shiny cover. The constantly-repeated mantra about the Government having to borrow €400 million each week tells us nothing, beyond what a child with a calculator could work out by dividing €20 billion by the number of weeks in the year.
I attended the RTÉ programme about which Mr Collins has become so exercised and I witnessed no “bad mannered” contributions by any member of the audience and no “assault” on Colm McCarthy.
However I did hear Mr McCarthy assert that the banking crisis and the public debt were separate, unrelated issues, and that the property developers who brought about the sorry collapse of the country’s finances should not be asked to contribute to paying off this massive debt as they are broke. Neither assertion would withstand scrutiny in any serious debate. Such nonsense doesn’t say a lot about Mr McCarthy’s understanding of economics, but it does tell us where he stands in the current political discourse.
Mr Collins states that “debasement of political debate has now become a really serious problem”. He is correct about that. – Yours, etc,