Sir, - You are greatly to be congratulated on publishing in some detail the fascinating analysis by your marine correspondent of the possibilities of the infant Irish seaweed industry (July 7th).
Some of us have for years been urging those in a position to do so, to create such an analysis and at once follow up what it demonstrated. Unfortunately we had not the money needed to open up this potentially invaluable industry, only a stubborn patience to go on shouting into deaf ears, which, as we always hoped, have now begun to hear. Today, the country is allegedly floating on floods of money, some of which must surely be diverted to this truly constructive purpose.
Incidentally, should not Lorna Siggins's article have been on your front page? Is not The Irish Times becoming a bit too obsessed with millionaire property- or potential property-owners? Two weeks ago you used the biggest headline I remember since 1945 to tell us that a member of an Irish family had sold her stylish London house for £6 million. Today (July 7th) your front page is full of news about individuals willing to spend millions for a house in Dalkey, and this is at a time when thousands of decent Irish people are put in a position where they have no hope of buying a house at all. Your treatment of the mob of searchers for mansions costing millions sharply recalled the words of the late Pandit Nehru when he was here: he did not know which he hated the more, the poverty of the poor or the vulgarity of the rich. Please stop giving so much of your space to the latter to the exclusion of the former, the victims of, rather than the riders on, the already ageing Celtic Tiger. - Yours, etc., John de Courcy
Ireland, Dalkey, Co Dublin.