Madam, – Elaine Byrne’s column on nation-building (Opinion, November 3rd) should be compulsory reading for everybody in a position of leadership and influence in our country today and a copy should always be at hand. I attended a conferring ceremony of the National College of Art and Design in the O’Reilly Hall in UCD on Monday afternoon to present a prize to an excellent education graduate. The future we present to these gifted young people is, as Ms Byrne infers, very bleak.
Her focus on an America with great economic difficulties striving to re-imagine its healthcare should inspire us to start living again and improve our society. The new RTÉ programme presented by Pat Kenny, with a deliberately divided and fractious audience, reflects our current state of national divisiveness. Is there any other civilised nation that allows its public servants to be vilified and seeks to create a spurious division between private and public employment?
We tried isolation for many decades, doom and gloom in the 1980s and now we seem hell bent on a decade of divisions.
Ms Byrne’s masterpiece was published on a day when the David Begg-inspired Irish Congress of Trade Unions recovery strategy provides an opportunity for national unity and recovery.
Seán Lemass ended the isolation; optimism eventually dispelled the gloom and doom, but it is surely in all our interests to end the current divisiveness. Ms Byrne is correct, negativity will not save us or facilitate the nation-building that will create a fairer and equitable society. – Yours, etc,