Minister Aodháin O’Riordáin in a Dáil reply (July 9) on the proposed NAMA auction of the last extant 1916 battlefield referred to no’s 14 -17 Moore Street as being “the only pre-1916 buildings on the street”.

Pat Daly (Letters, July 13) is another who trots out “Greek debt” as a catch-all slogan without actually understanding where this debt came from and that it is made up of two unrelated elements.

I have just read the book Whispering Hope, the harrowing account of five wonderful women who were confined in the Magdalene Laundries.

“Everywhere, welfare authorities were calling in the unemployed for questioning and examination as to whether they were fit for work, those who were deemed fit were drafted into……schemes of one kind or another; those who failed to appear were taken off the register, and their payments stopped. Rent supplements were cut, payments to carers for the old and sick for medication were slashed. A working-class woman who asked the welfare officer for help in paying for her 75-year-old mother, whom she cared for at home, was told that the state would no longer pay for such people, who were nothing but a burden on the national community’’.

Mr. Liam O’Mahony asks whether those “attired in clerical garb” at a demonstration were victims of hate crime as a result of “aggressive and confrontational” behaviour towards them.

The problem in the Greek economy came to a head because of a failure by successive governments there to collect taxes and a reluctance on the part of the electorate to contribute towards austerity measures.

Michael Clifford appears surprisingly ameliorative in his appraisal of Brian Cowen’s “performance” at the banking inquiry (Opinion, July 9.)

Most economists believe austerity is the opposite from what is needed for a depressed economy.

Nothing is likely to have gladdened the hearts of the criminal gangs who control smuggling of displaced people in the Mediterranean region than the spectacle of three government ministers traipsing all the way to Malta for a spurious media photo opportunity aboard the LE Eithne.

Kevin McCarthy claims (Letters, Irish Examiner, July 7) that advocating for a one-state solution in Palestine and Israel “meets the EU’s definition of anti-Semitism”.