So the Government is planning to spend more taxpayer funds for international consultants to examine water fluoridation (Irish Examiner, March 11).

I disagree with the campaign to cease fluoridation of drinking water in Ireland and the recent declaration of Bantry as a ‘fluoride-free’ town.

I wish to thank the informed councillors in Cork County Council who this week voted unanimously to support a motion calling for an immediate end to artificial fluoridation of public water supplies in the Republic of Ireland.

With reference to ‘feed the city’ on Saturday, March 15, have not the city centre traders suffered enough, with flooding, extortionate rates, parking costs and now, on a bank holiday weekend, free food to be given to their customers?

The present debate on Ireland’s Corporation Tax rate is political grandstanding on the part of our European colleagues, the European Court of Justice in the leading case in the area is very clear.

The cancelling of an agreement with the UK to export wind energy and the shelving of the 40 wind farms in the midlands show that our renewable energy policy is over-ambitious.

Since our economic commentators won’t ask this, I will.

Next Monday many of our politicians, at taxpayers’ expense, will leave Ireland and abandon their posts for junkets to America and other exotic places to celebrate Ireland’s national holiday, St Patrick’s Day, with the stranger and the foreigners, leaving at home the Irish people who elect them to sink or swim in poverty and recession.

Ireland was the island of saints and scholars and now it is a nation ridden with criminals.

Banning slaughter methods in which cows and other animals have their throats slit while sensate is good.