Brendan Casserly (Letters, May 4) suggests that TDs should receive an annual travel allowance (paid monthly) based on the distance from the Dáil to their constituency.

I was interested to read that Mr Hogan promises to take action against those who fail to pay the household charge.

Would the resignation of Cardinal Brady be of any lasting benefit to the victims of abuse involved in this current church inquiry scandal or, indeed, any of those victims of clerical abuse everywhere?

Your reader Brendan Casserly (Zonal Solution to TDs Expenses, May 4) will, no doubt, be happy to hear that the ‘zonal’ system of managing TD’s travel allowances that he advocates has actually been in place since 2010.

As Church of Ireland members, who are lesbian, gay or bisexual, we were not consulted as the Bishop of Down and Dromore and Archbishop of Dublin drafted the resolutions on sexuality before General Synod this week, which stigmatises any sexual relationship outside opposite-sex marriage as not ‘normative’.

I think it is a good proposal from the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, to have an independent commission into all the history of what Fr Brendan Smyth did in assaulting so many children in the Republic and Northern Ireland over a 40-year period from the late 1940s to about 1990, but I think it needs to include the stories of American Catholic children he came into contact with in North Dakota and Rhode Island, and anywhere else in that country, and what the civil and Church authorities there knew about him.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped America through its Great Depression with friendly ‘fireside’ chats.

Is there a connection between the many-sided attacks on Cardinal Brady and the campaign in favour of the Fiscal Compact Treaty?

Your front page (May 5) had me somewhere between laughter and outrage.

When I read a defence of gay marriage like that of your columnist Colette Browne (May 2), then I consider two things.