One day last year I went around to my neighbour and announced that he would start paying my mortgage with immediate effect, and that he had no choice in the matter.

There is much debate about the facts and figures associated with Ireland’s receipt of liquidity funding from the Troika and the repayment commitments for both public borrowings and that which we have borrowed to repay private bank debts.

I totally agree with Fianna Fáil leader Michéal Martin that Ireland should be given an opportunity to vote on the European Fiscal Treaty.

In relation to your picture and article on last Wednesday’s Examiner of a Peruvian tribe sitting on the edge of a river bank — this tribe, and others like them, have been living in the jungle area uncontacted for thousands of years and now, apparently, due to logging of trees and natural gas exploration, they have come in contact with modern man who through contact has given them diseases that could kill the tribes.

While reading your report that 16,000 households had their power cut off in 2011, I wonder if Minister Phil Hogan would tell me are those cut off who own their house still deemed able to afford the household charge?

Declan Doyle is probably right when he says that any debate on the EU treaty changes will be “peppered with terminological inexactitudes of the greatest magnitude” (Letters, Feb 2).

Many commentators decry the exodus of senior civil servants from their posts. Their experience, we are told, will be a great loss.

Who would have thought that a government which presented itself as the saviours of the Irish people in Feb 2011, would find itself running away from the Irish people in Feb 2012?

Mary Harney said all our centres of excellence would be open in 2010.

Apparently we have another new treaty which requires members of the eurozone to set up a legislative ‘debt brake’ and if they don’t adhere to it, as yet undetermined sanctions will be automatically applied.