Don’t shame us for not having the time to care

IT was naive of your columnist Fergus Finlay to accept the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) as a measure of goodness within any society, and specifically modern Irish society (Irish Examiner, November 14).

In fact, the index is wrong and Irish people in general don’t feel any sense of ‘well-being’ simply because they don’t have time. They are too busy getting up at the crack of dawn, rushing their 2.4 children into criminally expensive healthcare, racing to join the early morning road-rage, grabbing their sustaining cappucino before commencing a 12-hour, stressed-out journey into the madness that is third millennium ‘work’. Later on, they return their ulcer to the rush hour, made more maddening by the inane soundbites from commercial radio stations.

No, Irish society doesn’t have time to care about the privatisation of health care for the elderly.