PD polices were vintage Thatcher

I WISH to take up the challenge of Michael Burns (Letters, July 24) to name five PD policies which could be described as Thatcherite.

Mr Burns offers a bottle of wine for each one named, so here goes:

1. The PDs were the strongest advocates of the privatisation of State companies such as Eircom and Aer Lingus. This mirrored exactly Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation of British Telecom and British Airways, with similarly disastrous consequences there and here.

2. Mary Harney’s thinly veiled Eurosceptic assertion that Ireland is “spiritually a lot closer to Boston than Berlin” could have come directly from Thatcher’s famous speech where she declared that “Europe will never be like America ...”

3. Michael McDowell’s infamous statement that our economy “demands ... inequality in some respects to function” is scarily similar to Thatcher’s famous statement that “there is no such thing as society”.

4. The PDs heartily endorsed the introduction of tax individualisation which has proved to be anti-family and resulted in the conscription of women into the workforce. Margaret Thatcher achieved an almost identical result when she scrapped tax allowances for married couples during her time in Downing Street.

5. And most recently, the plan for hospital co-location, enriching property developers and cementing our two-tier health system, mirrors the introduction of the ‘internal market’ into the British NHS by Thatcher in 1990.

This introduced competition to the British system and has had detrimental effects on the solvency of public hospitals.

I look forward to five bottles of wine from Mr Burns, and will open them in celebration of the demise of the PDs which, thanks to Tom Parlon, may come a lot sooner than expected.

Barry Walsh

Brooklawn

Clontarf

Dublin 3