Faith moves us from greed to God

Four years after giving her famous “tip-toeing back to Church” talk in Clare, you tell us (November 28) that ombudsman Emily O’Reilly was back there again with some more memorable gems of comment and advice: “Fortunes overnight have vanished... nothing seems stable, not even the banks... we revelled in the blingy wealth... a near national obsession with handbags... a belief that if some people weren’t able to fend for themselves that somehow they didn’t deserve to be helped.”

She added: “In poorer times, we presented a warm, spiritual, friendly face to the world even as we hid away anything that sullied that image.”

And in the context of the bizarre ban on mention of Christmas in an Irish radio advert, the president of secular France is even talking about breaking with the schizophrenia of secularism and invoking France’s Christian roots.