Newspapers should focus on the real culprits

THE emerging consensus among the national broadsheet newspapers around support for the Government is becoming unseemly.

I am a public servant who has very reluctantly accepted that we the people have to sacrifice much to rescue our country from the deliberate and reckless ineptitude of the Government and other powerful interest groups such as banks and almighty shareholder/bondholders.

However, this sacrifice is not intended to make the people who mugged us look like heroes. The national press editors have cautioned unions and public workers to be cool and calm in how they react to the destruction of their quality of life.

Is is now surely time for these editors to begin forensically to examine the nature of a society that repeats incompetent economic treason in every generation. When Charles Haughey and his friends turned the instruments of the state into a means of personal advancement, the press was mute. When planning corruption was riding high, the press was mute.

Today we are continuing to pass incomprehensible sums of scarce money to the failed, non-commercial Anglo Irish Bank – a scandal that makes planning corruption and Haughey’s offences look like child’s play.

So far I have seen no forensic journalistic work exposing this massive national financial haemorrhage. The press have perhaps rightly asked the weak and vulnerable to do their bit. As a poor and weak public servant I now ask the press to do its bit and pull these unworthy clowns to pieces.

Declan Doyle

Lisdowney

Kilkenny