A straight line through square miles of verbiage

HAVING on occasion given out through clenched teeth and in language liberally interspersed with four-letter Anglo-Saxon about some of the stuff that Terry Prone writes, I must now congratulate her on her column (February 15) about recent high-profile political resignations.

It was the most incisive and insightful of the square miles of verbiage that last week’s departures of George Lee and Deirdre de Burca engendered in the media.

All of us have inherited this democratic republic from our forebears. They, at great cost to themselves, replaced an 800-year-old colonial situation with an egalitarian democracy. Like any human institution, it is not perfect.

At present we have a party in government almost continuously for a quarter of a century. We also have a Dáil in which family dynasties predominate and almost 90% of the members are men.

The lesson to be learned from Terry Prone’s excellent column is that surely, after less than 100 years of self-rule, we should not replace a permanent foreign-sponsored elite, based on the philosophy that arrogance will get you everywhere, with a permanent native elite based on the same philosophy to which all of us would be expected to kowtow ad infinitum.

Anthony Leavy

Shielmartin Drive

Sutton

Dublin 13