Seanad no retirement home for politicians

YOUR columnist Matt Cooper says (June 4) the Seanad is “a retirement home for politicians who have lost their Dáil seats.

If he had bothered to research this claim before including it in his column, he would have found that just 10 senators out of the total of 60 are former TDs who lost their seats at the last election. You can hardly describe that as a retirement home.

Mr Cooper also calls for the abolition on the Seanad not because of any positive impact it will have on our political system, but purely because it would save €25m.

How would this sum compare with the €400m the Government is borrowing every week to bail them out of their own incompetence? Is it really worth filleting our democratic institutions purely to save a few shillings to paper over the incompetence of Fianna Fáil?

The patriots who founded our state and its institutions must be spinning in their graves at the thought of this kind of kneejerk politics.

Barry Walsh

Brooklawn

Clontarf

Dublin 3