Politicians get a free run on expenses issue

YOUR editorial on the “embarrassment” of members of the Government because of the Callely affair is apt (August 7).

Day after day prominent government spokespersons are paraded in the media and allowed to sound high-minded on this issue.

Giving members of a government – many of whom have been in power for 15 years – a platform to complain unchallenged about abuses of an expenses regime over which they presided is derisory.

If the expenses regime was working as it should have been, the claims that are now being complained about would not have been paid.

Yet journalists allow government politicians to wash their hands in public without raising the issue of why these expenses were paid in the first place.

Anthony Leavy

Shielmartin Drive

Sutton

Dublin 13