Paying the price for reckless monetary policy

I FIND it extraordinary that Sean Scully (Letters, August 11) somehow manages to lay the blame for Britain’s public disorder at the feet of Margaret Thatcher, who resigned over 20 years ago.

He seems to have forgotten that Labour ruled Britain most of the time since then, and their fiscal and monetary policies were anything but Thatcherite.

Our fiscal difficulties lay largely in the reckless and spendthrift policies pursued by Fianna Fáil from 2000 onwards. The current imbalance between government revenue and expenditure is greatly exacerbated by the growth in the public sector, and by a benchmarking arrangement with public sector unions.