Taxpayer footing bill for preferential education

Your editorial (Mar 6) made a gallant effort in defence of the practice of taxpayers footing the bill for the funding of private fee-paying schools.

However, I believe the last line in your argument was perhaps also your weakest — “That is how our capitalist world works and to pretend otherwise is dishonest and naive”.

Would that be the same capitalist world as being managed by our present and last governments that brought us such gifts as mass unemployment, mass emigration, a suicide epidemic, home repossessions, mass gas and electric disconnections, children going to school hungry, home and water taxes — the list goes on?

Should the Irish taxpayer really be asked now to continue to pay for other people’s preferential education, on top of what they are already paying for other people’s bank debts?

Kieran McCarthy

Lower Midleton Street

Cobh