Home boys home, in the old country

Next Monday many of our politicians, at taxpayers’ expense, will leave Ireland and abandon their posts for junkets to America and other exotic places to celebrate Ireland’s national holiday, St Patrick’s Day, with the stranger and the foreigners, leaving at home the Irish people who elect them to sink or swim in poverty and recession.

This, in my opinion, is national treason. As the voters at home cry for bread, big brother far away eats cake. It is economical spongers our leaders have turned into, wasting money we cannot afford on trips to the Big Apple, staying in the best hotels.

When they come home we will be saddled with the bills which is why we have to pay water and property taxes etc. Why should our Taoiseach have to bring a jar of shamrock to the US president in the White House on St Patrick’s Day? It undermines local and national morale, as there will be no political leaders to review our parades or take the salute. It shows where their loyalties lie. If American politicians left the US on July 4 the American people would hang them out to dry in the next election. What our leaders are doing going on these junkets is an act of betrayal. We as people and as a nation will never be taken seriously as long as we let our leaders do a runner to foreign places as we let outsiders in their foreigners parades show us up as a nation of drunkards, aided and abetted by absentee Irish political leaders. If we are to mature as a people and a country then we must shake off the green Paddywhackery image that Americans and foreigners have of us.

That we don’t have pigs in the kitchen, we don’t believe in leprechauns and that we have grown as a people and are far removed from our colonial past. That we can read and write and are an educated people and understand world events and we tip our hats to no one. We are an equal race to others as we do away with the Darby O’Gill image. Our leaders don’t do us any service by play acting up to what we are not, then screw us for taxes when they come home.

Martin Ford

St Anne’s Terrace

Sligo