I Don't Want My Sons to Grow Up in a Country They Want to Leave. Like I Did. Like You Did, Brian. I Love Ireland and It's Up to You to Keep the Lights On [Eire Region]

Daily Mail › February 10, 2009

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Summary

DEAR Brian, it was your birthday earlier this month. I didn't get around to sending you a card. I guess I had one or two things on my mind at the time: my pension disappearing, my E650 gas bill, my horrendously recurring nightmare in which George Lee has got into my house, my sense that my children will grow up to face emigration, as I did in my time, and as many of my friends did, and many of yours did too. So I thought I'd drop you a line just to say a belated Many Happy Returns. (Not only electoral returns, of course).

So how's tricks anyway? You're looking a bit stressed. I can't say I blame you. I know your job is tough. The problem in Ireland, it seems to me, is not only the downturn itself. It's the dismal, useless, flagrantly pathetic failure of your Government to provide anything approaching leadership. If you had asked a panel of experts to design a situation in which citizens would feel nothing but misery and powerlessness, they would come up with a scenario not unlike the one we're in now. In Britain, Gordon Brown has managed to convince people that there is a way out of the grief, that there are things they can actually do. In America, President Obama's whole campaign was based on that notion. But here people are beginning to feel the point of the Government is to issue surly proclamations of compulsory despair, lightly seasoned with pepperings of heartache.

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Extract

I Don't Want My Sons to Grow Up in a Country They Want to Leave. Like I Did. Like You Did, Brian. I Love Ireland and It's Up to You to Keep the Lights On [Eire Region]

Your Government is making people passive. It's making them afraid. If we were genuinely all in it together, I think people wouldn't mind quite so much. They'd be willing, out of affinity or some sort of communal feeling, to sacrifice even more than they are. But we're not in it together, as the Budget...

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