Sir, – I do not doubt that TDs work extremely hard, as Gill McCarthy points out (June 24th). However, the problem is not how hard they work but what they work hard at.
It seems to me that we have the balance wrong in Ireland between the time members of the Dáil spend on small local issues, and always making themselves available to their constituents, and the amount of time that they leave to dealing with the bigger, and in some ways more significant, questions of national importance. It takes a certain type of person to be good at imagining where the country is going and how it will get there.
Maybe the way our politics is run, with its emphasis on the local and the “personal touch”, does not encourage enough involvement of the kind of more visionary people this country needs for tackling the bigger issues better. – Yours, etc,
JOE McCARTHY,
Arbour Hill, Dublin 7.