Sir, – I have just watched a short video that a friend sent me on WhatsApp and it starts with “there is only one thing worse than being Irish and that’s not being Irish”.It made me think. We are told that we are a very successful and affluent country so I ask myself some questions that have been asked time and again over the years. There are of course many, many more. Please add to this shortlist. Why are any of our children still waiting on life-changing surgery? Why are staff who looked after me so well in hospital over the past few years being harassed on their way to and from work?Why are houses in every rural area, every city, town and village all around the country lying vacant when the number of people needing accommodation, both public and private, is growing every year?Why in a country with so much coastline have we not harnessed the wind and waves to their maximum? Why is the cost of childcare making potential parents think twice about starting or expanding their family?Why is it acceptable for every public project to run out of control?After 14 years being taught our Irish language, why am I unable to understand An Nuacht or indeed any programme as Gaelige but can still recite the Modh Coinníollach and Aimsir Chaite, Laithreach, etc, etc, for many briathra rialtra agus irregular verbs?The above are only a small start on the questions that we all have but the solutions are more difficult.My last question sort of answers itself and it is this. Why do we still believe that the people who we elect every few years to run the country will solve the problems? The answer, I think, is we don’t believe they will solve the problems but they won’t do as bad a job as the alternative crowd would. – Yours, etc,JOE GLACKIN,The Bramblings,Dublin 5.Academic integritySir, – Your recent coverage of allegations against a Cambridge professor concerning research integrity was timely in signposting a need for broader public discourse (“Star scholar Jason Arday resigns from Cambridge amid questions about his life and career”, August 6th). Governance mechanisms must be robust enough to ensure that the highest research standards are maintained in the age of AI. Flawed research is clearly not a new phenomenon as demonstrated by the retracted Lancet paper linking the MMR vaccine to autism. The consequences of this played a significant role in vaccine hesitancy. Retracting the paper did not undo this damage but rather fed a cycle of distrust, in science itself and the experts who produce it. The impact of research on myriad aspects of daily life is typically invisible. In child and adolescent psychiatry, however, the real life effects of flawed research are particularly evident. When erroneous data based on bad science enter public discourse, these findings may be absorbed into the knowledge base that AI systems draw on and reproduce. The contagion effect of bad science can thus be compounded, appearing as fact in spaces where children, teenagers and parents seek trustworthy answers.The potential value of AI to research, and by extension to human progress, is immense. An attuned, engaged public alongside rigorous safeguards will determine whether that potential is fulfilled or corrupted. – Yours, etc,FIONA McNICHOLAS, Professor of child and adolescent psychiatry,School of Medicine, UCD,BLÁNAID GAVIN,Consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist,School of Medicine, UCD.Violence and independenceSir, – Stephen Collins traces Irish independence to political campaigning running from Daniel O’Connell’s election in 1828 to the First Dáil in 1918. The dates are right. The story in between is more contested than that framing allows (“We need to kill the idea that violence led to independence”, August 7th).O’Connell’s own success came only after his 1828 election for Clare raised the prospect of unrest serious enough that the government judged emancipation the safer course. His later Repeal campaign, conducted entirely within the law, was ended when the government banned the Clontarf meeting in 1843 and imprisoned him. Constitutional politics met a hard limit there, well before 1916, whether it was winning or losing.The year 1916 deserves to be judged on its own terms, since it was not, at the time, an act with any popular mandate behind it. The Rising was widely unpopular in Dublin as it happened, and the men who led it did not claim to speak for an electorate. What changed opinion was the response to it: the executions of the leaders over the following weeks turned a minority rebellion into a cause, and that shift fed directly into Sinn Féin’s landslide two years later. Collins is right that 1916 does not itself supply the democratic case for independence. But the manner of its suppression is part of why the 1918 result looked the way it did.That election is where the stronger argument lies. The Dáil it produced was declared illegal and put down under martial law, a lawful mandate met force in exactly the way Clontarf had been. The War of Independence followed a mandate already won and then refused, which is a different thing from violence substituting for politics.Calling that a myth requires a version of events more comfortable than what actually happened.The Troubles were fought against the same adversary, but in a fundamentally different context: a partitioned North still under British rule, an already sovereign state to the south, and no election result comparable to 1918 behind it. Treating it as part of the same lineage as 1916 muddies rather than clarifies the point Collins wants to make.A State that taught the O’Connell and Parnell tradition without also teaching what happened when Westminster set aside the result of a general election would be leaving out the part of the story that actually explains 1919. – Yours, etc,RORY HEARTY,Newry, Co Down.Background music is tone deafSir, – I am sitting at an outside table at a west Cork hotel overlooking the sea. It’s a sunny day and all seems well – except for the intrusive, repetitive, loud, inane and really irritating background “music” that plays on endlessly. And so it is in so many cafes, bars, hotel lounges, shopping malls, hairdressers, etc, all over the country. People who go to so much trouble setting up these types of businesses clearly think it obligatory to play some kind of moronic, inane “music” when it would be so much better to not have any such background noise. Yes, I know that the musically illiterate aren’t bothered by all this but there you go. The torture will no doubt continue for those who have a more discerning musical intelligence. – Yours, etc, ANTHONY HARTNETT,Bishopstown,Cork.Time to tax the coffee cup?Sir, – Despite initial scepticism and reservations surrounding the deposit system applied to drinks cans and plastic bottles, there is no doubt that the initiative is a resounding success. The qualifying discarded containers are sought after currency as evidenced by the number of “bounty hunters” in operation together with households who have harnessed the practice of returning in bulk.The absence of the “bounty” qualifying containers has, however, highlighted another problem – discarded coffee cups.I know that some of the most responsible coffee sellers encourage reusable cups but the quantity of indiscriminately dumped coffee cups is a real blight.Why not apply the same bounty to single use coffee/ice-cream containers? For those who still want to dump, there will be plenty of willing people ready to collect and redeem them. – Yours, etc,BRIAN MURPHY, Templeogue,Dublin.A Government bonds proposalSir, – There’s been plenty of speculation about the Government’s new investment vehicle to encourage Irish deposits away from the banks and into what is, in effect, the world casino that is the stock market.A simpler, better solution would be to let Irish taxpayers buy and hold Irish government bonds tax-free. Over the next five years or so, the government will borrow roughly ¤100 billion and pay out about ¤3 billion a year in interest (at 3-3.5 per cent). If it designed a fund giving taxpayers access to new government bond issuance, they’d earn that 3 per cent+ a year themselves – and the interest the State would otherwise pay to foreign investors would stay in the country, drastically reducing the real cost of borrowing.Everyone wins, except the banks and the stockbrokers and insurance companies that would otherwise collect fees on equity vehicles that, at current market valuations, would be a pretty risky place to put people’s savings. – Yours, etc,CHARLES McLAUGHLIN, Stoneybatter, Dublin 7. Christian Brothers Sir, – To answer Bernie Linnane’s question (Letters, August 6th) the Christian Brothers are no longer responsible for the 100 schools to which she refers. The trusteeship and ownership of the school buildings, as well as the overall responsibility for upholding the school ethos, were transferred to a lay trust called the Edmund Rice Schools Trust (ERST) in 2008. – Yours, etc,SEÁN Ó BRITAIN,Drogheda,Co Louth.Not wild about wild bushesSir, – Recent correspondents have debated the merits of compulsory wearing helmets by cyclists from a road safety perspective. The various Dublin local authorities have come up with a novel way to render helmets absolutely essential.Having invested millions in impressive cycle ways, the councils have failed to maintain the paths and, over the summer, have allowed adjacent hedgerows extend their tentacles at head level. The wild rose bushes are a particular menace. A cyclist who attempts to travel to or from the city via the N11 cycle path without a helmet will regret their folly and will literally look like they were dragged through a hedge backwards.Whether or not it was their intention, the local authorities have made the wearing of cycling helmets, to adopt the phrase used for the MyGov card, compulsory, although not mandatory. – Yours, etc,DAVID LOUGHLIN,Dublin 6.Another question answeredSir, – In his letter (Letters, August 7th) in reply to mine (Letters, August 5th) a spokesperson for Allianz asks if my assertion concerning the scale of Allianz Group investments in Israeli sovereign debt is from data “cited in a recent Middle East news outlet”. I can confirm that the data is from an article which appeared in Middle East Eye (Revealed: How a German-US corporate giant became the world’s largest foreign financier of Israel’s wars) published on June 19th, 2026. The article quotes research by the Netherlands-based financial research organisation, Profundo. – Yours, etc,ÉAMONN MEEHAN,Chair, Sadaka-The Ireland Palestine Alliance,Blackrock,Co Dublin.Missing the pointSir, – Your editorial on August 6th has yet again missed the point. There is no obligation on individual solicitors to work under the new system of criminal legal aid which was introduced unilaterally by the Minister for Justice. The criminal defence sector is outsourced to private practitioners who have to absorb all of the overheads associated with running an office in a fee structure set by the Government and not index-linked. Those solicitors who want to work in the criminal legal aid system need to be working in a system that functions properly. Why should solicitors be complicit in a flawed system that they know is going to fail? The flat fee system proposed by the Minister is neither workable nor fair. There is no nuance, flexibility or exemptions in the scheme. Other jurisdictions have much more nuance in their criminal legal aid systems. In their systems, the legal aid payment can take account of factors such as the nature of the offences, the nature of the offender, whether an interpreter/psychiatric report was required, delays caused by the prosecution, etc.The report produced by the Department of Justice recognised many operational pressures in the District Court that contribute to delays. Despite this, the Minister took the easy option of blaming the defence lawyers for delays. It’s time for him to recognise that the vast majority of defence solicitors do not “game the system”, and stop blaming them for the actions of a few bad actors. – Yours, etc,ANNE DOLAN,Retired defence solicitor,Co Cavan.Giving creditSir, – After such a long hot July, with (very) minimal rainfall, the authorities who manage our water supplies deserve the highest of praise. How would any other business like it if supply evaporated while demand soared, and the expectation was that the show must somehow be kept on the road? – Yours, etc,BRIAN QUIGLEY,Dublin 9.