Dear Editor, I very much welcome the emergence of the Reform Alliance and hope it will grow into a new political party. At present there is no political party in which Catholics can participate, a party where their insights and giftedness are fully appreciated. This has created an enormous democratic deficit in the Irish political scene. At best a person of faith has been driven to the margins, at worst they have nobody to vote for. We do not have to look very far to see the absence of a Catholic moral compass in Irish political life. A political life which targets the unborn for killing, which is more interested in traffic flow than in housing the homeless, which starts the new year with a record number of murders. A shallow happy holiday style XMAS message where Christ dare not be mentioned. An inclusiveness that includes everything and everyone except Christ. But Catholics know where Christ is excluded so too are the weak, the poor, the vulnerable. This is what the champagne socialists and nominal Catholics cannot grasp. They have turned their backs on the one who has the answers, from whom all good things come. And for this we are paying a deadly price. We need a new political party like the desert needs rain.
Yours etc,
Gerard Rooney.
Ballymacoda
Co. Cork.