The government is quite correct to identify the extent to which messages are being manipulated in the media at present. It should know – the vast majority of the manipulation is coming from the cabinet table.

The late Seamus Brennan told the Greens, when negotiating this current government: "You're playing senior hurling now." It would seem that the hurling has become quite dirty, and is only going to get dirtier. It would be too much to expect the government to come out like men and women and declare with courage, in straight language, what it is going to cut and exactly how, before the summer holidays. Instead, it will wait for the summer holidays and throw bricks through various poor people's windows, then run away like the 'black and tan' politicians they truly are. Only if it is chased down the proverbial road, as it was by the older people of Ireland when their medical entitlements were threatened, will it think twice about victimising poor and vulnerable groups.

We should be in no doubt that the cutting agenda of the next three budgets is going to hit the most vulnerable hardest. The alternative would be to hit the wealthiest. The degree to which we all casually accept that the rich are immune from any harm over the course of this crisis is symptomatic of the success of the right-wing nature of the political discourse over the past 50 years. Rather than a proper debate on how to share the pain, the cowards in this government are running their ideas past the media they claim is misrepresenting them.

We will know our true nature as a people by the time the final whistle blows in this most dirty of senior hurling matches.

Declan Doyle,

Kilkenny