In response to Vincent Browne's query as to what we citizens can do to help the dire situation in the Irish peace process, I recommend that we hold a protest and call on our fellow citizens to march on our streets for the end to this very serious impasse.

Thank you for the interview with Gerry Adams (Village 15 January). It highlighted the innate hypocrisy of Sinn Féin. For once I got the impression Adams was uneasy at the persistent repeating of questions on which he was fudging his responses.

Adams was shown to be very selective in what he wants to believe and not believe. Clearly the bank robbery was a major embarrassment to him, not only in itself, but in highlighting the frightening level of criminality within the IRA.

The Community Workers Co-operative (CWC), a national anti-poverty network, which has been an independent critical voice of government policies on anti-poverty and equality issues for 24 years, has had its funding withdrawn by Minister Noel Ahern, in what the CWC calls a sinister move to silence an effective critical voice.

The unfortunate events that have happened in the Indian Ocean since Christmas Eve have saddened the hearts of all the peoples of the world. In terms of giving, maybe the governments of Indonesia and India could stop the manufacture of their military war machines for one week. This would show their governments' real committment to their own people.

PAUL DORAN

Dublin 22

Development is a good thing. An Ireland without development would be an Ireland which stagnated, an inward-looking Ireland without aspirations or the confidence to make plans for its own future. It would be an Ireland in which our children would be taught to revere the deeds of their fathers and to undervalue their own ability to contribute.

The powerful would remain forever powerful, the poor would remain forever poor, the excluded would remain forever excluded. Nobody could want an Ireland like that.

In considering the type of Ireland we would like to live in in 2005 and into the future, we have to examine what type of society we currently live in. I would like to deal with just one aspect of current Irish society: the concept of "freedom".

A statement by Alice Leahy, Director and Co-founder TRUST, on the Homeless Agency's cavalier spending.