Letter: You do not have control over your own destiny if you do not have control of the nation's monetary base

When Irish nationalists repeat, ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’, or ‘Our day will come’, do they mean when Irish monetary policy will be taken away from the European Central Bank and given to elected representatives of the Dáil Éireann?

You don't have control over your own destiny if you don't have control of the nation's monetary base. Similarly, the Bank of England has had operational independence since 1997 which is why HM Treasury owes the Bank of England a couple of trillion pounds – and rising. If Parliament was sovereign, Parliament could write off any debts. So much for the clarion call, ‘No surrender’ used by the other side. We surrendered decades ago.

It's the same in the USA where the US Federal Reserve Act of 1913 gave monetary power to an independent quasi-government agency, the Federal Reserve. So even the ‘land of the free’ isn't free in the sense of controlling its own destiny through control over the monetary base.

I wouldn't say we're ruled by financiers, but governments are certainly not in control, and that's who we vote for every four to five years. It's the same story with health as you might have seen over the last few years. We've given control away to global health bodies. Our own experienced doctors and our own established health centres and health services are somehow deemed no longer able to decide what's right for patients when they've been doing all right since 1948.

A more appropriate slogan might be, ‘That's another fine mess we've gotten ourselves into’, but sadly, cultural conditioning has made most people blind to these revelations.

Louis Shawcross, Co Down