Letter: Old pillagers

Your article "Retiring? Try a move to Ireland..." (29 September) reports a growing number of pensioners crossing the sea to Ireland to live. I wonder if these economic emigrants have considered that if British taxation levels had been in any way similar to Irish ones over the last 25 years, all the benefits for the elderly could have been provided here?

This achingly beautiful, soft, sad, green island is still, in parts, achingly poor. Yet another migration to Ireland to take advantage of the mechanisms they have devised to care for themselves is yet another exercise in pillage they could well do without.

Bernard Coleman

Market Deeping, Lincolnshire