Sir, - During the war of Independence (1918-21) Lloyd George boasted that he had built a "paper wall" around Ireland. The death of Terence Mac Swiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, on hunger strike in Brixton prison, broke that perfidious newsprint barrier. Today, together with such a barrier, one of radio and television has been established, facing both inwards and outwards. The result, as in Hamlet's Denmark, is that the Irish people have become "muddied, thick and unwholesome in their thoughts". Thus, every issue affecting national integrity is forcibly restricted to eclectic discussion on a false antithesis.
Did the Irish National Congress, for example, spare a thought for the fact that every Orange Lodge in Ireland protested against the Act of Union in 1801, when it demonstrated against the Orange Order's commemorative plaque being unveiled with the benediction of Dublin's Lord Mayor, Mary Freehill? Did she, for that matter, apprehend that the stand-off at Drumcree and the Garvahy Road represents a macabre historial role reversal, in as much as the forebears of the Dissenters at Drumcree represented Irish republicanism and those of the Catholic nationalism of the Garvahy Road monarchism? These are the only "two cultures".
And while the whole national issue needs rational resolution, the Green Party wastes its time on the issue of flouridation, already resolved in a Supreme Court case in the 1960s. Why not protest at the presence of sodium chloride in sea water, since this is compounded of a most corrosive metal sodium and a poisonous gas chlorine?
Again, the issue of the refugees, the responsibility of the post-colonial imperial powers of Europe and the US is posed as one between racism and anti-racism to the detriment of the solution of Irish emigration and the cardboard boxes, while those well-ensconced at home, with the grovelling gratitude of nepotism, are made to feel grateful to the same imperial powers for taking in our deoraithe - pardon me, "huddled masses".
There appears no end, as with Hamlet's Denmark, to this "rotten state" of Ireland. - Yours, etc.,
Derry Kelleher, Greystones, Co Wicklow.