PAUL JOYCE,
Sir, - It is now just over year since the terrorist attacks which so devastated New York City. Recently I have observed a growing criticism of America in the letters pages of your newspaper. These attacks are of an increasingly unsophisticated nature. In past days America has been accused of being a "sick" society, of not caring about the deaths of Afghan civilians, of environmental recklessness, of war-mongering breast-beating.
This saddens me greatly. Five years ago I left Ireland for New York, and a better life. I find this city supremely exciting, and its inhabitants to be some of the most culturally sophisticated and tolerant friends I have ever met. They have accepted me graciously.
I started my own business, which was encouraged by the entrepreneurial spirit of business persons here. They were sincere. My wife and I have just had our first baby, who was greeted to this world by the visits of my American neighbours. They were sincere. I have just completed the exam for citizenship, as I shook the hand of a politician and a judge who greeted their new fellow citizens, I looked in their eyes and thought "They are sincere".
For those sections of Irish society who would judge us by caricatured stereotypes, I think you do us a disservice, and implore you with all my heart to look again. An attack on New York City is not an attack on an uncivilized loudmouth, it is an attack on something far grander, the melting pot of all races and all cultures. I believe New York to be a bold social experiment, a vision of a multicultural future for all humanity. For it to be trivialised so, saddens me.
This is not to say that all criticism is unwanted - a social experiment on the scale of America is bound to have flaws. Indeed the scientific nature of this society demands criticism of what it does wrong, in order to right it and move forward.
The countrymen of my spirit are now American, but the countrymen of my heart will always be Irish. I ask of Irish critics: a little more analysis, a little more understanding, a little more humanity. - Yours, etc.,
PAUL JOYCE,
Yonkers,
New York,
USA.