Sir, – Listening to the interminable bickering of British politicians at Westminster this week, they might care to heed the words of John Donne, published almost 400 years ago in 1624 as Devotions upon Emergent Occasions : "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe, every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse ..." – Yours, etc,
JUSTIN MacCARTHY,
Sandymount,
Co Dublin.