Madam, - Your star columnist Kevin Myers deserves tremendous acclaim for his masterly assessment of the court appearance and verdict in the hearing of the case of a man whose drunken and wantonly reckless driving caused the death of a father and his daughter of 16, as well as of another man who was a passenger in the speeding car (An Irishman's Diary, December 18th).
The judge at Trim Circuit Court saw fit to impose a sentence of five years' imprisonment on a charge of dangerous driving after the defendant had pleaded not guilty. After his penetrating analysis of the kind of legal double-speak and vacuous comment that characterised the outcome of the trial, Kevin Myers concluded:
"We've failed Mary McEvoy; we've failed the memory of her dead husband and her dead child. Their lives, her life, must have some value, and this can only be measured in the condign severity with which we treat the man who chose to behave as he did, spreading ruination and death, yet who then denied responsibility for his deeds."
The legal system may have failed in its task, but surely on behalf of society there exists in Kevin Myers a columnist whose sense of outrage at what can pass for retributive justice in our courts deserves the highest commendation.
Or, as Shakespeare put it: "For what he has he gives, what thinks he shows". How fortunate that he is provided with a forum on such tragic happenings as this. -
Yours, etc.,
DES CRYAN,
Blackrock,
Co Dublin.