Sir, - The price we pay for the benefit of a free press is quite high, as William F. Cooper quite rightly points out (May 9th). For not only does it serve to highlight events that some people would rather forget about - in this case the hunger strikers - it allows bad journalism containing no trait of objectivity to try and distort the reality of what happened during that historic period in Irish Republicanism.
With the notable exception of Robert Ballagh, who makes many fine, well-balanced contributions to your paper, the predictable anti-republican blame game rhetoric once again reared its ugly head on the 20th anniversary of these men. There almost seems to be a culture fostered in the Dublin media whose sole aim is to distort history in the hope of satisfying their own poorly hidden agendas. In recent times they even have attempted to slight the memory of Padraig Pearse.
It was interesting to read the Irishman's Diary of May 2nd, which focused on the life of Bobby Sands. A begrudging acknowledgment of Sands's sacrifice was followed by a detailed description of some of the prison officers murdered by IRA. Nowhere did it detail the hardship that Sands, his family or fellow prisoners endured trying to carve out some sort of a life in an environment where he was discriminated against at every turn - an environment of hatred and bigotry fostered by sectarian institutions created and copper-fastened by the intransigence of successive British governments. Security forces were held totally unaccountable for biased, partial policing, infringing one community's civil rights at every opportunity, and colluding with loyalist paramilitaries.
I cannot hide my admiration for these men. Nor can I cannot condone the actions carried out by their colleagues on the outside. But if people through ignorance, apathy or whatever reason are going to conveniently forget the conditions that surrounded these historical events and play the blame game, they should look at the roots of the problem and for once not constantly address the symptoms. - Yours, etc,
Patrick Fogarty, Church Avenue, Rialto, Dublin 8.