Madam, - Isabel Conway's report in your edition of May 6th about the remains of RAF Sgt John (Jack) Kehoe from Tullamore being finally buried with full military honours in the Commonwealth military war cemetery near Berkhout in the Netherlands brought back memories for me.
In 1997 my wife and I brought my late father-in-law, Dessie (Desmond) Lalor, from Abbeyleix to the grave of his brother, Sq Leader Ossie (Oswald) Lalor, in a similar war cemetery outside Rheinfelden, Germany, not far from the Dutch border.
Ossie was also shot down returning from a mission over Germany in 1941; he died from his wounds on the ground and was finally interred with other airmen in Rheinfelden, where the last rows of Commonwealth graves record deaths in action during late March 1945, the dying months of the second World War in Europe.
I fully appreciate the anguish of the Kehoe family as my late father-in-law was the first of the family to visit Ossie's grave (though his name is commemorated on the doors of St Canice's Cathedral in Kilkenny), because for a long time in the Republic of Ireland the families of fallen Commonwealth soldiers felt it was not appropriate, or not safe, to mention that they had lost loved ones in the Allied war against the original "Axis of Evil" - Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
The Dutch and others who suffered under their yoke in Europe and Asia have no hesitation in honouring the memory of the gallant Irish men and women from North and South who gave their lives for the liberation of many nations.Even though Rheinfelden is in Germany, it is attended to this day by Dutch volunteers.
Ossie Lalor's name and rank is now inscribed on the headstone of the Lalor family plot in the picturesque rural graveyard of the little Church of Killermogh outside Ballacola. But it is not now time that the new Taoiseach and Laois-Offaly TD Brian Cowen should lead the Irish civilian and military authorities in officially commemorating Ossie's and Jack's contribution in a war that not only defeated one of the two most evil regimes in recent world history but also in effect prevented that evil reaching the shores of the neutral Republic? - Yours, etc,
PIETER TESCH, Croydon, Surrey, England.