Madam, - As a citizen of Dun Laoghaire for most of my 92 years, allow me to congratulate you on Patrick Yeates's moving Irishman's Diary of November 1st about James Byrne of Dun Laoghaire, who died on hunger strike for the right to join a trade union. I greatly regret not having been at the Byrne memorial, of which I knew nothing until reading page 15 of your, as usual, absorbing paper: By that time the ceremony was over.
Like James Byrne, an admirer of James Larkin, whose guest I was with my wife in 1936, from then I have always declared my politics to be "Larkinite" as a permanent admirer of a great Irishman who, as Patrick Yeates said of Byrne, rejected killing as an essential political weapon. - Yours, etc.,
JOHN de COURCY IRELAND,
Grosvenor Terrace,
Dalkey,
Co Dublin.