Madam, - J.O. Ryan (September 9th) contends that Ireland's missionary role is ending. Not so. His remarks are hardly fair to the growing number of "new" missionaries from all classes of Irish society who spend time on the mission fields of the Third World.
These are the doctors, nurses and many other professional people who take time from busy schedules to bring their experience and expertise to setting up clinics or advising on new buildings for the broken peoples of the world. They are the workers with voluntary organisations spread across devastated countries.
More especially they are the young people - the doctors, nurses, lawyers, engineers, technicians, teachers, pharmacists, veterinary surgeons, skilled workers and artisans - who put their careers on hold to work in intolerable conditions and sometimes dangerous situations.
Ia radically changed and ever more rapidly changing world, let us pay tribute to the old order of things and remember the traditional missionaries, many of them still in the field. But let us welcome the new order of Missionary Ireland is now sending abroad. Let us be proud of them. I am confident Bishop Donal Lamont would have been. - Yours, etc.,
PHIL O'KEEFFE, Landscape Gardens, Churchtown, Dublin 14.