Madam, In The Irish Times (August 19th) there is a nauseating photograph of Mr Padraig Flynn entering the Humbert School in Ballina and a report from Patsy McGarry entitled "He did it his way says Flynn at dinner honouring Haughey". Perhaps this is a Freudian slip as many of the problems associated with Mr Haughey and some of his acolytes were that they did things in exactly their own way.
In the same article we see that Mr Tim Pat Coogan offered by way of explanation of Mr Haughey's failings that they may have resulted from a car crash in the 1960s. How then can those same people credit Mr Haughey with genius after he returned to power in 1987? Some car crash! Perhaps a little bit of modesty might have prevailed at this summer school madness, and it really proves that we are truly in the middle of the silly season. - Yours, etc,
Brian MCCARTHY, Clifton Crescent, Galway.
Madam, - At last the truth about the late Charles Haughey's perjury, political treachery and social and moral duplicity has been revealed. We are all, I'm sure - and I am particularly - indebted to my old pal and sometime journalistic sparring partner, the distinguished former editor of the Irish Press, Tim Pat Coogan, for the answer to the burning political question which had dominated Irish political life for nearly 50 years.
Charlie got a bang on the head, not as a child but, as Mr Coogan points out, in a car accident. As reported in The Irish Times (August 19th) Mr Coogan believed that "Mr Haughey's later bad judgments may have been the result of a car accident he had been involved in during the 1960s when he was Minister for Justice and suffered head injuries".
For crying out loud, Tim Pat, get a grip!
And while I'm about it, apart from the outrage of the Humbert School giving the late Taoiseach a memorial dinner, former EU Commissioner Padraig Flynn offered a quote from Virgil: "O passio graviore debit deus qui quoque finum" which he translated as "the evil that is done to you God will settle in the end".
Maybe another line or two from Virgil would round this all off: "Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto," which arrives in English as "odd figures swimming were glimpsed in the waste of waters".
Yours, etc,
HENRY KELLY, Hampstead, London NW3.