MARGARET POWER,
Sir, - Philip McGarry (January 14th) asks why the leaders of nationalism in the Republic are not willing to apply the same rules to themselves, in relation to sharing government with Sinn Fein, as they have urged their counterparts in the Northern Ireland Assembly to use. He fails to recognise that the circumstances in the Republic are very different from those in Northern Ireland.
It is distasteful to all law-abiding, tolerant, fair-minded people to have terrorists of any persuasion in government. But perhaps this is the price we have to pay to heal the wounds of the past and enable Northern society to take a tentative step towards becoming, one day, a liberal democracy where representatives with private armies have no place. The Republic has already reached that position and it defies logic, common sense and good political judgement to suggest, in the interests of consistency, that its Taoiseach should overlook the different political environment of the two societies.
Circumstances must surely inform policies and actions. Such expediency guided the actions of the Alliance Party last Autumn. Mr McGarry's bewilderment might be dispelled if he recognised that Mr Ahern may have been as wise, and as politically astute as the Alliance Party, in taking particular circumstances into account when deciding on appropriate action.
Edmund Burke, to whom our First Minister defers now and then, would arguably have no problem with Mr Ahern's diversity of approach: he advocated that "a different state of things requires a different conduct". - Yours, etc.,
MARGARET POWER,
Ardglass,
Co Down.