Sir, - Richard Ingrams commented last week, in his much read Observer column, on the implications of recent events which could adversely influence the course of the peace process. First he deals with the matter of Senator George Mitchell's right hand woman in the talks support team in Northern Ireland, Martha Pope, who has taken a substantial sum of money off the Mail on Sunday for a defamatory allegation that she was having an affair with Gerard Kelly, a former senior IRA member.
As Ingrams points out, since the allegation had no foundation whatsoever it is safe to assume that the source must have been so highly placed that the paper could run the story on it without any other attempt to check its sources. "Equally fishy" is how Ingrams finds successive appearances on TV of the informer Sean O'Callaghan, one of whose messages was that the IRA had never meant to maintain its original ceasefire. One could add to Richard Ingrams's list the fact that Adams and Kelly were both detained by the British Army without explanation, a few weeks ago.
This is certainly not the attitude of a Government trying to achieve a ceasefire. One could hardly imagine, for instance, a more inappropriate time to release O'Callaghan. Ingrams thinks that the timing suggests "the thinking of certain diehard sections of British Intelligence".
Remembering what we now know of the destabilising activities of British Intelligence over the past twenty years (even against England's own Prime Minister), it would be most helpful to have an assurance from the British Ambassador to Ireland, or her office, that the timing of these events is coincidental. - Yours, etc.,
Fairfield Park,
Rathgar,
Dublin 6.