Madam, - The President 's visit to Belfast is at once insulting and laughable. For months now Catholic communities across the North have been suffering a campaign of intimidation, violence and murder at the hands of unionist paramilitaries while the supposedly reformed police force up there sits on its hands. Homes have been burned, schools and churches have been vandalised.
Unionist paramilitaries are suspected in at least two murders, that of 25-year-old Lisa Dorrian and 15-year-old Thomas Devlin - and that's apart from their own internecine feud (which usually resolves itself through intensified attacks on Catholics). Yet, after all, that Mrs McAleese planned to visit a school on the Shankill Road in Belfast, which ironically had to be cancelled because of unionist violence.
Mrs McAleese, who always talks about inclusivity, would be better issuing a call of solidarity with the many victims of systematic unionist aggression in places such as Ahoghill, Co Antrim, or Ardoyne, Belfast. That this insult fails even to register among Southern politicians and the media is shameful and depressing for its apparent lack of awareness and indifference.
Mrs McAleese's notorious comparison of unionist persecution of Catholics, which has been an inherent feature of the northern State since its inception and continues to this day, to Nazi pogroms against Jews was in fact correct. It wasn't a lapse in judgment that she spoke the truth then, but a lapse in her cloying pandering to Northern unionists, a contemptible mindset shared by many others in the South.
Reconciliation is all very well. But what about a courageous stand against injustice, for truth and with people who daily suffer an onslaught of bigotry and hatred? - Yours, etc,
FINIAN CUNNINGHAM, Whitestown, Co Louth.