Madam, - David Adams (Opinion, March 31st) agrees with Tony Blair's linking of religiously motivated Islamic terrorism with Protestant murders of Catholics in Northern Ireland.
While I greatly admire Mr Adams's desire to confront the beam in his own community's eye, I believe that both he and Tony Blair are profoundly mistaken in this instance. The conflict in Ireland has little or nothing to do with religion, other than as a handy way of identifying which tribe you belong to.
Catholics and Protestants are not attacked because of their religion, but because they belong to the enemy tribe. The conflict in Ireland is just a typical conflict between neighbouring tribes fighting over a piece of territory.
We nationalists perceive the unionists as usurpers of part of our ancient tribal territory and we are obsessed with reclaiming it. We are convinced that it is our birthright eventually to colonise the unionist people in a united Ireland.
Unionist violence against nationalists is motivated, not by religious bigotry, but by an instinctive primeval fear of being subsumed by us nationalists.
Until we nationalists abandon our belligerent and futile urge for a united Ireland and then sit down with unionists in a spirit of total equality and mutual respect, there can never be peace on this island. - Yours, etc,
DICK KEANE, Glenageary, Co Dublin.