Sir, - July 1st saw the historic opening of the Scottish Parliament in the absence of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He had stayed behind in Belfast to engage with the Ulster Unionist response to the courage and heroism displayed by Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Gerry Kelly and other Sinn Fein leaders. As First Minister Trimble started out the day before the TV cameras, we all heard that response, a petulant abuse of both Prime Minister Blair and Taoiseach Ahern as "willing fools" for recognising the courage of the Sinn Fein President.
If the Prime Minister had attended the Edinburgh Parliament he would have borne witness to a Scottish nation confidently looking to the future, underpinned by both the statesmanlike address of its First Minister and the Parliament itself joining in the singing of Rabbie Burns's great anthem of democracy A Man's A Man for A' That. It fell to Prime Minister Blair to address instead the Ulster Unionist Members of the Northern Assembly - but to no avail. And perhaps it is just as well that their First Minister absented himself from that meeting since here too a line from Rabbie Burns might have been found all too appropriate to characterise that Belfast farce - "Wee sleekit cow'rin' tim'rous beastie."
I do not relish seeing the history of 25 years ago repeating itself as farce, since it is not alone even more tragic but is in fact far more dangerous than ever before. In 1974, I was among a handful of people who went out with buckets of paste to cover Dublin City with posters saying "Save Power-Sharing: Delete Articles 2 and 3".
But by copper-fastening that territorial claim in the wake of the Supreme Court judgment that it represented a constitutional imperative, the Cosgrave-Cruise O'Brien government ensured the collapse of the Sunningdale Agreement. Nonetheless Seamus Heaney's "hope and history" at last appeared to rhyme for me last year when the people of the Republic voted overwhelmingly to replace the territorial claim with the principle of consent, in the context of full implementation of the Good Friday Agreement.
If First Minister Trimble persists in sabotaging that Agreement he will indeed have earned a unique place in history - as the Ulster Unionist leader who actually refused to lead his people into the future and instead bequeathed to them the retention of Articles 2 and 3, with the full force of a constitutional imperative to govern what he will have demonstrably proven to be a failed political entity. - Yours, etc.,
Manus O'Riordan Finglas Road, Glasnevin, Dublin 11.