Sir, - In his review of Mary Kenny's book (March 22nd) David Quinn quotes Shaw as saying "In Ireland the people is the Church and the Church the people". The facts are as follows. A character of Shaw's, the defrocked priest Father Keegan, delivers a speech in John Bull's Other island, part of which runs: "In my dreams it (heaven) is a country where the State is the Church and the Church the people: three in one and one in three". This is a far cry from Mary Kenny's misquotation.
If anyone wants to know what Shaw really thought about the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, the best source is the successive prefaces to John Bull's Other Island. In these, he makes it clear that he was not enamoured of the Church. He refers to "the sweating in conventual factories and workshops" which, he says, would end under independence. He predicts, quite wrongly, that under a national government "the yoke of Rome" would be thrown off and "the island of saints (will) assume the headship of her own Church".
How is it that Shaw can be so flagrantly misquoted? The reason is not far to seek. With the vast expansion of the Yeats and Joyce industries, he has been relegated to the pantheon of the Great Unread. As such he is an ideal peg, on which to hang any flimsy argument or false attribution.
Recently, on television, one of our senior politicians informed us that Shaw was responsible for the saying "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time". I look forward with joyful anticipation to being told any day that "The buck stops here" was said by Napoleon at Waterloo, and that de Valera coined "The more things change, the more they remain the same". - Yours, etc.,
Strand Road, Sandymount, Dublin 4.