Madam, - Having spent 20 years in London from the mid-1940s to the Swinging Sixties and having come to regard that city and its people almost as my own, I was greatly upset at the recent attacks. But Londoners are very resilient and I know they will not only survive this attack, as they have survived others, but will defeat it by their very resilience and determination not to let themselves be beaten.
I arrived in London a mere two years after the end of the second World War and was immediately struck by the spirit that had survived the ferocity with which Nazi Germany had pounded the city. I was amazed also at the lack of animosity against the average German two years after the war. Here we were, 25 years after our fight, and we still regarded the Brits as "enemies". Indeed some of us still do, another 60 years later!
Later, how shocked and saddened I was when our own brave, self-appointed fighters attacked London. If I tell you that a very close relative worked in Harrods when the IRA bombed that Arab-owned emporium you may guess how outraged I was. Of course, they did not succeed where Hitler's bombers had failed.
Now again, London is under attack and its people made to suffer for something that is not of their doing. The average Londoner is as opposed to the war in Iraq as he/she is to "holding on" to six Irish countries in which he/she has not the slightest interest.
I join your other correspondents in offering my condolences to the victims of the bombing outrage in London and their families, in the knowledge that their forebears' resilience in the 1940s ensured that our democratic way of life has survived. - Yours, etc,
W.J. MURPHY,
Malahide,
Co Dublin.