Sir, - Stunning hypocrisy has become endemic and epidemic in Celtic Tiger/Peace Process Ireland. Last week, Charlie McCreevy warned us that we would all have to tighten our belts (although yet another amnesty for tax cheats kicks in this month). Charlie, Bertie and Mary have spent the past four years talking people into hock by raising expectations and initiating the biggest credit spree the State has seen. The belt-tightening advice has an uncanny parallel with that of the daddy of all Irish hypocrites - that great patriot who lives in North Dublin aping the British aristocracy.
Our recent national day of mourning may appear to some as a spontaneous act of sincerity. But no such gesture was afforded for other appalling atrocities worldwide (10,000 butchered in the UN protected enclave in Srebrenice, thousands of Kurds massacred in Southern Iraq, or the victims of Chernobyl, Rwanda et al). Of course, these latter ruined peoples have little economic value. Sure they probably have no feelings anyway.
On the return to our screens of RTE's Questions and Answers two weeks ago, viewers might have been dumbstruck by a Fianna Fβil politician demanding of Sinn FΘin's Mitchell McLaughlin to decommission! The normally so wooden Martin Cullen actually became quite animated. His party has gauged since September 11th that it is now expedient to decry terrorism, the guns, the baseball bats and the Semtex.
The shooting in the back of Martin O'Hagan got blanket media coverage and government handwringing as an outrageous attack on free speech by loyalist thugs. A couple of years ago the former IRA man Eamonn Collins published Killing Rage, in which he tendered some unsavoury personal insights into the motives and lives of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and various IRA activists. Shortly afterwards he was tortured in Newry and butchered to death. There was little media coverage. Only a handful of brave journalists covered that attack on free speech and breach of the ceasefire. Attendance at his funeral was at one's peril. There was little official comment. Political expedience saw to that. And the savage intimidation goes on.
We have become a deeply hypocritical people. - Yours, etc.,
Brian Morris, Blackrock, Co Louth.