Sir, - In some countries the publication of new, original thinking by a fellow countryman meets with interest and discussion. In Ireland, the stock public reaction is frozen silence or destructive mockery with an ad ho- minem thrust. The latter response occurred in Bill McSweeney's review of my new book The Postwestern Condition: Between Chaos and Civilisation (Books, September 16th).
A reviewer's first task, when discussing a new book about the condition of the Western world, is to summarise the book's thesis (the blurb can help). Mr McSweeney omitted to do this. Instead, while depriving Irish Times readers of this basic information, he caricatured me and my writings over the past 40 years and made irate, sporadic and baffling references to my new work.
With good reason, Mr McSweeney had not been asked to characterise or review my writings since 1960. His profound ignorance of them and me is evident in such absurd depictions as "fiery critic of modernism", "avid collector of conspiracies", one "who shoots from the spleen at any deviator from nationalist orthodoxy". ("West Brit" and "two-nation theorist" were only two of the names I earned for reshaping the nationalist approach to the Northern problem!).
What Mr McSweeney was invited to do was to review my new book. He is a lecturer in international peace studies. One of my book's central themes is the moral approval given by the rulers of the West to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki massacres and to atomic weapons generally. I argue that this approval began the West's exit from Western civilisation.
Weirdly, though it bears closely on his specialty, Mr McSweeney didn't even mention this central theme of the book, let alone discuss it. In his stock, Irish-academic reaction to the sight of an Irishman - not a foreigner! - publishing some radically new thinking about the world, he forgot to make the sort of critical contribution which he was fitted to make - and which I would have welcomed. - Yours, etc.,
Desmond Fennell, Dublin 7.