Sir, - It is depressing to live in a culture where memories of the past have to conform to pre-set agendas before they are treated with respect. George O'Brien's review of Criostoir O Floinn's There Is An Isle: a Limerick Child- hood (Books, April 25th) tells us more about the reviewer's prejudices than it does about the book.
Frank McCourt is widely (and justifiably) acclaimed for his honesty, humour and pathos, but admiration for Angela's Ashes does not prevent me from taking other, different memories of the past seriously. To George O'Brien, however, an admission of even moderate happiness in Ireland in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s (particularly in Limerick) is not so much a memory as an ideological position: "Commentary of this kind has the valuable effect of revealing the ideological skull beneath nostalgia's ostensibly innocent skin."
The derisive and dismissive tone throughout the review is not only unfair, but it sets out to consign to oblivion a vast amount of personal testimony (not only from O Floinn, but from others) about experience of life in the past - memories, judgments, opinions, even tastes, which do not fit in with current orthodoxy. A historian can only weep at such silencing.
The most revealing part of O'Brien's review was the comparison of O Floinn to James Joyce's anti-Semitic, insular "Citizen", simply because O Floinn expresses admiration for Eamon de Valera and distaste for some aspects of modern Catholicism! This kind of reductionist name-calling is nothing other than thought-policing. - Yours, etc.,
Caitriona Clear
Department of History, University College Galway.