Madam, - Recent correspondence in your newspaper suggests some readers still subscribe to the charmingly old-fashioned fiction that the fox-hunting community consists entirely of coroneted earls, red-cheeked squires and assorted other chinless wonders from the stagnant end of the gene pool. The truth is more prosaic.
The majority of people who hunt with hounds hail from a wide range of backgrounds - white collar, blue collar and no collar at all. Doctors, dentists, teachers, nurses, police officers, factory workers and computer analysts count themselves as participants and supporters of a sport rooted in centuries of tradition that nowadays plays a vital role in the rural economy by employing thousands.
In a gesture worthy of Pilate, Tony Blair washed his hands of the anti-hunting Bill and allowed it not out of any concern for animal welfare, but to placate a backbench mob in revolt over his leadership. They in turn are motivated by a drooling, neo-Marxist class bigotry that can only be propitiated by the purging of these latter-day Kulaks.
In this vendetta they are assisted by the indifference of an urbanised society that spends its leisure in shopping malls or slumped in front of television, and which regards the countryside as a sanitised theme park populated by rabbits with pocket watches, badgers wearing smoking jackets and toads that can talk.
Will parliament close down abattoirs where animals are ferried in on conveyor belts and wait their turn, terrified, for an imminent death they are fully aware of? Of course not. The burger-munching townie masses would never stand for it. Thus we have a ban that stinks of the tyranny of the majority. And foxes will continue to die by bullet, snare, poison and motor car.
Most Irish people will, understandably, shrug their shoulders and wonder how all this concerns them.
Yet the smoking ban demonstrates there are no limits to the arrogance of our own ruling élites and the cultural vandalism inflicted by their lunatic PC agenda.
Outlawing hunting in Ireland would be an assault on liberty and another milestone on the road to a dystopian police state beyond the pen of Orwell or Kafka. - Yours, etc.,
PHILIP DONNELLY, St Albans, Hertfordshire, England.
Madam, - Why should someone's views on the terrorising and killing of animals for the pleasure of it be based "on bigotry and ignorance" (Aona Cowley, September 29th)?
One gets tired of hearing about "traditional sports", as if the deliberate infliction of pain for fun can be justified.
Incidentally, I don't eat animals or consider animal welfare above human welfare, which is the usual line of attack on anyone who dares to question blood sports. - Yours, etc.,
JACQUELINE PERRY, Chestnut Road, Mount Merrion, Co Dublin.