Madam, - I welcome the historic move by Britain's parliament to ban fox-hunting and hare-coursing. For centuries, the law in Britain permitted the organised hounding to exhaustion and death of wildlife for sport.
All previous attempts to seek protection for these persecuted creatures failed due to the powerful hunting lobby in the unelected House of Lords. No matter how great the Commons majority favouring a ban on hunting, the landed gentry, backed by peers who had no democratic mandate, were able to thumb their noses at the will of the people and the decisions of parliament.
The Irish government should now follow Britain's example and give the thumbs down to "sporting" cruelty. Our politicians should bear in mind that organised hunting and coursing were imported to Ireland by the British upper classes. Throughout our long and turbulent history, the red-coated hunter was a symbol of oppression and tyranny.
During the Famine, he rode to hounds across a countryside ravaged by hunger and disease. He was the one who gave the order to evict entire families into poverty. It was he who sent out the crowbar gangs to torch his tenants' humble shacks.
He wrote flowery letters to his pals back in the shires of Middle England as the Irish starved, rotted in jail for stealing loaves of bread to feed their families, pleaded for mercy from the battering ram, or prepared to mount the scaffold. A man of culture he was, if not renowned for his sensitivity to the "croppy" Irish.
And hunters blew their horns and bugles in contempt back in 1798 as our patriots swung from the gallows. Fans of hunting in Ireland swelled the serried ranks of collaborators - the cap-tipping informers who aided and abetted the oppressors. Britain is at least - and at long last - making an effort to come to terms with the horrifying legacy of fox-hunting. It is bravely admitting to the world the wrong that has been perpetrated against millions of beautiful wild animals whose only "crime" was to have been born in a county that permitted such cruelty.
The situation in Ireland is different. As we don't have a House of Lords to meddle in our democratic political process, there is no excuse for pandering to coursing clubs, foxhunts, or stag-hunters who abuse our wildlife heritage. - Yours, etc.,
JOHN FITZGERALD, Callan, Co Kilkenny.