Sir, In a week when John Bruton has reminded us of the historic if precarious current opportunity for progress to peace in Ulster, I was amazed at Peter Carey's clumsy attempt in your letters page (May 1st) to draw parallells between the unhappy situations in East Timor and the North. He rightly points to the lack of self determination in East Timor and the consequent heavy presence of Indonesian troops.Timor, that British troops in Ulster are there to prevent self determination? If so, by whom?
The enduring reality of Ulster is that the majority artificial or not of its population consider themselves British and wish to remain so how does this compare to Timor? Indeed the IRA's problem has always been that, how ever much it may succeed against the English, it gets nowhere against the Ulster unionists. The opportunity that exists in Ireland and the UK is based, as recent articles in your paper make clear, on a new and wide recognition that withdrawal of British power from Ulster in the absence of a political accommodation between all indigenous parties would be at best inconclusive and at worst calamitous. For Carey to suggest otherwise is to engage in the worst from of idle mischief making. Yours, etc., Nash Island, Darien, Connecticut.