Sir, - Last night I finished reading Nelson Mandela's wonderful autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Near the end of the story, when Mandela is describing the tortuous negotiations leading up to agreement on formation of a cross-party government, one sentence jumped out of page 589: "We told him [Prime Minister de Klerk] that we would turn in our weapons only when we were part of the government collecting those weapons, and not until then."
Is this too simplistic an approach for the complexities of the situation in Northern Ireland? - Yours, etc., David McCabe,
Waltham Terrace, Blackrock, Co. Dublin.