Madam, - Garret FitzGerald (Opinion & Analysis, April 12th) writes of the courage of the many journalists who covered paramilitary activities in Northern Ireland over the past three decades. Yet this courage, he adds, did not always seem to him to have been matched at editorial level.
He cites Gerry Adams's denial (in an RTÉ interview with Brian Farrell) that he was a member of the IRA. "Thereafter, all the rest of the media seemed to feel it necessary to accept Adams's denial". Did editors really need to worry "quite so much about being sued for libel by paramilitaries"?, he asks.
Garret was a weekly columnist at The Irish Timesfor 16 years under my editorship. I cannot remember the newspaper's failure to pin down Gerry Adams's alleged membership of the IRA as a recurring theme in our conversations or, indeed, in his own copy.
What I do remember over my years as editor (and while working under my predecessor editors, Douglas Gageby and Fergus Pyle) are innumerable editorials in which The Irish Timesmade it clear that it recognised no distinction between Sinn Féin and the IRA, that it understood Sinn Féin to be subservient to the IRA's "Army Council" and that it believed the leadership of both organisations to be interchangeable.
Newspaper editors can have an irritating habit of asking for some corroborative evidence before allowing serious claims to be published in their news columns, as distinct from opinion sections.
I worked with a succession of excellent (and, as Garret says, courageous) Northern editors and reporters on the ground in Belfast. Had any of them been able to furnish such evidence to me they would have, rightly, expected the newspaper to publish it and it would have done so.
But perhaps more tellingly than any of the foregoing, I cannot remember any charges of membership of the IRA being laid against Mr Adams - much less his conviction - during the years when Garret was in government as Taoiseach, with the full resources of the State's security and intelligence services at his hand.
It is extraordinary that he would expect the newspapers to have asserted (without evidence) what the State, of which he was Taoiseach, would not. - Yours, etc,
CONOR BRADY, (Editor, The Irish Times, 1986-2002), Monkstown, Co Dublin.