CONOR McCARTHY,
Sir, - Tony Allwright (May 21st) is mean-minded and credulous in his response to the Government's decision to accept two of the Palestinians exiled in the wake of the Church of the Nativity siege. Israel may say that these men are "terrorists", but the fact is that they have not been charged with anything, and they have nothing to do with what Mr Allwright so glibly calls "home-grown \". Ireland is not illegally occupying the West Bank, so we have nothing to fear from these men.
The fact is that the plan to accept exile for these men has been a highly controversial one for the Palestinian Authority, since for obvious reasons it has no wish to seem to endorse Israeli ethnic cleansing, of however few people, and since it is illegal under the Geneva Conventions for any country to deport people from a territory conquered in war.
The exile plan has been hammered out carefully between the authority, the Israeli government and the European Union as a means to defuse what was otherwise likely to be an indefinite stand-off. Ireland's participation in the plan is part of our ongoing involvement with European Union foreign policy on the Middle East crisis, and as such is to be welcomed. - Yours, etc.,
CONOR McCARTHY, Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Dame Street, Dublin 2.