Sir, - Ms Joan Byrne's parallel between Jesus Christ and 10 republican prisoners is, admittedly, an impressive achievement in obscenity. Her impassioned screed (Opinion, July 23rd), is, however, otherwise standard off-the-shelf cant. There should be no need to take notice of this sort of thing, let alone respond to it, if lies repeated often enough did not frequently come to be perceived as truth.
It bears repetition, therefore, that these prisoners killed themselves. Ms Byrne writes of people in "genuine anguish at the prisoners' plight". The anguish may have been genuine, but the plight was of the prisoners' own making. Ms Byrne portrays Margaret Thatcher as "intent on the prisoners' destruction". Well she might have been, but any such intention was superseded by the prisoners' own actions. She was a passive observer in their destruction; they themselves were its agents. Some people believe the prisoners' motives noble or heroic, and Thatcher's petty and cruel. This belief, however impassioned, cannot alter that fact that the prisoners were not destroyed by Thatcher's hand but by their own. They were not murdered: they were suicides.
Ms Byrne says the dead prisoners have become icons in their community. Reading "community" to mean "republicans", this is undoubtedly true. That this community places the 10 dead prisoners in the same pantheon with such other icons as the Warrington and Enniskillen bombers is (unwittingly) more fitting commentary than anybody outside this community could hope to manage. - Yours, etc.,
Mark Devlin, Frankfurt, Germany.