Sir, – Brendan Halligan's prescription ("Brexit support from Berlin and Paris will come at a cost", Opinion, July 28th), to the effect that our approach to Brexit must involve playing a full part at the centre of the EU in negotiations, as opposed to confining ourselves to a narrow concentration on our own sectional interests, is so important that it deserves to be disseminated far beyond the MacGill Summer School, and you are to be commended for publishing it.
It is indeed well past time that we cut the umbilical cord that has fastened us the Britain. It is beyond time that we realised that smug notions attached to our historically serendipitous neutrality are removed in favour of a realistic understanding of what it means to live in a free and democratic society that is threatened by fanatics and / or rogue states who are fully prepared to use all of the technology that globalisation has placed at their disposal in order to attack and undermine those principles.
We will do this most effectively only in full and meaningful co-operation with our EU fellow states. If that means working with them on a common approach to fiscal as well as monetary policy (which we already have by our use of the Euro), and playing a full part in our common defence, then so be it. – Yours, etc,
SEAMUS McKENNA,
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Windy Arbour,
Dublin 14