Sir, - The battering Dundalk took in the past week from both national and international media was utterly insignificant, of course, compared with the agony of Omagh. It did, however, evoke a magnificent response from the people of the town, 12,000 of whom took part in the areas biggest ever demonstration to emphasise their total hostility to that atrocity. They applauded the chairman of the council's statement that "we utterly repudiate violence and state categorically that we will never tolerate in our midst people who perpetrate acts like this."
The London Times recognised this with a picture of the estimated 12,000 and an article entitled "Dundalk turns out in force to show its disgust for Real IRA." As a daily subscriber to The Irish Times, I was saddened by your paper's total lack of coverage of the Dundalk demonstration. Instead, you have published a completely ludicrous comment from a Tory backbencher, Andrew Robathan, that a lot of people in Dundalk "by their votes supported people like this". In the recent referendum Dundalk voted 93 per cent Yes and in the past 20 years the highest vote obtained by Sinn Fein in Louth was 8 per cent. How inconvenient when facts intrude on prejudice. - Yours, etc. (Cllr) Stephen Burns,
Oriel Terrace,
Dundalk,
Co Louth.
Due to an error in editorial administration, Dundalk was not included in the report of last Saturday's peace demonstrations which appeared in Monday's editions. The error is regretted. - Ed., IT.