Sir - It's sometimes argued that Ireland is the sum of her artists and in the art of cinema she has no greater light than Neil Jordan. No one should be above criticism, but it's futile to use historical argument against a work of art, just as it is to complain about the physical impossibility of the necks of Giacometti's figures.
As everyone knows, the artist offers his or her version of the rainbow of things, struck through the prism of his or her sensibility. And history itself is notoriously shifting, tending to fiction, and many-faced. And alas, truth and fact are rarely the siblings that they appear - or that one would like them to be, for the sake of safety, permanence and comfort, those excellent things.
Jordan is showing magnificent courage in the face of what amounts to unanswerable criticism. The court of reality, history and righteousness is a poor court for the trial of art. On the other hand, there are few great works of art that were not shoved in the dock there first. - Yours, etc.,
Rathdown Park, Greystones, Co Wicklow.