Madam, - The Taoiseach spoke protectively at the weekend of Fr Reid and his "Nazi" outburst.And rightly so. After all, Fr Reid, along with Dr Martin Mansergh, has been an informal adviser to the Irish Government over many years.
But perhaps this is the real worry. Since the Belfast Agreement a whole seven years ago, Dublin and London have repeatedly blurred moral and political principles in their engagement with Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA.
David Trimble divided the Ulster Unionist Party down the middle on almost a dozen occasions to make power-sharing possible, but this was simply taken for granted. By contrast, the Provisional movement was accorded a luxurious and indefinite timescale within which to decommission its illegal weaponry.
A blind eye was turned to massive criminality. Paramilitary repression within working-class areas, including murder, was ignored (at least until the McCartney sisters forced some moral courage upon Irish and British policy-makers). An unintended result of these policies has been a sectarian poisoning of public life in Northern Ireland and a fatal weakening of liberal nationalism and liberal unionism.
Is it not worth pondering if the advisers - good men all - have been offering the wrong advice since at least 1998? - Yours, etc,
LIAM KENNEDY, Rugby Road, Belfast 7.
Madam, - From the cradle to the grave, we will all end up being labelled as belonging to some category or another. I am a Northern Protestant, and I will be (inaccurately) labelled "unionist". Fair enough. I can live with that.
One label I cannot live with, and find deeply offensive, is the label of "Nazi". I'm assuming that President McAleese, Fr Alex Reid and all the rest are referring primarily to my parents' generation, so let me comment on this.
My father gave five of the best years of his young life fighting fascism in Europe. In common with most, he did not talk a lot about his experience. They saw too much, those men.
When eventually demobbed from the British Army, he got a job as a bus driver and my mother worked in a shop to help supplement his wages and raise their two children. I am not aware of any special privileges afforded to our family over the years - far from it; and in Portadown (yes, Portadown) we had very good relations with our many Roman Catholic neighbours. We had nothing that they didn't have, which wasn't a lot, I can tell you.
It would be ridiculous to say that there was no discrimination against Roman Catholics - of course there was - and this discrimination was indeed perpetrated by the unionist leaders of the time, but to use the term "Nazi" is plain nonsense, and an insult to those who suffered and died in Nazi death camps.
As one who considers all 32 counties as being my home, I have been frequently saddened and frustrated over the years by the hand-wringing, holier-than-thou posture adopted by many from "the top down" in Southern society, especially - but not restricted to - the Roman Catholic Hierarchy.
It seems to me that for fascism to survive and flourish, it needs to have a bully-boy private army faction to drive home the message with extortion, death and the threat of death, law-breaking and general non-observance of "common decency" and respect for others who do not agree with its ideology. Now, does that sound familiar? - Yours, etc,
HARRY PETTIS, Bangor, Co Down.
Madam, - Fintan O'Toole's commentary on the broader context in which Fr Alex Reid's remarks should be read was, as usual, exemplary (Opinion, October 18th). To it I would add only that there is a need to acknowledge, in due proportion and without inflammatory emotion, the links of action and desire which existed between Nazi Germany and organisations or individuals in this country. The IRA of Sean Russell is well known in this regard; less so the utterances of W.B. Yeats.
I document these, together with Nazi manipulations of that great poet, in Blood Kindred (reviewed in your edition of October 1st). Your reviewer saw fit to classify my argument as rhetorical and, to do so, suppressed much textual new evidence. There is no point in wagging the finger at an elderly cleric, if we continue to salute uncritically a pillar of our "cultural" tourism. - Yours, etc,
W.J. McCORMACK, Rockcorry, Co Monaghan.
