Madam, - Kevin Myers's (October 14th) ridicules my suggestion in the Sunday Independent that "the real 'no petty people' of modern Ireland [ my italics] were the small tenant farmers of Ireland who refused to be cowed by a tyrannous Protestant gentry, magistracy, yeomanry and church establishment."
Equating "modern Ireland" with the 20th century, he has no problem in having his usual schoolboy fun at my expense. But the phrase I carefully chose was not "of modern Ireland" but "in modern Irish history". This is the convention in any Irish historian's language for the period commencing in 1800, if not dating from the 1780s or 1790s.
This is the time-frame, extending to the mid-19th century (generally the same context of Yeats's pompous phrase), in which I set my perfectly reasonable proposition. I have in mind, as only one example, the Rockite resistance of 1822 in Co Cork, and the gentry response to it.
For Mr Myers to change "in modern Irish history" to "modern Ireland" in order to submit my sentence to ridicule is a distortion for which I am owed, but do not expect, an apology. - Yours, etc.,
Prof JOHN A. MURPHY, Emeritus Professor of Irish History, University College Cork.