Sir, - Is Nuala O'Faolain really somebody to write about the North? As one of the voices in the sustained whinge that went up last summer against the choice of a Northerner for president, Ms O'Faolain's blind spots are already well known to readers of The Irish Times.
To give her due, she now frankly admits to her near total ignorance of all things Northern, and even if this hasn't prevented her from generalising in the past, she's now off to remedy that. Great - but you would think, to read her column of January 5th, that she was going to Mars. Fair enough, if that's how she feels, but she's wrong when she says: "North and South are worlds still largely unknown to each other."
Like thousands of Northerners, I went to university south of the border, and I feel as at home in Dublin, or on the Dingle peninsula for that matter, as I do in the North. Queen's University and the University of Ulster have in recent years seen a greater intake of Southern students. For so many of us the information gap Ms O'Faolain is off to investigate doesn't exist, and for many people on both sides of the Border it never did.
However, if the deconstruction of her exchanges with the local baker helps her to an understanding that Ireland may be bigger than the Republic, and that the North is full of people just as Irish as herself, then she'll have learned something. As for her fear of not being able to make her copy interesting enough, a word of advice would be to drop the Martian angle. - Yours etc.,
From John Gray
Barcelona, Spain.