Madam, - With contributions from Declan Kiberd (May 1st) and John Waters (May 2nd), The Irish Timesjoined newspapers in several countries across Europe marking the 40th anniversary of the 1968 "May events?" with articles seeking to dismiss those events as insignificant or portray the protagonists as insincere or deluded.
Declan Kiberd claimed to be able to discern a search for authority in the student revolt - in other words, the children wanted to be like their parents.
John Waters lamented how the revolt created a break between youth and age, tradition and freedom. Two irreconcilable accounts, but with a shared one-dimensionality and lack of persuasive evidence.
I count myself lucky to have landed up in Berlin as a visiting student in 1967 when the radical student movement was in its early days. The German revolt continued into the next year, with Daniel Cohn-Bendit as a link between it and the Paris rising.
The revolt was, as always, messy and contradictory. It was painful to see cultural analyst Theodor Adorno shouted down when he criticised the students. But the support for the people of Vietnam and for Iranian students harassed by their secret police was surely genuine, and was expressed at some cost - student Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by police during a demonstration against the Shah.
Media monopoly and the "grand coalition" of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats were opposed in an anti-authoritarian spirit that was all the more significant in Germany just a generation after the Nazis ruled.
I was lucky too to be in Prague in summer 1968 when there were continuous meetings at street corners - and to have left before the Soviet tanks rolled in.
The influence of those events and of the 1968 events in France and the United States was felt in Ireland as the civil rights movement came on to the streets of the North. The 40th anniversary of that movement's founding deserves better than the begrudgery expressed by Declan Kiberd and John Waters in relation to some symbolic "1968".
Waters says 1968 "was, on the whole, a damp squib", yet we are discussing its complex cultural and political legacy across Europe 40 years later. 68-ers left their trace in the feminist, human rights, environmental and other radical social movements of later years. Maybe we need some more damp squibs. - Yours, etc,
BRIAN TRENCH, Griffith Avenue, Glasnevin, Dublin 11.