Sir, – Surely your readers noticed that Nicholas Allen, your reviewer of our co-edited book The Idea of the Union: Great Britain and Northern Ireland, glancingly identified only two out of our 20 contributors and thus never descended to engagement with a book that teems with argument, observation and evidence ("The Idea of the Union: a troubling unionist manifesto", Books, December 18th).
Where is Dr Brian Barton on the origins of partition? Or Dr Graham Gudgin on the assumption of state-wide anti-Catholic housing discrimination? Or Dr Ray Bassett on the Irish government’s EU-backed attitude to Britain during Brexit? Or Lord Trimble on the Protocol? Or Mike Nesbitt MLA on the urgent priority of making Northern Ireland work? Or 13 other contributors?
This is a discourtesy to your readers, the editors and writers.
Unionists and nationalists must argue their cases. Instead, your reviewer offers an autobiographical hymn to the Republic and contemptuous dismissal of a reasoned defence of the Union.
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Prof Allen expects unionists to devise programmes on education, alleviation of poverty and climate change while they are harassed daily by an increasingly emboldened nationalist front with only one goal in its sights: getting Northern Ireland out of the UK and into a fantasy united Ireland, abetted by Irish governments which he claims have been unionism’s friends.
His only quote from the book is by one of us (Foster) on multiculturalism and even then he gets it wrong. When Foster writes that unionists do not qualify even for nominal respect, he is speaking of group attitudes.
If Prof Allen were to read books on multiculturalism by Irish sociologists, he would find that the unionist community is not in their remit. – Yours, etc,
Prof JOHN WILSON
FOSTER,
Vancouver;
Dr WILLIAM
BEATTIE SMITH,
Belfast.