Sir, - Your report of August 12th was inappropriately facetious and inaccurate. The following points should clarify matters.
What was stolen yesterday was a headstone on which were simply recorded the names and life dates of both Patrick Kavanagh and his wife Katherine, together with some lines of Kavanagh's poetry.
This headstone was not erected by "a commemoration committee", but by Katherine's sister and executrix Helen Moloney, and was paid for by the estate in the normal way. This was in fulfilment of Katherine's wishes. The only other significant direction in her will had been that such assets as she had, and her interest as copyright holder of Patrick's work, should go in their entirety to a trust to commemorate her late husband by providing financial support for needy poets in their middle years.
The headstone was erected only after the grave had lain bare for some months, following the sudden removal of the original coverings and cross dating from the late 1960s, some weeks after Katherine's burial. The first Katherine's family learnt of that removal was from the newspapers.
The result of the theft - and, it now transpires, of the destruction of the headstone and surrounds erected by Helen Moloney - is that Katherine now lies unacknowledged next to her husband in Inniskeen graveyard.
You quote one person as describing the dignified and distinctive headstone now destroyed as somehow "pagan". What could be more un-Christian than to despoil a grave in such a way as to deny a blameless woman public acknowledgement that she lies in death, as she did in life, with her husband? - Yours, etc., Eunan O'Halpin (nephew of Katherine Kavanagh and of Helen Moloney),
Parnell Road,
Harold's Cross,
Dublin 6.