Sir, – The Penny Catechism issued by the (Roman) Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin when I started school in the 1940s dated the Incarnation of Christ as 4,000 years after the creation of Our First Parents. John Charles McQuaid was the (Roman) Catholic Archbishop in the 1940s and later. Whether he actually read the catechism before giving it his imprimatur is doubtful, but its calculations were based on the calculations of an illustrious Dubliner, James Ussher, who was, in succession the (Protestant) Archbishop of Dublin and Armagh. Ussher was born in 1581 and died in 1656, four years before the establishment of London’s Royal Society and the adaptation of the scientific method. He was a man of his time, a time which perhaps still ensnares Edwin Poots, and might even have had attractions for John Charles Charles McQuaid. – Yours, etc,
DONAL KENNEDY,
London.