Madam, - Mr Jaime Hyland (June 2nd) has a point. In my description (May 28th) of the last phase of the Irish national stripping act, I used a shorthand which ignored people like himself.
He and some other Irish like him have renounced Catholicism for thought-out reasons, not as part of the recent fashionable rush led by a section of middle-class Dublin. But the same was true in all the previous instances when an Irish élite looked with disdain on some cultural feature that distinguished the Irish, and abandoned it. In each case, there were a minority which did this for what seemed to them well-thought-out reasons.
What fascinates me, and what I was writing about, is not the rights or wrongs of the matter, but the overall pattern of national self-obliteration; its end result; and what we are going to do with that.
Assuming that once again the lower ranks follow where the élite leads, we are on the way to becoming the most undistinguished nation in Europe - an invisibility in Ameranglia. According to how we view this and act, it can be an exit from history or an opportunity to make history.
As I wrote, we have created a tabula rasa and post-Irish space on which something quite new and post-European can be built. Anthropologically speaking, we are an experiment.
Put somewhat differently, the Spike could be the symbolic end of the Irish, but it could also be a fresh start. - Yours, etc.,
DESMOND FENNELL,
Anguillara,
Rome,
Italy.