Dear - , I am looking after the rates, medical cards and service charges problems. No need to worry about any of these. If the County Clinic send out another medical card review form, hold it for me and I will complete it for you.
I am returning some of your papers in the brown envelope.
Yours sincerely . . .
The letter could be just another example of a paternalistic politician "minding the seat". And in one sense, it is. It was written by Padraig Flynn to a Castlebar woman. However, the classy letterhead is that of the august European Commission in Brussels and the date is April 1993 - well after the new Irish Commissioner had kicked the dust of Irish and Mayo politics off his heels.
His problem was the hiatus between his departure and the installation of his replacement. Beverley was in the wings. The succession plans were in train but not yet secure. No question then of passing on the client's problems to a Fianna Fail rival or back to the responsible local authorities. Thus was Ireland's European Commissioner, a member of one of the world's most powerful executives, still busy looking out for medical cards, still busy minding the seat back home.
"A Flynn must support a Flynn," as Beverley would declaim six years later, striding up to vote against a Government amendment calling on her father to make a statement about the £50,000 cheque allegedly given to him by Tom Gilmartin.
It is a measure of how far the mighty have fallen that in the seven weeks of Beverley's ordeal the best assistance Padraig Flynn could provide for his daughter was to stay away from the court.
Why she took the case in the first place is a mystery to every Fianna Failer in Castlebar. "More crap came out in the course of that case than was ever broadcast by RTE," said one senior activist. "If she'd just left it alone, the story would have died quietly and three years later who'd have been bothered? It wouldn't have influenced the kind of person who bats for Beverley down here. Look what came after - Ray Burke, John Ellis, Denis Foley. Not forgetting the tribunal which her own father is facing into . . . "
When the words "insufferably arrogant" crop up for the sixth time in a single day around Castlebar - and that's just among the Fianna Fail faithful - it is clear that the most virulent Flynn opposition is within the Fianna Fail party.
"The Flynns have a sense of the right to rule," said another senior activist, ostensibly in the Flynn wing. They still remember how in the days leading up to the 1994 nomination convention, the local cumann membership suddenly exploded to four times its normal size.
There was nothing in the rules that forbade the startling rush to join up and vote for Beverley. But when the resulting crush in the function room at the Welcome Inn led to some of her rivals' supporters being locked out and trying to force an entry, the perception of real or imagined injustice was bound to gain currency. The Castlebar cumann never fully recovered the sense of unity and morale needed to fulfil Bertie Ahern's ambitions for a third seat in the five-seater constituency.
Even before last week's verdict against Cooper-Flynn, a TG4/MRBI poll was predicting only two seats for FF - and they were the last two. Ominously, any swing in favour must come from the town: "Rural Mayo is Fianna Fail; the town is not," said one observer.
Whatever the protestations of the local party leaders this week, the sound of chickens coming home to roost is deafening. They claim that the formation in Castlebar of two new Fianna Fail cumainn a few weeks into Cooper-Flynn's courtroom ordeal - unbeknown, it is rumoured, to either her or the party's local councillors - was entirely coincidental. But by any standard, the timing was hardly supportive.
And as the move required the approval of party headquarters, the message to Cooper-Flynn from the leadership is not encouraging.
Despite her brisk re-entry into political activity - she was back meeting constituents in Castlebar the day after the verdict and at a function in Swinford on Monday night - intimations of political mortality are palpable. Certainly, any hopes of a senior ministry for her or a town with a long sense of entitlement, seem to lie in ashes.
The other sound in Castlebar this week was of once-proud Fianna Failers clamming up - "the silence of the lambs", as one source put it with a grin. Businessmen who have prospered from the Flynn association would rather not talk about it, thanks - not even to render faint praise. For now, the possibility of an appeal gets everyone off the hook and is presented as a lifeline.
But no one is taking any bets.
In any event, they hang much of the blame for the Flynn misfortunes on begrudgery and the "sneering Dublin media". One FF councillor told the Connaught Telegraph it had reached a point where the media "needs to be reined in". The belief is that the Flynns have been "targeted" and that Beverley's only crime was to be a small cog in a national culture whereby only fools paid taxes. By this rationale, she becomes a kind of victim.
It's a long, long way from 1977, when Padraig Flynn abandoned teaching and his lucrative pub business to bound into Dail Eireann in his white suit, the self-styled Messiah of the West, professing a fine scorn for what he called "ambiguity", whether social, moral or economic.
" 'Twould be a grand thing," he said in a 1979 interview, fixing his eyes on some unseen horizon, " 'twould be a grand thing to lose your seat for something fundamental, for something unambiguous."
By some ferocious twist of fate, both professionally and personally, he has had to handle more ambiguity in a decade than most have to face in a lifetime.
In a material sense, life has been good to Padraig Flynn. It has taken him from the modest corner bungalow on the Newport road out to the imposing, red-brick, neoGeorgian residence in Carrowbrinogue with its own lake and properly surfaced walkways, not to mention the fine Dublin house and, famously, another in Brussels. From the big old Datsun to the two kinds of Mercedes and an Opel parked out front. From the modest Dail salary to the £140,000 a year from Brussels and after that, the handsome pensions.
In the process, the politician famous for his implacably conservative, Catholic views in the 1970s and 1980s has been forced into a radical rethink on social and moral issues, the most conspicuous of which was the 300,000 Valentine cars sent out with condoms inside in 1996, as the man in charge of the Commission's Europe Against AIDS programme.
And at a personal level, like any parent, the paths taken by his children have probably taught him as much about ambiguity as any world-class social issue. Of his four children, two are separated. Beverley's relationship with Mayo builder Tony Gaughan came to national attention last week when he turned up in the High Court.
Last year, when Audrey, his third daughter, was disqualified from driving for 10 years, given a suspended jail sentence and fined £6,800 at Castlebar District Court for more than 20 motoring offences, her then partner and father of her baby also got a three-year driving ban and fines totalling £1,000.
This week, when the same man was back in court on another motoring offence and possibly facing jail, a consultant psychiatrist pleaded for leniency on the basis that he was now a patient in an institution and that the seeds of his illness were laid down during his troubles and the attention they received last year - all of which has copperfastened a sense among some that the media spotlight has been unfair not only on the Flynns but on their associates.
Yet, the same people wholly agree with the judge's opinion of Audrey's evidence as showing "complete breathtaking arrogance".
"Because she grew up with her father being the Minister for Justice, she would definitely have seen herself as above the law," said a woman who knows the family well. "She would never have been asked to explain herself before in that way. It was obvious that she thought Daddy would get her out of it."
Audrey is a light-hearted woman by all accounts and is said to have been happy with the quality of the photographs to emerge in the media. She continues to run a successful creche in the town.
Padraig Flynn has two other children. The eldest, Sharon, who was originally tipped to be the inheritor of the Flynn seat and was Beverley's constant companion during the High Court case, is a national school teacher locally while Turlough, a Dublin-based accountant, is rarely seen in Castlebar.
Are the Flynns finished? Not according to some who attribute almost superhuman powers of survival to them: "You can't bury the Flynns. They're not buriable."
Local activists will happily list the mighty works wrought during his various ministries - the roads, the public buildings, the holiday village, the lakeside walks - and are resolved that these will not be forgotten. Even her detractors do not dispute Beverley's ability, articulacy or willingness to cover the gruesome miles of this vast constituency in the battle to mind the seat. However, her fate, they say, is in Dublin's hands.
"But as we know, there's a culture in Ireland of forgiving the sinner. Look at Lowry's march since his exit from Fine Gael. It can benefit as much as hamper a politician. If the perception is that she was done down badly, they'll come to her help. They'll go by instinct, not by logic."
For Beverley, next week will tell a tale when the issue of costs comes up for decision. For her father, the tribunal looms ahead during which anything can happen. Even his fans concede that this will be no help at all when it comes to the battle for the third seat or even for the image of Fianna Fail, still less for the Flynn name.
"Is there something in the Castlebar air?" asked one man this week, before going on to point out that Castlebar has produced no fewer than three men who went on to become Ministers for Justice - Micheal O Morain, Charles Haughey and Padraig Flynn, all of whom ended up in "difficulties" of one kind or another. And for the record, he noted, the father of another former Minister for Justice, Ray Burke, hails from a few miles down the road.