Sir, - After reading Aine Ni Chonaill's letter (January 2th) in which she denied having publicly made the infamous remark concerning Helmut and Hannelore Kohl and the piece of suet, I was disturbed to read Paul Cullen's reply, which immediately followed it:"The remarks I quoted were made twice in my hearing by MsNi Chonaill as she and her opponents were exchanging views in a hotel lobby after her organisation's disrupted meeting in Ennis on the night of January 13th." This wasn't, but might as well have been, followed by "So, there!"His response would have been crushing had Ms Ni Chonaill denied having made the suet comment. She hadn't. She admitted having said it; that is precisely what one means when one denies having said something "publicly". What is said when addressing a public meeting or in the course of an interview with a journalist is said publicly. What is said during a conversation in a hotel lobby, even when overheard by a journalist, is clearly said "in public", but not quite so obviously said "publicly". Ms Ni Chonaill's letter could have been published without comment. She had admitted the remark. She did not express surprise at Mr Cullen's knowing what she had said, so it was clear that the remark had not been made in a private or confidential context: a conversation in a hotel lobby was just within the range of possibilities allowed by her asserting she had "never publicly made the remark". Her letter could be read as sufficiently true to be let stand.I believe it should have been. I had come away from Mr Cullen's report of January 17th with the clear image of Ms Ni Chonaill making this comment from a platform to an (admittedly small) public meeting. I was not quite as appalled as Mr Horst Weber (January 21st), but only because Helmut Kohl is not, as Mr Weber seems to think, a foreign politician (the shape of the EU gives him too much influence over our lives for that). To express the wish for someone's death is bad; to do so from a public platform, for me at least, compounds the offence immeasurably.I re-read the original report and find that I can forgive myself for the false impression I had formed, but I do not forgive Mr Cullen for having allowed me to form it. His paragraph before the quote is a comment on her "speaking style", which is characterised as being "punctuated by frequent and sometimes eccentric digressions" with an example given of something she had said "on Tuesday" (the day of the meeting). Since this immediately followed a paragraph on the meeting itself I had, I think reasonably, assumed that Mr Cullen was talking about her pub- lic speaking style, and that the suet remark was a further, and horrifying, example of an eccentric digression from the platform.I doubt I was alone in imagining this remark to have been made to the meeting. Mr Weber says he was offended that anyone could "publicly state" such a thing.
"Publicly state" is a shade strong for something Mr Cullen overheard said in a hotel lobby. It should have alerted him to the possibility that his report was open to an important misinterpretation. That was the time for him to give us the context of the remark. Having failed to do that, it was shabby to comment on Ms Ni Chonaill's letter: his report was far more misleading than hers. - Yours, etc.,William Hunt,Harold's Cross,Dublin 6W.