Sir, - Patsy McGarry's "Irishman's Diary" on Michael Davitt was a welcome salutary reminder of the amount of genuine long term benefits which accrued to Irish society from the agents of change by non violent means. Davitt was not alone - Daniel O'Connell's work has never been enough praised and this son of a nationalist MP (nationalist of the genuine variety) recalls the Redmond brothers in Wexford who dissipated their all for the good of their fellow man. Willie Redmond, we also recall, gave his life in the first World War for the "freedom of small nations" such, doubtless, as his own.
The article highlights another, plank in the collective eye of the Republic of Ireland, namely that you have not yet matured sufficiently as a society to have put your cult of violence (to a "political" end, that is) behind you. Your Government, for example, have a decidedly free and easy attitude to your very own Irish mafia, within your own borders, namely the IRA. And until you in the "Free State" (sic) mature sufficiently to bring such symptoms of political immaturity to an end, you have no mission, ladies and gentlemen, dabbling in your present amateurish way in "the North" (sic). - Yours, etc.,
Garden Street,
Magherafelt,
Co Derry.