Sir, - While I respect the constitutional and moral right of any citizen to voice a personal opinion, when that opinion is formed through ignorance and blatant intolerance, it cannot go unchallenged.
I sincerely hope that Aine Ni Chonaill's views on ethnicity and immigration (April 29th) are not widely held.
For most of the past two centuries Ireland has exported significant numbers of its citizens around the globe. The majority have been "economic refugees", escaping not a despotic regime which deliberately deprived its people of basic civil and human rights, but poverty, destitution and unemployment. Economic circumstance was the motivation for many Irish emigrants, yet today it appears that we do not accept it as a legitimate motive for others. How can such hypocrisy be justified? Is threat to life by ruthless dictators acceptable but threat to life by poverty not? What constitutes a genuine asylum-seeker as opposed to a "fraudster"? Given the recent revelations by Mr Frank Dunlop, it appears we can teach refugees a thing or two about corruption and fraud. Perhaps they have come for nothing more than an education?
To assert that the lesson to be learned from ethic conflicts is to avoid ethnic diversity is infantile. Ethnic conflict is a convenient blanket to cover disputes based on greed and economic exploitation. The current Zimbabwean "conflict" is based on nothing more than lasting injustice in the distribution of land and resources, due to the country's imperial past. The race card has been played by a manipulative politician desperate to cling to power.
Ethnic diversity exists on a global scale. Maintaining some form of ethnic purity is impossible and justifying the attempt is simply bigotry. - Yours, etc.,
John O'Leary, South Harrow, Middlesex, England.