Madam, – Cáit Ni Arrachtáin (April 24th) has written from a country in the Middle East to an Irish paper in order to complain about sensitive matters of culture and identity in France. I would remind her that there are forceful feminists on both sides of this particular debate and that France is a republic committed to certain principles in respect of behaviour in the public domain. It is also a country in which such matters have been subject to an animated debate that plainly demonstrates the absence of simple solutions.
In this debate tensions between Western and Middle Eastern perspectives are interwoven into a complex mix involving identity, feminism, culture, and the civic space. These are beyond my capacity to pronounce upon; nonetheless it is clear to me that this matter goes much deeper than a uni-dimensional feminist issue.
Finally, am I the only reader to find it unfair of Ms Ní Arrachtáin to characterise the political outcome of the long debate in France as betraying a “moral and cultural superiority complex”? Instead, might we Irish not do better by learning something from the French experience? – Yours, etc,