Madam, - Bill Fearey is to be highly commended for his imaginative suggestion that we abandon St Patrick and adopt Leopold Bloom and James Joyce as national patrons (June 20th). After all, such coarse characters have it to their credit that they make manifest a vulgar display of various bodily functions such as defecating, urinating, masturbating, vomiting, belching, picking one's nose and scratching itchy pimples in public.
And isn't this just what we spontaneously do ourselves every Saturday night on the streets of Dublin? In this sense, the role model which Bill Fearey is advocating is quite apt and suitably appropriate. Away then with St Patrick. What need have we of a patron who was prayerful and humble, and who devoted his life to the disinterested spiritual service of his fellow man? A dignified icon such as this is out of place and much too old-fashioned and passé for the New "honky-tonk" Ireland we are busily building today. - Yours, etc.,
THOMAS P. WALSH, Faussagh Road, Cabra, Dublin 7.