Building Bridges

Sir, - If I were a unionist I wouldn't know whether to feel reassured or insulted by Ruth Dudley Edwards's attempt to speak on…

Sir, - If I were a unionist I wouldn't know whether to feel reassured or insulted by Ruth Dudley Edwards's attempt to speak on my behalf (October 28th). Her use of a tribalist perspective is patronising and offensive. She reminds me of one of those anthropologists who discover a remote hill-tribe in Papua, New Guinea and then set themselves up as champions protecting their people. She informs us in hushed, reverential whispers how she was once invited by a farmer in deepest Tyrone to visit, and how "he and his tribe" brought her to an Orange gathering - speaking for all the world as if she was a privileged witness to secret initiation ceremonies of a hilltribe of Co Tyrone. Can't she see that in using this outmoded twotribes perspective it is she and her anti-nationalist cabal from Dublin who are the real problem here? - Yours, etc., Michael Morgan,

Glen Road,

Belfast B11.