A chara, - As the after-shocks from Fr Reid's "Nazi" comments continue to reverberate, many closet unionists "down South" have felt emboldened enough to retaliate and it has brought a welcome clarity in some surprising ways.
It started off with Garret FitzGerald's outrageous implication (Opinion, October 15th) that our promotion of the Irish language should never have happened because it is alien to unionists. Then Dick Keane (Letters, October 10th and 17th), writing under the guise of being a "nationalist", suggests that having given up our territorial claim, we should now abandon even our aspiration to unity, because all this talk about (dwindling) majority rule is really all very undemocratic and ungentlemanly.
The final straw for me came at a wedding last weekend when a Fine Gael activist beside me (Irish and Catholic, by the way) refused to stand for Amhrán na bhFiann, citing his lack of loyalty to it and its "failure to acknowledge our historical ties with Britain" or some other such nonsense.
Yes, everyone is entitled to their opinions, and the Civil War is a long time ago, to be sure; but whatever about their convergence on economic policy, on matters closer to the heart the divisions between and loyalties to the two major parties are as clear and as strong and as relevant as ever. It is about time this was brought out into the open. - Is mise,
DAVID CARROLL, Castle Gate, Dublin 2.