Sir, - The prospect of your newspaper hosting a prolonged debate between John Waters (Opinion, April 23rd) and Garret FitzGerald (Opinion, April 14th) on the moral imperative of paying tax is one to view with the apprehension one might reserve for a Giles/Dunphy symposium on the merits of 4-3-3 over 3-5-2. In short, Garret, don't even think about it! Many of us will have been greatly surprised that Dr FitzGerald thought it necessary to respond in the first place to Mr Waters's piece defending Beverley Cooper-Flynn (Opinion, April 9th), but your columnist must have been gratified to have got a rise out of Garret the Good - for him, no doubt, the embodiment of that phantasmal Dublin 4 coterie of "self-styled liberals and secular-pluralists" who in Waters's florid imagination "have spent 30 years undermining our cultural foundations".
An old Chicago newsman once said that "a columnist is like a hooker - every day you have to fake it!" And reading the pure sophistry of the recent John Waters columns, it's hard to detect an ounce of conviction in his perverse defence of Haughey, Lawlor and Cooper-Flynn. He does it to goad the liberals and to have Garret FitzGerald take the bait must have seemed the like the greatest catch of all. Enough already! - Yours, etc.,
Bert Wright, Hillside, Dalkey, Co Dublin.