Sir, Is not Ireland, along with its territorial waters, a self declared nuclear free area? Yet we are told that Dublin is soon to be graced with a visit from the USS John F. Kennedy, a nuclear powered and armed aircraft carrier, a ship a little smaller than Croke Park, with the capability, if needed, of converting Dublin, its citizenry, and most of the surrounding country side into radio active cinders.
Our National Lottery is touting this visit by raffling tickets to tour the craft, as if it were a sort of floating Disneyland with which it shares, perhaps, something of t.he same kind of deranged fantasy. It would require the suave savagery of Jonathan Swift to do justice to the irony inherent in the fact that the very technological gung ho which spawned this nightmare vessel was incapable of preventing a begrudging nobody from blasting a 10 cent bullet through the brain of its country's president, after whom the ship is named.
And, sickest of sick jokes, nestling in the nuclear maw of this behemoth is an ambulance, a gift to the people of Ireland, from the makers of this monument to the lunacy of the human animal.
History, it is said, plays two performances the first as tragedy, the second as farce. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis - Virgil had it right, hadn't he? Yours, etc., Mount Pleasant, Waterford.