Sir, - As president of the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament I remember the courtesy with which Messrs Aiken, Andrews and other Fianna Fail ministers in a past, pre-tribunal age treated the views of that organisation even when they did not always agree with them. Now it seems that a Government obviously losing popular support proposes to regain it by deliberately insulting its opponents. I refer to an ignorant and abusive statement from Mr Brian Cowen last weekend denouncing critics of his party's military policy as "supporters of isolationism masquerading as advocates of neutrality".
In the first place, if a minister intends to be taken seriously it is his duty to find out what his opponents' outlook really is before he starts insulting them. How would Cowen like being described as a potential agent of the international trade in armaments masquerading as a normal peace-loving citizen?
I can assure this individual that long before he was born, because my mother lived in Italy, I used to go there for school holidays and consequently learnt Italian. Then, sent to a school in England that fostered an outlook as arrogant as the minister's, I walked out and found myself a job in a Dutch ship which visited ports in Spain, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, with all of which countries I have kept contact in the intervening 70 years. After that I worked for periods in France, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Tunisia and Yugoslavia, which necessitated using at least one of the languages used locally, and found myself in due course a member of the marine academies of France and Portugal and the Instituto Browniano in Argentina. Now I am accused by an ignorant braggart of being "isolationist".
As a supporter in the past of the League of Nations and, until recently, of the United Nations, and as (unlike many colleagues in the peace movement) a convinced socialist, which means a convinced internationalist, I am like many fellow-citizens suspicious of my country joining a military alliance dominated by ruthless "great" powers. - Yours, etc.,
John de Courcy Ireland, President, The Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Grosvenor Terrace, Dalkey, Co Dublin.