Sir, - Mr Culleton from Maryland (January 5th) is good enough to confess to an interest in Ireland. His interest might be heightened if he realised that in recent years many of us have come to realise that friends in other countries had begun to despair of us as a bunch of irreconcilable bigots who believed that the gun was nature's implement for securing political aims. The loss of friends' esteem helped many Irish people of varying backgrounds to think again and start wondering if friends might be worth listening to after all. Hence the dawn of optimism about Ireland's future during 1998.
The political establishment in the US ought to take a lesson from what is happening here. People outside the US are not hostile to the people of that country and are ready to admire them when they earn it. But very large numbers of people across the world seriously estimate that the governing bodies in the US have a well-deserved reputation for cruelty, arrogance and greed. I have instanced examples of this in this correspondence, and incidentally I can say that though I first had the privilege of having a letter printed in your paper in 1938 and have had the privilege renewed many times since, I have never before received such a flood of letters, phone messages and street parleys, very often from complete strangers, as in the past few weeks, while only one fellow countryman has expressed disagreement. This ought to make Mr Culleton ponder.
Few will believe that the US is active in the Gulf on behalf of the Kurds, who would be abandoned if it suited the military-industrial complex (which no less a person than President Eisenhower admitted has a decisive voice in US policy). The US did nothing to prevent the break-up of the relatively peaceful and prosperous pre-1980s Yugoslavia, which annoyed it by organising a non-aligned movement of states that saw both NATO and the Warsaw Pact as potential disturbers of world peace. But of course big powers have always grubbled around for allies among more easily manipulated small states.
Finally, will Mr Culleton give us a good reason why the US - threatened by no other power and already, as it ceaselessly boasts, the only super-power - has to burden its people with a colossal rearmament programme costing more than $10 billion, providing itself with infinitely more weapons of mass destruction than Saddam ever dreamed of, when the US is notoriously the country with the widest gap between its rich citizens and its poor? What a windfall for the military-industrial complex! - Yours, etc., Dr John de Courcy
Ireland, Dalkey,
Co Dublin.