Madam, - Minister for Justice Michael McDowell says that many people have contacted him to pledge their support for his stance on the Afghan hunger-strike in St Patrick's Cathedral. He can huff and puff as much as he likes, using the crudest form of argument - the unprovable assertion that the people agree with him. But I, for one, do not agree with him.
I went to the cathedral on Monday and Tuesday to find out for myself what was going on. It was clear that the whole debacle of grown men and school-age children putting themselves in danger of immediate death is due to their utter despair that they can see no future for themselves in the limbo to which the Minister has consigned them. Living in a hostel on €19 per week, they have no control over of one the most important ingredients of life, their diet. Forbidden to seek work or adult education, they are without intellectual stimulation, and have nothing to do but to wait in deepening depression to find out if anyone is going to tell them what is to be done with them. Kafka, or Beckett?
The rigidity of the minister's mind-set - refusing even to go down or to send a representative to talk to the Afghans - is, I take it, a hangover from the H-block hunger strikes of a quarter-century ago. It would be encouraging if he had the sense to see that the two situations are entirely different, but he obviously hasn't; and neither has the Taoiseach who babbled about "threats".
Who is threatening whom? Their total misreading of the situation shows how far they are removed from reality and how necessary it is for them to go to St Patrick's and find out for themselves. They keep telling us how humane their asylum policy is; but until this can be seen it will not be believed. - Yours etc,
MARGARETTA D'ARCY (Member of Aosdána), St Bridget's Place Lower, Galway.