Madam, - Your publication of extravagant denunciations of me by Martin Mansergh and Kevin Myers is probably unanswerable in your paper. Nevertheless here is a response equal in length to Senator Mansergh's second denunciation (May 3rd).
One might spend a lifetime asserting basic truths about the Ulster Protestants against the trend of enthusiastic nationalism (which included Dublin 4 in 1970), campaigning for the separation of Church and State while the Catholic Church was institutionally dominant, and indicting Britain for refusing to incorporate the Six Counties into the functional democracy of the British state, and yet be an anti-Protestant bigot and an Anglophobe, according to the strange reckonings of Mansergh/Myers, if one does not hail Elizabeth Bowen as a North Cork writer. Bowen is their test of unreason. I suppose every faith needs one.
In her last memoir Bowen describes how as a girl of eight she soaked historical England into her system, and she rejected classification as a regional writer. As a mainstream national writer, she can only be English.
In Senator Mansergh's first denunciation I am charged with describing him as a spy. It never occurred to me that he might be a spy, though he reveals that some of his colleagues thought him one. Although the response from Aubane was not published, he concedes in the second denunciation that no such allegation was made about himself, but claims I made it about his father. But his father was an open functionary of the British Empire. He did not go around under false appearances spying out the country as Bowen did. His book on Ireland was honestly published as a Commonwealth document. And its evasions are what one expects from a writer in the British interest: the 1918 Election and the Treaty ultimatum. And his book on the Great War, which began as lectures to a college for Protestant young ladies in Dublin in 1944, is little more than a recycling of the British war propaganda of 1914, completely at variance with the views of Connolly, Casement and Fianna Fáil.
Bowen, though a spy and an English writer, was actually included in the North Cork Anthology so that people might sample her, since she had occasionally lived in her Cromwellian mansion there, as isolated from the populace as any of her ancestors. But Mansergh's inclusiveness is such that he wants William Ferris excluded because he wrote that "the English are the great war-lords of modern time". Are we required to describe the state which has fought many more wars than any other in modern times as a peace-loving state? One might argue that it was good for the world to be made war upon by Britain, but it is perverse to deny that it has been making war almost continuously from a position of safety for over 300 years.
Mansergh's summary of my views on the second World War would be worthy of Pravda. I held that Britain prevented France from making a workable settlement which Germany in 1919, and facilitated the growth of Nazi power for six years, before encouraging Poland to reject a moderate German proposal for settlement of the Danzig issue by offering it a military guarantee, and then failing to deliver when the German/Polish war broke out. It then declared war on Germany but failed to prosecute it, wasting many months trying to get into the Soviet/Finnish war instead, and leaving Germany to take the initiative in France. Following the debacle in France it refused a settlement though unable to give battle, hoping to gain the Soviet Union as an ally, although Churchill (and Bowen) saw Communism as a far greater evil than Fascism. The extermination of the Jews was conducted in the obscure hinterland of the German/Soviet war, and it is improbable that it would have been attempted otherwise.
As to "the Irishness of The Irish Times", I am perhaps biassed in that the first issue of it I saw advised Irish emigrants of the dangers of race-mixing, which was then a very English attitude. Our discovery that Major McDowell sought advice from Downing Street reinforced that bias. And Mansergh's placing of "Anglo-Ireland" on a par with "De Valera's Ireland" rather gives the game away.
I had not previously thought of him as a chip-on-the-shoulder Protestant. But what else blinds him to the fact that the North Cork Anthology covers the entire social spectrum without regard to creed or economic status? It is genuinely inclusive. It does not include on one side while cutting off at the other, as Irish Times columnists do. - Yours, etc.,
BRENDAN CLIFFORD, Belfast 12.