Sir, - Last Monday I went to my local newsagent to pick up my edition of Saturday's Irish Times and you may imagine my horror when I opened it up to see the ruined statue of my famous relation, Padraic O Conaire. I can imagine how my late father, Judge Charlie Conroy, or my uncle Michael Conroy (late of Garafin, Rosmuck, Co Galway) would have reacted had they been alive.
Many the time I sat and listened as my father and uncles talked and reminisced about their first cousin. The tales were legion. As a faculty member at UCG, I discovered that these tales had been "sanitised" for the benefits of our young and impressionable ears. Suffice it to say that, knowing that Dev was going to unveil the statue, Uncle Michael (and others) dressed it in a blue shirt - an act regrettably discovered before the unveiling.
I shudder to think what my father would classify as a fitting sentence for the "Bowsies" who perpetrated this senseless act. - Yours, etc., Prof John C. Conroy, Department of Biology, Univesity of Winnipeg,
Winnipeg, Canada.