Sir, - Toby Joyce (October 25th) indicts me for a litany of failures, not least apparently failure to provide him with a convincing argument against joining PfP. If Mr Joyce is an advocate of PfP, his hysterical and highly personalised distortion of my original brief letter, which posed what I considered a relevant question, speaks volumes for the standards of attention of his cohort.
Having lived and worked in several countries of western Europe, including Berlin during the Cold War, I hardly need Mr Joyce's facile lecture on continental geography. Having been made redundant from a transport livelihood by Serbian aggression on Croatia and having followed the progress of Gulf War I and the arming by the western powers of Sadaam to contain their failed puppet Shah of Iran, let me relieve Mr Joyce's "sadness" that "the only evil Mr Flinter sees in the world is IMF loans". The reference in my original letter (October 13th) was to the loan-shark austerity programmes accompanying such loans which have destroyed and will continue to destroy the lives of viable children through the withdrawal of health, housing, educational and other programmes, often with the same funds being diverted, as will happen here, from social development to war toys for our boys.
At no point in my letter did I advocate toleration of China's actions in Tibet, Russia's predations in Chechnya, or any of the other current geopolitical crimes implied by Mr Joyce's allusions, nor did I advocate anything so stupid as "to stop globalisation".
What I did ask was: "Could it conceivably be that the best route to European security lies in the promotion of a globalisation that is something more than a licence for the former colonial powers to continue extracting resources . . . through "free" market mechanisms". It is still a relevant question, when all that disinformation is scraped away.
I wish Mr Joyce much luck in his plucky efforts to "assist in maintaining peace in our backyard" and hope that the experience leads to a grounding in reality that helps dissipate the more fantastical elements displayed in his letter." - Yours, etc.,
Damien Flinter, Ballyconneely, Connemara.