Madam, - It has long been the right and the privilege of Irish poets to satirise people in authority - a right secured for them by various clergy, Colmcille being the most prominent.
But to compare Archbishop Martin with a KGB enforcer, as Paul Durcan does ("We'll have none of your individualistic gestures", Opinion, August 19th) is stretching the exaggeration proper to satire beyond breaking point.
The archbishop merely pointed out the teaching of the Church in the cases Mr Durcan raises. No one was sent to even the mildest of gulags.
- Is mise,
AONGHUS Ó HALMHAIN, Páirc na Seilbhe, Baile an Chinnédigh, Co Chill Mhantáin.
Madam, - Paul Durcan's poem in your edition of August 19th confirms the impression I got from his Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin, which was meant as an assault on the reputation of Eamon de Valera. For that poem told more about the poet than it did about Dev.
It told this individual that Durcan was a sore-headed solipsist, a braggart and a snob. Lest we might think the poet hob-knobbed with the hoi polloi or played Billy-in-the-Bowl with a twangman's mot, we are told that he rolled with a judge's daughter.
Now he has a go at Archbishop Martin for the legitimate exercise of the authority vested in him. It is an authority accepted by Catholic priests at their ordination. The Catholic Church is a voluntary body, not a conscripted one, and like other bodies it has rules. Similarly, the various elements of the Anglican Communion are voluntary and have rules.
Newman and Manning and Wiseman were clerks in Anglican Holy Orders, but they were unable to consecrate the Eucharist in Catholic churches until they transferred voluntarily to the Church of Rome and were ordained in accordance with its requirements. Many Catholic priests celebrating Mass in the Westminster Archdiocese today have followed Newman's trajectory.
Father Iggy O'Donovan of Drogheda will have known all this, and his "individualistic gesture", so admired by Paul Durcan, was a hackneyed V-sign, not just at his bishop but at ordinary, traditional, sinning Catholics like myself. It seems to me to have been a coat-trailing exercise rather than the outcome of Christian charity or normal good manners.
- Yours, etc,
DONAL KENNEDY, London N13.