Sir - That prejudice, violence, and acts of vengeance were endured by Irish Protestants during the War of Independence and the subsequent setting up of the independent Irish State has been well documented in recent historical accounts.
Such treatment no doubt drove some to leave. But Kevin Myers is most disingenuous in his assertion (An Irishman's Diary, July 14th) that "a process of expulsion and coercion" was responsible for the marked decline of the Southern Protestant population between 1919 to date. If he believes this, who was behind this "process"?
Mr Myers ignores, for example, the contemporaneous creation of the Northern Ireland state under British jurisdiction. That development provided a strong cultural, political, and economic impetus for the movement of large numbers of Protestants, especially from what became the border counties of Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal. It is also a matter of record that the Northern Ireland regime led by Sir James Craig aggressively encouraged Protestants from these counties, through the offer of government jobs, to relocate across the border to neighbouring Fermanagh and Tyrone to help offset the narrow Catholic majorities there. This new dispensation was the work of the same Craig regime that sought and obtained - unfortunately with British Government acquiescence - the creation of "a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people".
It is also ironic that Mr Myers, who has to his credit spent considerable time on these pages discussing the sacrifices of both Catholic and Protestant Irishmen in the Great War, underestimates the terrible and disproportionate impact that death on the fields of France and Belgium had upon the Protestant male population of Southern Ireland.
Given that ethnic cleansing and its relevance to Ireland in the last century was a central theme in Mr Myers's article, perhaps he might be interested in the remarks of the Rt Hon E.C. Ferguson delivered to the Ulster Unionist Executive in April 1948 on the topic of how best to handle the small Catholic majority in Co Fermanagh. Ferguson, then a leading Ulster Unionist MP at Stormont representing Enniskillen, urged the council "to adopt whatever plans, to take whatever steps, however drastic, to wipe out this nationalist majority". That these comments were made freely in what was regarded as a corner of the United Kingdom by a leading unionist politician without fear of censure only three years after the defeat of the Nazi regime and the discovery of the extermination camps might further whet Kevin Myers's appetite for historical inquiry - Yours, etc.,
Francis Costello, (Ph.D., Modern Irish History), Hampton Park, Belfast 7.