Madam, - I would have been inclined to ignore Christopher Murray's letter (December 18th) in response to one of mine, among others, if it were not written by a senior academic. From such a source, its disregard for facts is worrying.
He says those who criticised Colm Tóibín's play Beauty in a broken Place, and the Abbey for presenting it, are "clearly calling for some kind of censorship". None of the letters you published suggests censorship. (One suggests that the Abbey Theatre should cease to sell Tóibín's play-script as a gesture of atonement to the late F.J. McCormick, but not that it be banned.)
My own letter of November 2nd warned against censorship, though it does not use that word.
Dr Murray excuses Tóibín by likening him to Aristophanes. The complaint about Tóibín's play is that it purports to portray real events, but falsifies them, something I do not think happens in any of Aristophanes' surviving plays.
Dr Murray is well qualified to correct me if I am wrong and, if I am right, to know his comparison is misleading.
But the most worrying part of Dr Murray's letter is where he says McCormick "had put himself in the firing line", and proposes that neither he if he were still alive nor his family should complain of his coming under fire. This is to ignore the thrust of all previous letters on the subject, which is that the portrait of McCormick in Tóibín's play is false.
The implication of Dr Murray's letter is that any weapon, including falsehood, is "legitimate" against a "legitimate target".
This, from a senior academic, is a cause for concern. - Yours, etc.,
MICHAEL WILLIAMS, Grosvenor Square, Dublin 6.