Sir, - Your editorial (July 10th) argues for the residents of the Garvaghy Road to allow a token parade down along the contentious route. Perhaps you might care to take the time to explain the logic of this argument because I for one certainly fail to grasp it.
Your position is that the residents of the Garvaghy Road have the right not to have a parade of the Portadown District of the Orange Order pass through their area. This is a right which they have been denied until this year. Now that this right has been accepted for the first time in history, they should immediately forfeit that right since failure to do so will lead to further brutal attacks on Catholics, their homes, workplaces and churches by those who do not believe that this right should ever have been granted to residents in the first place.
The Irish Times is truly leading the way in new philosophical concepts (and in danger of leaving many of the us behind). Hypothetical rights. Imagine the consequences had this been applied earlier in history.
When Rosa Parks demanded the right to sit where she wanted on a segregated Montgomery bus on December 1, 1955, the problem of the US civil rights movement and of decades of racial unrest could have been solved at a stroke through the application of hypothetical rights. Rosa Parks would have been informed that she had a right to sit at the front of the bus but should not exercise that right since the subsequent white backlash would cause black churches to be bombed and people to be murdered etc.
According to the logic of The Irish Times, Rosa Parks would indeed "bear a degree of responsibility - albeit indirectly - for the terror". Had she accepted that certain rights were hypothetical and should not be exercised, she could then occupy the moral high ground . . . presumably at the back of the bus? - Yours, etc., Paul O'Connor,
Grafton Street, Derry.