Sir, - Poor Joe McDonagh, poor Liam Mulvihill! They really left the safe and cosy shallows and found themselves in (for them) dangerous and uncharted waters last Saturday. It is really extraordinary how two capable administrators showed such political naivete. If they are still in any doubt as to where a sizeable part of the Association now finds itself, they need look again at the wording of the amended motion which was written out for them.
They will find not one, but two, references to the "British-Irish peace agreement". There is no such thing, of course, just as there was no British-Irish war, except in the minds of a narrow constituency which finds the idea useful as a form of retrospective justification. Anyone who has any knowledge of the Northern Irish will recognise that the words used were not a slip of the tongue (or pen). The political activists there do not make such mistakes.
The GAA president and general secretary have a lot of ground to recover and I wish them the best of luck. - Yours, etc. John Newman,
Glasnevin Avenue, Dublin 11.