Madam, - I am sure that this year's Remembrance Sunday services will not provide the occasion for any personal attacks by an Irish Times columnist on surviving veterans of the Allied forces in the second World War, and that the Irish Times response would be one of indignation were any other Irish newspaper to act in such a vein.
Consider, then, my surprise at the vindictive and highly personalised attack by your columnist Kevin Myers ("Irishman's Diary", Oct 19th) on the fact that the President of Ireland so graciously received a courtesy call from four International Brigade veterans of the Spanish Anti-Fascist War on October 15th - the veterans in question being the last two surviving Irish volunteers, Bob Doyle and Michael O'Riordan, and Jack Edwards and myself from Britain.
The International Brigade Memorial Trust is a body established by veterans and their families and friends in order to pay tribute to our fallen comrades from both Britain and Ireland. This year's wreath-laying ceremony at the Irish memorial plaque outside Liberty Hall was performed by Deirdre Davey, daughter of the Rev Robert M. Hilliard of Killarney, who gave his life in defence of the Spanish Republic at the battle of Jarama in 1937. Our annual general meeting is held each year in a different city in these islands, but never before has it been subjected to such a newspaper attack, not even by those newspapers that historically had supported the British government's policy of appeasing fascism and denying to the democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic the means by which to resist the military onslaught of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler.
When I was born in Liverpool in the momentous year of the Dublin Lockout of 1913, and my father named me James Larkin Jones in honour of his friend and former fellow worker on the Liverpool docks, I was also imbued with the Larkinite principle of "an injury to one is the concern of all". The planes that were to bomb the city of Coventry to smithereens in the 11-hour-long blitz of November 1940 were the same Nazi German bombers that a British policy of appeasement had permitted to destroy the Basque city of Guernica in April 1937.
In a message to our agm on October 15th, Ireland's Taoiseach, Mr Bertie Ahern, paid the following tribute: "The willingness of those who joined the International Brigade to sacrifice all so that others could enjoy a democratic way of life is an inspiration to us all, and the fact that Spain is today a leading democratic nation in a strong and united Europe is no small tribute to them".
As Spain's democratically elected parliament had been defended by International Brigaders in 1936, so also did its democratic parliament of 1996 award the right to claim Spanish citizenship to Irish veterans Eugene Downing, Bob Doyle, Maurice Levitas, Peter O'Connor and Michael O'Riordan, together with other International Brigaders from all over the world.
When all is said and done, the verdict of history that matters most to us International Brigaders is that of the Spanish people themselves. - Yours, etc,
JACK JONES, President, International Brigade Memorial Trust, C/o TGWU Retired Members' Association, Transport House, London.