Sir, - I subscribe entirely to Dr Noel Browne's call to President Robinson switch off the "fatuous, low watt, low powered electric candle in her window". It is nothing more than, quite literally, window dressing, and has no meaning to the vast majority of our diaspora.
A comment on this letter in a Sunday newspaper (January 14th) refers, somewhat patronisingly, to Dr Browne as "continuing to tilt at windmills". Rather do I think of Noel Browne in the words of Daniel Berrigan used to describe his friend Thomas Merton - "a man crazed with caring about the human condition, crying forever into the North Wind of indifference and despair."
Noel Browne was, like myself, lucky enough to have been born with a built in shit detector. It is heartening to find that, at eighty years of age, it still functions perfectly good to know that the passing years have not diminished his integrity and his courage, and that he can still blow against the walls of all the powers that be the trumpet of his defiance. - Yours, etc.,
Bellevue Avenue,
Glenageary,
Co Dublin.