Madam, - I write to congratulate RTÉ on an exemplary documentary, "The Killings at Coolacrease", shown on October 23rd on RTÉ1.
As your columnist Ann Marie Hourihane commented (October 25th), never has the title of the series - "Hidden History" - been more apposite.
The story of the extirpation of the Pearsons, a prosperous nonconformist family, from a Co Offaly farmstead, epitomises how we mask our past.
The background to the story was sketchy in places, and further clouded by interviewees' attempts to justify in retrospect what happened.
But there was no disagreement as to the central events of June 30th, 1921: as the family home burned to the ground, and in front of their mother and sisters, two young men were stood up before the firing squad of an illegal organisation.
Each was shot in the genitals and buttocks and left to die in an agony that lasted many hours. (One is left to speculate on the process by which this "sentence" was arrived at; it had to have been premeditated).
The victims were then left to the ignominy of the secret, hurried burial and the unmarked grave.
The surviving members of the family eventually found refuge in Australia.
The contemporary relevance of the story was brought out all too clearly by the verbal contortions of apologists as they struggled to defend or gloss over the unspeakable.
We continue to see the same process at work in public discourse on Northern Ireland, the same relentless efforts to mould the consensus as to what is to be remembered and what is to be forgotten.
But lasting peace and reconciliation cannot be grounded in distorted half-truths and selective amnesia. - Yours, etc,
D KELLY, Whitebeam Road, Dublin 14.