Sir, It is news to me that, in Northern Ireland, the poppy is worn on Remembrance Day "to demonstrate the superiority, or at least the superior numbers, of one community over another" (Mary Holland, November 14th). Union 1st politicians and not many of those have used both the Battle of the Somme and the British Legion's poppy to emphasise the Britishness of the Protestant people, but Protestants themselves have worn the poppy since it was introduced in the early 1920s, simply to remember the war dead.
Ms Holland also claims that the two minutes' silence at 11 am on Armistice Day was abandoned by "a war weary British public in the 1920s . . ." It would be interesting to know where the evidence for this comes from. I can tell Ms Holland that the two minute silence stopped practically all pedestrians and traffic throughout Britain and Northern Ireland not just in the 1920s, but well into the 1930s. Ask anyone over 70 years of age.
The impression that the poppy is a badge of unionism owes most its origin to republican bigotry. Remember that it was the IRA that killed 11 civilian innocents and injured 63 almost exactly nine years ago, on November 8th, 1987, by the Enniskillen War Memorial. Yours, etc., Copeland Crescent, Comber, Co Down.