Sir, - Carol Coulter (September 3rd) writes that "Unitarians trace their roots back to the first Protestant Dissenters in Dublin in the 16th century".
That is certainly news to me. The Hungarian Ferenc Dávid, a Unitarian dissenter from orthodoxy, propagated Unitarian views publicly as leader of the Transylvanian Unitarian Church from 1566 to 1578, when he was arrested and imprisoned.
But it was at least two generations after Dávid before Unitarianism in any organised form reached Britain and Ireland. The oldest surviving Unitarian church in England is Toxteth Chapel in Liverpool (1618), and although in 1923 the then Cork Unitarian Minister William Weatherall hypothesised that there may have been Unitarian stirrings in Cork in the 1620s, that remains conjectural.
The earliest firm foundation dates in Ireland are Dublin, c.1649, and Clonmel, Bandon, Tipperary and Cork in the mid to late 1660s. The oldest Unitarian church surviving in Ireland now is Cork's New Meeting House, opened on August 4th, 1717 to replace an earlier building. The New Meeting House is thus not only a priceless example of the Irish Unitarian heritage, but also, into the bargain, Cork's oldest surviving church.
I know of no Unitarian survivals in Ireland from the early Celtic period, such as are found in Wales in the very early stone crosses at Margam inscribed and dedicated "In the name of the Most High God". Can any Irish antiquarian or mediaevalist adduce any Irish parallels for these very early Welsh Unitarian remains? - Yours, etc.,
Dr MARTIN PULBROOK,
New Meeting House,
Prince's Street, Cork.