Sir, - Although it was not included in The Irish Times/Poetry Ireland list of 100 favourite Irish poems, that anguished call for mutual understanding between orange and green, John Hewitt's "The Colony", deserves to be more widely known and appreciated. (In this regard The Irish Times earned our thanks for having published the full text of the poem as part of its reportage on the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985.)
In view of the lack of trust over the decommissioning issue, it was a timely coincidence that Y should have quoted from both "The Colony" and from that "most haunting elegy", Sir Samuel Ferguson's "Lament for Thomas Davis" (In Time's Eye, February 15th).
Hewitt's colonist narrator, although conscious of "that terror" which dogs his besieged people from their folk memory of the slaughter perpetuated on them when "the dispossessed" rose to regain the planted and colonised land, would nonetheless, try to convince "my people and this people" that "we are changed/ from the raw levies which usurped the land/if not to kin, to co-inhabitants".
The Irish Tricolour symbolises the all-embracing nationality preached by Thomas Davis, based on love of Ireland. If the Tricolour is to be truly upheld we need to convince the Northern Ireland Protestants that they are not merely co-inhabitants, but kin.
And because the nationality represented by the Irish Tricolour is one which, as conceived by its founder Davis, was not to preclude civil war, we also need to convince the republican movement in general, and the Provisional IRA together with the Real IRA and Continuity IRA in particular, that armed struggle, whether in actuality or tactical threat, is an insult to the flag they, with invincible ignorance, claim to uphold.
Perhaps a national forum of some description would help us in this dual task, and duty. Yours, etc.,
James McGeever Dublin Road, Kingscourt, Co. Cavan.