Sir, - The distinguished journalist C.P. Scott observed of his profession (and mine): "Comment is free, but facts are sacred." Dennis Kennedy's answer (February 9th) to my response to his original article reads more like a political agenda than any presentation of facts.
I've already pointed out that the Government of the time (1970) did what any responsible government conscious of its duty would do in similar circumstances: it instructed the Army to prepare plans in case a particular situation should arise, no more. That is what contingency plans are.
Mr Kennedy's assertion that such government contingency plans were also a declaration of intent to make "incursions" into the North is as nonsensical as is his statement that the provision of vital field hospitals was "inflammatory"!
As for asserting, as he does, that, on the one hand, the minority population in the North was never deprived of normal civil rights, and on the other that "real, and sometimes imagined, infringements of minority rights were substantially addressed by 1970", such logic beats me.
Burntollet and Derry, the events of the 1920s and of the 1930s, when I spent part of many summers in the North, were not imaginary.
Was it not J.M. Barrie who said: "Facts were never pleasing to him. He was never on terms with them until he had stood them on their heads"? Certainly, the facts as I know them are not congruent with Mr Kennedy's robust and a posteriori theory - which I translate loosely, but in this instance accurately, as through his posterior. - Yours, etc.,
Eoin Neeson, Blackrock, Co Dublin.