YOUR columnist Steven King’s self-proclaimed pro-Americanism must be of a very shallow kind indeed if it can be undermined by the results of a single poll on which he largely based his column and which he later admitted was flawed in its methodolgy and execution (‘America’s political wingnuts create an ugly mood of fear and loathing’, April 14).

AMERICANS — don’t you just love them? Actually, by and large, I do. There’s an ugly snootiness in some quarters in Ireland, and Europe more broadly, towards the US and its citizens which was never quite going to be eradicated by the election of Barack Obama. I have written as much before.