Martin D Stern doesn’t clarify what he means by “same-sex activities” [Irish Examiner, Letters, April 17], so I can only infer that he’s referring to two women playing tennis or guys playing football together.

That members of the gay community want their long-term relationships recognised by the State is understandable but does not give them the right to redefine the word “marriage” and insist that others accept this new definition.

Dr Kevin McCarthy (Letters, Irish Examiner) is, of course, perfectly entitled to deplore Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral success but he stretches the point when he claims that it is “a triumph for the politics of fear over socio-economics [in which] he created national security paranoia in the last days of a bitterly divisive election campaign”.

You report (Feb 4) that “Jordan executed two al Qaida prisoners by hanging, after Islamic State (IS) militants put to death a captured fighter pilot by burning him alive in a cage”.

Eighty-four-year-old pensioner and widow, Anne Spearman (Letters, Nov 14) makes an impassioned plea to Finance Minister Michael Noonan “to look elsewhere to make his cuts” rather than do away with pensioners’ bus passes.

Michael A Moriarty (‘Stopping the bloodshed in Syria’, Letters, May 31) writes that “The government of Syria may be far from perfect”, which is obvious to anyone following the events there.

PÓL Ó CIONSALGH is being naïve when he asks: “Why don’t the Revenue Commissioners go after all the big tax evaders instead of pensioners?”

IN his letter (June 9) Brian C Murphy wonders if EU aid to Gaza went by road where he says it would be subject to the massive tail-back of goods entering through Israel.

JA Barnwell, commenting on the Chinese new year celebrations in Dublin (Letters, February 22), says we might model ourselves more on the Chinese who view their ancestors with real respect.

THE British MPs’ expenses scandal would appear to show that the word politics really is derived from the Greek “poly”, meaning many, and “ticks”(sic), blood-sucking parasites.

IN her letter (January 14), Miriam Cotton claimed Steven King’s column (January 7) on Israeli actions in Gaza embodied an astounding “distortion of fact and history”.

IN his letter headlined ‘Neither fascism nor saving the Jews was Britain’s aim’ (Sept 10), Tim O’Halloran says “there is a subtle rewriting of history that suggests the Allies were trying to save the Jews”.

IN his letter headlined ‘Slaughter in Sudan: UN stands idly by’ (Irish Examiner, September 13), John O’Shea drew attention to the estimated 400,000 lives lost in Darfur and “the sheer indifference of the UN security council to the plight of the vulnerable millions of innocent people” there.