DR Pat Muldowney’s letter (October 29) on RTÉ’s Hidden History programme (October 23) was valuable at the time and has become of even greater importance subsequently.

AT the end of November Michael Collins had proposed a new oath to be attached to the draft treaty: “I... do solemnly swear to bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the Irish Free State as by law established and that I will be faithful to His Majesty King George in acknowledgment of the Association of Ireland in a common citizenship with Great Britain and the group of nations known as the British Commonwealth.”

IN his column (Irish Examiner, June 3), Ryle Dwyer states that in my book, Michael Collins’s Intelligence War, I alleged Robert Barton was ‘Bob’, the unwitting source of so much information accumulated by the top British spy in Ireland during 1920 and 1921.

A Dublin man has been given early release from his 10-year sentence for raping a woman whom he dragged into bushes and subjected to almost seven hours of violent sexual molesting in 1996.