Perhaps the answer to Gordon Cunningham’s query as to why the Minister for Foreign Affairs Charlie Flanagan was so vocal in his call for sanctions against Russia, and not against Israel (Letters, October 20), is the tacit recognition by the government that the imperative behind the two actions was different.

The latest pension records from the Irish Military Archives show that Robert Briscoe’s application for a State pension, for IRA service in the War of Independence, was resisted by fellow republicans.

Victoria White’s inflammatory column ‘We are washing our hands of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (July 31), uses the revisionist interpretation of Ilan Pappe to depict the founding of Israel in 1948 as an imposed Nakba (catastrophe) on the indigenous Palestinian Arabs of the era.