Dropouts who changed things for the better

YOUR columnist Malachi O’Doherty (Irish Examiner, December 8) makes the interesting assertion that fear of nuclear annihilation “explains the irresponsible ‘60s” more effectively than other social theories.

In this context, he mentions dropouts who bought “cottages and goats in Kerry and Donegal”.

I think Mr O’Doherty is being flippantly dismissive of many people from Britain — and mainland Europe — who forsook foreign suburban surroundings in the 1960s (and the ‘70s and ‘80s for good measure) in order to make new, rugged and precarious lives for themselves on small holdings in the periphery of rural Ireland.