Judging Dev is good enough for classroom

THE managing director of Mercier Press, Clodagh Feehan, is upset that Diarmaid Ferriter’s major work, Judging Dev, has been circulated to the schools (Letters, December 5).

Dr Ferriter’s weakness is that his book “takes a favourable view of its subject”.

Are we then to assume that if it had been a hatchet job, there would have been nothing wrong with circulating it to our students?

Ms Feehan feels it would have been more appropriate to distribute the great work The Making of the Irish Constitution 1937 by Dermot Keogh and Andrew McCarthy. By coincidence this work is published by Mercier Press.

I have read both books and believe them to be equally great. I find myself disagreeing with Ms Feehan’s view that Dr Ferriter’s work is “propaganda”. He is probably our most brilliant young historian today. A historian’s job is to help people understand what made people behave the way they did in past periods of history, not to judge them by contemporary standards.

Fr Iggy O’Donovan

Shop Street

Drogheda

Co Louth