In defence of principled socialist with realistic views

I READ with bemusement Pat Corkery’s attack on Cork Socialist Party councillor Mick Barry (Letters, August 21) and with much greater alarm the letter by Desmond FitzGerald from Canary Wharf in London, no less.

Mr FitzGerald suggests that ethnic Russians living in Georgia should return to the ‘motherland’. Perhaps he believes they should be repatriated altogether.

Is Mr FitzGerald aware of the history of this kind of reasoning in eastern Europe after the First World War and more recently in the former Yugoslavia? From 1918 the Radeks in the Ukraine claimed that Soviet power in Red Ukraine was invalid because some of the workers who had voted to align themselves to the Russian Federation were ethnic Russians.