Fawning attitude to monarchy

YOUR columnist Matt Cooper (April 15), commenting on the imminent arrival of Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland, displays an abject servility towards British royalty not seen since former Taoiseach John Bruton grovellingly referred to his meeting with Prince Charles in 1995 as ‘the happiest day of my life’.

One could be forgiven for thinking that Mr Cooper was acting as Ireland’s indigenous public relations officer for the British royal family and not a columnist for a leading national Irish newspaper. Such a fawning attitude towards British monarchy is not alone embarrassing but repugnant to the republican ethos of this state.

Displaying a condescension which I have rarely witnessed, Matt Cooper urges us to behave “like good neighbours who can put aside rows from the past”. To refer to the imperial colonisation of this country and the horrors that followed in the form of the Penal Laws, subjugation, slaughter, famine, plantation and forced transportation, as ‘rows from the past’ is an affront to those who suffered appalling abuses from our former colonial masters.