The columnist as a fellow traveller

DANNY MORRISON’S piece entitled ‘Republicans no dunces in a land of slow learners’ (Irish Examiner, June 21) is an unworthy ex post facto justification for years of IRA murder and mayhem during which thousands died and tens of thousands of lives were ruined.

He makes snide remarks about the SDLP's efforts on Sunningdale.

The SDLP members of the Northern Ireland executive were decent, upright and straight-talking people doing what they could to address internment and other issues.

Unlike the IRA, which did its bloody best to destroy Sunningdale, the SDLP were then the elected representatives of the nationalist population a fact Mr Morrison overlooks.

He is factually misleading about the Criminal Law Jurisdiction Act it was not an extradition measure but the opposite: a mechanism to try suspects without extradition. In 1979 the Pope, amidst millions of joyful Irish people, pleaded "on bended knee" for the IRA to stop.

But the IRA and their fellow travellers, Mr Morrison among them, had as little respect for the Pope as they had for anyone else outside their own clandestine vanguard of republicanism. They repudiated his plea and dashed the hopes and prayers of millions.

If the IRA had stopped in 1979, the dead of Enniskillen, Teebane Cross, Warrington, Frizell's fish shop, Roermond, etc, would have not have been added to their already grim 1970s toll of La Mon, Bloody Friday, Mullaghmore and all the rest.

The statement rejecting the Pope's pleas was drafted by Gerry Adams and none other than the same Danny Morrison who graces your opinion columns, now in the guise of a writer, a man of letters, possessed of artistic sensibilities. He also distorts the comment about 'slow learners.' In 1973/4 the republican movement rejected the notion of a local power-sharing executive. In 1998 they finally accepted this.

It speaks volumes for Mr Morrison's values if he regards the numerous deaths caused by the IRA between the two dates, with no authority from anyone but themselves, as somehow worthwhile. Today those killed have no voice and enjoy no sympathy from Mr Morrison, who is alive and well, continuing his poisoned rhetoric now from a position of privilege as a columnist of a national newspaper. Something is wrong about that.

There is a place for opinion of a strongly nationalist bent. But Mr Morrison is too unrepentant either to be taken seriously or to be so privileged.

Joel Fitzpatrick

Iona

Dalkey Avenue

Dalkey

Co Dublin