Sir, - Margaret Power (August 14th), admits to puzzlement over the term Anglo-Irish and asks: "How does one qualify as Irish?" Bernard Shaw answered this question with his customary panache.
"Eternal is the fact that the human creature born in Ireland and brought up in its air is Irish. I have lived for 20 years in Ireland and for 72 in England; but the 20 years come first, and in Britain I am still a foreigner and shall die one.
"The mere geographical accident of my birth, for which I deserve no credit whatever - this fact that I am an Irishman - has always filled me with a wild and inextinguishable pride. I am also proud of being a Protestant, though Protestantism is to me a great historic movement of Reformation, Aspiration and Self-Assertion against spiritual tyrannies rather than that organisation of false gentility which so often takes its name in Ireland. Certain English historians and even some Irish Gaelic Languages have tried to steal Swift and Berkeley, Sheridan and Yeats (to say nothing of myself) as Anglo-Irish. There was never any such species as AngloIrish; and there never will be!" - Yours, etc.,
Dr T.K. McKeogh,
Greenfields Court, Kilkenny.