Sir, - After reading your Editorial of August 27th entitled "Aboriginal Rights", I wondered whether President McAleese was misinformed, misguided or misquoted in respect to any comparison she may have made between the treatment of Aborigines in Australia and Travellers in Ireland.
It has to be stated that the Travelling community in Ireland were not subjected to 200 years of murder, rape and dispossession. The Australian political and legal context is complex, certainly, but there can be no denying that the Aborigines were terribly abused. Some were kept on reserves where they were segregated in accordance with sex and deprived of normal liberties. Elsewhere, children were stolen and lands expropriated by those who had no compunction about hunting Aborigines down with a view to extermination. Untold thousands were shot or poisoned by Europeans as massacres in the form of "punitive expeditions" were perpetrated, with almost genocidal zeal, by police and settlers in the Northern Territory as late as the 1920s.
In 1992, premier Paul Keating admitted that white Australians took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life enjoyed by black Australians. Without mentioning how Australians had permitted British nuclear tests on Aboriginal lands, he conceded that Europeans had brought diseases and alcohol to the Aborigines, committed murders, and practised discrimination and exclusion through ignorance and prejudice.
Before such polite, political confessions, there may have been a national "cult of forgetfulness" based in turn on a "cult of disrespect" among white Australians, but this was surely the least of the problems suffered by Aborigines! To focus on this "neglect" is rather to miss the main point: the tremendous injustice and anguish which lay behind systematic policies of "protection" and "assimilation".
In this context, if in none other, Irish Travellers have been very lucky indeed, although it may not be politically correct to say so in a cultural climate prone to flattering self-flagellation. - Is mise,
Charles J. O'Sullivan, Sunnyside Avenue, Western Road, Cork.