Sir, - The saga of the late John Charles McQuaid gets curiouser and curiouser. According to John Cooney's article (The Irish Times, April 6th), "The enormous influence which the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Charles McQuaid, exercised on the interparty government was the key factor in its decision to abandon Noel Browne's Mother and Child Scheme." Mr Cooney wrote that "McQuaid may have won the trial of strength against Browne, but in the long run it proved to be a defeat from which the Catholic Church in Ireland can measure the beginning of its decline. Browne's winning card was that this was no way to run a democracy claiming the name of a republic."As Mr Cooney makes clear, Dr McQuaid's fall came about because of his disastrous pastoral failure to adapt to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Some people seemed to be of the opinion that he had frittered away his episcopacy on issues such as "mixed bicycling".Not surprisingly, Eugene Charles McQuaid has a somewhat different point of view. In his letter (April 20th), he informs us that we owe our present prosperity to the far-sightedness of his late great-uncle. Mr McQuaid is sure that this "very prosperous place" was "what John Charles must have envisaged while taking an extensive role in the draft of our 1937 Constitution". One cannot help wondering if today's hedonistic young capitalists appreciate that they may owe their prosperity to John Charles McQuaid.Reading between the lines of the appreciation of the late Archdeacon Cathal McCarthy (The Irish Times, April 27th), it would appear that "G.S." is a highlyplaced member of the Catholic Church. It is pathetic that he should use this occasion to be the hagiographer of John Charles McQuaid. "G.S." infers that Dr McQuaid was not a member of a group who refused to admit any change in the Irish Catholic Church after Vatican II, and claims that this was "a myth engendered by some elements of the media". This kind of revisionist spindoctoring is objectionable at any time. Its gratuitous inclusion in this appreciation of an obviously fine man, Cathal McCarthy, was both inappropriate and insensitive. - Yours, etc., Myles Crowe.Tobernea Terrace, Seapoint, Co Dublin.