Sir - In protest at the unseemly exposure to prurient public gaze of what is an essentially insignificant and unnewsworthy incident among people from whom the reading public expect better - namely, the bitter dispute between Vincent Browne and Fintan O'Toole in your columns about press coverage of the Rocca case.
I, for one, don't care who started their fracas; whether they have been bedfellows on other issues; whether Vincent or Fintan delivered a "haymaker"; whose nose is out of joint; or whether or not excessive force was used in defence of the Old Lady of D'Olier Street, whose only error was to afford both of them some misplaced hospitality.
Rather than succumb to increasing tabloidisation, might I suggest that in future your opinion columns should be confined to serious, newsworthy issues - such as what Vincent thinks of Fintan's intellectualism and vice versa, and what each of them thinks of John Waters's world view, and whether John Waters thinks? Surely these are more appropriate subjects for the opinion columns of a serious newspaper of record.
The alternative would be to keep the upstairs rooms permanently locked, which would be awfully unfair to better behaved platonic bedfellows, such as Garret, Nuala and Dick, all of whom have had the run of the place for so long, and none of whom would upset even a vicarage tea party. - Yours, etc.,
Dail Eireann,
Baile Atha Cliath 2.
