Madam, - With Colin Cooper's letter of August 31st, you have at last printed some corrective to the extraordinary and mainly urban mania about ragwort.
It now seems to be forgotten, but in my time and before it was widely recognised that the campaign against ragwort was less about control of a native plant than control of the native population.
It was a make-work scheme to keep gardaí in quiet country barracks energetically occupied, like something out of John McGahern's novels. And having guards on high bicycles looking over hedges demonstrated to a post-Civil War rural population that they were being monitored by officialdom. The deleterious effect of the plant itself was a minor issue compared with the underlying purpose of ensuring social calm through official vigilance. - Yours etc,
HUGO BRADY BROWN, Stratford on Slaney, Co Wicklow.