Madam, - Paul Foot's sudden death in London last week has come as a shock to his many friends in this country. He loved Ireland and was a frequent visitor who took a particular interest in its history and literature.
His ability as a journalist has been honoured by the many awards he received. But it was his commitment to revolutionary socialism that informed and shaped almost every aspect of his life. He was one of the first journalists in Britain to take up the miscarriages of justice suffered by the Irish community in Britain. He campaigned for years in the Daily Mirror, Socialist Worker and Private Eye for their release, never losing heart at the indifference of the establishment to their plight. He was an eloquent and inspiring speaker and spoke out on behalf of the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, Anne Maguire and many others.
I remember in 1992 in a restaurant in Sligo, a middle-aged women approached Paul because she wanted him to know that his meeting in London on behalf of the Birmingham Six was one of the most moving events she had ever attended. When the Morris Report into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings was published earlier this year, Paul wrote a piece in the Guardian demanding that the Blair government hand over all relevant papers to the inquiry.
He was a modest and wonderful man, forever poking fun at himself. He wrote beautifully and his book Red Shelley was a powerful polemic, which in Paul's own words attempted "to take Shelley out of the academic prison in which he has been firmly trapped for over half a century". Almost alone he converted a generation to the pleasure of Shelley's poetry.
His book on the fight for democracy, on which he was working for the past 10 years, is due for publication next year. That will be his monument. But so many people across Ireland and Britain will have cause to raise up in their hearts a monument more endurable than brass or marble to the memory of Paul Foot.
We have lost a comrade and a friend. It was a privilege to have known him. - Yours, etc.,
PAUL O'BRIEN, Synge Street, Dublin 8.