Sir, - Recent reports of the IRA smuggling weapons and trying to recruit students make grisly reading. The Good Friday Agreement has sunk like a sentimental souffle, based as it is on radical contradictions. For my Prime Minister to insist, as he does every week, that "there is no alternative" is as suspect as the agreement itself. As Margaret Thatcher found, there are always alternatives.
It is the English, not the Scots or Welsh, who remain the IRA's prime target. It is we English, if we wake up, who hold the real key to Northern Ireland. We can and should make it independent, a small state in the EU, bound to European laws and values. Its minority Catholics would be protected by such laws, like minority groups throughout the EU.
At last the politics of Northern Ireland would have to grow up, no longer able to "cling to nurse for fear of finding something worse". The dismally provocative Orange marches would end or become subject to the European Court. The IRA and its puerile gangsterism would be exposed as a violent anachronism, opposed by every EU nation.
This is the alternative, the practical by-product of English determination to heal this running sore, once and for all. Mr Blair should dare to ask us if this is what we want. -Yours, etc.,
George Delf, Brancepeth Castle, Durham. DH7 8DF.