Sir, - Has Ireland gone completely mad? I woke up Monday to find that the front pages of Irish newspapers were dominated by news about some obscure national soccer team manager called Hoddle. I switched on my car radio on my way to work and there he was again, this man Hoddle, top of the news headlines, and discussed in all the morning chat shows.
With my confidence in world sanity shattered, I did a quick Internet search to see what print and electronic media outside Ireland were saying about this great managerial washout. I searched in vain, for the story had not made either the front or inside pages of the German, American, Spanish, Italian, French or Scandinavian media I searched.
So what was all the fuss about, and why was the Irish media so obsessed with this Hoddle man? And then in a flash of blinding light, enlightenment found me. I had made the monumental error of momentarily forgetting that, in this post-colonial republic of ours, when the English tabloid press sneezes in London, Dublin's media usually catches a cold. - Yours, etc.,
James F. Murphy, Smithstown, Shannon, Co Clare.