Madam, - It seems both remarkable and improbable, even in this amnesiac age, that "veteran journalist" Cathal O'Shannon (interviewed in Weekend Review, January 6th), or his programme researchers ( Hidden History: Ireland's NazisRTÉ1 TV), were unfamiliar with the essays of Hubert Butler ("The Artukovitch File", Escape from the Anthill) published by both Lilliput and Penguin Books in the late 1980s and 1990s, and subsequently in New York and Paris.
Butler's work has been acclaimed and attested to by, among others, Dervla Murphy, Eoghan Harris, Roy Foster, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Fintan O'Toole and the late Joseph Brodsky, and in his writings he smoked out the Croatian mass murderer and traced Artukovitch's presence in Ireland in 1947-48 and the role of the Franciscans in giving him shelter on his passage west to California, prior to his eventual extradition to Yugoslavia in 1986.
Mr O'Shannon has usefully revisited this case in his drama-documentary, but due acknowledgment should be made to one of Ireland's most powerful prose writers of the past quarter-century.
- Yours, etc,
ANTONY FARRELL, Publisher, The Lilliput Press, Sitric Road, Dublin 7.