Sir, - I refer to the appalling "exile or death" sentences being passed down by the Provo thought police since Mo Mowlam gave them the green light to continue maiming and threatening murder, provided of course that none of their victims was wearing the uniform of the Crown. Is this some kind of rich irony, or what?
What concerns me is the silence of all the so-called "independent" civil and human rights activists who always seem to materialise whenever RTE announces that "nationalist residents" will be protesting at decisions by the Parades Commission that have gone against them, and then evaporate when genuine civil and human rights issues need confronting. I'm concerned also about the silence of Albert Reynolds and the Fianna Fail Minister Chris Flood, who were very vocal when Catholic protesters were being cleared from the Ormeau Road but who now appear to have lost their voices when young Catholic men, under sentence of death from friends of the very same protesters, need to hear them most.
And what can one say about the silence from our hapless Foreign Minister, David Andrews? Apparently in East Timor people are murdered but in north-east Ireland they are merely killed - and mysteriously too, despite what the dogs in the street are yelping. Mr Andrews's negotiating partner, Liz O'Donnell, needs to stop looking as though she's been blinded by the recent eclipse and tell her boss that he's colluding, however unwittingly, in the formation of a Mafia state and that his silence and his refusal to condemn are taken as acquiescence by the capos in the Catholic ghettos, and indeed the loyalist ghettos.
Time to speak out. Loudly. - Yours, etc.,
Eddie Naughton, Weavers Street, The Coombe, Dublin 8.