Sir, - Just home from a research expedition on behalf of the Maritime Institute of Ireland in North Africa, I found your issue of October 24th kept for me so that I would not miss the eloquent tribute paid in it by our president, Desmond Branigan, to the Irish seamen in our very inadequate merchant shipping fleet who risked their lives throughout the 1939-45 war, bringing us essential cargoes without which society would have collapsed.
Mr Branigan mentioned Capt Frank Forde's vividly readable history of our wartime merchant fleet, The Long Watch - due, I believe, for a long-awaited re-issue. This book should be in every school library in the State.
No tribute can be adequate for our wartime merchant seamen, 149 of whom lost their lives. With no protection in the form of escorting ships - our tiny navy was only just being founded - and no weapons on board, our seamen defied the suspicions and threats of two gigantic belligerent naval forces to keep this nation alive.
All the recognition our merchant fleet has got from authority is to have been allowed to shrink to virtual insignificance. - Yours, etc.,
John de Courcy Ireland, Dalkey, Co Dublin.